Cohort-Based Learning: Build for Scale, Alignment & Performance Readiness

Socioeconomic trends (automation, changing demographics, increased social polarization) have converged worldwide to create the need for a new kind of skill and competency. A capability is an ability that combines cognitive and empathic skill with contextualized knowledge and practical wisdom. Distinguished from mere “skills,” capabilities reflect total readiness to perform.

These future-oriented abilities make individuals, teams, and organizations robust and resilient. They are acquired through intensive learning that goes beyond knowledge acquisition to include awareness, social context, and courageous action. These capabilities prepare people to confront a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world with confidence and purpose.

Capabilities are best learned together and acquired through experience. Many learning organizations understand this intuitively but are not aware of the internal and external resources at their disposal to create learning experiences that retain the intimacy and connection of small groups while driving the results, consistency, and scale needed by large enterprises. They face the additional challenge of building deep organizational capabilities and achieve alignment across a massive, disjointed, remote workforce, in a time of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

To respond to this challenge, we’ll explore the movement toward cohort-based learning, especially applied to higher-order human skills. Cohort or group-based learning can be a powerful way to gain deep capabilities in leadership, salesmanship, and digital transformation. From sustainability efforts to sales onboarding in companies from Cemex to Stanley Black & Decker, this practical session will look at real examples of organizations that have drawn creatively from their learning ecosystems (bringing software, services, and content together) to create experiences of scale and intimacy for learners, driving performance readiness, while meeting the needs of the business flexibly.

In this session, you will:

• Understand how a cohort or group-based approach to learning can be applied to use cases ranging from leadership to sustainability
• Discover how to address the challenges of engaging learners in a lifelong learning journey while working remotely or in a hybrid environment that begins during their onboarding experience and continues throughout the touchstones of their career
• Analyze examples of successful cohort-based learning, including full-blown Capability Academies, in order to interpret your own learning ecosystems and assemble the building blocks of your own programs
• Learn how to build deep organizational capabilities and achieve alignment across a massive, disjointed, remote workforce, in a time of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity