Who Should Pay For You To Learn?

You started as a small fish with dreams of being a biggie. You routinely practiced your moves. You tried to learn new tricks to please those who held power to hand out generous changes in S&B (Salary and Bonus). You regularly preened yourself as you passed the mirror, admiring the lean mean fighting machine that you continued to be — at least for the initial few years. When you met the other alum from your college or B School, you traded notes to see if anyone had learnt a trick that you had no clue about. There were usually a few who always had something clever to share. You read professional journals. The names of those authors were all familiar. Like it was back when the professors would keep egging you on to read more and more and yet would sneer at your term paper before labeling it a B+ at best despite your efforts. That just built in you the grim determination to keep slaving away at sharpening your skills until you could extract an A+ from the hard-to-please faculty. You ran on that learning treadmill and discovered that you were still in the same place. You knew that you had to be better than the best to make a mark in the big bad world. That was then.

Over the years you have managed to move up the food chain. You started changing your focus from being the most competent, professionally speaking, to other stuff that helped you climb the rungs of the organizational structure. The per capita frequent flyer miles of the continent have gone up because of you. You are mastering the golf stroke. You are no longer the innocent wide-eyed teddy bear. You are the political animal a lion tamer would dread. The corner office is in sight. You point to your beer belly that is now competing with Homer Simpson’s and laugh it off as a sign of prosperity (it still makes you a slob). Building those muscles. Learning is not on your agenda. When your coach tells you that your IQ and EQ points have not improved for eons, you are annoyed. That is so not true, you say. “I am the one who speaks at every seminar on the critical importance of building a learning organization (cool phrase, what!) and my favorite story to motivate the troops is on taking risks. You know, the lightbulb fellow, Edison did not get the filament right the first time either.” You will point out, as evidence, to those motivational quotes that are framed and put on your wall about why we should all aspire to be lifelong learners.

You show everyone the dozens of group photos of you and bunch of fat-cats from your weeklong training sessions on Leadership Development at the ski-resort and the 5 day seminar on “Life’s Lessons that Golf Taught Me”. Or that Team Building do at the place tucked away in the mountains which is famous for the sea-food grill … By the way, have you noticed in all the fat-cat photos, that it is the same bunch of guys who seem to be landing up for these paid holidays and generally speaking the same fat cats speak at EVERY seminar with the Powerpoint slides they made ten years back? Ever wondered why their ‘menu and venue driven’ training should be funded by the employer? Why??

Not saying for a minute that ALL training is only menu and venue driven. Not at all. That would be painting everyone with a broad brush. How do we differentiate the good guys from those with the horns and tail? If only individuals had to fund their own learning and development agenda with their own vacation days and their money instead of being paid for by the employer, there would be a sea change in the way people would view their own learning options. Instead of taking the ‘menu and venue’ based courses, you would choose what you truly need to be ahead of the pack. You, like all employees, would take those certifications to refresh your knowledge and those that you need to build your soft skills, to learn how to run a virtual team, to know what is the next big thing lurking around the corner waiting to snap at your ankles and render you obsolete. That is the only way to separate the wheat from the chaff or the lean from the mean. Have everyone fund their own effort at keeping their skills upgraded.

So what is the role of the employer in getting the new upgraded version 2.0 of me? Here is the deal. If the new improved me, results in my manager noticing the large shovels of contribution I have been heaping on to the company’s bottomline since, they will need to pick up the cost of that skill upgradation plus add some more to fund all the coffee I had while I was slaving away, credit back the vacation days (and maybe throw in a few extra), it would be a win-win. The employer would be only paying for what is visibly and in a measurable (not miserable) way adding to the bottomline. The employee would really think very hard about the courses that will add value professionally and then be at pains to show how it is showing up in the new improved behavior at work. No more menu and venue based training. Let that place famous for the sea-food grill appeal to the tourist and not masquerade as a training destination.