A Different Approach to Online Education
The full impact of the pandemic will take years to understand, but one trend in particular has clearly been accelerated: the adoption of digital technology. Buying groceries online, consulting a doctor through an app, and video conferencing with colleagues are behaviours that have been adopted with remarkable speed. By and large, many of these virtual tools are more efficient than their analog twins, and should remain in use even after the pandemic ends.
However, the efficacy of one important tool remains in doubt: online education for working professionals.
Continuous learning has never been more important. It is the lifejacket that can keep us, as knowledge workers, afloat in a swirling sea of change. The problem is that most online courses don’t provide a good return on investment, which I define as useful skills developed in proportion to the amount of time and money devoted. The Harvard Business Review reports that organizations spend $300B a year on learning programs, but only 12% of employees actually apply any of the new learning to their jobs. This is a gaping, expensive gap that leads to poor outcomes for both employees and employers. It’s also an opportunity, and this article is about one idea that has made online learning more effective for me: start with a stretch project, not with an online course.
Stretch projects:
Traditional learning in school is designed to dispense information and measure its retention through tests. It is often disconnected from the application of that information to real problems. At the school level, perhaps this approach makes sense, with the rationale that all citizens, regardless of aptitude and interest, should have a basic understanding of math, science, history, and language. But in the workforce, knowledge alone is not enough; it is how the knowledge is used to drive business impact that matters.
This is why starting the learning process with a stretch project makes a big difference. Nearly all of my professional growth has come from being assigned a stretch project, which I define as a challenging problem with high business impact that is about 20% beyond my current abilities. Typically, the first step of the project is to define its scope and identify the tasks to be executed. This first step often exposes significant knowledge and skill gaps, and I can then hone into acquiring the specific information that will fill those gaps, either through an online course or meeting with a subject matter expert.
If we know what we need to learn and why, online learning can be a real accelerator: the skills can be developed with speed, applied to the project right away, and improved with real time feedback. If we don’t know what we need to learn and don’t have a compelling reason to do so, online courses become similar to traditional schooling, with interesting content that is consumed one day and forgotten the next.
Conclusion:
Lifetime employment at a single company is a relic of the past. Lifetime employability, on the other hand, is the consequence of having relevant skills and applying those skills to problems that matter.
If you’re interested in developing a new skill over the next few months: consider starting with a specific, challenging project, instead of signing up for a generic online course.
You might be rewarded with a more buoyant life jacket.
