Learning, New Paradigm of Training and Development.

By H Rubijanto

Nowadays management want a new kind of worker with a much broader set of skills, or at least a strong foundation of basics that will enable them to learn on the job. They are seeking employees skilled in problem solving, listening, negotiating, and learning how to learn.
Technological change, innovation and heightened competition drive the upskilling of workers. Competitive challenges motivates companies to use an array of strategies that call for innovaton, adaptable workers with strong intrpersonal skill.
The key basis as a oundation for broader, more sophisticated job related skills, includes:
= Learning to learn, Listening, Oral Communication
= Problem Solving, Creative Thinking, Self Esteem
= Goal Setting / Motivation, Personal and Career Development Skills, Interpersonal Skills
= Teamwork, Negotiation, Organizational Effectiveness and Leadership.

The Purpose and Importance of Training and Development.

The major purpose of training and development is to remove performnce deficiences, wheter current or anticipated, that are the result of employee’ inability to perform at the desired level, and be more productive. Training for performance improvements is particularly important to organizations with stagnant or declining rates of productivity. Training is also important to organizations that are rapidly incorporating new technologies and consequently increasing the likelihood employee obsolence. A number of organizations are investing in information technology and knowledge management information system.
If an organization can increase the adaptability of its workforce through training and development, it can increase the adaptability of the organization itself, thus increasing its potential for survival, profitability and commitment of employees to the organization.

The Necessary to Reengineer the Training Function.

Re-engineering the Training Function means a transformation from developing Individual Competence to creating Organizational Competitiveness. (Dr. Michael J. Marquardt).
Today the industry and business has entered globalization era, in which the companies all over the world compete one another in a such way in order to be a winner. In this situation we need speed and punctuality, that is why the role and function of sophisticated Information Technology and Telecommunication becomes a main bridge which connects an individual with another one, a group with another one, which shortend the distance and time, so that everything becomes more effective and efficient.
It means this condition will give added value to the community, especially to those who are involved as producer or user of Infotech and Telecommunication.Using infrastructure network and business information system will enable us to accelerate the growth of economic activities, where businessman could easily knows information on market demand price competition, new product and service development, services rendered to the customers and other kinds of information which can support the whole activities of business.

In line with the increasing need of information , the society, the education world of training and development in the business world should be more familiar with sophisticated communication facilities and information technology, in order that all activities can be accomplished comprehensively and effectively. With the capability in mastering such technology, the production processes, formely done in an integrated way in one place, nowadays can be divided and spread to all parts of the world according to the pattern which gives an optimum efficiency.
The potential of new customer and the increased global competiton leads to a different emergence of a new telecommunication global market place. Current and coming soon features of telecom service will come to a convergence of information technology product service. Knowledge, skills, financing and marketing, all of these components will increasingly come from sources all over the world to match the infotelecom industry requirements developing customize demand of multimedia services.

The rapid changing environment, interactive workplace and different customer and worker’s behaviour become the prominent factor in taking into account of Reengineering the Training and Development Function. The changing enviroment includes globalization, economic and marketing competition, the emerge of the new sciences, knowledge era and societal turbulance.
The interactive of network system in information technology requires downseizing and smarter organization structure to enable workforce diversity and mobility and motivate total production quality initiatives.
The new consumer are not what they used to be, more affluent and better educated. They have expectations that say they can have any product, any time,any place and they expect to get it at low cost. Shift from big technology to high technology, so it enables to mass customization, a unique setof preferences, unlike anyone else’s. Being able to access information globally, systematically is quite attractive marketing technologies to show, promote and customize product service.
As the response to the changing enviroment, new employees expectations are balance between personal and work life, satisfaction, challenge and active participate in every learning opportunities.
In becoming a learning organization is required seven Paradigm Shifts from training to organization wide learning to meet the changing of global business. (Prof. Dr. Michael J. Marquardt)

