Special report | Cognition switch

What employers can do to encourage their workers to retrain

Companies are embracing learning as a core skill

A STRANGE-LOOKING SMALL room full of vintage furniture—an armchair, a chest of drawers, a table—was being built in the middle of Infosys’s Palo Alto offices when your correspondent visited in November. Tweed jackets hung from a clothes rack; a piano was due to be delivered shortly. The structure was rough and unfinished. And that, according to Sanjay Rajagopalan, was largely the point.

Mr Rajagopalan is head of research and design at the Indian business-services firm. He is a disciple of “design thinking”, a problem-solving methodology rooted in observation of successful innovators. His goal is an ambitious one: to turn a firm that built a global offshoring business by following client specifications into one that can set the terms of its projects for itself.

Design thinking emphasises action over planning and encourages its followers to look at problems through the eyes of the people affected. Around 100,000 Infosys employees have gone through a series of workshops on it. The first such workshop sets the participants a task: for example, to improve the experience of digital photography. That involves moving from the idea of making a better camera to considering why people value photographs in the first place, as a way of capturing memories. As ideas flow, people taking part in the workshops immediately start producing prototypes with simple materials like cardboard and paper. “The tendency is to plan at length before building,” says Mr Rajagopalan. “Our approach is to build, build, build, test and then plan.”

That baffling structure in Palo Alto was another teaching tool. Mr Rajagopalan had charged a small team with reimagining the digital retail experience. Instead of coming up with yet another e-commerce site, they were experimenting with technologies to liven up a physical space. (If a weary shopper sat in the chair, say, a pot of tea on an adjacent table would automatically brew up.) The construction of the shop prototype in Infosys’s offices was being documented so that employees could see design thinking in action.

Infosys is grappling with a vital question: what do people need to be good at to succeed in their work? Whatever the job, the answer is always going to involve some technical and specific skills, based on knowledge and experience of a particular industry. But with design thinking, Infosys is focusing on “foundational skills” like creativity, problem-solving and empathy. When machines can put humans to shame in performing the routine job-specific tasks that Infosys once took offshore, it makes sense to think about the skills that computers find harder to learn.

David Deming of Harvard University has shown that the labour market is already rewarding people in occupations that require social skills. Since 1980 growth in employment and pay has been fastest in professions across the income scale that put a high premium on social skills (see chart).

Social skills are important for a wide range of jobs, not just for health-care workers, therapists and others who are close to their customers. Mr Deming thinks their main value lies in the relationship between colleagues: people who can divide up tasks quickly and effectively between them form more productive teams. If work in future will increasingly be done by contractors and freelancers, that capacity for co-operation will become even more important. Even geeks have to learn these skills. Ryan Roslansky, who oversees LinkedIn’s push into online education, notes that many software engineers are taking management and communications courses on the site in order to round themselves out.

Building a better learner

Another skill that increasingly matters in finding and keeping a job is the ability to keep learning. When technology is changing in unpredictable ways, and jobs are hybridising, humans need to be able to pick up new skills. At Infosys, Mr Rajagopalan emphasises “learning velocity”—the process of going from a question to a good idea in a matter of days or weeks. Eric Schmidt, now executive chairman of Alphabet, a tech holding company in which Google is the biggest component, has talked of Google’s recruitment focus on “learning animals”. Mark Zuckerberg, one of Facebook’s founders, sets himself new personal learning goals each year.

An emphasis on learning has long been a hallmark of United Technologies (UTC), a conglomerate whose businesses include Pratt & Whitney, a maker of aircraft engines, and Otis, a lift manufacturer. Since 1996 UTC has been running a programme under which its employees can take part-time degrees and have tuition fees of up to $12,000 a year paid for them, no strings attached. Employers often balk at training staff because they might leave for rivals, taking their expensively gained skills with them. But Gail Jackson, the firm’s vice-president of human resources, takes a different view. “We want people who are intellectually curious,” she says. “It is better to train and have them leave than not to train and have them stay.”

