Don’t restrict learning

Observation

• Many employees do not invest enough (?) in learning
  • Even restrictive learning budgets don’t get used
• To ask for a training often takes several steps and approvals.
• Getting reimbursed is cumbersome. Sometime people have to pay from their pockets first.
• Companies I worked with worked with Learning budgets.
• Individual learning is often not core to personal development programs in companies

Orientation

• employees don’t invest in themselves
  • not enough financial support
  • cumbersome process
  • no time beside operational work
• assumption that removing budget restrictions leads to wild west learning

A way forward

• Remove too strict learning budgets. If someone wants to learn then foster and amplify. And provide some [[Simple Rules]] as guidance.

Some Simple guidelines

• Establish sharing of learnings either within your team or even outside your company
  • based on [[MOC Building a 2nd brain |building a 2nd brain]] the step of expressing is crucial for learning
• Suggest to build a connection with company purpose, missing, OKR.
  • This way learning can help the company innovate and further progress in direction operational excellence
• Monitor yearly used learning investments and even share within company.
  • It provides a social anchor and enables people to compare and adjust their investment
• And celebrate increased learnings and share success stories based on these learnings.

Interesting approaches

• Introduce a Day of Learning and Innovation. At Blinkist we used one Friday per quarter that was especially dedicated to learning (either individually or in small free formed groups)
• Make payment or reimbursement for learning super easy. E.g. via services Pleo where everyone can work with individual virtual credit cards.
• Provide simple access to knowledge. Blinkist e.g. offers BlinkistBusiness where employees get access to Key Insights from over 5000 non-fiction books and podcasts. This way one can get a fast overview on topics and take an informed decision on what to drill down.

Linking

• MOC Building a 2nd brain
• [[The Fifth Discipline]]

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