Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Good morning everyone. Today I'd like to talk about the idea that learning and development professionals, which make up a significant number of people in the human resources domain, need to reinvent themselves. And this is coming slowly, but like a snowball. It's picking up speed and picking up momentum. Now, my historic participation in the learning industry goes back to before the Internet, when I worked for an online learning company, which was then acquired by a company called Digitalthink, which was a publicly traded billion dollar online training company focused on digital skills. In the early two thousands, I had the opportunity to run product management there and product marketing and really get to know a lot of the chief learning officers and many l and D professionals around the world. And then eventually I was laid off from digital think and became an analyst. So that's kind of my history with this. And during this period of time, we had a very significant transition taking place from classroom training to online learning, which resulted in elearning moocs, LinkedIn learning, coursera, skillsoft, and hundreds and hundreds of other innovations which continue. And learning and development professionals, as they went from being very creative teachers and very creative instructional designers, became technologists. And the L and D profession, which I really loved because it's one of the most creative parts of HR, became very technologically savvy. And many people in L and D actually are technologists at heart. There's a job title called instructional technologist. They understand scorm and lmss and video production and audio production and data, and they're understanding AI and they're learning about Aih. And there's an argument you could make that you really can't be in L and D or an L and D practitioner if you're not a technical person. Now, if I take a step back, I've done many, many studies of L and D over the years, and let me just talk about what L and D is really all about. The core roots of the learning and corporate learning industry, which is hundreds of billions of dollars, is we need to train employees on everything that we do at work. Systems, processes, products, services, pricing, and we have to train them on their own profession. How to be an accountant, how to be an HR person, how to be a manufacturing engineer, how to be a manager, how to work in supply chain, and all of those functional domains, including engineering and science, materials science, etcetera. Most companies assume that you have the basic education in school and that their training is really about company stuff. I spent an entire year at IBM very early in my career. For example, as a trainee, I actually had a business card called trainee for an entire year. And as a systems engineer, I went to probably 20 or 30 face to face courses. I mean, classroom courses on operating systems, software, network configuration, all the stuff that IBM did. And IBM was very committed. And by the way, I also took an entire year of sales training, including face to face simulations and role plays. IBM was willing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on me and others because at that time, the IBM products and services were so complex, they really wanted all of their customer facing employees to know how they worked. And this really paid off. Certainly for me. Being a learning type myself, I loved it. I loved learning all that stuff and then using it. Now, the way I look at the learning industry, however, we need to frame it differently. All of these problems still exist, including leadership development and management development and sales skills and technical skills and compliance and diversity. But there are really four big use cases. So let me talk about these four biggest use cases, which I call the learning architecture. The first is one that has not really been addressed well, but it will be in some sense defines the future of L. And D is knowledge. And I mean information. I used to call it informational courses versus competency based courses, but they're things like, I don't want to know how to be a software engineer because I'm not one, but I need to know what Java beans is, and I need to know what Java is. And I have to understand that the people in the meeting are not talking about a new cup of coffee. They're talking about a programming language. And I need to know what a programming language is and how people use it, even though I don't know how to do it. And what is the implication of someone discussing it in terms of a skill or an operational problem? And I'm not comfortable being in that meeting if I don't understand it. And then there's, you know, some very simple things, like, I'm at the Kinko store and I'm running the operation and the copier jams, and I need to know how to unjam it. And I don't want to take a course. I just want to read a placard on the side that shows me information on how this copier works so that I can unjam it, not understand how to design it or fix it, just unjam it. Or I'm a telephone repair person and I can't get the box open because it's a different kind of box that I've never seen before. How do I open it? What model is it. So there's really thousands and thousands of things here in level one that are sitting around in books and websites and maybe little videos and little audios or in other people's heads that people need to do their jobs. And unfortunately, the big use case for training is to scroll around and use their little slider on their computer to go to the part of the course that tells them this thing they want to do. I mean, a good example in my case is I have this massive spreadsheet I've been working on that seems to be filled with blank spaces instead of empty cells. So when I want to do an average of, you know, the number in a large column and multiply it and divide it rather by the number of entries, it keeps getting the wrong divisor because it's counting the blank cells as empty cells. So I want to get rid of the blanks. Well, believe it or not, I've been in Google and I spent an hour trying to find how to do this. Eventually I found a YouTube that was very short with somebody that had a visual basic macro that does this. So, you know, an hour later I'm running this macro and trying to clean up the spreadsheet. I don't want to take a course on how to build visual basic. I don't want to take a course on how excel works. I just want to do this thing and know how to do it in the future. Okay, so that's number one, and that's going to be a big, big area for L and D. Number two is capabilities. Now, I know what Java beans is. I understand the concept, I understand the word, but now I need to know how to use it. I am a software engineer and I may not want