YOU LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERYDAY
WHAT IS LEARNING?
Learning, seems like an easy term to define no? We all learn right? Everything you can do today you learnt, you learn how to walk, talk, do mathematics, ride a bike, drive a car, you learn about people, about cultures learning is an endless entity hence the saying you learn something new every day. Just like learning is critical to our development as humans, it is also critical to organisations. However if you are to teach someone something new within an organisation it is important that you have an understanding of what learning actually entails.
Like many concepts the definition of learning is not black and white however learning can be broadly defined as an acquisition of knowledge and skills that are developed through education and experience. It involves encoding, retaining and using information (Muchinsky 2006, Hatami, 2013). As individuals we will all identify with one definition of learning more so than any other and we all have a preferred way of using our own knowledge, giving us different learning styles. Learning is viewed differently by those who dedicate their time and knowledge into researching the field meaning that there are a number of different types and theories surrounding learning along with a number of different learning styles that individuals can adopt (Pritchard, 2014)
Before going any further it is important to first understand the basic learning types.
LEARNING TYPES
CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
We’ve all heard of Pavlov’s Dog, this type of learning involves a stimulus which is paired with an unconditioned stimulus which in turn elicits a conditioned response. You may be asking how this is relevant to your business at this stage...well classical conditioning is quite important in business, you want people to buy your products or use your services am I right? In order to do so you generally try to associate your tactics, business, products and services with positive, pleasurable emotions of your customer, employee or business partner (Weiten, 2005) , this process is classical conditioning!
OPERANT CONDITIONING
Also known as behaviour modification, this type of learning is based[RJ1] on the work done by B.F Skinner. Operant conditioning is a form of learning whereby voluntary responses are controlled by either positive or negative reinforcement. A positive reinforcement is likely to strengthen a response making it more frequent, whereas a negative reinforcement is likely to weaken the response meaning the individual is less likely to repeat such behaviours (Weiten, 2005). This type of learning is one we can all probably relate to and understand if you do something right, I.e. in the world of business make your monthly budget, you may be rewarded with a monthly bonus or a percentage of commission on sales, which acts as an incentive for you to strive to make next month’s budget, because you were able to buy those new shoes or take that holiday you had been dreaming about thanks to this reward. However if you don’t make your budget for the month you may be put on a performance improvement plan which may result in further consequences if you fail to improve, meaning you will cease any behaviour that may have led to the failure of reaching budget.
OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING
Also known as modelling, based on the work by Albert Bandura this type of learning acknowledges that although conditioning both conditional and operant are important it is impossible to learn everything by emitting random responses until we reach the desired behaviour, for example if you knew nothing about driving, had never seen anyone drive a car before it would be very difficult to jump in a car and learn how to drive by emitting random responses until one of them lead to a favourable outcome. Thus observational learning is where an individual’s learning occurs when their response is modelled by the observation of others (Weiten 2005).