We Are Asking The Wrong Questions About Lifelong Learning
Challenging the current perspective.
Background
There is a belief that many in the workforce do not have the right digital or data-oriented skills to thrive in a modern knowledge-based economy. Everyone is talking about up-skilling and re-skilling. Every HR department is pushing the narrative of on-demand skills-based learning curriculum onto its general employee population. Every university is pivoting towards stackable courses for adults. But I’m not seeing that it makes a difference to shifting the needle. You may have read about the productivity paradox — the continued decline in workers’ productivity despite the improvements in technology and education.
In my 30th article, “The Problem With Adult Learning”, I wrote about the confusion between lifelong learning and adult continuous education. I also suggested how adults could be “encouraged” to up-skill themselves to overcome the natural inertia — (a) continuous re-certification of skills, (b) make everyone teach, and © stop fixating on measuring learning outcomes to drive learning diversity.
With various impending changes in the Singapore continuous education landscape (e.g. reduced funding, mandatory stackables), I wanted to do a follow-up article. I believe we are asking the wrong questions about lifelong learning, which is the underpinning principle driving the thinking on up-skilling and re-skilling of the workforce.
And so I dedicate my 68th article to a counter-argument on how we should be approaching lifelong learning.
(I write a weekly series of articles where I call out bad thinking and bad practices in data analytics / data science which you can find here.)
Ancient Myths
There are many incorrect assumptions in lifelong learning and its related adult education domain. We are asking the wrong questions or using the wrong perspectives to approach the problem. Some of it is rooted in old mis-beliefs.
Myth #1: Job longevity stunts ability.
For starters, there is a belief that if someone stays too long in a job, they will become ossified in their skills and knowledge. There is a suggestion that job longevity leads to stunted abilities, particularly for knowledge workers.
This myth makes the false assumptions that jobs are immutable; even though on the surface the job titles may have remained unchanged, the reality is that job scopes are continuously morphing. By extension, staying within the same function or same organisation doesn’t equate to complacency. Despite impatience by the younger generation, there is evidence that it takes at least 2 years to be sufficiently competent in any job, and 4–5 years to get good at it. And I’ll wager you’ll need a lot more than that to become an expert.
Myth #2: Technical skills require progressive formal instructions.
There is also the myth that you need to take formal classes and certification courses to acquire technical skills; that learning needs to be structured and hierarchical for such disciplines.
Governments and educators continue to view continuous learning and adult education through the lens of formal education. But adults learn in very different ways because of lived experiences and dynamic contextual influences. The false assumption here is that teaching technical skills to adults must start with a strong fundamental knowledge foundation. This then leads to the secondary belief that it’s difficult to ingest such foundational curriculum all in one go, and that breaking them into bite-size stackables would increase accessibility and take-up.
Some of the best data analysts and data scientists that I’ve met do not have deep formal education or certification in the discipline. They “upgraded” themselves into the role by getting involved in projects, read widely, seeking out mentors, and doing overall OJT (on-the-job) learning. All they had was a health dose of curiosity. (Personally, I’ve learnt more from books, conversations, blog articles, Wikipedia, and YouTube than I’ve learnt from formal education throughout my professional career.) This also throws shade on the concept of stackables. The sad reality is that stackables don’t change the nature of the curriculum; they simply chunk it out. They are still governed by ancient concepts of curriculum design. Genuine learning has a more organic shape, and isn’t determined by sequence or pedagogy. Ultimately, it’s about making the learning assets accessible and meta-tagged for connectivity (i.e. the inter-relationship of the assets).
Myth #3: Adults won’t learn if it’s not funded.
Then there is the myth that people won’t up-skill if it’s not funded and supported. Yes, the adult education industry has exploded due to subsidies and government funding. But it doesn’t mean that adults are actually learning.
The flaw in this thinking is the underlying belief that adults don’t want to learn. That they see learning as a cost (on their time and resources) and not an investment. If the removal of funding leads to a massive decline in course take-up, I would surmise 2 things: (a) the courses don’t actually add value to the employee’s career, and/or (b) the courses were incorrectly priced (i.e. inflated because of subsidies). Those would be more logical hypotheses than assuming that employees are too lazy to care about their careers.
Human beings are naturally curious, like our mammalian and hominidae kin. That curiosity is the key driver to learning. The continuity of it is driven by feedback reinforcement. The lack of feedback will dull, and even kill, curiosity. I would argue that employees become “dull” because the organisation’s environment and culture does not provide space for them to lean into their curiosity; they could not put into practice or experiment with the takeaways from their curious endeavours.
Myth #4: Employees are being made redundant because they lack sufficient skills.
And this takes us to our final myth. The belief that the rise in redundancy is because employees no longer have relevant skills. It’s easier to blame the employees than confront the reality that a significant number of businesses are in decline because of poor strategy and leadership. Re-skilling and up-skilling isn’t going to reduce the redundancies, although it might help you land on your feet sooner.
Conclusion
These myths shape the adult learning landscape today. Governments are working hand in glove with corporations to convince employees that they need to be continuously trained through the lens of formal education, creating stackables to create the illusion of a learning journey. But that isn’t going to foster lifelong learning. Instead, that effort is better directed at figuring out how to increase and integrate OJT opportunities, and understanding the feedback loops that would sustain curiosity in the workplace.
