According to experts, the 21st century is the age of knowledge and learning. In this context, we keep hearing of lifelong learning. However, for many people, it does not necessarily sound positive. Who likes to get a life sentence? Only a few years ago the motto was “We are learning for our job!” Today, learning is the job. How do we deal with it? Further education and training are standard in every successful company. If you are clever, you do not simply undergo training on speculation but define, evaluate and develop the competencies required for the success of the company. The unrealistic do-gooders of human resources development become strategic partners of corporate management. So far so good. But what is the situation regarding learning? If learning is the key skill, we need to become learning pros. Do we have concepts to learn how to learn? Actually, the company’s further training programs should contain plenty of learning opportunities. You can find a lot of info on this topic posted at this life insurance comparison site. In fact, only a few companies offer their staff members special training schemes with regard to learning. The solution is still sought in new content. A didactic standard hardly exists. The training concept of most providers is based on instructor-led learning whereby technical knowledge is conveyed to the participants in a way that is easy or not so easy to understand. This model, however, dates back to the beginning of the last century. Modern learning methods eliminate the separation between the facilitator and the learners. The participant is not solely a consumer of contents but creates the learning process actively.

 

The term prosumer is now widely used in marketing. The passive consumer has become the co-producer. In companies like Spreadshirt, he develops his own design not only for himself but also for others. If one applies this to learning, it means that the learner develops from being a participant to being a participant. A participant of a seminar who googles the topic during the event is currently perceived as a troublemaker. This is exactly where the problem lies in most of the traditional training opportunities. We live in an age of networked thinking and acting. This has to be reflected in our learning opportunities and requires a new understanding of the roles in the learning process and the development of new learning methods.

At this stage, the traditional set-up predominates, which is already determined by the classroom setting. The trainer sits or stands in front. The participants sit at the tables and look at the putative place of action, previously the blackboard, today the screen, where contents are solely displayed in a more or less meaningful way. A glimpse into the function rooms of the internal academies and seminar hotels gives a realistic picture of the predominant learning environment provided by the institutions offering organized learning. The more expensive the hotel, the more structured the setting. Additionally, the more expensive the event, the more the setting is based on the ancient ideal of the eloquent orator facing the interested auditorium.

However, learning is on no account only an auditory, cognitive, and linear process, but also a multimodal, individually associative, and at the same time collectively variable process. Thus, teachers, trainers, experts, and the companies HT-strategists need to develop appropriate solutions which really take the results of learning research into consideration. In this respect, a traditional lecture on networked thinking in a large hall of a congress center is as much a paradox as is this article. It appears as a print version, written by experts for experts, in a medium that claims to cover current issues and future trends in the fields of marketing and sales. Who will read it? What effect does reading have? The books of brain researchers are sort of weird, as they reflect on brain research findings and draw absolutely right conclusions about modern teaching and learning settings in the possibly most boring way, without any colored illustrations and using the worst technical jargon. I have complained enough now, what should a modern sales training approach look like?

 

1. Define, what should be learned

This is the old-fashioned part of the recommendation. The field of sales training often gives an exemplary demonstration of the lampooned seminar tourism without defined learning targets and competencies. Here, it would be helpful if sales departments and HR-development departments end their tug of war over competencies and contents. The exciting question is how current corporate targets can be synchronized with the individual learning objectives of the sales representatives. In order to answer this question, a measurable evaluation of the existing competencies and those to be developed is required. No witchcraft. The processes are known, have been proven for at least twenty years, and validated. The only problem is that these systematic procedures are only applied by ten percent of the companies.

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2. From participant to participant

The difference is made by involving the target group in all stages of the requested competence development. The problem of most of the traditional methods is not the content. It is always available in a virtual sense. Every digital native finds all relevant content in the fields of sales or management within ten minutes of research on Google. It is an intriguing question, how knowledge becomes a skill. The old saying that if you want to learn something, you should start teaching it, gains new meaning in the age of Web 2.0. Responsible self-study students can research, prepare and discuss contents. In a few years, today’s experts will fight over copyrights in a similar way to contemporary artists. If you are clever, you establish communities and retain the loyalty of the participants by means of supplementary offers which go beyond mere knowledge. Only those who succeed in shaping the responsible educated citizen of the web into a co-producer of content under the branded power of an expert status will have the future on their side.

 

3. From training to simulation

It is, therefore, clear that events for training purposes with participants who are present at the venue need a completely different method than that of today’s seminar tourism. Where information was given in the past, training is given today. Where training is given today, real practical experience has to be simulated in the future. What speaks against replacing all the same sales training methods with practical role plays? Seminar acting is an established profession in the Netherlands. There, no respectable HR developer would have the idea to have role plays performed by stressed colleagues who play the roles of difficult clients unprofessionally. Why not establish a training center for the sales representatives, where full-time actors who are capable of testing the key success factors in a discussion on a particular product in a real everyday atmosphere are available? A role-play to practice customer visits providing professional feedback instead of instructor-led learning with a proven transfer rate of ten percent maximum.

 

4. YouTube for the new way of learning – The demands of the digital natives require new solutions

If learning becomes the most important competence of the 21st century, the use of new media, in particular, requires solutions that exceed the alternatives of the current market participants considerably. Google and Microsoft are already working on specific learning platforms. In-App Store, more and more learning programs can be found for various applications. The use of new media for the purpose of learning becomes standard and the pressure of professionalization increases. Those who grew up with the Play Station do not appreciate linear learning programs with retro pixel style graphics. E-Learning needs to become sexier. Big solutions are required, either in high-end techniques or as grooving guerrilla offers for web-affined nonconformists. Those who are somewhere in between will encounter problems. The YouTubisation of learning began long ago. This is precisely where the opportunity lies for the defragmented training market. The question remains when the big platform solution will be produced that achieves the grouping of the existing vast amounts of content in a meaningful way and defines a new standard of imparting knowledge.

 

5. Imparting learning skills as a meta-competency

First-career entrants who have never used a computer? Unimaginable. Experience in using standard products of Bill Gates? It is a basic requirement for all entry-level job candidates to be paid beyond the minimum wage. How about the ability for self-study? Currently, it is a welcomed but rather nebulous additional competence for which a generally accepted definition or a valid evaluation procedure does not exist. This is precisely the new treasure of the Nibelungen of the Teutonic world champions of export in global competition. Instead of waiting to see which products will be launched in a few years by the education machinery which embraces reforms after being shocked by the Pisa results, now smart companies should develop their own solutions for imparting self-study competencies and create their own standards in HR-development work. At the beginning of the internal educational career are training programs including learning type tests, learning techniques, and the intelligent use of the internet as a knowledge web, in order to synchronize individual career and learning objectives with corporate targets. Everybody learns for himself and at the same time increases the intellectual capital statement of his employer.

 

Perspective: Land of learning

During training in Malaysia, when I was reading the local newspaper at breakfast, I came across a full-page advertisement for a private kindergarten. Parents were assured that their offspring receive a trilingual education and learns to play at least one instrument before even reaching the age of six. When I was browsing local bookstores I discovered a whole lot of learning-to-learn literature aimed at teenage students. There was a good deal of children’s books on the topic of mind mapping and memo techniques. Topics like these would still surprise some managers in Germany, which is convenient for us trainers. It is dangerous for our country and our businesses. Germany was the land of poets and thinkers? The future belongs to the land of learning.