CEO Today Magazine October 2019 Edition

TIPS & ADVICE www.ceotodaymagazine.com 40 Ralph Ballard, Consulting Director at Total Negotiation Group delves into the importance and benefits of continuous learning and development. Research last year revealed that the UK’s best-performing businesses put their success down to learning and development. The UK L&D report surveyed and analysed more than 100 companies, with the top performers claiming that staff training is at the heart of their growth strategies. This shows just how much learning has evolved since my first experience of it in the early 2000s. Back then, I was a learning recipient and it was very much a traditional teacher-‘tell’, classroom- based, ‘one size fits all’, sheep- dip approach. It’s long since been acknowledged that this approach fails to encourage sustained learning and once the delegate leaves the classroom, their ability to retain what they’ve learnt decreases rapidly over time. However, the conditions for transforming learning as a key growth strategy have never been stronger than they are today. With recognition that a ‘classroom only’ approach limits sustained learning, the 70:20:10 model is increasingly becoming the standard for many workplace learning programmes. 70:20:10 combines formal learning (10%), such as classroom- based; social learning (20%), mentoring or coaching from a line and manager; and self-driven learning (70%) which comes from day-to-day experience of doing the job. Blended learning is an approach to learning that combines multiple opportunities to learn through a variety of different mediums, and as such supports the 70:20:10 learning principles. Blended learning is not limited to only these and can use all of them, or just a selection of these types of learning assets; Why the Learning Journey Mustn’t Begin and End in the Classroom By Ralph Ballard, Consulting Director of Total Negotiation Group