Clearly, challenging job assignments could prompt self-learning, the
desire of people to find out what they're doing.
Hopefully, people won't be left to their own
devices to figure out how to learn new tasks.
If there are new screening procedures, if there are new
record-keeping procedures you don't want people to learn trial and error.
So, when these things are introduced people
may feel excited about learning about them.
They may also feel threatened that they don't
have the capacity to carry out the new skills.
So it's important to let employees know, and provide an opportunity for structured,
on-the-job learning, for mentoring by co-workers and senior staff.
By having in-house technical presentations to the staff.
Having, maybe a special seminar each week. Or using staff meetings for this.
Another way of encouraging learning within the organization is rotational assignments
so people can learn the procedures and practices in different service units.
They can learn about child care in one unit.
They can learn about pharmacy management in another.
And then of course the organization could, either on its
own or linking up with other institutions, such as Johns Hopkins, provide
electronic training, internet training, and educational resources, having access.
One of the key issues that we found in terms of the latter, is a
survey that was done by some of my students in the southwest part of Nigeria.
They visited Both formal government health agencies,
as well as NGO health development organizations.
And to find out whether the employees had access to the Internet to
help them plan their health education, and also for their own continuing education.
And unfortunately it was discovered that even
though many donor agencies provide computers to
The government health departments the front line
you know the, the service delivery staff the
program staff usually did not have access to these.
They had to go out on their own to an
internet cafe that was unreliable and expensive to get email.
To do web searches, the computer, if it was linked up at all to the internet, was
primarily a tool for administration, the secretaries and the
budget staff used the computer, not the program staff.
It was a big contrast to the experience
of staff in NGO settings.
Many of those staff had computers on their desk.
They were linked up to a local server.
And they were using the internet to find out about new
programs and get educational information to plan their activities in the community.
To communicate with other people doing similar work in other parts
of the country and world so they could learn from each other.
So here again our examples that an organization
can do to enable a continuing education and self-learning.
And we need to encourage these kinds of approaches.