In a recent blog post on the Malta Today website, Education Minister Evarist Bartolo wrote about the need of making Malta a learning nation. He wrote about the policy to make lifelong learning an ongoing process and highlighted the importance of appealing to the early school leavers.
Within this context he claimed that “access to relevant learning throughout life is a fundamental cornerstone in our aspirations to have a sustainable knowledge-based society and economy”.
As a minister, Dr Bartolo rightly mentioned what the government’s policy is and what strategies he is adopting in this area. However, I would like to use this blog post as a launching pad to look at the issue of lifelong learning within a business perspective.
To claim that a job for life no longer exists may sound like a cliché in 2015. Yet this is the starting point of lifelong learning at the workplace. The fact that persons change jobs (even if they remain with the same employer) throughout their career does imply that they have to develop their skills over the years. This could mean learning how to do things differently, learning new tasks, improving their so-called soft skills and taking on new responsibilities.
In fact, over the years, we have shifted our focus from the need for academic intelligence (which is very often represented by one’s qualifications) to emotional intelligence (very often represented by one’s ability to build fruitful relationships at work) to learning agility (one’s ability to keep on developing one’s skills).
This does not mean that academic qualifications or one’s experience count for nothing. What it means is that academic qualifications and experience only have value if the person knows how to use them to develop oneself further. Hence the statement that we need to make Malta a learning nation.
The fact that we have to achieve excellence in most of what we do implies that most workplaces are knowledge-based
A more practical consideration is that we spend a significant chunk of our life at the workplace. Therefore, if we accept the importance of lifelong learning, a great deal of it must take place there, where wealth is created. This does not mean that lifelong learning only has value if we attach it to work. However, we have to accept the strong linkage between the two, and unless there is this linkage, it would be difficult
to understand how we can put this policy into practice.
This places a responsibility on the management of businesses to create what has been referred to as a learning zone at the workplace. By this one does not mean there is a section on the premises of any business that would be dedicated to learning activities. What it does mean is that the whole of the workplace needs to be transformed into a learning zone. There needs to be a learning culture.
The creation of a learning culture leads to several advantages: it leads to a higher level of employee motivation; learning makes work more pleasant; it tends to get persons out of their comfort zone and reduces work-related stress. Learning generates a more positive attitude to change as it makes a person more flexible and more adaptable, and enables management to empower their employees more. It helps to create the balance between the need to achieve results and the need to maintain harmonious relationships.
Another point that needs to be made is that most workplaces in Malta have become knowledge-based organisations. By the term ‘knowledge-based’, one does not necessarily mean high-tech laboratories. The service that we give to our tourists is knowledge-based. The pharmaceutical product we produce in one of our manufacturing set-ups requires knowledge. The back office support provided by corporate services firms to international companies is knowledge-based.
The fact that we have to achieve excellence in most of what we do implies that most workplaces are knowledge-based. This in turn requires the management of businesses to transform the workplace into a learning zone.
This will require our workplaces to be such that employees feel challenged but not threatened, where the focus is on collaboration and teamwork, and where they learn how to achieve a high-performance outcome in whatever role they have.