04 Mar 3 ways to use experiential learning to develop your team

To thrive in today’s ever-changing market landscape requires businesses, leaders and teams to be able to reflect on today’s reality, what’s working and what’s not as well as be able to anticipate and plan for what’s around the corner.  These reflective capabilities are critical to ensuring we remain relevant and competitive and are able to meet the progressive needs of customers, consumers and the workforce.

Learning and development practices in the workplace have also needed to evolve to support this fast-moving commercial environment; from your conventional face-to-face classroom sessions to micro learning (skills-based education in small learning bites) and eLearning through learning apps, social networking and collaborative platforms to encourage the sharing of information and experiences.  Key to this is creating an experience rich process that engages as well as encourages critical thinking and reflection.

When it comes to course content and approach – no matter which delivery method is used – more and more organisations are gravitating towards experiential training to ensure optimum learning and therefore capability development, believing that merging two traditionally separate aspects of training (learning and hands-on experience), is the best way to provide skills which learners can immediately put into practice.

What is experiential learning?

Experiential learning is the process of learning through experience.  It addresses all 3 key learning styles – Visual (Seeing & Reading), Auditory (Listening & Speaking) and Kinaesthetic (Touching & Doing) – stimulating all of these senses and resulting in a more effective way for the delegate to absorb information.

Relying simply on learning mediums to get the message across is not enough to reinforce the key learning principles, so it is key that you get the learner to live through the experience as this will embed their understanding of the subject matter, build capability and further reinforce the learning outcomes. Experiential learning produces real results faster than predominantly classroom-focused programs and exposes learners to company-specific, real-world situations; not abstract constructs that may not apply to their job.

Here are 3 ways to embed experiential learning into your team’s development:

1. Making experiential learning a key component of any overall learning journey – such as including case studies and applying concepts to business issues and opportunities, immersing in business simulations and real life situations – all the way through to using Virtual reality (VR) to see ideas come to life in store.
2. On the job application of key activities from the training, where the learner is supported as they go about applying and implementing the tasks at hand. This ensures that the learner is encouraged to practice and apply what they have been taught, as well as be coached and supported through this process.
3. Continued use of experiential learning approaches to ensure ‘stickiness’ of learning over time. Options include learning lunches, refreshers of key concepts and reflection of use ahead of key milestones and process steps in the business, use of eLearning platforms and apps to support continued learning in bite size chunks.

If you want to up your learning and development game and are a FMCG professional looking to increase the capability of your team, the Australian Grocery Academy offers a unique, experiential learning experience that will fast track your high potentials and give you tangible return on investment from day one.

Contact us today to find out how you can transform your team in 2019.