to be an expert, but I got to know how to write some code. I need to know what kind of code to write, what tools to use, etcetera. And maybe I want to spend 20 minutes, ten minutes, five minutes learning this stuff. Maybe I'm willing to take a lab, maybe I want to coach, maybe I want to be validated through some tests, but they're probably a waste of my time. And maybe I'm just curious about this stuff and I'm really interested in it. And so I need a ten minute, 20 minutes, 30 minutes course or whatever you call it. And this level two training is really kind of the core of what we do now. Some of it's really in elementary and some of it's really advanced. And that's the problem. If you look at LinkedIn learning, for example, I was going through a period of time a few years ago when we were really in investing in search engine optimization and new marketing here. And I know basically what SEO is. Being an engineer, I wanted to learn about it before I, you know, hired somebody to do it. And I went into LinkedIn learning and I looked for courses on SEO. Well, it was a very frustrating experience because some of the courses were very elementary. They were a complete waste of my time. I would speed through those and realize I just wasted ten minutes. Some of them were geeky about tools and I didn't really want to know about tools. I wanted to know the fundamentals. And I. Some of the best practices, some of them were very advanced and very specific to, like, Facebook. And you know what? I don't think I ever really found a good in depth course on SEO that would teach me all about it. So I went on the Internet and browsed around and taught myself. And that's what's going on in lots and lots of companies. Some people will ask an expert because that's the easiest way for them to learn. Some people will read, some people will take a course and slog through it, you know, and there are many, many use cases of this that have to do with the workflow of the person in their job. I was with Chanel a few weeks ago, and in the Chanel boutiques, individuals that are showing you beautiful purses or jewelry really need to know a lot about those products, how they're made, the features, the fixtures, the excellence, the quality. And they're not going to get that by reading a little brochure. They're going to have to get somebody to explain it to them. They're going to have to ask. They're going to have to sit down and learn about how Chanel designs and builds and makes products beautiful and excellent. And anyway, that's level two. And then there's level three. Level three is what I call mastery. This is where somebody has reached a point in their career where their job is pretty fixed for a while and they want to get really good at something. And for example, most of our HR clients want to get really good at their domain of HR. So they want to read our research. They want to go through our maturity models. They want to join the big reset. They want to talk to other people, and they just want to get really, really deep and master their craft. And I think most of us as humans aspire to this in something. It may be playing the piano, it may be playing soccer, it might be being a parenthood. And, you know, you're reading books on it and you're listening to podcasts on it, and it's really become in some sense an obsession of your life in a positive way. For example, I'm reading a big long book on the gene and I didn't learn a lot about biology in college. I'm not going to become a genetic engineer, but I don't want to just watch a five minute video. I'm fascinated to really dig into how this works. And, you know, we all have these domains in business and work where we want to become an expert on using, creating graphics or understanding how to prompt AI, or learning how to sell and overcome objections, or, you know, make this manufacturing process really, really, really good. And if I'm in a job like maintenance or repair or service, these are really business critical issues because if you're not really good and master at this domain, you're going to cause havoc and spend a lot of money that the company doesn't want to spend. Back in the days of EMC, when EMC was a hardware company and they sold big giant disk drives, they basically built a learning architecture with a mandate that you're not going to become an EMC repair person unless you go through a series of face to face courses with hands on experience with the equipment led by an expert. And because it was too risky for you to go and do this work without that level of mastery, this is true in nursing, this is true in healthcare, this is true in a lot of jobs. And that's level three. Sometimes you're going to have a preceptor, which is somebody who validates your skills. Sometimes you're going to have a coach and you're going to always work on mastery. Level four is what I call certified. Level four means that for some reason a government regulation or a policy in the company, we are not only going to make sure you know this stuff, but we're going to revalidate that you know it year after year or period after period. And if your credential expires, you're not going to be able to do this job anymore. And there actually are quite a bit of applications of this in different industries. Sometimes the credentialing agency is internal, sometimes it's external. Sometimes it's mandated because of the culture of the company, because we really want people to be good at this and understand it at a regular basis. But that is a sort of another fourth level of business rules and modality for courses. Now, in some cases, companies have created pseudo badges and credentials that don't mean much. And I think it's a little bit sad in some degree that the badging idea was initially a gamification idea and then became what we thought was a credential. And so we now have this world where because of LinkedIn, so many people can create certifications on so many things that you can perceive someone to be a credentialed learner when they may or may not really be. But anyway, that's all the stuff you have to think about in these four levels now, these four modalities or levels I call your learning architecture. And if you don't have some type of an architecture like this, whether it be three levels or four levels or two levels or whatever you decide, then you're going to have a hard time organizing all the content that you built, given these four modalities or levels. The job of L and D is really interesting. You've got to take all the professional domains, job roles and critical competencies in your company, and you have to build content that is easy to consume, that meets the needs of the company along these levels. And that's a really interesting, massive, difficult job. Mary Glavocka, who we've been working with over at Rolls Royce, for example, is