The Characteristics of Professional Learning - Essay Example

LEADERSHIP One of the main concern that human resources management have today is how to get the employees be fully engagedwith the goals and objectives of a certain organization. Endless changeable environment in the organization and frequently changing targets are the most important management tasks to deal with. In order to achieve the object in view, organizations should motivate their personnel and remain them satisfied with what they do. This may be achieved only under the strong leadership, mentoring and well- design scheme of constant learning that an organization should provide to its employees. The purpose of such learning for HR managers is to develop knowledge, skills and practices in order to help employees to perform their activities at a high level. While there exist the standards of learning, they are not a prescription for how education and development managers should refer all the challenges for improvement of the employees’ performance. The standards of learning rather focus on one critical issue, which is a professional learning. The standards only highlight the characteristics of professional learning conducted for effective practices, supportive leadership and improved employees outcome. In modern organizations professional learning within communities requires constant improvement, assistance of collective responsibility and support of forming of individual, team and the organization in general. This learning apply a cycle of action research, analysis of data, planning and implementation as well as evaluation and reflection. These data is examined to identify learning needs within the organization. The process of planning and implementation requires appropriate strategies to reach the objectives of the organization. In addition, professional learning gives an opportunity within the organization to evaluate the outcomes of the employees’ performance (Wiedrick, n.d.). Learning communities in the organizations share collective responsibility that brings all workforce that is the policy makers, stakeholders and staff, to enhance effectiveness of one organization. Learning communities connect knowledge and skills development with the practices that are necessary for the implementation of goals set by the organization. Such professional learning is driven by shared goals, professionalism and high expectations that deeply influence the outcome of the whole organization. To overcome barriers that interfere proper perception of learning, organizations should focus their efforts on outcomes that reflect that focus, such as different kinds of assessments, analyses of employees’ achievements and strategies made for improving results (DuFou, 2004). The people in Nestle, the world- known food company, based in Switzerland, are committed to making life better in providing products and services at a highest level of quality. Since the company focuses on promoting health and fosters youth education, it develops the communities within the organization, encouraging employees’ volunteerism. Thus, the organization shares knowledge about nutrition, health and wellness for the general public and its employees as well. For example, the company conducts a program that supports classrooms with materials that teach children how to make good decisions about food and exercise. This learning show the consumers that Nestle products are the part of delicious and nutritious meals. Learning of the youngest generation is vital for the company. Thus, Nestle youth education programs focus on enhancing academic skills that children will need for promoting healthy and productive lives. Nestle’s employee volunteerism enables its employees to spend much time outside work, promoting health and wellness and educating community. Each year, volunteers impact more than thirty five thousand students (Community involvement, n.d.). Along with this, Nestle provides cocoa farmers in Africa with the practical support and means that enable their children to get into the classroom. The company tends to improve the lives of farmers and their communities, improving productivity and providing the flow of good quality and the sustainable cocoa (Nestlé: Tackling child labor in cocoa farming, 2014). In order to enhance the effectiveness of the organizations and result for all employees, skillful leaders need to develop capacity, advocate and create support systems for professional learning. Leaders throughout the working community acknowledge effective learning as a main strategy for providing support to the significant system improvements in order to increase results for all employees. Whether they lead all levels of the organization, leaders work out competence in ability to learn and lead learning, support it and share leadership and responsibility for its effectiveness and outcome. Leaders are aware of their high expectations for all parties that are involved into the work of organization and require ambitious improvements in assessment and leadership practices. These improvements are the efficient learning to that enlarge employees’ knowledge, skills and practices. Since leaders seek for the effective professional learning to be focused on thoughtful outcomes for them, their staff, they join their deep understanding of and cultural sensibility to the community and support for results to achieve the organizational objectives. They highlight professional learning as the organizations vision and find it as a core function for improvement of the organizational activities. They also establish and maintain a public and persistent focus on their professional learning (Jackson, n.d.). In Nestle, its leaders clearly understand the critical connection between the enhanced employees’ learning and their own professional learning. They use this understanding of organizational and human changes to create such conditions and resources that support learning and change on a constant basis. Leaders make their own career- long learning visible to others, as it help for professional learning of their staff. In addition, they take an active part in professional learning within and beyond their work environment. Through learning, Nestle management identifies and clarifies its values and beliefs in order to influence on their personnel and to achieve the organizational goals. Moreover, to keep the top positions of the best food companies in the world, Nestle leaders establish organizational systems and structures that support efficient learning and thus constant improvement for the organization. They are active engagers of policy making and decision