The relationship between Learning Agility and success
Authors: Sanne Haring, MSc, Jair Shankar, MSc, Koen Hofkes, MSc.
In today’s ever changing world, the importance of a dynamic workforce is on the forefront of every HR professional or selector’s mind. Companies that have a workforce that can adapt quickly to new company policies, a new company direction, or company transforming based on the economic climate or competition from rivals, are the ones that will most likely survive! It boils down to one fundamental question: How can we ensure that these fluid individuals are easily found? Those who are both able to adapt to new situations and thrive in a changing environment.
Learning Agility is the ability for someone to rapidly develop new effective behaviour based on new experiences and to easily move from idea to idea both within and across experiences. It is about the flexibility to approach situations from multiple perspectives and the speed of learning new things. This flexibility and speed means that people who are Learning Agile, have the ability to incorporate new skills into their current skill set quickly and efficiently, while at the same time unlearning ineffective skills with the same efficiency and speed (DaRue, Ashford, & Myers, 2012). It can also be said that those who are learning agile are not only problem solvers, they are also problem finders and are happy to tackle these problems head on (Hofkes & Busato, 2015). The importance of learning new skills and unlearning ineffective skills is apparent when linked back to the study conducted by McCall and Lombardo (1983), since overreliance on old skills could set someone up for failure.
Due to the growing interest in Learning Agility, many of our clients want to investigate the potential of using Learning Agility as an assessment tool. This has allowed us to collect Learning Agility data from a wide variety of sources and to use that data to extensively investigate the relationship between Learning Agility and other concepts. The results are based on an anonymous data sample of over 17,000 people from a wide variety of HFMtalentindex’ clients.
This study includes:
- Learning Agility, Performance and High Potentials
- Learning Agility and Performance Over Time
- Education and Learning Agility
- Age and Learning Agility
- Gender and Learning Agility
- Learning Agility by Region
- Learning Agility and Sector Strengths
- Learning Agility Benchmarks
The potential of using HFMtalentindex’ Learning Agility is limitless, enabling us to conduct different types of analyses while using our extensive database.
