Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Hello everyone. This week I'm off to Europe for a couple of weeks of vacation and some meetings. And one of the things I'm going.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: To be talking about in several locations.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Is the future of learning and development.
I really do believe we are going through the biggest reinvention of corporate training since the beginning of the Internet. And let me give you a brief.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Introduction to what I'm talking about, and.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: You'Re going to hear a lot more about this from us as we roll out some of the research we're doing. The learning and development industry is about 330 or $340 billion. Companies spend on average one thousand two.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Hundred dollars to one thousand three hundred.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Dollars per year, every employee.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Much, much more.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: For senior people. The range of topics, as you know, is vast. Leadership development, supervisory training, compliance, operational training, IT technical training, desktop training, diversity, as well as professional education and technical skills.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: In whatever job you have, operations, safety and compliance.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: So there's a lot of dimensions to this. The paradigm of instructional delivery generally follows education, where we teach people things through either instructors. About 30% of learning and development is.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Still spent on instructor led training, either virtual or face to face.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: About 30% is self study online and the remaining 30% is some form of elearning or self delivered content assembly where.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Somebody goes through a collaborative learning course.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: A cohort based learning course or something else.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: And then of the remaining five to.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: 10%, there's some VR, there's some ar and other forms of simulation. So the paradigm of this is an education paradigm. And I got involved in corporate training.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: In the early two thousands when the Internet started.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: And basically what we did with online learning is we copied the instructional paradigm onto the web. And for the last 24 years we've been evolving it to include micro learning videos. Short form learning nudges mobile programs that.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Give you messages, message based learning, learning in the flow of work, which means.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Learning on demand or as needed through your PC, through your phone, through teams or the devices you use in your work. And content being authored by experts who are content developers, not subject matter experts so much, although there's been a lot of that with the creator economy, but really authored by professional instructional designers and corporations. And this is a massive industry, one of the largest pools of people in human resources, and very creative, very technology savvy, very mission driven, and very sensitive to the needs of learners or employees because most learning is optional. So if you build something that people don't like, you know, it's embarrassing and.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: As well as being a waste of.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: Money and a waste of time. So a lot of the energy that's been going on in learning over the years has been design, design thinking, pinpointing.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Learning to the problem, performance consulting, needs.
[00:03:45] Speaker A: Analysis, and crafty instructional design so that we're not wasting people's time on topics they're not interested in or they don't need. And then most recently, unlocking that content so people can find information quickly without.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: Having to take a course if all they have is a question.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: And under that industry, we've built 15 or $20 billion of learning management systems, which companies have for mostly compliance and tracking and regulatory management and reporting learning experience platforms that sit on top of that. And then tools like Viva learning and degreed and others that are delivering content in the flow of work.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: And a massive industry of content providers.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Including us, who sell either academies courses, content integrated content solutions so that corporations.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: Can take that content and stick it.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Into this infrastructure and deliver it to employees.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: And we also know from both economic.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Research and engagement research that learning is one of the most important parts of somebody's job.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: If you're not learning on the job, it becomes boring.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: You can't grow, you can't become a more impactful person. In fact, I've always felt there's really.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: Only three reasons to learn. One is to improve your performance in.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: The job you're in, so that you.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Can do more or deliver more. The second is to repair your performance.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: If you're underperforming in some area and fill the gaps in your capabilities.
[00:05:22] Speaker B: And the third is to get a.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: New job, to learn how to be a manager or a supervisor, or a senior person, or move into a new profession or new career. So this is a vastly needed, never ending industry that actually is somewhat recession proof.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: During recessions, people do cut back on.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Training, but they don't do away with it. They rarely do away with it. And, you know, companies are going back to corporate universities and there's lots of other benefits, cultural benefits of people meeting each other while they're learning to learning from peers, coaching, etcetera. So anyway, it's a big, complicated area. And most companies have a somewhat convoluted.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Process where they have a lot of.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Corporate people building corporate programs and corporate tools and corporate platforms, and then lots and lots of remote groups doing training and learning on their own or connected to the corporate. I think we've found in a lot of the work we've done with a lot of companies that oftentimes two thirds of the l and D spending is.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Hidden not in the l and D budget. And nobody tells you where it is.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: Because they don't want you to take it.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: And the reason for that is there's.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: A centrifugal force in learning towards the business.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: If I'm running a sales team or a marketing team or an engineering team.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Or whatever it may be, and they are not performing well, I'm not going.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: To wait for corporate to build some.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Academy to fix this.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: I'm going to spend my own time.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Or my own money, and I'm either.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Going to hire a consultant, I'm going.
