What I’ve discovered about learning since joining CodeSafe Solutions

How do you learn important skills in your organisation?

As a former school teacher, I’ve always been interested in education because I’ve seen first-hand the power that learning has in achieving positive outcomes.

After a decade of teaching children, I felt it was time for a new direction. I wanted a role that presented new challenges but also enabled me to draw on my experience in learning and education.

I found that at CodeSafe Solutions, which I joined at the beginning of 2019 as a project coordinator. CodeSafe has developed a methodology to upskill workers via their preferred learning method. It’s called the Experiential Learning Process (ELP) and it enhances the transfer, retention and recall of knowledge in a workgroup. Using this proven framework, which has been independently evaluated by RMIT, experienced workers can capture and share their knowledge with others to improve productivity, quality and safety in the workplace.

Luckily for me, CodeSafe had already developed the ELP methodology.

Seeing how we could facilitate people learning from others via a ‘show me don’t tell’ mentoring approach expanded my notions of the adult education process. At university, I learned educational techniques that could be applied to different age groups and environments. We were taught approaches that would be most effective based on the audience whether primary or high school, etc.

Here, at CodeSafe, I have discovered that educational principles I was taught to teach adults were not necessarily the most effective for a kinaesthetic (hands-on) learner demographic. The outcomes I’ve witnessed the ELP framework achieve has helped me to learn this.

I’ve observed that bringing people together to share their experience and then having repetitive access to short engaging videos that demonstrate that experience, is a far more powerful mechanism for adult learning and knowledge retention.

The ELP methodology promotes a bottom-up flow of communications, which gives seasoned workers a platform to share their experience and know-how as well as promote safer ways of doing a job. The result is definitely a more confident, capable and connected workforce.

How CodeSafe Solutions ELP methodology helped me and can help you too!

Being just 10 months into my new career I can say I am still learning, but I have gained a greater understanding of how the ELP framework works for adult learning and how it can help solve business challenges. Seeking out more experienced colleagues, observing how they perform tasks and being open to what they say has helped me to grow in my role. I now realise that these principles are actually also reflected in the ELP methodology and I now understand why they are such a foundational part of the solutions CodeSafe develops to equip and engage a workforce.

For some time, I believed adults who understood what their company did and their roles in helping to achieve business objectives would be easier to teach. However, I have since learnt that that is not always the case.

Adults harness knowledge and habits that they are continually observing during their working life, which can actually make it more difficult to teach or re-teach the correct way to perform a work task when we use more traditional adult educational techniques.

Ultimately, I’m convinced that using visual learning techniques for adult learning is more effective because it shows workers how to complete a task correctly and safely rather than tell them what to do. Videos are more focused and engaging, so people don’t lose attention, but what really sets CodeSafe’s solutions apart is the genius of the QIN mobile application that gets these videos into the hands of the adult student quickly, for free, anytime and anywhere.

All in all, I’m really enjoying the journey I’m on and I’m looking forward to what the future holds for my career.

For more information on our ELP methodology and how it can help upskill your team, please visit here.