Experiential learning is an emerging tool to fill skill gaps by upgrading skillsets in a modern workplace, says Ashish Gaikwad
As the country is focused on creating jobs through initiatives like Make in India and Digital India, the challenge for the industry is to attract talent with the right skills and improve the skill sets of existing workers to keep pace with the changing demands of the job.
While organisations are focused on ensuring a perfect fit of talent for every job, the skills gap emerges as a key challenge in the industrial workplace. Failure to address the skills gap can not only hamper employee productivity, but also have a direct negative impact business profitability.
The situation is further accentuated by technological advancement and automation reducing the shelf life of skills and putting added pressure on skills upgradation. A recent McKinsey Global Institute report cites that by 2020, the world will face a deficit of 40 million high-skilled workers and 45 million medium-skilled workers. Concurrently, the number of low-skilled workers will increase to 95 million.
Challenging times
In a highly competitive work environment with compressed product and service lifecycles and faster turn-around times, the cost of training workers on processes and systems can mean additional deployment of time and effort.
Additionally, businesses also have to bear the loss of knowledge and skills when highly trained workers retire or leave the organisation. The big human resource challenge for organisations is to have a robust training and upskilling system in place to ensure a continuous stream of trained talent and a future-ready state of preparedness.
Technology for training
The traditional or passive training approaches are proving to be inadequate and ineffective in training millennial employees. Research shows that millennial respond better to experiential learning techniques rather than passive learning methods.
It is imperative for businesses to adopt active or experiential learning methods to address their training needs. The new technology-enabled trend in training is catching up fast in India with several organisations deploying experiential training activities for their industrial learning initiatives.
The philosophy involves immersing an employee in the environment in which they will work through simulation, using virtual and augmented reality — be it the creation of a shop-floor experience or the construction of an office environment.
Immersive future
Unlike the passive training methods, which are often one-sided, experiential learning involves a two-way interaction. Active learning methods result in longer retention of knowledge compared to passive learning methods as it lays importance on development of skills rather than a mere transfer of facts and figures. It also reduces the time required to train an employee — from half a year using passive methods to a couple of months.
The experiential learning solutions substantially improve skill retention, even while taking significantly lesser time to train the employees. Businesses can also leverage the experiential learning solutions to measure the effectiveness of the training and its contribution to overall plant performance.
Experiential learning methods expose learners to company-specific, real-world situations, which have more relevance to their jobs. They allow learners to make mistakes, and correct and re-learn at negligible costs. In such customised learning process, learners get to train themselves on various job activities such as installation, configuration, inspection, maintenance, troubleshooting, replacement of working parts, and much more.
They also allow users to record and save their work to the cloud making it digitally accessible whenever they need to learn about a specific procedure or situation. However, the biggest unique selling point (USP) of experiential learning methods is that all the learning takes place in a safe and controlled situation with no risks to the lives of the learners and others, as well as the plant and environment.
Workplace change
Experiential learning has the potential to bridge the gaps in employee training that the traditional training methods have failed to deliver. Companies which have been quick to adopt experiential learning methods are witnessing positive impact on their business operations. They have been able to reduce operational costs by up to 50 per cent in some areas and improve the utilisation of manpower.
Today, companies are looking for rapid results and availability of fully trained workers, which is impelling them to search for innovative training strategies. As competition for skilled workers rises, it is imperative for businesses to adopt technology-based experiential learning methods to address their employee training needs and bridge the talent skills gap.
The writer is MD, Honeywell
Automation India Limited