Such attitudes are becoming more common. When Satya Nadella took over as boss of Microsoft in 2014, he drew on the work of Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, to push the firm’s culture in a new direction. Ms Dweck divides students into two camps: those who think that ability is innate and fixed (dampening motivation to learn) and those who believe that abilities can be improved through learning. This “growth mindset” is what the firm is trying to encourage. It has amended its performance-review criteria to include an appraisal of how employees have learned from others and then applied that knowledge. It has also set up an internal portal that integrates Lynda, the training provider bought by LinkedIn (which Microsoft itself is now buying).

AT&T, a telecoms and media firm with around 300,000 employees, faces two big workforce problems: rapidly changing skills requirements in an era of big data and cloud computing, and constant employee churn that leaves the company having to fill 50,000 jobs a year. Recruiting from outside is difficult, expensive and liable to cause ill-feeling among existing staff. The firm’s answer is an ambitious plan to reskill its own people.

Employees each have a career profile that they maintain themselves, which contains a record of their skills and training. They also have access to a database called “career intelligence”, which shows them the jobs on offer within the company, what skills they require and how much demand there is for them. The firm has developed short courses called nanodegrees with Udacity, the MOOC provider, and is also working with universities on developing course curriculums. Employees work in their own time to build their skills. But AT&T applies both carrot and stick to encourage them, by way of generous help with tuition fees (totalling $30m in 2015) for those who take courses and negative appraisal ratings for those who show no interest.

As continued learning becomes a corporate priority, two questions arise. First, is it possible for firms to screen candidates and employees on the basis of curiosity, or what psychologists call “need for cognition”? Getting through university is one very rough proxy for this sort of foundational skill, which helps explain why so many employers stipulate degrees for jobs which on the face of it do not require them.

Curiouser and curiouser

More data-driven approaches are also being tried. Manpower, a human-resources consultancy, is currently running trials on an app that will score individuals on their “learnability”. Knack, a startup, offers a series of apps that are, in effect, gamified psychological tests. In Dashi Dash, for example, participants play the part of waiters and are asked to take the orders of customers on the basis of (often hard to read) expressions. As more and more customers arrive, the job of managing the workflow gets tougher. Every decision and every minute change in strategy is captured as a data point and sent to the cloud, where machine-learning algorithms analyse players’ aptitudes against a reference population of 25,000 people. An ability to read expressions wins points for empathy; a decision always to serve customers in the order in which they arrive in the game, for example, might serve as an indicator of integrity. Intellectual curiosity is one of the traits that Knack tests for.

The second question is whether it is possible to train people to learn. Imaging techniques are helping unlock what goes on in the mind of someone who is curious. In a study published in 2014 in Neuron, a neuroscience journal, participants were first asked to rate their curiosity to learn the answers to various questions. Later they were shown answers to those questions, as well as a picture of a stranger’s face; finally, they were tested on their recall of the answers and given a face-recognition test. Greater curiosity led to better retention on both tests; brain scans showed increased activity in the mesolimbic dopamine system, a reward pathway, and in the hippocampus, a region that matters for forming new memories.

It is too early to know whether traits such as curiosity can be taught. But it is becoming easier to turn individuals into more effective learners by making them more aware of their own thought processes. Hypotheses about what works in education and learning have become easier to test because of the rise of online learning. MIT has launched an initiative to conduct interdisciplinary research into the mechanics of learning and to apply the conclusions to its own teaching, both online and offline. It uses its own online platforms, including a MOOC co-founded with Harvard University called edX, to test ideas. When MOOC participants were required to write down their plans for undertaking a course, for example, they were 29% more likely to complete the course than a control group who did not have to do so.

Information about effective learning strategies can be personalised, too. The Open University, a British distance-learning institution, already uses dashboards to monitor individual students’ online behaviour and performance. Knewton, whose platform captures data on 10m current American students, recommends personalised content to them. Helping people to be more aware of their own thought processes when they learn makes it more likely they can acquire new skills later in life.

This article appeared in the Special report section of the print edition under the headline "Cognition switch"

Lifelong learning

From the January 14th 2017 edition

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