Current Paradigm = = = = = =>> New Paradigm

= Productivity = = = = = =>> Learning
= Workplace = = = = = =>> Learning Enviroment
= Predictability = = = = = =>> System and Patterns
= Training = = = = = =>> Learning
= Worker / Employee = = = = = =>> Countinous Learner
= Supervisor = = = = = =>> Coach and Learner
= Engagement = = = = = =>> Learning Opportunity

Employee Development = = = = = =>> Advantage Development

= Individual Capability at Work = = = = = >> Business Competitiveness
= Acquired Performance Capability = = = = >> Organizational Productivity
= Selection of Employees = = = = >> Individual and Team Work

The idea of learning organization seems having closed-relationship to knowledge management. We need better tools for assessing an organization’s rate and level of learning to ensure that gains have in fact been made. Managers should have a firmer foundation for learning organization. Without this groundwork, progress is unlikely having opportunity to stay on and develop their potential abilities. For practical purposes BellAtlantic has come to a conclusion that in learning organization, companies values are the foundation of both cultural change initiatives, and companies way behaviors are the necessary ingredients for a learning organization.

A learning organization can be defined as an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. A learning organization is the only organization that will survive in a competitive enviroment. In the near future there will be no doubt, most companies will eager to implementing ‘knowledge management’ as their strategic management, provided this program conducted in more favorable atmosphere by better mastering information technology of infotech leaders and awareness to adapt smart culture in learning organization. An important change is the shift in focus from traditional highly structured and hierarchical organization to the dynamic business team, which cuts across traditional organizational boundaries, to be thiny and smart learning organization, a new form of flatened corporate layers and at the same time are changing the way people work. The pyramid structure that has been part of the business culture for decades is being replaced by a new responsive form. In both front liner and managers are being organized into laterally based work teams with new accountabilities and responsibilities. The open networked organization what Telco pursued is based on cooperative, multidiciplinary teams and business networked together across the enterprise and linked to the external customer and partners.

The advantage of streamlined, small and smart organization

is possessing flexibilitis factors such as dynamic, fluid and adaptive to the progress of telecommunication and multimedia product services. The divisionalized structure of Telco organization would eliminate overcontrolled hierarchies, reduce restrictive job description and simplify procedure, supported by integrated, holistic and project based system. All of these efforts and attitudes are directed to serve and retain existing customers, meanwhile innovatios should be found and implemented to accommodate new customers. Learning Organization will always keep the ability to stimulate insight and knowledge which arise from experience and experimentation, observation, analysis, and a willingness to evaluate the process that brings succeed and fail results.

Learning organization is not only based on adaptive learning, companies need to focus on continous learning which emphasizes on continuous evaluation and improvement in ongoing process towards the objective of the organization. Learning is about creating knowledge of alternative procedures and latheral way of thinking, it is more shared ideas and distributed opportunities to contribute companies accomplishment. The incremental improvements are not just depend on the past track record of success but should give more attention to the possibility of coming changes in customer behaviors and product service’s technology improvements for survival in fast changing and unpredictable environments. They reason that probable and desirable consequences of an ongoing state of experimentation are that organizations learn about a variety of design features and remain flexible. The infotech leadership management's role in the learning organization is to design, desiminate knowledge, and steward who can build shared vision and adapting different culture of work enviroment. They have responsibility to build better condusive situation of the organization where everybody are enabled continually to increase their capabilities to shape their future of career planning.

To implement learning organization required the right strategy and fostering strategic thinking that the function of planning in organization should be inspired by learning process as the most possible scenarios. In this condition infotech managers must be mentally prepared for the uncertainties of business environment. The main factor of the learning organization is in organizations way to process their managerial experiences become a ‘common used’ knowledge, thereby the ability of an organization is not measured by what it knows, that is the product of learning, but rather by how it learns, the process of learning. Management has to encourage, recognize, and acknowledge the creativity, a sense of efficacy, and empathy of their people. The application of groupware tools, intranets - internet and employee’s news could be more effective in facilitating the processes of knowledge dissemination and implies discarding of obsolete and misleading knowledge. The application of information technology is more than just to prevail the unflexibility of the existing structure but also to bridging the gaps of knowledge overchanging behavior and customer’s expectations.