trying to do this in the engineering domain at Rolls Royce, not because they haven't done it before, but because they really need it now for onboarding and new hires. And the CEO is reorganizing the engineering function and pulling engineers out of the individual product groups into a central team that can share and loan skills out to the different product engineering groups. This is an interesting restructuring that's really changing the nature of this company, allowing them to share technologies across the different product and initiatives and sciences that they create. By the way, this is the part of Rolls Royce that creates missiles, submarines, jet engines, security stuff. That's for the Defense department in the UK and so forth. And what happens in these situations is that this need to create localized, high value skills is always getting bigger. Because if you centralize these kinds of programs, they tend to fall apart. Because the people, and I call this, by the way, the centrifugal force of the L and D department, the people that know the most about the jet engines at Rolls Royce or the purses and the handbags at Chanel are not sitting in HR. They're not sitting in L and D. They're either in the product group, they're in the customer centric group, or they're in the engineering and research and design group at the IBM organization where I used to work in the 1980s, the people that taught our courses were the engineers or the implementers of systems. We used to go to courses about, say, network configuration, and someone would stand up in front of the course and say, let me show you how we did the SNA configuration at bank of America. And, you know, that was really, really a good way to learn. And I knew that this person really knew what they were doing. So we have to figure out how to implement and design and deliver these three to four levels of learning with the participation and the deep involvement of the subject matter experts or the actual implementers of the systems and solutions that we're trying to support. Now. Then there's this issue of instructional design. We have specialists in L and D who pride themselves on taking these content areas and scratching their heads and figuring out how to design something that will deliver these skills to new people. Do we need a linear course? Do we need a simulation? Do we need a series of case studies? Do we need a workshop?
[00:16:53] Over and over and over. And what we learned in my experience, and this was true at Deloitte as well as at IBM, is that the complex content was not delivered by trainers. It was delivered by the experts. At Deloitte, for example, all of the consulting training is written by and delivered by consultants, which, by the way, is a great learning experience. As I wrote about in the blended learning book years ago, the most valuable way to learn a topic is to teach it. You will spend weeks and weeks and weeks going through your head and your experience and trying to figure out what you actually know and organize it in a form to deliver to others. And you will end up being a lot smarter about the topic. I remember we did a case study with british telecom who had built a learning system called dare to share, and it was very innovative at the time. They used these little video recording devices that we had to buy separately before we had mobile phones. And what they did is they told all of the field service people at BT that if you're a repair person out there in the field fixing something or operating something and making it work better, and you figured out how to do something cool that you think other people might want to know, just videotape yourself doing it and share it. And it was a massive success because all these little stories became available to people to find the things that they needed to do that no one in L and D had any idea was out there. And the L and D department wasn't really doing much except giving them a platform to share it. So that environment, which has led to companies like Udemy and 360 learning, where you enable the subject matter experts themselves to use these new AI generative tools to build content that they need and support others, is going to be part of this new world. If you have SME's teaching courses, as we did at IBM, creating exercises, participating in the course through chat, providing expert feedback, etcetera, that is going to be part of your life. And I like to call these capability academies where you give the domain that you're supporting, like making the marketing function or the sales function or another function, you give them the tools and capabilities and support to build and support this capability development exercise. By the way, in sales, there's a job title called sales enablement. Sales enablement is not an HR, it's usually in sales. These are people that worry about all of the training and support and coaching and tools that salespeople need to do their jobs. This is a perfect example of how we need to address L and D in virtually every functional domain, which is again the reason that I tend to call these academies. And in some cases, these are very strategic roles now. So when you think about your role as a head of L and D or a more centralized function, you're going to need to look at not only these functional areas that might be being done by functional leaders, but also some very critical jobs. For example, if you're an insurance company and actuaries are really the core of your business, you're going to want to spend some time understanding what the roles and skills are of actuaries. And you're going to want to have a very focused program on development and support, recruiting and internal mobility of actuaries. If you're a software company, it might be the data scientists. If you're Walmart or Starbucks, it might be the supply chain experts. And these are groups of people that should be working together, working as an academy, sharing best practices. And you're going to probably want to support them directly because they're business critical roles. Not that sales isn't too, but sales tend to be big enough that they can often do it themselves. Now, one of the other things that happens as you think about this centrifugal effect, and this is what Stuart Logan did at bank of New York Mellon, which was really a fascinating role he built, is creating cross functional capability councils. Because many of these specialized roles like product management or project management or analytics are filled with experts with different job titles in different parts of the company. So if you're becoming aware of groups of capabilities that belong together, like a change management group or a management group, this is really what leadership development is, actually, then you're going to want to bring these people together.
