Cognitive Apprenticeships: 5 takeaways on how to transfer skills at the 21st century workplace

This is a summary from a gem of a podcast by Tony Gambell of McKinsey, that I listened to last week (source at the end). Some great insights on how one can use apprenticeships to build org wide skills.

1. Transfer of skills
Apprenticeship is an opportunity to transfer expertise from someone who knows how to do something to someone who is just learning. It’s a teacher-learner relationship that happens in the flow of work.

2. Ways to build a system of apprenticeship
- Modelling: The ability to show someone what you know and help them understand the rationale behind it.
- Scaffolding: The support that you create for people to do the work. It could be a document that you give someone. It could be a YouTube video you send.
- Coaching: The feedback, pointers, tips, and things that you do to help as someone is doing the work. Giving lots of rich feedback so the person gets better at what they are doing.
- Fading: Knowing when to pull back. As the person starts to get better and better, you remove some of the training wheels that you are providing so the person is able to act with more independence.

3. Apprenticeship is nonhierarchical
It doesn’t have to be top down. It can flow both ways. It’s a way to transfer skills from someone who is better or an expert to someone who is learning or a novice. An expert doesn’t have to be a person who is older / more senior than you.

4. Making the invisible visible
Today’s work is deeply cognitive where we think about it in our heads before executing on actions. One can’t see this. The idea of apprenticeship is for the expert to ‘model the thinking’ and speak about invisible insights while working on projects. To this extent, a measure of success is how much the learner is able to adopt a new way of thinking because of the expert.
For example, maybe you get a ppt, and it’s not what you want it to be, you change it and make it right.
Nobody can learn anything from that, but if you sit with somebody and you say, “Here are the ten changes that I made on this ppt. Let’s talk through them. Let’s go into this thing that I need you to do differently. Let’s talk about why this matters.” - you are able to start the process of skill transfer.

5. Informal moments of collision
Apprenticeships work because of unplanned moments when two coworkers collide, or find time to connect, whether it’s following a meeting or over a cup of coffee. Considering a hybrid world of work, one needs to intentionally create ‘windows of time’ where you can stop and have moments of apprenticeship with people on your team. Or as a learner that you deliberately pause and ask someone why they acted the way they did.

Happy apprenticing!

Source: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0uzxV92leLjkRvbQpu1i2k?si=Kr-BswnISEi1oXA1wyOOPg