Sekisui House U.S., Inc.

Abbie Mirata

Learning Transformation Leader

Making Learning Part of the Work

Traditional training says “sit in this room for four hours and absorb.” or “take this eLearning and do a knowledge check”. Continuous learning says “here’s a 10-minute nudge that weirdly shows up right when you need it. Growth doesn’t happen in observation, it happens in responsibility, so real learning happens in the field, with leaders, in the day-today. HR and L&D can only add so much on top of an already overworked workforce. If every development effort is one more thing bolted onto someone’s calendar, we’re competing with their actual job for attention and their actual job wins every time. The better move is designing learning that integrates into the work people are already doing, not learning that takes them away from it. A culture of continuous learning isn’t measured by how many workshops happened. It’s measured by whether growth is happening inside the work itself.

Designing Learning around the Real Problem

Meet them at the level of the actual problem, not the level of the org chart. Most performance issues labeled “a training gap” are actually a business strategy gap, a capacity gap or a communication gap wearing a training costume. And meet them with the same bar you’d set for a customer. If you wouldn’t put it in front of a customer, don’t put it in front of an employee. Somewhere along the way, L&D got comfortable with “good enough” or an out-of-the-box course uploaded to the LMS, a slide deck over Zoom while everyone’s got email open, multitasking in another tab. Employees can tell the difference between something built for them and your culture and something bought off a shelf. Creating something that actually holds attention takes thought, intention and production value. That applies just as much to an in-person workshop as it does to virtual instructor-led training. If people are multitasking through your session, that’s not a them problem, that’s a design problem. I’d rather spend the extra time making something people sit up for than crank out one more thing that technically checked a compliance box.

Making Managers Owners of Development

Managers are the whole ballgame. It starts and stops with your leaders. HR can build the best program in the world, but if a manager never mentions it again after the kickoff, it dies. The managers who get this right treat development like a normal part of the conversation, not a special occasion. They ask about it in 1:1s. They connect a stretch assignment to a skill someone’s trying to build. They model it themselves, which matters more than any of us want to admit. I see this play out constantly in coaching work: the leaders who struggle most are usually stuck in the coworker-to-boss identity shift, still operating like a peer instead of stepping into ownership of their people’s growth. Development doesn’t scale through HR alone. It scales through a few hundred managers deciding that it’s worth their time.

“A culture of continuous learning isn’t measured by how many workshops happened. It’s measured by whether growth is happening inside the work itself.”

Making Growth a Reason to Stay

People don’t leave jobs where they’re growing. They leave jobs where they feel stuck, unseen or like their development is nobody’s priority but their own. I think of employee experience as a leading indicator of customer experience and learning is a huge piece of that EX equation. When someone can point to a real skill they built this year or a framework that actually changed how they lead, that’s a different relationship with the company than “I sat through the annual compliance training.” Retention isn’t really about the learning program itself. It’s about what the learning program tells people about whether they matter.

Building Skills before the Gap Appears

Get in the room early and get in it with operational fluency, not just a training request form. Some of the strength of my team comes from the fact that several of us, myself included, come from operational roles. We understand the business. That means we’re connected to the actual strategy, the future skills it’s going to require and the communication and documentation it takes to move a workforce through change.

The pattern I want to break is L&D getting looped in at the end, handed a decision that’s already been made and asked to “build a program around it.” At that point you don’t understand the operation, you don’t understand what the initiative actually does to the people doing the work and you’re stuck teaching a process change instead of building adoption. Teaching a process is explaining what changed. Building adoption is understanding why people will resist it, what it threatens about how they currently work and designing the experience that gets them to actually own it. That only happens if you’re brought in at the beginning, asking questions until you genuinely understand the strategy, not just the deliverable. Then you can build the implementation and the program together, instead of bolting a program on after the fact. If L&D only shows up to react to the gap that’s visible right now, we’re always building for the workforce we already have. We should be building for the workforce we want three years from now.