Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Good morning, everyone. Today I want to talk about where corporate L and D is going. Now, most of you who work in L and D know this, but let me just briefly discuss the fact that corporate training and education is a massive business. It's over $300 billion spent on onboarding, compliance training, leadership development, sales training, technical training, professional development, vertical training in every virtual domain of business, including HR, like our professional Development Academy, the Josh Burson Academy, and the suppliers of training are vast. I consider this to be what is called a red ocean. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of providers. Corporate universities have to go out and they have to shop for books and materials from experts, content provided by publishers and content companies, consultants that build special training programs for very unique needs. Virtual reality tools, tools for learning management learning management systems learning experience platforms skill systems executive education programs online learning programs that are in cohorts. Online learning programs that are blended. Online learning programs that are performance support oriented. I mean, there's a really big, big thing going on here. And in the middle of all of this learning and development marketplace, there's a peer marketplace that has never really blossomed called knowledge management that is actually going to merge with learning and development, which I'll explain in a minute, where the it department is usually dealing with the document management and other assets of the company, compliance documents and other things that employees need to do their jobs, which are sort of a form of learning too. Many years ago, I started a craze around the concept of learning in the flow of work. And the idea was, you know, quite good because everybody really understands it. And that is that in the older days of corporate education, you would go to a training course, literally go. You would sit in a room for a day or two and you would then go back to your job. And that actually worked very well, by the way. But we don't do that anymore, at least not very often. We do it for big events and large change activities, but most of our learning takes place as we need it when we have time on Friday afternoons during a staff meeting. And so what's happened in the learning industry is all of these forms of content and expertise have been moving to digital form that are easier to consume, more personalized, and more relevant to the needs you have. And I was having a conversation with LinkedIn on Friday, and I'll talk about them in a minute about how you measure the impact of learning. And I know that most L and D leaders are constantly asked, what is the impact of all this stuff we're doing? And, you know, you can do ROI studies. You can do a b tests of who's been through it and who hasn't. You can do satisfaction studies. Well, I wrote a whole book on this a long time ago and what I basically concluded was the most important measure of learning is utility. Did the manager or employee or worker find the content useful in their current role, in their professional development, in their journey as a leader, in their other activities that they're doing or not? If not, they took the course because they had to and they probably wasted their time and your time. So we're really in this constant quest of giving people what they need to do their jobs better. And this will never go away. We'll always be working at it and finding new ways. Now where we are today is technology is completely changing. Not only has the concept of learning changed and the consumption of learning, but the concepts around it. We used to train people as a separate activity from the rest of the things going on in the company. Now learning is integrated into our jobs, careers, aspirations and business strategies. So many, many of the things that used to sit around in learning catalogs similar to university catalogs, literally, I mean, I think a lot of learning activities in companies were modeled around university learning. Now we're saying I'm in job a trying to move to job b, I see some adjacent skills. What do I need to know to go from being a data analyst to a data scientist, to go from being a marketing manager to an expert in SEO and SEO advertising, or from a data scientist to a machine learning engineer or a sales manager to a large account manager. So these are not just training programs, these are development programs. And when you think about L and D as a development activity and not just a training activity, then you have to match it up to the roles and jobs and skills that your company needs. And so a lot of the original sort of content and libraries and there were literally books of training at IBM when I was there. I mean physical books that you'd scroll through and pick the course you wanted. Now we have these systems like talent marketplaces and talent intelligence systems that will show you what courses, content experts, mentors, coaches are relevant to the journey that you have selected or the system told you is a good idea for you next. And so in today's corporate environment, rather than waiting for your boss to tell you what's next and then take the courses to prepare for that, we're really all developing ourselves all the time. So these systems really require a much higher level of intelligence than they did before. The traditional learning management technology, learning management systems which is last time I sized it, a multibillion dollar market is really very static. It's not designed to tell the employee what he or she should do or give them a lot of advice. It's designed to let them just find something, do a search and consume it. So that's another big context, too. You also have to remember and reflect on the fact that L and D professionals are amongst the most innovative, creative, technology oriented people in HR. You know, most of the roles in HR, including Chros, by the way, have very little technical background in terms of technology. But L and D people do. They've been using macro media or video authoring tools or audio authoring tools. A lot of people in L and D are really designers, and they really have a lot of creative instincts, and they do a lot of creative things in their lives and their careers. And when a new technology comes along, whether it be YouTube or Twitter or AI or mobile phones or new algorithms, they use them, they pick them up and they try them. And so some of the most innovative things in the whole HR profession actually come out of L and D. I mean, the whole idea of a skill in a skills taxonomy started with degreed and edcast L and D providers, because those of you in L and D were using these lxps and saying, hey, what about, you know, maybe I can do a skills taxonomy from all this searching stuff that's going on, and I can figure out what the skills are in this job or this role or this part of the company or this individual. And, you know, even things like mobile learning and video learning started in L and D. I don't know most of you know this history, but long, long before YouTube existed, we were building video based learning in Fly, which was the predecessor technology to the mp4 that we use in the phone now. And I worked with a company called 9th House Learning in 1999 that had built just spectacular learning programs that were videos as good as Seinfeld episodes, but we couldn't run them on our phones or there were no devices to run them, unfortunately, and we didn't have enough bandwidth. So people have been experimenting all the time, I expect, and I'm