Early-career professionals are often celebrated for their coachability, openness to feedback and overall willingness to learn. This desire for ongoing learning is praised in performance reviews and built into competency frameworks. Yet, as training professionals, we must ask whether we’re nurturing not only the desire to learn, but also the curiosity.

Adaptability is a critical skill for the modern workplace, yet there’s a fine line between being adaptable and overly complacent. In their desire to please and meet business requirements, some employees lose their sense of agency, treating learning as a prerequisite instead of a need.

Learning and development (L&D) must nurture an innate curiosity in their learners, demonstrating how to seek out learning experiences as a response to their environment. This is what it truly means to foster growth mindsets and learning agility — training learners to have autonomy over their professional development.

The Hidden Costs of Career Drift

Overly adaptive employees can risk detachment from their role’s purpose. Career drift describes a state employees can feel when they are performing the essential tasks and duties of their job but not moving forward. It’s easy for the “drift” to go unnoticed since the worker is showing up, doing their job well and ticking off all the boxes. Yet, over time, it can show up as professional dissatisfaction. This could potentially lead to:

• Lower confidence at work, hindering critical-thinking and decision-making skills.
• Poor collaboration and innovation, since employees may doubt their own judgement and hesitate to cause friction.
• Reactive training experiences, because learners perceive training as a way to “put out fires” versus enhance future skill development.

A study by the Journal of Vocational Behavior found that career adaptability can negatively affect employees’ professional career.

Professionals who were highly adaptable but lacked a personal career strategy reported lower levels of satisfaction and engagement. Though they participated in ongoing learning opportunities, they did not feel ownership for their development or engaged with the company as a whole.

4 Ways to Motivate Learners to Take Charge

Authentic skill-building is derived from challenging norms, thinking outside-the-box and confident decision-making. This requires instilling an innovative mindset that teaches employees how to take charge of their own career development. Here are four strategies to guide your workforce toward autonomous learning:

1.    Educate workforce on coachable skills.

Coachability is not about blind receptiveness, but instead requires the ability to evaluate input, consider relevancy and make intentional iterations. Being coachable is a skill that must be taught. You can do this by:

• Defining coachability in the context of your organization.
• Educating learners on how to embody specific coachable skills (e.g., active listening, self-awareness).
• Showing managers how to receive thoughtful pushback and not just compliance by demonstrating the keys to fostering psychological safety. Managers should know how to engage in collaborative feedback, giving direct reports the space to say, for example, “I hear your feedback, but here’s another approach I’d like to share.”

2.    Foster decision-making skills.

Many L&D programs emphasize skills development, but very few focus on developing decision-making skills as a capability. Create modules that simulate relevant workplace challenges, allowing participants to walk through scenarios that challenge critical-thinking, problem-solving and conflict management skills. Partner eLearning modules with roleplaying to reinforce the skills in a low-risk environment, build confidence and increase learning engagement.

3.  Foster just-in-time learning experiences.

Learning is most effective when it is relevant and timely. When employees receive too little or too much information it can lead to overwhelm. To promote a balanced learning environment, embrace a just-in-time learning model, tailored and aligned to individual learner development. You can do this by implementing learning roadmaps in your training initiatives. Give managers the tools to help employees identify skill needs, set priorities and connect goals to career growth with a learning roadmap. Ensure they include checkpoints for continuous reflection and goal-tracking.

4.    Pair learners with a mentor.

Peer learning and support can be valuable in building trust and engagement; however, it cannot replace the guidance of a seasoned professional. Mentorship programs can encourage intentional learning and foster on-the-job training experiences that stimulate advanced career growth. Mentors can help mentees reflect on their future career goals and how to choose the right growth opportunities to get there.

Create two-way learning experiences so training benefits both mentor and mentee. Seasoned professionals can gain fresh perspectives from mentees, while mentees learn advanced skills. Lastly, mentors should be trained to empower mentees to take ownership of their learning instead of relying solely on guidance.

Conclusion

In the rush to future-ready our workforce, we could be overlooking confidence-building strategies in our training content. Work competency and skill proficiency matters, but without confidence and self-agency, learners could remain in the passenger seat of their careers for life.

Being teachable is a strength — until it becomes a substitute for self-direction. As L&D professionals, our role isn’t limited to facilitating learning but also includes building confidence and motivating learners to trust their own discernment.