How cohort-based learning can motivate your colleagues to invest in skills development

Key takeaways:

• Cohorts help make learning a priority
• Having endorsement for senior stakeholders is essential
• Give feedback to ensure continuous learning

The Government Campus makes upskilling civil servants a priority. Yet, anyone who’s responsible for the learning and development of teams knows that nurturing ‘a culture of learning’ is easier said than done. Teams and individuals face a variety of challenges, from not being able to find the time for learning to getting buy-in and demonstrating impact.

Apolitical understands that to create effective online learning, it is essential to invest time in building communities and a social learning environment. We do this by delivering cohort-based learning, where learners move through our online courses together. This involves a mixture of asynchronous and synchronous learning: learners complete lessons and participate in discussion forums in their own time but come together for live online masterclasses and skills-sharing sessions.

But, as this question from Manisha Pathak, Capability Partner within the Cabinet Office, suggests, reaping the benefits of social learning hinges on building the right environment:

“How can we, as a civil service, create the right learning environment that reinforces the habit of social learning? So when we do have a group of learners, momentum and motivation stays at a steady high.”

At Building core skills through high-impact learning, one of our recent community events, we heard from a variety of voices from within the UK Civil Service on how cohort-based learning is helping them to overcome some of these common challenges.

These are their tips for success:

1. Help make learning a priority

‘Finding the time’ tops the list of learners’ biggest challenges when it comes to investing in skills development. Cohort-based learning addresses this by encouraging learners to follow similar schedules (e.g. a recommended one hour per week) while giving them the flexibility to learn at their own pace in a way that fits their own energy patterns and preferences.

By scheduling regular checkpoints within teams to catch up and discuss learning, you create an environment that encourages learning without being overly dogmatic. At the event, the Department for Health and Social Care shared how their cohort met up regularly in smaller groups to discuss their progress and how it applied to their own context. This approach not only helps learners to make time but also enhances learning — it makes it possible to discuss and even teach others things you learned, which is the highest form of mastery.

2. Senior buy-in is essential

Apolitical’s cohort-based model involves delivering contextualised live online events to help consolidate and discuss learnings from our online courses. Having senior stakeholders attend these events to share context up front helps learners understand why they are undertaking learning and how that fits into wider departmental priorities and strategy.

To go one step further than that, having senior colleagues themselves participate in cohorts helps to role model the importance of setting aside time for learning. Junior learners have expressed that they also benefit from having greater exposure to those from higher grades.

3. Give feedback to ensure continuous learning

Learning as part of a community also opens the door to improved quantity and quality of feedback. To make sure that learning is continuous, rather than ‘one-and-done’, it is essential that participants receive feedback when applying learning in their day-to-day roles.

We heard from colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions that by being on a cohort of Advance Your Writing In Government with colleagues, they now felt better equipped to give and receive feedback on each others’ writing since they now had an established common language and set of frameworks. As Manisha Pathak shared: “The right learning conditions, the right learning environment, increases motivation, collaboration and feedback.”

So that’s it, three simple but powerful ways cohort-based learning can overcome some of the common challenges when creating a learning culture.

If you are interested in partnering with Apolitical to deliver or develop successful cohort-based learning, please contact freddie.price@apolitical.co or keri.landau@apolitical.co

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