‘Can you learn soft skills from e-learning?’ by Paul Matthews, Training Journal, December 2011

This article is of particular interest to MTP as we have recently been asked by a client to build on their e-learning programme in people skills by creating an on-line session, to be delivered by one of our facilitators. I therefore had to go through the existing e-learning programme to judge what kind of foundation it would provide. I was highly impressed by the design but very uncertain about its likely impact. The author’s views confirm and clarify my reservations.

The article starts well but does not quite maintain its early promise. The author makes the key point right up front; that you can learn about soft skills via e-learning but you can’t necessarily learn to perform more effectively. You might become more knowledgeable but performance improvement depends on the effectiveness of subsequent practice.

Some people might therefore reject e-learning for this reason, in the same way as the more perfectionist L&D professionals say that ‘awareness’ training in finance or business is not effective. The author makes the point that the road to competence is a sequential process and learning about the importance of a skill can be a first step on the way to eventual mastery. He uses the pathway from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence to illustrate this point. E-learning may only move you through the first stage to conscious incompetence but that can be a key step for the manager whose people skills need to improve.

Having made this excellent, practical point, the author then loses his way by suggesting that, after learning what the skill is and why it is important, e-learning can allow learners to practice people skills. This is where I part company with the author’s views, particularly as he stresses the importance of creating ‘realistic scenarios’ to relate to. My view is that e-learning then becomes superficial and patronising, particularly with experienced managers. A typical approach is to introduce fictional characters and require judgements that are impossible without knowing the history, context and personalities involved. And it is not really practice; it becomes a guessing game with no perfect answer.

I sympathise with what the e-learning designers are trying to do because, to make e-learning engaging, you have to create interaction. But there are other ways of doing this, for instance asking learners to input what THEY would do when faced with scenarios in their own context and then feeding back the pros and cons without claiming that there is a right answer. This is however not ‘practice’; it is merely an interactive way of increasing understanding,

The article then goes further downhill by suggesting a rather meaningless distinction between e-learning and e-reference which did not move the argument forward. However there is a recovery at the end when the author makes the important point that the right way to see e-learning is as one of a number of learning methods that need to be blended together. This resonated particularly well with me because the on-line facilitator-led session for our client mentioned above was designed to lead into a later face to face programme when the skills will be applied.

The article raises interesting issues but it would have been even more useful if advocacy of the blended learning approach had been raised earlier and had underpinned the rest of the content.

Click here to view the article in full:

http://www.trainingjournal.com/feature/2011-12-01-can-you-learn-soft-skills-from-e-learning/