Using diversity and inclusion competencies to improve your organization’s learning resources

How do you know if your organization has the right online learning resources in place to help your staff succeed? When it comes to learning that promotes diversity and inclusive behaviour, it can be particularly hard to tell if your resources will equip employees with the knowledge and skills they need in order for change to happen.

Effective diversity and inclusion (D&I) training is not just about raising awareness – it needs to do more than that. You want your online learning resources to help people behave more inclusively, but inclusive behaviour can be hard to define.

If you want to know if your D&I learning offerings align with what your organization wants to achieve in this area, a competencies framework can help. TRIEC’s Inclusive Workplace Competencies framework can help you look at what you have, where the gaps are, and crucially, whether they are helping users turn knowledge into action.

TRIEC has first-hand experience of this – we did it with our own materials!

When we first began developing content for our online platform, we leveraged existing workshop materials and responded to interest expressed by potential users. From reading I’ve done on e-learning over the years (and about D&I learning in general), this adhoc approach is pretty common.

As our offering became more robust, we have been working on developing a more strategic approach to thinking about our online resources (what to delete, what to keep, and what to add). Using the Inclusive Workplace Competencies as a reference point has been useful in helping us to think more clearly about which information and skills would be most useful for our learning materials to focus on going forward.

Each of the Inclusive Workplace Competencies features a set of performance criteria. These criteria set out the knowledge and skills that someone needs in order to demonstrate the competencies through their behaviour. You can use them to decide what you should include in a learning resource to help learners know how to perform those behaviours successfully.

Through using the performance criteria to review our own learning resources, we realized we had a great deal of material that covered awareness raising and foundational knowledge. We had a decent amount of material that covered strategies and tools to help people navigate cultural differences in the workplace and to help make their workplaces more diverse and inclusive — but we also realized that this needed to be built out further. And we discovered that we needed significantly more online resources around D&I strategy and how to foster change in an organization.

Using the Inclusive Workplace Competencies helped us to create a clearer picture of our current offering and develop a strategy that sets out where we want to go and how we intend to get there.  We now have a solid plan in place and will be adding new content to TRIEC Learning over the next few months – watch this space!

Learn more about the Inclusive Workplace Competencies.

Rachel Crowe is TRIEC’s Manager of Learning and Inclusive Workplaces.