Employees must know less and learn more, says Reuters head of learning

Citation

(2006), "Employees must know less and learn more, says Reuters head of learning", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 38 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2006.03738fab.005

Employees must know less and learn more, says Reuters head of learning

People need to know less and learn more if they are to be successful in the modern business world, according to the global head of learning at Reuters, the multimedia news agency and financial-information service.

In a presentation on “Taking the Training out of Organizational Learning”, at Moving Learning 2006, Charles Jennings drew on his experiences in managing the Reuters internal-learning organization. He outlined the company’s strategy of focusing on the performance of employees and how they learn in today’s rapidly evolving, “information-rich” business world.

“To be effective in today’s world, we need to know less and learn more,” said Charles Jennings, who over the past 20 years has led a range of learning, e-learning and collaborative-learning initiatives for corporations, the UK Government and the European Commission. “That may seem illogical. However, the amount of information available to us is increasing at 30 per cent a year, and much of the information and knowledge we need to do our jobs and live our lives has an increasingly short useful life. We can therefore no longer know all there is to know about anything, and it’s unwise even to try.

“In the face of this steamroller of data, information and knowledge, traditional training models can no longer serve us effectively. The word ‘knowledge worker’, in today’s world, is a misnomer. Knowledge workers actually need to hold less knowledge in their heads to do their jobs than they did 20 years ago. However, they need to have the skills to be able to find the right information and knowledge, and build it into capability as efficiently as possible. To do our jobs, we need to be flexible and fleet-of-foot, and our learning provision needs to be fleet-of-foot as well.”

Moving Learning 2006, which took place at Microsoft Reading, UK, and the Hotel Artemis, Amsterdam, Netherlands, also included presentations from Allison Rossett, of San Diego State University, and Alison Hollas, of ntl:telewest.