The Learning Experience vs Earning Experience Gap

Keeping aside all sorts of statistics, I thought the Learning Experience vs Earning Experience gap was important to discuss and debate. If I start by putting myself in the shoes of the learner, then we obviously learn to feel powerful—and that power can be income power or knowledge power. For instance, meet my cats who are proactive knowledge seekers.

It is very essential, each day that they wander and sniff across my entire apartment complex to learn about every activity or every living creature that has occurred/existed in the last 24 hours. Only then can they come home and sleep soundly. The exercise of acquiring knowledge and the knowledge itself gives them tremendous satisfaction. Similarly, many of us, often, make an effort to acquire a similar ‘knowledge’ power. But Google has now taken over this space. If you seek knowledge, you can Google, yada yada yada boom badok bang…

Who remain are eager income seekers and this is the audience that educational institutes, training/eLearning are seeking to empower. And despite increased variety, increased access and an ever-increasing number of ‘proactive learners/participants’—the employee/student’s learning experience is questionable and the ‘earning’ experience for each learner is diverse, to say the least.

People continually train/learn to invest in themselves, and they expect to immediately monetize that learning. Each course might be bespoke, multi-device, socially-connected, localized, collaborative or mentor-led—yet it is becoming harder to earn from what has been learnt. I had recently joined a class to upgrade a certain skillset and met many mid-career executives who were in the same boat. One year later, most of us are yet to certify and start practicing what we learnt. This is how it often unfolds…

From the other perspective, as a trainer/instructional designer—I find myself creating the same courses over and over for different clients. And I find myself thinking, if so many people are learning this content, then how come this topic isn’t dead and over? Are we re-learning things because of our failure to monetize what we have learnt? Or is it that we are not unlearning first? Yes. There is a gap here.

I think this gap can be addressed by adding two essential elements to the learning-to-earning journey (L2EJ): design thinking and coaching. Design thinking goes beyond just learner audience understanding and bespoke content selection. It is about understanding your learner/participant’s L2EJ and using that data as input when creating course content. This means fierce involvement from HR, Marketing and a subgroup of the learners/participants themselves.

While adding design thinking will get you real world, practical, paradigmatic buy-in, there is the entire issue of learner motivation. What makes me change my behaviour? This impacts the L2EJ. It's not just about teaching soft skills, it is the general emotional maturity of your participant/learner that needs a boost. This is where coaching comes in: coaching is not mentoring. Breaking down internal resistance is important for anyone to absorb their learning. Coaching helps in ROI and closes the L2E gap.

Take these small steps today for your next learning design approach. They are not complicated if you are confident about, and committed to, including them. Tell me how it goes!