Touching the learning aspect of five diciplines to enable the fifth

Speaker: Jonas Andersson
Venue: Hamburg (May 20th 2014), Copenhagen (May 21st 2014), Stockholm (May 22nd 2014), Helsinki (May 23rd 2014)

Creating organizational competence in applied areas is time consuming and far from simple. At the same time, an edge in areas like project management, systems engineering and product creation at large, can be argued to be a prerequisite for reaching and sustaining a high degree of value creation in technology intensive organizations.

Yet, the toolbox applied to design competence development activities and validate the investment in such are far from as sophisticated as the technological products produced or the emphasis spent on more tangible aspects of Systems Engineering.

This presentation elaborates on and exemplifies how the intention of creating a learning organization can be combined with modern didactic practices to support its realization. Practical examples are gathered from the speaker’s close to 20 years’ experience of designing competence development for Swedish academia, governmental bodies, and industry.

The concept of learning depth is employed to define learning outcomes clear enough to support the alignment with as well short term needs of the organization as its strategic objectives. Learning taxonomies are discussed as a tool for defining such learning outcomes that also provide a solid ground (and help) for designing adequate and varied competence development activities over time. Learning activities needs to address both the individuals and the team as a whole and alternative strategies to address this are presented.

Finally the importance of assessing and validating competence development is elucidated. First and foremost as an integrated tool for learning, but also to justify investments made to stakeholders, to certify individual and group achievements, and to create corrective actions for continuous improvement.

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