Learning with the Kazaks

Welcome to this week’s Discuss HR. 

We’re starting to get back to normality after an extended period of holidays, Easter and a wedding.  After last week’s quiz we’re also getting back on track with the long awaited return of regular columnist John Hepworth.  You may recall John was unavailable for his last regular post because he was spreading the good word of HR in the rather surprising destination of Kazakhstan.  (Ed Scrivener) 

Learning with the Kazaks 

Kazakhstan has a population of 16.4 million

I feel that I can speak from experience here, having returned in recent weeks from a 10 day lecturing programme in Almaty, Kazakhstan. And what an experience that was too! 

So – what I hope to do here is to share these experiences and relate them to learning, the universal skill that we all need, whatever our culture and nationality. 

Let me start – as is my fashion – with a few definitions in order to get us all onto ‘the same page’. Learning is ‘a process within the organism, which results in the capacity for changed performance, which can be related to experience rather than maturation’, or so Ribeaux and Poppleton wrote in 1978. Scientific stuff, eh? But I hope that we can see the similarities to the practical tools that we use on a daily basis, such as Kolb et al’s Learning Cycle from 1974 (e.g. Stage 1 being having an experience either planned or accidental). Or indeed, the development of Honey and Mumford’s Learning Styles (e.g. reflectors learning best when they can review what has happened and what they have done) in 1992. 

What Ribeaux and Poppleton were getting at I think is that maturity [being around a long time] is no substitute for experiencing something new. And that is why I am aiming to follow the lead of others in my profession who set themselves an annual target to ‘learn something new’. For me, this first attempt has been learning to swim. But returning to Kazakhstan – for me, I was use to foreign travel with work but never to an Asian-based country. 

And a definition for Kazakhstan? Well, a Russian commentator summed it up as “…citizenship is the nation of which you possess a passport [in this case Kazakhstan] and nationality is the ethnic group one defines oneself from [in this case, the ancestors were Genghis Khan]…”. You can see perhaps that my approach to the lecturing experience set me challenges as to how learning may be perceived in such a climate and especially with my stereotypical views on ex-USSR countries. Is there such a difference between citizenship and ethnicity? How might it affect learning? Time to dig out my copy of Hofstede… 

With this in mind, then, you will not be surprised to learn that even though I prepared thoroughly – chatting to colleagues who had been to the country, seeking out information from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Wikipedia even – NOTHING prepared me for the experience of going to Kazakhstan. Some obvious things first: little or no English spoken by airport officials [and my Russian – was that the language? – is limited]; concern over whether the visa would be acceptable [and amazing relief when it was]; was the taxi driver REALLY the one sent by the agency to collect me, or were they there to rob me [and I am a rational, logical person]; would the technology work in the lecture room; and so on. Amazing to think that this was my attitude – on reflection. What was preventing me from learning from the experience and embracing it? 

Now, what happened in the lecturing environment? To begin, establishing how we were to learn together was crucial. Hence, from my Kazak hosts, a plea to speak in Russian to each other to clarify understanding and also the use of technology [iPhones mainly] with automatic translation software installed so they could comprehend, as well as hear, the words. From me, a plea to ‘flag’ when this was happening so I could measure the input accordingly – and be assured that they were not talking about last night’s football! Equally, the attitude appeared to be that even though they were on a course, they were still ‘at work’ – so, e-mails and phone calls abounded throughout. They were expected to be available. Another aspect of learning that I had not appreciated was a culture of non-criticism. For sure, I had huge respect for these delegates, attending a course to learn in a language that was not their first language. But for me, I had not considered that the basis of a Western education system – compare and contrast theories and argue for the best – would be a new concept to my delegates. 

My main learning however from this whole trip was that essentially, the elements of successful learning are the same the world over. The Kazak delegates were motivated to get the qualification linked to the course; they needed a variety of learning approaches to satisfy their learning styles; they were capable of terrific insight and also, as with all students, frightful boredom [nothing to do with the lecturer they tell me]; the environment for learning needed to be right – and often that was not right; and they suffered from the same anxieties and mental barriers to success experienced by many students. 

Overall, then, I would not have missed this new experience and am happy to go back… 

About the author 

John helps organisations, especially in the SME sector, achieve competitive advantage. He has a particular interest in translating strategic HR management into practice. Typically, this has meant focusing his efforts on recruitment & selection, performance management and training & development activities. John sees the challenge of matching the development of internal competencies with the externally driven demands of the market place as one of the key themes in developing organisational engagement, capability and performance. 

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Discuss HR is the blog for Human Resources UK, the leading LinkedIn group for those involved with HR in the UK.  Next week’s Discuss HR will be published on Thursday 12^th May and will be written by Annabel Kaye, Employment Law Specialist.