“I need more capability building”
People don’t arrive at work thinking this ever, they do however think, I don’t know how to do this, we keep screwing this up, nobody knows who has the answer, this takes too long, or we need people productive faster.
The “learning industry” has spent years trying to move beyond “training,” but in doing so it may have named itself into abstraction. It keeps inventing increasingly sophisticated terminology to demonstrate that the field is way more than courses. Yet the terminology may make the field less intelligible to the exact people they’d like to bring into it – company leadership!
“Training” creates an immediate mental model – someone is going to show me how to do something.
“eLearning” does too – I’m going to complete something online.
Even “course,” “workshop,” “coaching,” and “job aid” are concrete. You know roughly what you’re getting and what you’ll be doing.
Now compare that with capability building, skills-based design, adaptive learning, learning ecosystems, AI augmentation, talent intelligence, workforce transformation, learning in the flow of work.
What?!
And there’s an interesting irony here too – calling everything being created “learning” may have been THE most problematic word right from the moment T&D became L&D.
Say what you mean. Mean what you say.