Personal Blogs

B814 – Tutorial 1 – Learning & Development at Work

An eye-opening tutorial today on B814 outlining and observing the art of learning (while ironically engaged explicitly in the very same act of learning). Grateful to the class for providing insights on the four-stage model of Kolb (1984) and concepts relevant to HR practice and organisation development from their experiences.

I also managed to squeeze in a quick listen to the L&D podcast on Apple Podcasts. The episode where David James interviews Julianna Gill from Smallbrands is worth listening to. Julianna speaks on a topic within L&D referred to as ‘performance consulting’, which I noticed is very much the action learning component of Kolb’s 1984 model set out in a very pragmatic way.

Planning on approaching the TMAs and EMAs by collecting explanatory variables and forming an objective function to elaborate on the solution to an L&D question. I will ensure I search the literature for good examples, study relational aspects of Kolb’s model, and comment appropriately.

In their classic Journal of Applied Psychology research article, Julian Barling and co-authors study a leadership training intervention in the structure of PICO (a common model for systematic reviews) and in doing so have been cited over 2640 times by their peers in the field. One such citation is in Gubbins’ and Rousseau (2015:111).

Reading Gubbins and Rousseau (2015), the first thing I realised is its very critical of Government's perception of University funding, which reminded me of a few interesting examples where I had encountered first-hand how research and practice are mutually disaggregated. Then I recalled when I attended a 1-day workshop held by Recruitment Leaders Connect. Bill Boorman was the instructor for the day leading us through the presentation, bless his socks. He was a great speaker nonetheless. 

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sat next to Howard and Billy, who each were presenting two contrasting bits of information. Howard, how recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) was the next big thing in recruitment. and Billy who was a 360 recruiter, was outright promoting the contingent agency recruiter grind.

This then reminded me of Gubbins' and Rousseau (2015) who in their paper mention this coupled concept of translational research - where research on theory informs interventions and outcomes in practice. What's so important about this. What does it represent? How does it apply to my example of Howard and RPO at the conference I attended? and HRD in practice, more generally?

The truth is I don't yet know and I can only guestimate because there are various factors at play. Race, level of experience, cultural competences, differences and significances across time between RPO and agency work. But what I do know is (academic) research can be seen to inform events such as Recruitment Leaders Connect - to an extent. If you believe I am talking rubbish, I am not. All you have to do is watch UChicago's YouTube video on how to write academically to understand that academia can be a very self-centered profession that occasionally misses and ignores its various audiences. 

As Gubbins and Rousseau (2015: 110) put it in their article: "Bennis and O’Toole (2005) argued that business schools emphasize research that speaks to the concerns of academics, while ignoring the connections to problems of management practice. According to their logic, by ending the knowledge generation process with articles that only other academics read, business schools are on a path to their own irrelevance."

I'll aim to complete Gubbins and Rousseau before I reflect conclusively on my opinion on these existential questions.

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