Excellent blog on valuable July reads by Jane Hart led me to this blog post by Thomas Handcock and Warren Howlett, July 29, 2014, CEB Blogs, a very good discussion of building productive learning cultures.
They recommend three steps:
1. Right size opportunities (which on the surface sounds fine but then they say that the "best organizations limit learning opportunities to those that are most relevant to employees and impactful for the organization but then rely on their (HR's) determination of learning needs (how do employees express their learning needs in this scenario? how does it support ownership and spontaneity beyond annual surveys? Of course they are talking about BIG corporations.) and "learning maturity" which sounds condescending to me)
2. Advance the organization's learning capability (most of this rings truer to me than #1 but it may be that my perception of what they say in #1 is slanted and hypersensitive). Here they talk about "teaching employees how to learn." "this lack of learning aptitude is primarily a capability issue, not a matter of employee motivation."
3. Foster shared ownership of the learning environment (which overcomes much of my objection to what they say in #1)