Learning agility: how to hire for jobs that don't exist yet

Pia-Maria defines learning agility broadly, as the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and keep learning and improving in a complex world.

Assessio measures learning agility in individuals, using personality and values data, across five dimensions:

• Change agility: learning by doing and experimenting.
• People agility: learning from and with other people.
• Mental agility: learning by understanding and analysing.
• Results agility: learning by pursuing goals and keeping momentum.
• Self-awareness: reflecting on and critically evaluating your own performance.

Together, these predict how quickly someone develops new behaviours. Organisations can then support that learning, or block it.

Pia-Maria stressed that individual, team, and organisational agility depend on each other. Personality and values shape how someone learns, but so do the people around them, the structure they work in, and the processes they follow. Put the same person in a different organisation and you get different behaviour.

That's why hiring learning-agile people is only half the job. The organisation also has to let them use that agility.

Many organisations recruit specialists. Pia-Maria argued that the most valuable employees are T-shaped, combining one or more specialist areas with a broad general base. Some are M-shaped, with two or more specialisms. They can move between roles and departments, understand different perspectives, and learn from many kinds of people.

Her hiring advice is to hire for attitude and train for skill. Willingness to learn matters more than having every skill in advance, because the skills will change anyway.

Organisations can also make T-shaped development easier by lowering the boundaries between departments, knowledge areas, and locations so people mix and move. Pia-Maria described this as job rotation, made permanent.

Pia-Maria sees experimentation, trial and error, as the fastest way to learn. People only experiment when they feel safe to fail, and otherwise they repeat what already feels safe.

Leaders and HR shape that safety most, because people watch how they behave. Pia-Maria's advice is to show vulnerability. When leaders admit mistakes and say they don't have all the answers, others start to do the same. Leaders can reinforce this in three ways:

• Ask questions: invite ideas on how the team can solve a problem together.
• Reward speaking up: give positive feedback to people who bring new ideas or raise concerns.
• Allow healthy conflict: let opposing views surface, as long as disagreement never becomes personal.

She warned against "artificial harmony", where people pretend everything is fine and keep their objections to themselves. Pia-Maria considers that more dangerous for an organisation than frequent open conflict.

According to Pia-Maria, the biggest barrier is structure, and HR often owns it. Narrow job roles, rigid career paths, and detailed job descriptions put people in boxes and discourage them from stepping outside them. Most people want to do their best and create value, and coaching helps them do that better than boxes do.

She also challenged annual budgets with fixed targets cascaded from the top. In her view, people should set their own goals and link them to wider organisational goals, choosing how they contribute. She would measure learning and improvement rather than individual performance, and track performance at the organisational level instead.

Highly regulated organisations such as healthcare find this harder, especially where blame culture takes hold. Pia-Maria's alternative is shared team responsibility, where a failure becomes a question of what the team learned. People still need guardrails during change, and she recommends clear goals and a few simple rules, without detailed processes that kill creativity.

Pia-Maria has guided transformations at Swedish car and furniture manufacturers, among others, and follows three steps:

1. Awareness: explain why the organisation needs to learn and adapt continuously. She usually starts with middle management or HR, and awareness spreads "like tea in a teapot".
2. Training: teach leaders and HR the tools, methods, and structures behind new ways of working, so they can train their own teams.
3. Coaching: help people keep using the new methods, because training alone fades once people return to their old routines.

Leaders have to go first. Benjamin noted that Assessio's own research points the same way, because a leader's learning agility tends to cap the learning agility of their team.

Agile organisations work in teams, so relationships matter more than individual brilliance. Candidates with strong independence values, who prefer to do everything themselves, may struggle in that setting.

Pia-Maria also pointed to the need for tranquility. People with a high need for tranquility prefer stability and predictability and avoid risk. People with a low need see change as an opportunity and are more willing to experiment and fail.

She doesn't recommend hiring only the highest scorers. Teams made up entirely of high potentials tend to compete with each other, while diverse teams that know each other well and handle conflict constructively create more value. Pia-Maria sees the team as the value-creating unit, not the individual.

Looking further ahead, she expects job descriptions to matter less. Some companies already hire strong, learning-agile people, give them a mentor, and let them find the role where they create the most value.

Teams move through predictable stages of group development, as researchers such as Bruce Tuckman, Will Schutz, and Susan Wheelan have described. Teams start polite and dependent on the leader, move through a storming phase of friction and unclear roles, and then reach high performance. Pia-Maria's advice is to recognise which phase your team is in and adjust your support, from building safety early, to managing conflict during storming, to stepping back once the team performs.

To track progress, she recommends retrospectives every two to six weeks: what went well, what can improve, and what to change before the next sprint. She also suggests her psychological safety game, a set of cards with statements that raise or lower safety, played at each retrospective.

Future-oriented hiring combines two decisions. Hire people with the learning agility to grow beyond today's job description, and make sure leaders build the psychological safety that lets them use it. Assessing learning agility at the hiring stage gives you an objective starting point for both.