The most important skill
Do you have the most important skill for today’s economy?
As leading organizations are building skills models for hiring and developing talent, there is one skill that makes employees 18x more likely to be identified as high-potential and significantly increases engagement among leaders.
That skill is learning agility. Learning agility is the ability to swiftly master new concepts, processes, and technologies. Undoubtedly, the need to learn new concepts, processes, and technologies like those which cloud computing, digital automation, and generative AI are presenting is critical. Agile learners, regardless of industry and role, will be the best at learning such new capabilities and adding value to their teams and organizations.
Learning agile employees and leaders are better able to learn technologies, face challenges, and evolve with changing needs. We need employees who can do all three!
How to identify learning agility?
So how to identify learning agility? For external candidates, learning agility can be assessed with an assessment tool, or through behavioral interviews and observation. Assessment tools provide a consistent proven approach, but have associated costs. One often overlooked benefit of using an assessment tool, is that results can be tied to other data to produce deeper insights and predictive analytics. For example, what is the correlation for attrition based on learning agility? What about performance and promotion? Some vendors offering Learning Agility assessments are Hogan, Mettl (Mercer), Korn Ferry, and Harver. There are plenty of others. If you are not using such an assessment, consider it, or at least put it on your talent roadmap.
Even if you choose to use an assessment tool, it’s important for leaders and talent professionals in HR to understand how to recognize learning agility. Such capability is very helpful in identifying high potential employees and supporting selection processes. Here are some approaches you can use to identify learning agility in candidates (or yourself!).
It’s important for leaders and talent professionals in HR to understand how to recognize learning agility.
The key examples will come from times a candidate or employee chose to learn a new skill or technology. A simple behavioral question could be "Tell me about a time you learned a new technology or had to work on something you had little familiarity with?" For entry level jobs that didn't require experience, I would sometimes ask candidates how they learned to use Microsoft Office, a favorite phone app, or even a complicated game as there are parallels in learning modern consumer applications and learning in corporate applications. As they answered, I would pay attention to discover the answers to these questions.
Do they have foresight on what to learn? Early adopters tend to be curious and look to the future. In some of the organizations I've worked with, employees volunteered to perform external research and present on new technologies and capabilities. This early adopter volunteer demonstrated a form of learning agility. The employees who waited to be taught by their peers demonstrated less learning agility. Surely today in your organization, there are some people learning everything they can about AI and others are waiting to be instructed to do so.
Are they proactive? Once a topic is identified, do they start research immediately? Did they initiate learning on their own or were they directed to learn the new skills or technology by their boss? Are they equally proactive in exploring interpersonal topics as they are with impersonal topics like online research?
Do they demonstrate agency? Did they show a sense of ownership to learn and discover new information? A person with strong learning agility skills starts researching on their own and finds resources without direction and doesn't ask permission. I like when a new associate is constantly Googling terms and trends during meetings to learn about topics we are discussing. A person with weaker learning agility skills tends to either wait to be told to learn something or struggles getting started and relies on colleagues and other easy to access resources for information.
Do they demonstrate curiosity? Learning agility correlates with intellectual curiosity. Passion for continuous learning is a key indicator. Ask what they are curious about, how they learned about it, and how they continue to improve their learning. Usually, the way a person approaches one topic they are interested in is similar to how they will approach other topics. Be cautious however, that some people can be intensely curious about a narrow range of topics (e.g., sports results or fashion) and not broadly curious. Validate that the candidate is curious about the domain they will work in.
How do they handle complexity? Those with top marks in learning agility love solving complex problems. The best cases are those that bring an interpersonal and technical problem together. In one organization I supported, we were writing an interface to digitize all paper documents (yes, in the dinosaur days) and there was also an HR leader who insisted on keeping the paper forms and not moving to digitization. This created a multi-dimensional challenge that was a ripe learning opportunity. The team got excited by the prospect of learning how to digitize documents and win-over difficult change resistors. They demonstrated great learning agility and delivered multiple successful HR transformation projects.
Learning agility is a broad and deep topic. There are other dimensions to learning agility I'm not covering here. See my note at the end for a more academic look at the topic. My intent here is to highlight this key attribute and share some simple approaches to begin to identify it.
Conclusion
As companies develop renewed competency and skills models, it’s important to include learning agility as a desired attribute for all leaders. And learning agility should not be confined to talent or HR teams, all leaders should learn to recognize and encourage it. Include learning agility in training, nurture it with an open, psychologically safe work culture, and reward demonstrations of it to foster a learning culture. The results will follow.
Note:
For the true talent pros and academics, yes, learning agility is more of a competency. The Burke Learning Agility Indicator is an often referenced source for measuring learning agility. It measures flexibility, speed, experimenting, performance risk-taking, interpersonal risk-taking, collaborating, information gathering, feedback-seeking, and reflecting. Other approaches to learning agility see it as a composite of change agility, mental agility, people agility, results agility, and self-awareness.
