It’s Time To Take A Broader View Of Your Career – The Art Of Lifewide Learning

What differentiates length from width? In geometry, the former describes the longest side of a figure. Many of us also have an implicit understanding of the two concepts: a snake is long and a hippo is wide.

Understanding the difference becomes a little harder when we think in abstract terms. Case in point, what distinguishes lifewide from lifelong learning? Are the two terms not interchangeable? For Tom Lindholm, the Head of Lifewide Learning at Aalto University in Finland, each phrase embodies a fundamentally different approach to business education.

“Lifelong learning has traditionally been seen as earning a degree in a certain discipline and then you spend the rest of your life improving on it. You become better and better in that field but it stays fairly narrow,” he explains.

In contrast, Aalto University Executive Education (Aalto EE) seeks to emphasise that participants on its professional training courses should take a broader view of their careers. Rather than focusing on lengthening their expertise in a single field, people are encouraged to broaden their portfolios of skills and competencies across many fields. We might envisage this as the difference between a fencing sabre, which is suited to the Olympics but useless in other contexts, and a pocket-knife.

“It’s also about how you learn,” says Lindholm. “On one hand you have very casual learning environments like massive open online courses (MOOCs). On the other, you have MBA and Executive MBA programs. The time commitment varies greatly. An instructive video may take 10 minutes to follow while a degree might span two years, and there are plenty of options that fall in between. Lifewide learning is about widening your perspective on where you draw your knowledge from.”

A commitment to widening the scope of participants’ knowledge and skills underpins teaching and course design at Aalto EE. Programs take advantage of the multiple subject areas that include art and design, computer science and engineering of the prestigious Nordic university to create a multidisciplinary approach to learning. It is a place where business meets art, technology and psychology. For instance, Aalto EE runs a program in Business of Culture, tailored specifically for executives in the arts and culture sector.

“The combination of different areas of proficiency is key. I don’t think there are many other players that can combine art and design with business and technology in the way that we can. In the field of art and design, Aalto University is ranked in the top six in the world according to QS,” says Lindholm.

“I’m not saying that we are the only one, but we occupy an unusual position where we can bring these three elements together. When the world is changing rapidly, we need to be able to draw on different disciplines to find new ways forward. For instance, I think it’s excellent that we can help students and adult learners from a business and a tech perspective to think about issues like the green transition,” he adds.

Lindholm is himself an example of taking a broader view of one’s career, as he occupies more than one position at the university. In addition to his role as Head of Lifewide Learning, he is also the Managing Director of Aalto EE. Indeed, being offered a double role at the institution was one of the reasons he was interested in taking the job. Before joining the university, he had a career in the consulting and training business, spanning multiple companies over two decades.

During this time, he observed a change taking place in how firms think about development. A previous school of thought suggested that developing the business and developing people could be done separately. But Lindholm disagrees.

“These two things need to go hand in hand. We cannot continue to think of changing the business and changing the people as separate. It doesn’t bring the organisation forward fast enough,” says Lindholm.

Aalto EE offers a broad range of open programs, in addition to customised programs developed to fit the specific needs of a client company. Working closely together with firms has made it clear that the need for both up-skilling and re-skilling employees is increasing tremendously, says Lindholm.

“Previously, when in discussions with a company, they wanted a program for the top 50 or 100 people to develop certain skills. Now the question is how can we develop skills for 4,000 or 5,000 people? Of course, these are two really different situations. There is still a need for leadership development in the top 100, 50 or 20 people at firms, but this is combined with a much broader need for rescaling,” he says.

The coronavirus pandemic triggered an exodus from offices into home workspaces. Implications naturally rippled into the education sector, as students and executive participants adapted to remote learning, resulting in a sizeable impact on the way lifewide learning is delivered by institutions like Aalto EE.

“I think it’s changed both in good and bad ways. One thing that’s clear is that people now realise you do not have to sit in a classroom in order to receive a high level of education. You can get access to very high-quality content for free, or almost free, on the internet,” says Lindholm.

“This has affected expectations, leading people to conclude we should no longer deliver lengthy programs; we should have everything squeezed into a condensed format. But I think it’s important that we realise we cannot develop skills and competencies in all areas with an online video lasting 45 minutes.

“This puts much more emphasis on the learning journey, on how we learn best, and that’s the one thing that we and other executive education providers will be focusing on going forward.”

In the context of increasingly competitive online courses, Aalto EE’s in-person programs remain popular. Lindholm notes that, from the Nordic perspective, he sees much of the learning being driven by participants. “Learning happens when people work together, reflect, and discuss ideas with each other, facilitated by a faculty member who acts both as a source of insights and a sounding board. These elements create a learning experience that leaves a mark on executive participants and contributes to the eventual transformation of ways of working and leaders’ mindsets.”

The Nordic style of leadership is an important part of Aalto University’s identity, an approach which focuses on making hierarchies less rigid and offering a greater voice to employees. It’s an attitude to leadership driven by individuals at all levels, pivoting away from the strictly top-down view, and which places effective communication and consistent integrity at its core. Lindholm believes the freshness of this concept resonates well with executive participants, driving the popularity of Aalto EE’s programs from beyond Northern Europe.

Innovating and moving with the times remain at the forefront of Aalto University’s priorities. “The day when you think you know everything and don’t need to keep learning, you should take a hard look in the mirror,” says Lindholm. He is particularly interested in building a greater connection between research and development (R&D) departments and systemic learning. Although often less visible than the introduction of new courses, Aalto EE’s programs are constantly being updated based on discussions with client companies and new findings from faculty research. In this way, innovation at the university is both market- and research-driven.

It would be a surprise to hear anything else. As an institution that takes pride in its commitment to keeping a broad perspective, the fact that Aalto University draws its innovation from a wide range of sources seems geometrically natural.