making. They establish policies, calendars and structures so to promote professional learning to increase employees’ achievement. Policies and guidelines ensure effective professional learning within their company as well. Learning increases organizations’ effectiveness and results for all employees. For this purpose, companies use a variety of sources to plan data, then to assess it and evaluate. Data from different sources treat right decisions about learning and that enhances outcome for every employee. These are the quantitative and qualitative data, formative and summative assessments, performance evaluations, observations, work examples, metrics of performance and portfolios. The use of these sources of data gives a comprehensive analysis of an employee, its supervisor and the performance in general. Proper analysis is important for data to give information about the learning. Data about the employees, their leaders and the system both are involved in, is useful in identifying of the individual, team and organizational goals for professional learning. Deep understanding guides data analysis and it helps to realize where employees are regarding the expectation of the organization. Employees’ data include assessments, during which the leader is able to see benchmarks, daily performance and work assessments. Employees’ engagement, attendance, perceptions of the company’s visions and statements as well as behavior and participation in various organizational programs are essential in understanding the needs of employees, their characteristics. When such data is known to the leaders, it enables them to make the decisions about the professional learning, however, the only data is not sufficient in all cases. Data will help to identify goals for learning, performance on various assessments and perceptions of employees and their results. Data implementation is also used to monitor and assess the achievement of the established benchmarks (Wielki, 2013). In Nestle frequent collection and use of data about the employees’ inputs and outputs as well as outcomes of professional learning intensifies the cycle of constant improvement that allow them for go on the adjustments in the process of learning and to enhance the results for them. Such continuous data collection and its analysis and use provide the involved parties with the information about the improvement. The amount of data provides the company with completely new operating availabilities. On the other hand, it simultaneously generates new challenges. Implementation of data standards and management of data is among the major objectives of the company. Learning designs within the organization are a variety of ways of creating employees’ learning experiences that is their activities and interactions. They are the framework that supports employees’ learning experiences. Joining the research and models of learning into the planning and design of professional learning promotes organizational effectiveness. There are many factors that influence decisions about learning designs. They are the aims of the learning, characteristics of those who will learn, their understanding of the learning process, familiarity with the content, work environment and available resources that support professional learning. The design of professional learning influences the quality and effectiveness of the organizational performance. The basis for learning design is formed to identify the critical elements required in it. These elements include the content or resources that learners associate with, the tasks or activities learners should perform and the support that is provided to help learners to engage with their tasks and resources. While technology is rapidly increasing the opportunities for professional learning, it helps to build, share and analyze the information to enhance practice. It increases opportunities for personalizing, differentiating and deepening learning, especially for employees with the limited access to the on- site professional learning. A process of choosing a design for the professional learning of employees within a certain organization, is rather complicated, as numerous factors should be taken into consideration. The first point should be the intended outcome, which can be taken from the data analysis of employee and leader learning needs. Effective designs for the learning help leaders to develop a complete understanding of the purpose of such learning, critical attributes, meaning and the connection to other items. To enhance employees’ learning, leaders give an opportunity for the staff to practice new learning with the ongoing assessment, provide feedback and coaching sessions to enable employees to integrate fully into the organizational activities (Learning Design, n.d.). At Nestle, such learning design is intended on learning outcomes, as they will enable employees to perform their work at best level, leaders to manage this work and the organization in general to provide its customers with the best quality of its products and services. The company provides its employees with the learning resources such as document materials, lectures and case studies. For the effective learning process, it establishes support through schedules, different instructions and procedures that help employees to perform their duties well. These approaches help the organization to set its objectives and build its strategy with the support and effective collaboration of all the team it has. Moreover, the company cars of its employees by conducting the coaching and mentoring sessions to increase their productivity and results. All these factors and approaches are assessed then in order to see the picture of the company’s progress (Training and education, n.d.). Professional learning enhances leader effectiveness and results for all employees and puts its outcomes with the performance and standards. Leader’s performance standards usually mean knowledge, skills and practices as of highly effective leaders. Standards lead to preparation, assessment, practice and evaluation; they establish requirements for leader preparation, identify expectations of the effective workforce, lead career- long professional learning of a workforce and set reliable metrics of efficiency for measuring one’s performance. Employees’ learning results are the expectations for all employees obtained at the highest levels. Learning for leaders focuses on employees’ learning outcomes and has a positive feature on changing practice and enhancing employee’s achievement. Along with the employee learning results such as focus, professional learning makes more profound the leader’s content knowledge and understanding of how employees obtain their experience. The more professional learning activity is, the more likely it will be effective in improving employee’s performance and it builds more advanced work to be a part of a connected opportunities for the constant professional learning. Learning results flow from the assessment of employees’ needs.  The needs should detect the space between the existing condition and the one that is desired.  Learning outcomes are the knowledge, skills or attitudes that are needed. They also demonstrate the solution to the identified problems and provide the direction to the planning of a learning activity. Learning outcomes assist in focusing on employees’ behavior that is to be changed’ they lead the content, instruction and evaluation; determine what should be learned; they pass what should be made. The need in learning is for the good both on the individual and the organization as it shows the gap between the current level of leader and employee and the level that the organization is expected from them (Writing learning outcome, 2014.). Only clear articulation of learning outcomes will be the basis of the possibility to evaluate the effectiveness of the learning process (Osters, n.d.). As learning outcomes demonstrate what employees can be able to perform in terms of their knowledge and skills, their components are essential for the success of the organization. For the Nestle, such outcomes will guarantee the efficient development of its activities. When writing the outcome statement, the key question should be answered. They will be addressed to the assessed needs of the company. Besides, these question are important for the decision- making process and are tailored to the intended audience that is the consumers of the organization. These question may include the level of awareness of the potential audience’s needs; the company should also understand the situation in which the problem occurs; what are the most important things that the company should do. What is more important is the assessment methods that Nestle uses for the selecting of the appropriate assessment methods. These are the performance assessment of the employees, the training session and certain exam at the end. Along with them, the company clearly states about the performance criteria they want to see in every employee. Good feedbacks, competency of employees as well as fields for the improvement that enable leaders to educate their staff for the good of the company. Managing employees in the most effective ways requires certain skills that leaders should possess. Only these skills will enable the achievement of the organization objectives and goals. While management organizations are characterized by developing of different strategies, having certain democracy and autonomy, their management practices cannot be reduced to one standard policy. However, professional organizations use to face the same challenge that is managing ones’ time and objectives in order to execute tasks and implement new ideas (Waldron, Vsanthakumar, Arulraj, n.d.). As Nestle is deeply organize company, it has the certain autonomy, however, accurate planning allows it to remain one of the biggest food companies in the world. It establishes and works out different policies and instruction, which are essential to every employee to accomplish. However, to ensure the stability of the company in the world market, there are few ways that will improve its activities. Thus, one of the effective steps may be enumerating actions of the company using brainstorming sessions among the employees of different divisions and the management. The action plan to be organized on the basis of goals and issues that the company face with. For the first phase the company should identify what actions are needed to address the issues and how to achieve the goals. One can establish the review process with the consumers where different issues will be negotiated. These indicators can be rated in order to understand the overall picture. From the improvement framework, there is a need to choose individual elements from the reference material that address issues and objectives. Action plan organized on goals and problems can be written in columns, where primary goals, purpose and actions will be written. One may use the following chart for the process of improvement planning. Primary goal (the outcomes expected) Purpose of goal (five why principle) Actions Priority Time Responsible for execution Reduce product development cycle Deliver earlier than competition This approach will keep the company’s process improvement plan focused on resolving issues and center on the organization’s challenges, continuously taken to move the organization toward its objectives. References Available from http://learningforward.org/standards/learning-designs#.VDgp0bCsVps Community involvement, n.d., Nestle official site, Available from http://careers.nestleusa.com/working/community-involvement DuFour, R., 2004. What Is a Professional Learning Community? Schools as Learning Communities, Volume 61 | Number 8  Jackson, D., Leadership, The professional learning organization, Available from http://learningforward.org/standards/leadership#.VDjO-rCsVps Learning design, n.d. Information and Communication Technologies and Their Role in Flexible Learning, Available from http://www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/project/learn_design.htm Nestle: Tackling child labor in cocoa farming, 2014. Nestle official web site, Available from http://www.nestle.com/media/newsandfeatures/cocoa-plan-child-labour Osters, S., Writing Measurable Learning Outcomes, n.d. Available from http://www.gavilan.edu/research/spd/Writing-Measurable-Learning-Outcomes.pdf Training and education, n.d. Nestle official web site, Available from http://www.nestle.com/csv/our-people/training-learning Waldron, M., Vsanthakumar, J., Arulraj, S. n.d. Improving the organization and management of extension, Available from http://www.fao.org/docrep/w5830e/w5830e0f.htm Wiedrick, J., n.d. Learning Communities. The professional learning organization, Available from http://learningforward.org/standards/learning-communities#.VDi3T7CsVps Wielki, J., 2013. Implementation of the Big Data concept in organizations – possibilities, impediments and challenges, Opole University of Technology, Proceedings of the 2013 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems Writing learning outcomes, 2014. The America Association of Law Libraries, Available from http://www.aallnet.org/Archived/Education-and-Events/cpe/outcomes.html Read More