Over recent years Cambodia has become one of the fastest growing economies in the world, averaging 8% growth over the 10 years from 1998-2018.
Finding their staff to be lacking in the necessary skills (especially those referred to as ‘soft skills’) needed to meet the increasing demands for their goods and services many companies look to put in place training to plug the gap.
Check out the CV of any Cambodian who’s been in the workforce for a few years and you’ll no doubt be presented with a long list (often a page or even more) of courses/workshops/trainings the person has attended courtesy of their previous employers.
But if this is the case, why are so many businesses in the country still bemoaning the fact that the staff in their organisations lack key skills like leadership, communication, empathy & decision making?
The reason is simple. Training workshops in isolation rarely result in sustained behaviour change.
When we start digging into the theories around work based learning the reasons for this become clear. The 70:20:10 Model developed by 3 US based researchers in the 1980s shows that only 10% of learning happens through traditional ‘classroom based’ learning.
According to the model, 70% of work based learning happens ‘on the job’ through processes of trial and error – an often slow, messy and wholly ineffective process.
And that leads us to the keystone in truly effective work based learning. The remaining 20% which the researchers defined as social learning, that is interacting with others through coaching and mentoring. Using these key tools as part of the process can not only help learners to embed the classroom based learning effectively but more importantly can help to provide an analytical and reflective space for better quality on the job learning to occur.
More recently, researchers have questioned the efficacy of the ratio identified in the original model, especially in light of the huge growth in technology since the model’s inception 30 years ago. They purport that rather than learning being defined by the 70:20:10 ratio model, great learning is a fluid combination of the three key components, formal, on the job, social and formal learning.
At MindCamp, we work hard to develop learning solutions that encompass all three elements of work based learning tailoring them to your individual business needs for maximum effectiveness.