Self-Directed Learning: A Key Ingredient for a Comprehensive Training Curriculum

The importance of a competent, well-trained workforce in sustaining a competitive business edge is well understood. This article introduces the notion of self-directed learning as a viable approach to complementing gas utility training programs to enhance their competitive advantage.

Overall, gas utilities provide excellent training for their employees through well designed courses and workshops. These sponsored programs cover such areas as on-boarding, job specific duties and responsibilities, safety procedures, and management. When an organization drives learning with sponsored programs, the employee is told what to do learn to properly do the job, in accordance with organizational and industry standards. Typically these sponsored programs are complemented by on-the-job training (OJT).

Such training has been deemed adequate by the utilities. But, is it really? We would suggest that it is fine as far as it goes, but more can be done, as alluded to in a recent edition of the comic strip, Frazz. Talking about training, Frazz’s friend laments: “Half of what I learn, I’m going to forget. The other half will become obsolete.” While this comic strip observation is accurate, the problem is not unique to utilities. The problem is inherent in all sponsored training programs due to the very nature of formal training itself. People tend to forget what they don’t frequently use or apply.

In addition, over time, new knowledge and skill deficiencies emerge. Some of the “new” learning needs are met by on-the-job training. As a result, employees frequently only need to learn portions of a topic as their work experience has already provided them partial knowledge and/or skill sets. As employees grow and mature in their jobs, their learning becomes increasing unique to themselves as individual learners. At this point, employee learning is very idiosyncratic, i.e., very specific to the unique needs of each individual employee.

The challenge facing utilities is how to identify and cost-effectively respond to these individual learning needs. Certainly it is both impracticable and cost-prohibitive for a utility to assume the responsibility for designing formal training programs to meet such a disparate variety of individual needs. How, then, is a utility to respond? We suggest the concept of self-directed learning (SDL) is a viable option.

By SDL we mean:
A process by which individual employees take the initiative in diagnosing their own learning needs, formulate their own learning goals, identify resources for learning, choose and implement an appropriate learning strategy and evaluate their own learning outcomes.

SDL complements sponsored training programs by enabling employees to fill in their individual “learning voids.” The employee identifies areas where skills have been forgotten, skill proficiencies are inadequate, or there are new things to learn. With SDL, the learner drives the learning and is responsible for designing, planning and conducting his own learning.