[00:06:53] Speaker A: To find a subject matter expert, and I'm going to figure out what I need to teach people how to do to improve them.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: To say nothing of safety procedures and.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Operational procedures that the remote teams understand that the corporate people don't understand anyway. So this is a federated function that cannot be centralized. And at its best, the federated teams.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Collaborate well with each other and share platforms and tools and information and best practices, so everybody isn't reinventing the wheel. But that's unusual too.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Even in the best companies, there's lots of distributed innovations and amazing things going on that people don't know about because they're not sharing them. But again, that's kind of just the nature of this really important domain. Along comes AI and these new ideas like the skills based organization, skills based talent mobility and talent marketplaces, automated AI driven career paths, career pathways, as we call them. And the learning industry has to be a part of this, because you can't get a new job, new role, get promoted, move into a new position without some degree of training somewhere from somebody. And not only do I need it during those transition periods, I need it all the time.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: New technologies, new tools, new products, new services. Well, the traditional approach to building content is going to be completely disrupted by AI.
[00:08:23] Speaker A: And so let me just mention the.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Four things I'm going to be talking.
[00:08:26] Speaker A: About in these meetings, and we will be producing much more of this later in the year. Number one, the learning and development technology stack is about to get radically changed.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Learning management systems are somewhat of a commodity. Some of them aren't very good.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Some of them are tuned towards customer education, some of them are tuned towards highly regulated content and regulated industries. Some of them are tuned towards operational training versus professional training.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: But it is a tracking system primarily, and a content management system.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: It doesn't really deliver learning to anybody. We can't do away with these things, but they're not the strategic delivery systems that we wanted them to be. The LXP, the learning experience platforms were designed to do that. But the learning experience platforms have been commoditized by many, many tools built into other platforms. You can get learning from Eightfold and gloat.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: You can get, obviously, you can buy degreed or edcast.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: But now some of that technology is built into Microsoft Teams and it's going to be built into workday and other tools. So the learning experience platforms are struggling to figure out what their role is.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: And these big content development systems, the.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: Tools that build rapid learning from PowerPoint and so forth, all of that within a year is going to be much disrupted by AI.
The reason is if you go to just chat GBT or go to Galileo.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: And ask Galileo to build you a.
[00:09:59] Speaker A: Course on how to hire nurses, it.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Will build you a course. It will give you an instructional outline, it will write tests for you, it.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: Will give you remedial answers to questions.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: It will give you simulations, it will.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: Write and develop case studies.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: And now that we have generation of.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: Audio and video, we will be able.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: To generate audio and video or find.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: Audio and video in the company. So a lot of that.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Instructional design.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Driven paradigm is about to be automated, not completely, but largely. And so if you aren't looking for trusted content in your company and in third parties like ours and HR or others, you're not going to be buying courses the way you were in the past. Now, you might be developing courses, but.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: You'Ll be developing them ten to 20.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Times faster because the AI can develop them so quickly, and the courses will.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Be able to be updated by simply updating the corpus. So if you build a sales training.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Course on a certain set of products and services, and everything changes because there's a new model or a new version or new pricing or new offers, you can update the course without going back and redesigning it relatively easily, almost automatically. That was never easy to do before learning.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Content management systems never played out into.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: That market, which of course leads to this issue.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Is what is content development going to look like? We're going to have to become really good prompt engineers.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: We're going to be replacing and upgrading a lot of our platforms to AI driven learning systems. We're going to be delivering learning that can be consumed in multiple forms, short.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Form, long form, or simply asking questions.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: Because the AI can generate content in any form, you don't have to rigidly create an instructional design around it. And new distribution channels like mobile teams.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Slack, whatever it may be, are going to be relatively trivial instead of having.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Special interfaces as well. And these are things that are real, not just ideas.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: These are things that are real today.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Number three, the consumption of learning is.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Going to be very hyper personalized. You know, we're going through the redesign.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Of the JBA right now and we're not there yet. It won't be till next year. But I. My vision for our academy is that it will have courses and all sorts of wonderful stuff, but you're going to.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Be able to tell it who you.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: Are and what you do and what you're interested in doing, and it'll generate content specifically designed to you in the.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Industry that you're in because we have.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: So much content available. I mean, why wouldn't you do that in every corporate application?
And then as the market and industry and company changes, that content can be changed automatically.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: And the system, because of the AI.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Nature of it, will always be up.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: To date and be able to notify.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: Learners when something changes.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: If you use Galileo as we developed.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: It today, it is a knowledge system.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: It is a problem solving system, it.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: Is a consulting system and it is a learning system.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: It will take you directly to content.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: Documents, videos or small pieces of courses.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: If you want to consume them.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: So if you've got an hour and you want to learn about diversity and inclusion in hiring, or you want to learn about high volume recruiting in retail, and you want to learn about the tools and you want to learn about.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: The vendors and you want to learn.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: About the assessment practices, Galileo will be a pretty good learning tool, as is today, without us adding a lot of these other learning features.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: And so what is the role of the instructional designer?
[00:13:42] Speaker A: You're going to do a lot less.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: Instructional design, a lot more corpus management.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Engineering, and then managing the corpus to make sure that it's trusted and reliable and up to date. The fourth thing that's going to happen.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Is learning and knowledge management are going to come together.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Knowledge management has been around a lot longer than I have. And you know, I've tripped across it many times as an analyst, and most.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: Of the time it was a search.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Engine solution or a knowledge management content system database or a wiki where people took all sorts of documents, process information.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Maybe they were proposals, maybe they were.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Customer deliverables or sales documents or whatever, threw them into this knowledge management system.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: And turned it into a big search engine.
