The Mission: Learning

“My advice to a learning professional in government is seek out opportunities to do rotational assignments in different parts of the organization so you can learn what makes them tick, what competencies they need to accomplish the mission,” Shelby said.

Madsen said cultivating a commitment to well-rounded self-development isn’t just good advice for government CLOs; it’s good advice to use when developing others as well. “People know so much more now than they did before, and people have to be much more rounded to be successful,” he said. “You have to be more resource sensitive. You have to be politically savvy. You have to be able to get your ideas across. You have to market.” He said it’s important to start developing these skills early in a government employee’s career and to continue that development throughout.

But as individual development of and by government employees has gotten broader, the learning itself has gotten more focused. “In a lot of the years that I was in government, it was kind of hit or miss and ad hoc,” Shelby said. “If there was a problem, you’d throw training at it, and there were abundant resources for most of the eras that I was around, so we tried several different things with no real focus on what the learning was. Whatever was the latest management or leadership technique; they’d build learning around it and throw it at an organization.”

Now, Shelby said there just aren’t enough resources available to support such an experimental approach. “You have had chief learning officers come to prominence in government where we understand the business,” he said. “We do needs assessment, and we show a critical gap in the organization and how learning can fill that gap. It’s a much more focused and efficient way of doing business.”

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