[00:21:39] This is really, in a sense, what the JBA is. When we started our academy, the whole vision that I really had, which has more or less come true, was that we were going to build a system dedicated to HR to talk about the complex interdependencies and skills and programs and topics and tools in HR. We would create a lot of programs and resources, and we've done a lot of that. But we would also hope and rely on the people in the academy to share with each other. And I think we've done a pretty good job of that. And when I go into the academy every day or two and I see people asking questions and sharing with each other, I realized that really a good L and D strategy creates these kinds of learning experiences so people will share with each other.
[00:22:28] I was thinking about this when I was at IBM. When we were learning about SNA, which was the proprietary networking protocols at IBM. It was very complex. There was a guy in our branch office who was the Sna guru, and they used to trot him out to clients all the time to do workshops. And, you know, when I went to courses about this particular topic, and it was very complex, and we were learning about packets and error handling and things that I'm not sure we really needed to know that when I went to these courses, the people that were in these courses were people that had done this, and they were showing me why these technologies that I was learning about were important and what the relevant application of them was in large companies. And that was all part of building this learning architecture.
[00:23:20] Now, let's talk about AI. We have been doing a lot of interviews with L and D leaders about AI, and there's a lot of confusion at the moment. In fact, we had a really incredibly good six week sprint in the big reset on L and D and Aihdeendeh. And I think it's upsetting the Apple cart. The article I put out last week, which was about aorist, was about what I called autonomous learning. And I think some people pushed back on it. And the point that I was trying to make is not that these systems are going to be eliminate all of our jobs, but this is a very different paradigm. About four or five years ago, before I get into where we are today, I met an entrepreneur who had spun off from Facebook, and he was very smart friend of Mark Zuckerberg, software engineer. And he said to me, I'm building a system that will crawl through the compliance documentation at banks, and he was working with Chase at the time. And it will generate learning courses and assessments based on what's in the documentation. And I thought he was crazy. I mean, I really liked his passion and I thought, this seems like an interesting idea, but he's never going to get it to work. Well, actually, he was using generative AI and this was like five years ago.
[00:24:34] And believe it or not, that is what is happening today. So what I learned from him, and we're learning through Galileo and we're learning through talking to many of you, is that this is really a paradigm change. And that even though we still have SME's involved in course development and course support, we are going to have a platform to rely on that can dynamically collect information in real time, generate content as needed. We never ever had that before.
[00:25:07] And so these concepts of SME driven learning, which came from Udemy or 360 learning or even YouTube, to some degree, are going to have a platform that you're going to be able to buy that isn't going to be very long from now that will allow you to deliver this kind of experience without doing it by hand. Now, why are people intimidated by this? I think to some degree there's two things going on in the market right now. If you're a designer and you're building instructional videos or you're writing tests or you're teaching courses, you don't want your job to go away and you're not going to believe that some tool is going to be able to do all the things you can do. So of course, you're going to push back. And what we're going to find as we use these things, and we found this with Galileo, and I think other companies are finding it, too, is that they generate amazing amounts of content. But we still have to figure out the use cases, the architecture and the user experience. And of course, the system won't necessarily know what level of rigor in the four levels I talked about earlier you need. So if it generates a simplistic answer to a question, the user is going to go back and ask it for more, and that's going to create more work, too. So we're going to have to really rethink what we do in L and D to create a learning experience which is easy to walk up to and learn, but also adapts to the person's need.
