Four Reasons To Teach Skills, Not Theory
Despite the fact that there’s so many trends in the broader L&D industry right now, practical skills-based learning is more important than ever. Most industry studies suggest that about 50% of employees will need upskilling and training in the near future. How better to train than by focusing on the skills they need?
Skills-based training is action-oriented and highly engaging for both the instructor and the learner. Many of the underlying principles used in learning can still be applied to skills-based learning. There’s nothing preventing you from including learning outcomes or learning objectives and ensuring they align with Bloom’s revised taxonomy. The only requirement is that they are oriented to teach practical skills.
In andragogy, you really shouldn’t be expecting an adult learner to recite a chapter of a book or share a summary of an eLearning. What this audience needs is practical skills, and here are some reasons why this type of learning is so crucial right now.
1. Most Effective Type Of Learning
Skills-based learning is the most effective type of training for an adult audience. According to most reputable studies, including one done by the OECD, around 67% of adults have reported improvements after participating in skill-focused training. While more dated learning approaches focused on theoretical understanding and conceptualization, skills-based learning takes a more action-forward approach. Both the final result and the process that learners go through is practical, engaging, and shows consistent improvements. Even when learners are actively failing at using a new tool, that can also be presented as a positive outcome. You can learn from clicking something wrong in a tool, you can only be frustrated when you can’t recall a fact from a book or compliance training.
Just conceptually, it can be very hard to explain to learners that they need to have some basic understanding of why the EU was founded to fully grasp legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the EU AI Act. With skill-based learning, you don’t need to ignore this theoretical foundation. You just package it in a different way. Teach students practical skills and work back to how post-WW2 Europe was a good foundational ground for a close-knit community of former sworn enemies that eventually led to comprehensive privacy legislation. It isn’t the easiest fact pattern to present, but teaching history can be messy. Which is another point that’s easier to make through skill-based learning.
2. Skills-Based Learning Works With All Delivery Methods
It is a very common misconception that skills-based learning can only be done in-person. This misconception likely derives from information training on-the-job. While there is a clear connection between the two approaches, saying you can only do skills-based training informally or through in-person delivery oversimplifies the broader point.
Take the example of applying GDPR. What is stopping you from starting an eLearning course about GDPR, with a case study that shows the consequences of a company not asking for customers’ consent? And then working your way back to the key principles of GDPR by showing multiple perspectives? Show the fines of up to €20 million that companies may face. Examine practical case studies of how GDPR breaches negatively impact customers. Just ask nearly everyone to consider how annoyed are they when they receive an unsolicited cold call for the third time in a week.
By examining these small and very practical approaches, breaking down the concepts and turning them into analytical skills, you can make material and content more engaging in any format. This applies to developing eLearning courses as much as to in-person delivery.
3. Skills-Based Learning Is Essential For Our AI-Dominated Times
There is so much focus on how AI is changing education, transforming our workforce and society more broadly. But, in one very foundational way, it hasn’t really changed all that much. We still trust human judgement to make final challenging decisions. For most organizations that are serious about safe and responsible AI use, there is usually a control called human-in-the-loop (HITL). And while training the HITL is essential to ensuring they are ready to make these tough calls, what exactly are we trying to teach?
Ability to call out that AI is wrong? Well, maybe as a practical consequence, yes. But saying that this is just “identifying that AI got the fact wrong” is an oversimplification that borders with being factually inaccurate. In most modern companies, you need to understand how AI models work before you can accurately check if they generate misleading or inaccurate content. Given that in many small to medium enterprises, you are very likely to wear different hats, another element you have to be mindful of is that many people conducting HITL also have to provide constructive feedback.
And how can you provide even somewhat constructive feedback on how to fix an AI model if you don’t have some skills and competency related to it? HITL is not simply knowing a fact and identifying that AI got it wrong. It’s a skillset that still separates human experts from AI. And knowledge, much like AI, doesn’t stay static. So our experts serving as part of HITL controls need continuous skill-based learning to stay at the top of their respective fields.
4. Skills-Based Learning Is Fun
Maybe this is just a personal opinion, and I’ll go back to my GDPR example yet again to try and argue this point. Unless you’re a lawyer, I think most people who have ever undergone GDPR training have found it a rather dry topic. To be honest, it’s not the most interesting topic to teach either if you start by teaching the genesis story of the EU, from how the European Commission for Coal and Steel started to how far the Council of Europe (not the EU) got with Convention 108 in 1981.
By the time I manage to explain that the Council of Europe is an entirely separate international organization compared to the EU, I’ve probably lost half of the room if this is an online class. Maybe I’m a bit luckier if I’m delivering this in-person. I am also not sure how I stand with you personally, but I hope you’re still finding some value here. But that doesn’t happen when you take a skills-based learning approach to the topic. And this may be deeply biased, but from my experience, when you teach any topic through tools and skills, most people will be engaged.
Even when I was teaching GDPR to a repeated group of Customer Support Representatives (who loathe the topic), they could much better understand these tools and procedures when it was linked to clear job requirements. When they could see that the skills I was trying to teach them was something really necessary, rather than a boring theoretical foundation, I never had to worry if my audience was close to falling asleep. In a classroom, in a Zoom call, it doesn’t matter: skills-based learning is not delivery method-dependent.
Whatever topic you’re training on and whatever format you choose, skills-based learning gives your audience an immediate reason to engage. It’s more effective, more flexible, and better suited to the demands of a rapidly changing workplace. And just as an added bonus, it’s a far more rewarding experience for everyone in the room.
