“Learning by doing, learning through discovery – that’s my preferred way.”– Stella Collins
This week’s Digital Adoption Show features Ajay Kumar, VP- Pre Sales at Whatfix, and Stella Collins discussing “Learn the power of doing with Neuroscience”.
04:36 -What are your thoughts on corporate L&D?
- Learning and Development leaders are developing and improving their own skills as they realise that the world is changing, and training at work is nowhere near like it used to be
- Also, L&D leaders do not necessarily need more qualifications. They need to be more professional about it. And that’s where understanding the science of learning can add to that credibility and professionalism
- We need to be much more connected to the business because gone are the days when learning and development kind of sitting in an ivory tower and could create content and just hope that people wanted it or just hope that people would choose them
08:51 -Tell us a bit about your critically acclaimed book ‘Neuroscience for L&D’?
- The book is a kind lot the reason that I have had this new role for two and a half years is that my co-founder discovered me by reading my book, and my book is about the science of learning. So it’s heavily scientific
- So the book is very practical. If neuroplasticity is the way we learn, then what does that mean for us in our jobs as L&D whether we’re trainers or designers, whether we’re delivering or you know, we’re kind of supporting learning? What does that mean for us? So it’s site very science base
- But the science is explained in the simplest reasonably simple way. It’s not too in-depth, but I can lead people on a journey. So they get a bit at the beginning, and then they build on it. And then it’s all about so what this means we need to do in our real jobs of trading, whether that’s trading digitally, whether it’s face to face whether you’re designing e-learning it’s practical
10:10 -How do you see the L&D role emerging in the new corporate world?
- It traditionally sits in HR because both HR and L&D have evolved to be different. But what we need to do is to have L&D emerge as very much a business partner with the business
- And we should be talking to the business saying, what do you need? What do you need your people to be able to do? And how can we support you in enabling that to happen?
- And that doesn’t mean we necessarily need to teach your people because if they’re learning Java, or they’re learning some kind of cybersecurity coding, we in L&D, can’t do that. But we can perhaps support the process so that those experts within the business who have the skills and the knowledge can teach the next people coming along, how can we support them to do that
- For instance, technical people tend to think that their technical employees need to have all those technical skills, and they kind of forget that actually, they still need to communicate well, influence or persuade or negotiate. And here l&d plays a crucial role by supporting both sets of skills, soft skills and hard skills because they actually go together, and they fit together very well
Stella Collins is Co-founder and Chief Learning Officer at Stellar Labs. She is a Learning specialist and author. She is an acknowledged expert on applying science-based learning to business performance solutions. She is the author of Kogan Page’s sell-out book Neuroscience for Learning and Development.
