Supply chain training
The future employee shifts from knowledge worker to learning worker
Supply chain training needs to evolve, urgently. Traditional models are no longer enough to best serve your teams’ learning and self-development needs and goals. As their executive, you have the influence and responsibility to shape and provide the resources they require.
Here, we will cover techniques to get there. First, though, let’s take a look at the dynamics pushing this need for change. Digitalisation, globalisation and the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 are just a few of the factors responsible for radically altering the way we work. Supply chains have been particularly affected, intertwined as they are with global evolutions and disruptions. VUCA reality is inescapable in the sector. As a result, previous supply chain training programmes and formats are no longer enough to progress and succeed. Your working landscape has transformed; your employees’ needs and expectations have changed; rapid, hands-on application of learnings is paramount.
In The Future of Work, author Jacob Morgan describes the seven principles of the future employee. It is our view that his sixth and seventh principles are especially relevant for your supply chain executive role: the future employee shifts from knowledge worker to learning worker and the future employee learns and teaches at will. More importantly, the future Morgan foresaw is now. This means it is vital for you to adapt and evolve the learning and development approaches you deploy within your organisation. To this end, we will explore the relevance of Morgan’s sixth principle below; our second blog in this series focuses on his seventh.
Your people are shifting from knowledge workers to learning workers
Instead, your people need and want to learn via tangible approaches, with clear relevance to their immediate processes, challenges and aspirations. In today’s supply chain arena, this approach is non-negotiable. Increasing geopolitical complexity, competitive supply-demand equations and rapid information influxes mean informed decision-making needs to happen at increasing speed. Periodic knowledge acquisition, therefore, leaves your teams outdated. We outline the future-facing alternative you can implement below.
How to meet your learning workers’ needs
Your supply chain training programmes must be rapidly implementable, organisation-specific and, above all, kept continuously up to date. These are the tenets we work with at TVCA.
We see continuous learning as the way forward for supply chain training, given that the vast majority of useful insights occur on-the-job, not in theoretical classroom scenarios. We support you as an executive to implement team-based trainings, too, enabling your people to strategise cross-functionally and join the dots of solutions faster. We offer you resources and guidance as you introduce experiential learning, boosting engagement across all levels of your organisation for learning that sticks. All tailored to your employee and organisational needs, and facilitated by our expert supply chain practitioners. Below, we explore the benefits in more depth.
Advantages of a continuous learning culture in your organisation’s supply chain training
For your team
By rethinking your supply chain training programs to en The future of supply chain learning is nowable continuous learning, you empower your employees to organically self-develop. Their curiosity and ambition are met with the truly useful, relevant learning resources and opportunities you provide. Encouraged by you to do so, self-starter employees can challenge themselves to learn and innovate on an ongoing basis. Sharpening their insights and ideas, and gaining the confidence to experiment in an organisational environment that embraces innovative mistake-making as part of progress. Seeing their initiatives succeed, too, creates a virtuous cycle of motivation and drive. This is the seismic shift that you can and should be creating space for: your executive role is to set your team’s overall direction, setting guidelines within which they can thrive. This means your role evolves from directive to coaching, aligning with the needs of your current and future learning workers.
Implementing simulation training is a useful strategy you can utilise. Designed to reflect their processes and pain points, simulation training provides your supply chain teams with insights they can apply directly to their day-to-day. Simulations are also vital to zooming-out your employees’ views on organisational operations. As such, they are a handy technique as you coach them to increase awareness of cross-departmental flows. The opportunity to play your part in increasing collaboration and silo-breaking within your organisation is, therefore, another key element here.
For you as a supply chain manager, director or executive
When you implement training programs specific to your organisation’s needs, it becomes far simpler to clearly demonstrate their positive impacts. You will be able to directly trace improvements to the practically, tangibly applied learning that you have implemented and led. Put simply, this ensures credit where it is due. You will be positioned to make your mark as head of your supply chain team, guiding employees that are thinking innovatively, independently and cross-functionally, generating output greater than its parts.
For your organisation as a whole
By implementing continuous learning, you will play a key role in normalising calculated risk-taking within your organisation. This underpins a mindset that embraces innovation and views failures as learning opportunities. Agility and adaptability are crucial elements of this, too. Encouraging a continuous learning culture facilitates the modernisation of top-down authority and idea chains that is needed to move fast. Instead of awaiting every instruction, you and your supply chain team can take the initiative, experiment and drive change.
By supporting your supply chain employees’ development in this way, you can pioneer this approach and encourage its spread in your organisation. This is key to creating and sustaining business value, preparing your company for future growth and challenges by enabling its people today.
Opportunity to innovate and advance, autonomy and the chance to put their stamp on successful initiatives is an attractive proposition for the future-making employees you want to attract. With talent in short and contested supply, the forward-thinking supply chain training programmes you implement could make all the difference to your proposition — and your organisation’s retention of great minds.
