Human-centered thinking in training management Empowering people for digitalisation

Digital skills: Trending and important, but beware of training management risks

Digitalisation is everywhere. So it is not surprising that digital skills are increasingly required, and good training management is decisive to identify required digital skills early enough. But in many daily exchanges about digital skills training, there are three risks worth mentioning: exclusively focusing on technology, using proxies for identifying training needs, and relying on assumptions. Let’s describe these risks one by one.

Risk 1: Focusing on technology

My first risk might seem counter-intuitive at first sight. All too often, we start conceptualising a digital skills training with technology in mind. It often sounds like this: “We need an AI course”, “We have nothing about Angular”, or “I think that a deep dive into 2-factor authentication is necessary.”

I can fully understand this: Technology has changed a lot, will change even more, and is just very fascinating. And all too often, it is even our audience who are asking for training on a specific technology. But technology is not valuable as such. It is not an end in itself, but serves a purpose, for example by making our lives easier or allowing us to do something we would not be able to do otherwise. So if we want to empower people to thrive in digitalisation, we need to train them in identifying this purpose and then select and design the appropriate technology. Training is no different.

Credits: Macro photo of a CPU by Alexandre Debiève, Unsplash

Risk 2: Using proxies rather than involving people

All too often, we are using proxies to identify digital skills training needs. For example, we look at terms entered into search engines, assuming that “those are people’s interests”. Or we look at job offers and extract lists of skills and competencies, assuming that “those are what is people need”. Now, of course, all of these are valuable data. And we can even collect them automatically and use artificial intelligence to assist analysis. But nonetheless, they only provide circumstantial evidence:

• People do not enter all they need to know into a search bar – in particular not when they are not aware that they need to know it.
• And not every relevant digital skill is in a job offer – just those identified by the hiring company. But companies do not always hire new staff to drive digitalisation: They can train existing staff, restructure the organisation, involve consultants, or outsource to external providers.
• Entire industries work with freelancer networks collaborating on projects rather than hiring staff.
• Digital skills are also relevant for personal projects, similar to this website. This does not make these skills less valuable: Personal projects often influence work practices, and sometimes even evolve into new business.

So we should not rely on proxies alone. It is impossible to create a training program for people (or even train people) without talking to them and observing which digital skills they need in their real lives. Yes, that might be “more work”, but we must not sacrifice this quality just for the sake of being quicker.

Risk 3: Relying on assumptions

More dangerous than using proxies is not having data at all, instead assuming that it is “logical” what people want or even saying that “we already know what people want, we are in this business for quite some time”. I am not saying that there is no place for intuition in training management – actually, intuition can be an excellent start for hypotheses for validation during the training creation. But when we only rely on our assumptions, we risk that our own biases or (worse) even arrogance gets into our way. And we risk the success of our training, or even of our entire organisational mission. This means that solid research on learner needs is not a “nice-to-have” or “something for later”, but a decisive factor in risk management. A UX manager put it nicely in a session at the UX festival 2024: “If I have no user research, I could also throw a coin.”

Human-centered thinking in training management

How do we address these risks? In this article, my goal is to emphasise how human-centered thinking can serve this. But what does “human-centered thinking” really mean?

There are different human-centered design approaches, but they all agree on putting the humans at the core. The aim is to create something that has a high chance of providing them with positive experiences and helping them to fulfil their deep human needs. This can address customers, users, employees, or other groups. Consequently, we might speak of customer experience, user experience, or employee experience as an outcome of the human-centered process. But the term “human-centered” does not necessarily mean that we ignore society, other living beings, or the environment: In the end, humans are interconnected with each other and our world, so that it is at our core interest to keep a balance. Still, some argue that we need to go beyond humans, for example in society-centered design or humanity-centered design.

For this article, it is not essential to dig deeper into different flavors of human-centered design. Instead, there are a few principles that I consider central for human-centered training management:

• involving humans throughout the entire process
• validating ideas in constant iterations
• making decisions based on data
• treating people with respect and dignity
• design for meaningful positive learning experiences

Let us now address principles aspects one after the other.

Principle 1: Involving humans throughout the entire process

Throughout the entire creation process, the audience is included. “Audience” refers to all stakeholders who are impacted by what we create, whether they are direct users or not. This is particularly important at the beginning, where we need them to understand their human needs related to the product or service we are creating, and at the end, where we verify whether our solution is working for them. This is decisive: We are not human-centered when we simply create something based on our assumptions (“I know what my customers want”) or publish a solution without knowing anything about what our audience thinks of it (“Let’s go live and hope for the best”). There are also methods to further include humans, for example in co-creation.

Principle 2: Validating ideas in constant iterations

Although a solid understanding and involvement of the audience is key, human-centered approaches are not like waterfall projects with massive steps following one after the other. In fact, required training topics are evolving quickly and depend highly on the specific context. So human-centered approaches are quick and iterative. They constantly build on feedback and new insights into audience needs.

Principle 3: Making decisions based on data

Being human-centered needs data about the audience. Data helps us to make an educated guess about what to create, specify solid requirements, and assess whether our solution is “good enough” to go live. Human-centered design is very similar to research: We are constantly creating hypotheses and collect data to validate or falsify them.

Principle 4: Treating people with respect and dignity

Being human-centered is based on a profound respect for people. For example, when the audience is adults, this means that we need to respect their training decisions. We should not consider some purposes more appropriate than others: Whether our learners take a course to work on a personal project or to create business, both are equally valid. Our role in training management is to guide and assist them, but always respect that they create their own destinies.

Principle 5: Design for meaningful positive learning experiences

The aim of human-centered training management is to build high-quality training programs. This means that learners reach their learning objectives (purpose), but also that they have positive learning experiences. People always have experiences, and we cannot determine how learners will experience our courses. But we can try our best to make them as worthwhile and enjoyable as possible. Having a solid understanding of the audience helps in achieving this.

Being human-centered also means working on long-term, sustainable solutions. When we think it through, there is no point in creating something that might be a positive experience now, but creates a worse experience in the future.

Human-centered approaches are also inclusive: They do not focus on one audience while ignoring the other. Instead, they aim to balance the needs of different audiences and also include anyone who is impacted by the product or service we are creating (regardless of whether this person is paying or not).

Conclusion

Education is inherently human-centered: All that we do as educators aims at allowing people to reach their potential and have positive learning experiences. Keeping this in mind can help us to mitigate the main risks in digital skills training: focusing exclusively on technology, using proxies to define training needs, and relying too much on our biased assumptions. In my next article, I will outline how this human-centered thinking applies to training management in practice.

Note: The views expressed here are my own.