Learning Agility

Learning agility describes the degree to which people are able to extract lessons from diverse experiences and apply them to practical challenges. Generally speaking, it is a person’s ability to learn new skills quickly and use those skills to adapt to [Page 880]the demands of a new role or job. Learning agility is a relatively newly developed construct; therefore, it is continuing to mature in terms of conceptual clarity and measurement.

The original framework proposed by Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger suggested that learning agility included four factors: (1) people agility, characterized by self-knowledge, ability to learn from experience, and resilience; (2) results agility, characterized by achieving goals in adverse situations; (3) mental agility, which involves thinking about problems in different ways and a tolerance for ...