Supply chain training
The future employee shifts from knowledge worker to learning worker
15-05-2023
Supply chain training needs to evolve, urgently. Traditional models are no longer enough to best serve your teams’ learning and self-development needs and goals. As their executive, you have the influence and responsibility to shape and provide the resources they require.
Here, we will cover techniques to get there. First, though, let’s take a look at the dynamics pushing this need for change. Digitalisation, globalisation and the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 are just a few of the factors responsible for radically altering the way we work. Supply chains have been particularly affected, intertwined as they are with global evolutions and disruptions. VUCA reality is inescapable in the sector. As a result, previous supply chain training programmes and formats are no longer enough to progress and succeed. Your working landscape has transformed; your employees’ needs and expectations have changed; rapid, hands-on application of learnings is paramount.
In The Future of Work, author Jacob Morgan describes the seven principles of the future employee. It is our view that his sixth and seventh principles are especially relevant for your supply chain executive role: the future employee shifts from knowledge worker to learning worker and the future employee learns and teaches at will. More importantly, the future Morgan foresaw is now. This means it is vital for you to adapt and evolve the learning and development approaches you deploy within your organisation. To this end, we will explore the relevance of Morgan’s sixth principle below; our second blog in this series focuses on his seventh.
Your people are shifting from knowledge workers to learning workers
Instead, your people need and want to learn via tangible approaches, with clear relevance to their immediate processes, challenges and aspirations. In today’s supply chain arena, this approach is non-negotiable. Increasing geopolitical complexity, competitive supply-demand equations and rapid information influxes mean informed decision-making needs to happen at increasing speed. Periodic knowledge acquisition, therefore, leaves your teams outdated. We outline the future-facing alternative you can implement below.
How to meet your learning workers’ needs
Your supply chain training programmes must be rapidly implementable, organisation-specific and, above all, kept continuously up to date. These are the tenets we work with at TVCA.
We see continuous learning as the way forward for supply chain training, given that the vast majority of useful insights occur on-the-job, not in theoretical classroom scenarios. We support you as an executive to implement team-based trainings, too, enabling your people to strategise cross-functionally and join the dots of solutions faster. We offer you resources and guidance as you introduce experiential learning, boosting engagement across all levels of your organisation for learning that sticks. All tailored to your employee and organisational needs, and facilitated by our expert supply chain practitioners. Below, we explore the benefits in more depth.
Advantages of a continuous learning culture in your organisation’s supply chain training
For your team
By rethinking your supply chain training programs to en The future of supply chain learning is nowable continuous learning, you empower your employees to organically self-develop. Their curiosity and ambition are met with the truly useful, relevant learning resources and opportunities you provide. Encouraged by you to do so, self-starter employees can challenge themselves to learn and innovate on an ongoing basis. Sharpening their insights and ideas, and gaining the confidence to experiment in an organisational environment that embraces innovative mistake-making as part of progress. Seeing their initiatives succeed, too, creates a virtuous cycle of motivation and drive. This is the seismic shift that you can and should be creating space for: your executive role is to set your team’s overall direction, setting guidelines within which they can thrive. This means your role evolves from directive to coaching, aligning with the needs of your current and future learning workers.
Implementing simulation training is a useful strategy you can utilise. Designed to reflect their processes and pain points, simulation training provides your supply chain teams with insights they can apply directly to their day-to-day. Simulations are also vital to zooming-out your employees’ views on organisational operations. As such, they are a handy technique as you coach them to increase awareness of cross-departmental flows. The opportunity to play your part in increasing collaboration and silo-breaking within your organisation is, therefore, another key element here.
For you as a supply chain manager, director or executive
When you implement training programs specific to your organisation’s needs, it becomes far simpler to clearly demonstrate their positive impacts. You will be able to directly trace improvements to the practically, tangibly applied learning that you have implemented and led. Put simply, this ensures credit where it is due. You will be positioned to make your mark as head of your supply chain team, guiding employees that are thinking innovatively, independently and cross-functionally, generating output greater than its parts.
For your organisation as a whole
By implementing continuous learning, you will play a key role in normalising calculated risk-taking within your organisation. This underpins a mindset that embraces innovation and views failures as learning opportunities. Agility and adaptability are crucial elements of this, too. Encouraging a continuous learning culture facilitates the modernisation of top-down authority and idea chains that is needed to move fast. Instead of awaiting every instruction, you and your supply chain team can take the initiative, experiment and drive change.
By supporting your supply chain employees’ development in this way, you can pioneer this approach and encourage its spread in your organisation. This is key to creating and sustaining business value, preparing your company for future growth and challenges by enabling its people today.
Opportunity to innovate and advance, autonomy and the chance to put their stamp on successful initiatives is an attractive proposition for the future-making employees you want to attract. With talent in short and contested supply, the forward-thinking supply chain training programmes you implement could make all the difference to your proposition — and your organisation’s retention of great minds.
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