[00:26:37] Now, there have been a lot of attempts to do this in the past, and, you know, I think for the last, I don't know, 15 or 20 years, we really haven't had much excitement going on in L and D. We've had, you know, VR a little bit. That's cool. We've had learning experience platforms which turned into portals which are just as junked up as everything else. We've had video learning. We've had, you know, a lot of new types of assessments, you know, a lot of good skills assessment tools and simulation tools and so forth. But generally speaking, these are kind of features of the learning experience and things, even things like badging and cohort based learning, they've been around a long time. So what we really did is digitize a lot of the ideas we had in the past, but we have never really had something like an AI engine. We have never had something that could dynamically pull together content, reassemble it, and produce it in different forms for different users. So this is going to take some rethinking, and it's coming to market in different forms. There are standard learning platforms like Sana and up limit and Arist and Dochibo shape and others. But then ADP, for example, has a new assistant that you're going to see in the fall that allows you to ask any question about HR, and it'll look up regulatory information. It'll show you how much money people made, it'll show you how tenure of your employees, that is essentially like a learning tool about aspects of your organization that you might have had to put into a course. And that's, in a way, why we built Galileo. Galileo is a platform purely dedicated to HR at this point, with a lot of content on management and leadership that allows you as an HR professional to essentially continuously advance and mature and implement your craft, your trade, your skills. That is really where this is going for every job in the company. And that is a totally different way of thinking about what l and D does, as opposed to the traditional model of let's build a course, produce it, launch it, see if people like it, and go on from there. But that gets me back to the concept of architecture. If we actually believe that these autonomous learning platforms are going to do our jobs for us, I think it's a big mistake. And a good example of a system that has not worked out well is YouTube. YouTube is a very fantastic place to find videos and stories and entertainment and education, but it is a mess. And if you were a corporation and you were trying to build something like YouTube to do your job, you would want to make sure that all of the content in there was tagged by level, by architecture, by role, by topic, so that the person looking for content doesn't get caught watching a video of two guys racing a race car around the track and waste 45 minutes.
[00:29:54] And that's why I spent the first 20 minutes of this podcast talking about architecture. Now, a good example of an organization that has addressed this issue is Brad Watt, the COO at Colgate. Brad is an exceptionally big thinking guy. Really interesting approach to this. He ran marketing for a lot of Colgate before this, so he's good at thinking about audiences, messaging, and what they've done at Colgate is basically simplified. Their architecture to each functional domain has three levels, beginning, intermediate, advanced. They have no more than three critical skills areas in each role. Not 20, not ten, three. And you as a user pick each skill and go through the content in the three levels depending on where you are today. It sounds very simplistic, but if you look at the implementation, it's very, very powerful. So while these technologies can create a lot of content and assemble a lot of content dynamically, we are going to want to constrain them so they don't end up creating something as messy as YouTube or TikTok. I think for some companies, a haphazard do what you want learning experience is great. If you're a small company with lots of things going on and it's new, people might want an activity stream of content to browse through to find what they need. But if you're a bank or you're an insurance company or a global manufacturing company or a retailer, and you have lots of people in different geographies and roles that are very specific in their responsibilities, you really don't want to waste their time looking around in this, you know, kind of AI driven learning machine. For content that seems to be appropriate, you want to direct them in the right direction. Now, we are going to actually be doing this in the Galileo Josh Burson Academy implementation, and we are working on it right this minute. And so let me offer this as I wrap this up. First of all, a lot of your hard work on experience, design, learner segmentation, aligning and partnering with the business leaders in your functional areas is more relevant now than ever before.
[00:32:15] What Mary Glavocka is doing at rolls is working with the engineering leaders in the different engineering disciplines to build these functional academies using advanced AI technology and experiment with the role of the three or four levels of capability that are needed. Number two, we are looking for two or three or four companies that we can work with directly. And what I mean by that is part of our research in this domain is we want to get our hands dirty with you. We are going to do it in our academy. We have a pretty big learning system right here that we're working on right now, and we are happy to share this with you. So if you're in a situation in your company where you're ready to jump in to a new AI architecture for learning and look at some new tools, and you're willing to spend a little bit of money on some services from us, and we're certainly not going to charge you a lot. We would love to work with you both to create a pacesetter experience for the rest of the industry, to learn together on what works and what won't work in your domain, and obviously to help you as well. This is going to be a big topic for me personally over the next six to nine months. I feel like I'm going back to my roots in some respects. We're going to decipher where knowledge management fits, where the four levels of capability fit, and what dynamic content and chatbots and how that comes together in the learning experience. I promise you that next year, when we produce a lot of this research and share it with you, we will have some really good tools, examples and case studies. And any of you that listen to this, that are doing cool stuff, including vendors, please reach out to us because we definitely want to talk to you. Have a great weekend. Talk to you guys next week. By the way, we have a big announcement next week, so stay tuned for that.
[00:34:24] Sadeena.