[00:14:32] Speaker A: So if I have to generate a proposal, I would look at who else has developed a proposal like this and maybe learn from them.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: And it was a mess.
[00:14:42] Speaker A: I mean, these things were out of date. We never knew who developed them. It was impossible to figure out which one to look at. We used confluence in our old company. It was kind of fun, but it was very difficult to manage.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: You can try tagging this stuff and.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Keeping it all up to date, but.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: It'S been really massively difficult. And it's very different in each domain, in manufacturing, in sales and service and.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Operations and healthcare and so forth.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: So knowledge management, and then how do you deliver it?
[00:15:09] Speaker A: You want people typing searches all day? Do you give it to them on their phone? Well, think about the AI platform now, the AI learning system as having access to not only the corpus of education and training, but the corpus of core content. And let the user ask a question.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: And show the user where the content came from.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: That is a knowledge management solution that's coupled with learning.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: We are completely building Galileo around this paradigm, and I think this is where a lot of you are going to go.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Most of you have massive amounts of content in compliance documentation, in process documentation, in safety documentation, in operational documentation, in policies, in different domains, not just in HR. And when you're building a course, you generally try to look at that stuff and extract it into the course.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Why wouldn't we take all that content and put it into the LLM in.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: The learning platform and then use it to support the course we develop?
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Maybe we do hand build the course.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: Using AI to help us, but while people are going through the course and, or if they don't want to take the whole course and they want to ask questions, why wouldn't they just go.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: To the source documentation directly?
[00:16:25] Speaker A: It'll be in the LLM and it'll be tagged and indexed, referenced automatically. That's the way it works in Galileo. That is where this is going. So corpus management, understanding where content came from, organizing content, managing the governance of content, those are going to be core parts of the learning and development function.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: And I haven't even gotten into talking.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: About simulations and videos and the authoring of advanced media that's going to come out of these omni AI's, which by the way, is going to happen in the next couple of months. So this is a massive, massive change to l and d I from my perspective.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: I think those of you that are.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: L and D practitioners have been working away in the background for the last decade, since the beginnings of e learning.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: Coming up with more and more good.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Ideas on how to take videos and make them shorter, and you create TikTok like experiences and mobile courses and using tools like Aris to deliver micro learning and making the systems more relevant. You didn't realize that the most important.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: Tool was just about to invent it.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: 18 months ago in AI, because all.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: Of that hard work is suddenly going.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: To become massively easier and it's going to change the job, the role, the function and the utility of l and D tremendously. Now, I'm not going to get into.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Case studies yet because I'm going to be meeting with a bunch of companies in Europe.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: But I'll tell you, it's going to be hard to get there from here because most bigger companies have giant libraries of legacy content, big lmss that are integrated with lots of other things, including compliance and ERP systems, lots and lots.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Of content development tools, content delivery tools.
[00:18:15] Speaker A: Instructional models, instructor led programs, and content.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Delivery experiences embedded into the company.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: So this isn't going to happen overnight, but I think this is going to be the most exciting time ever. We are in the middle of studying this, so we will have a massive research study for you probably next year, late this year, next year on this.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: So stay tuned.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: But it is the most interesting time in L and DA to me since the beginning of the iPhone. The iPhone kind of created a similar flurry of innovation. This level of innovation is going to be higher and it's going to really.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Change l and D tremendously.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: It's going to extend the utility of l and D tremendously because these whole issues of is anybody going to like the course? Are they going to finish it? Are they going to get anything out of it? It's going to be up to the learner now because AI is going to allow the learner, the employee, to pull.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: What they need from the system and consume what's most interesting and important to.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Them and come back later and get more. So space learning designed by you is going to be space learning designed by.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: The learner, where the learner will come.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Back periodically and learn more or revisit things that they don't totally understand on.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: Their own because the AI is so.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: Easy to consume and they can talk to the AI by voice or over their phone instead of having to log.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Into the LMS and wait 15 minutes.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: To get through the ERP to even find it. So this is going to be really, really fun. So give it a thought. Stay tuned for more, and we'll be.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Talking more about this over the summer.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: And certainly into the fall.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: And if you want to learn more.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: About all this stuff, go to the JBA, the Josh Burson Academy, bursonacademy.com comma, the AI and HR course, the three.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: We have three micro learning courses, one.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: On Genaida, on how to use genii, one on AI for HR and one on the predictions for learning and talent and careers and skills in the future. Lots and lots of stuff in there to learn about this.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: This is a year to really beef.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Up your internal skills because as the tools become more and more available and we will be telling you about all the tools, this stuff's going to pick up speed very, very fast. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Have a great weekend and we'll talk again in a week or so.
