To meet the needs of today’s diverse and fast-moving workforce, organisations must re-imagine their approach to learning immediately.
Three contemporary models provide powerful awareness for this essential shift in the way we professionally develop our staff across the region.
1. Self-Determined Learning positions the learner as an active agent in the self-reflection learning process (Heutagogy: Hase and Kenyon, 2000).
Considerations of this approach recognise that adults bring existing knowledge and complex motivations to any learning situation.
In practice, heutagogy means shifting the facilitator’s role from expert to guide (your Guide-On-The-Side), respecting the widening generational mismatch of expectations that loom large in our organizations.
This approach creates a psychologically safe space for young professionals and senior management to truly collaborate in excited debate, to define problems, explore solutions, and reflect critically on their current ways of working together.
This model is especially effective for supporting high potential employees who need more than pre-scripted professional development.
2. The Learning Transfer Evaluation Model (LTEM: v.13, 2024), developed by learning scientist Will Thalheimer, re-orients attention from content delivery to supported measurable outcomes in the office.
It stresses that true learning effectiveness is determined not by knowledge recall but by its successful application back in the workplace.
LTEM reinforces the need for experiential learning design, performance support tools, and post-training coaching to achieve lasting change.
3. The Individual Learning Journey model stems from doctoral research conducted in the GCC adult learning domain (Dr Laurence H. Brown, 2002 – 2006), during the co-construction of the GCC’s first online ‘Flipped-Learning’ hybrid degree programme, from 2001.
This experiential model was designed around an iterative, learner-as-agent framework, where participants shaped the direction of their learning by exploring their own personal online learning journey; coming together weekly to discuss the learning topic in a fully ‘flipped’, engaging peer-led group environment.
Rather than being ‘taught’ in the traditional sense, learners co-created knowledge in an individualised, context-driven space, making their learning process deeply personal, relevant to their respective interests and thus, empowering them to climb their individual career ladders.
This Individual Learning Journey model follows the precepts of both Heutagogy as well as LTEM, and was taken up by Saudi Arabia’s largest energy company nearly a decade ago.
Senior management invited Dr Brown to introduce this imperative development into the organisation’s General Instruction manual. Hence, managers could facilitate staff-led decisions as to the training topics that their direct reports felt guided towards, making the most of the new, cutting-edge online programmes from the world’s leading learning institutions, via edX and Coursera for example.
This shift in strategy towards autonomous choice had an immediate effect on motivation, morale and retention.
These contemporary learning models underscore a fundamental truth as we move into the complexities of this year, that for professional development to be relevant, effective and authentic, it must be fully flexible, active, reflective, and anchored in our client’s real-world concerns.