already seeing enormous amounts of innovation and creativity and new technology in this space, to say nothing of the metaverse, by the way. And even though I can't predict it exactly, I'm pretty sure that we're going to be wearing glasses that are going to be like our regular glasses. They're going to have little windows in them and little earphones in the back, sort of like the meta ray bands, and we're going to be learning that way, too. And for a lot of employees who don't sit in front of a computer, that's going to be a pretty good way to learn. And that's probably only in the next year we're going to start seeing that. So where are we? Well, let me highlight what I'm beginning to pick up, by the way, this week I was at the Betterup conference and I saw a product called Betterup manage to give you an example of what's happening. What those guys do now is you can take an assessment in this new tool. It will show you the areas of your soft skills or power skills that you need help. It will then give you directed learning based on your profile and your assessment. It will connect you to a coach, and it'll give you a step by step, week by week journey to improve your leadership skills. And it's not just for leaders, it's for everybody. So I think betterup manage is an example. And there's, by the way, it's entirely AI based. There's an AI chat included, so you can actually ask questions of the content and interact with the system while you're going through this real life coaching experience and self learning experience in betterup. LinkedIn has also really dramatically changed its offering. LinkedIn learning, which I told them is probably misnamed, and I think they're working on that, is way more than LinkedIn learning. Now, we used to think of LinkedIn learning as lynda.com videos. Well, that's where it's been for a long time. And they have lots and lots of video courses in there, including one or two from me on lots and lots of topics. But now you can interact with them through an AI, and you can ask questions of the courses or of the corpus at large. They will direct you to courses in your career interest. They're basically a talent marketplace now. So based on the taxonomy of your job and related jobs in LinkedIn, which is obviously very, very sophisticated, it will show you jobs in your company, by the way, that are open, that you might want to apply for, and then give you learning activities and access to learning in that direction. And it will actually show recruiters in your company who happen to use LinkedIn learning who is looking for opportunities that might be suited for a job. So recruiters get tapped on the shoulder and say, oh, hey, somebody over here in this department is a perfect fit for that job. Why don't you talk to them in addition to your external search? So LinkedIn learning has completely evolved in this direction, but where I think it's going is even more interesting. And that is, you know, AI, which we use a lot now with Galileo, so we're getting very comfortable with it, can do a lot of things. It can generate content dynamically, so we can take documentation or existing courses or maybe even a speech, and we can generate instructional materials, ask people quiz questions, test people, generate scenarios. You can obviously create almost any kind of content from it using generative AI. Generative AI can also serve as a coach while you're going through learning. So you can take the corpus of content in a training program, put it in the AI, and then ask it questions. While you're going through the training program, AI can assess your skills. There's a new company called Workera, and there'll be others coming that can use AI to ask you probing questions about a topic, and then, based on your quality of answers, ask you more questions to level you in a topic, which, by the way, has never really been very easy to do. It's very, very manual and very difficult. There's AI that will personalize the content itself so that if we built a course, person a sees it this type of course, and person b sees that type of course. Sana is doing that, the company that we work with in Galileo. And then there's, to me, the trillion dollar opportunity, which is merging all of our learning and development with the corpus of knowledge in the company. And let me run through that use case, because I think there's a bigger market for this than most people realize. So we're working with a large defense contractor in the UK. This is a company that builds engines and missiles and nuclear subs and all sorts of things that fly through the air. And they've been doing it for a long time. And they have lots of engineers that have, you know, developed mastery in many, many things, and they're in different business units and product groups, and they've taken all of this knowledge that they've accumulated through many, many years of building these different things, and they put them into videos, wikis, courses, documents, test results, findings, etcetera. And they built a massive wiki for this. A wiki, for those of you who don't know what it is, was really the only way to manage a vast amount of content when it was constantly changing. We built a wiki in my old company and it was actually very useful, but kind of a mess. And what happens with wikis is you put a bunch of content into these systems and it indexes them and tries to find the relationships between them and you have to tag them. And then people go in and find stuff. It's kind of a knowledge management system, but you don't always find the right stuff and you don't know what you don't know. And it's not really an instructional form. So if you're not sure where to start, the wiki could kind of get you lost. While you never really get to the point. So what these guys want to do, and this company, like most companies, has a lot of very senior people retiring. These people are going to retire with, you know, 30, 40, 50 years of intellectual property in their heads and they want to transfer that knowledge to new people because the new engineers who come to work at this company take almost a year or longer to learn how to actually do good work because they have to learn the legacy of all the things that have already been invented there. I mean, I remember when I was getting out of school in 1978, I interviewed with a lot of technology companies. I interviewed actually with the US Navy. I actually met Admiral Rickover and, you know, he interviewed me and grilled me on nuclear science and stuff. And then he said to me, you know, why do you want to work in the navy? And I said, because I want to learn about all this stuff. And he said, well, I don't want you to learn, I want you to do. He said, so if you come here, you're going to learn quickly because we need you to get some work done. Needless to say, I didn't go work there. But anyway, so that problem is in sales and marketing and product management and engineering, in customer service and HR. I mean, think about our corpus of knowledge in HR. Well, when you look at what an LLM can do, you look at what Galileo can do, you look at what any LLM you end up implementing. You can put that content into channels in these AI systems and offer them in conjunction with formal training. And the AI can not only help you build the instructional content, but provide you knowledgeable access to the corpus of knowledge already existing in your company way beyond what an instructional designer can do. I did instructional design. I know how hard it is. Imagine if you had to do instructional design for the entire development of a jet engine. Forget it. I mean, you'll spend your life working on that. You might be able to do instructional design for the noise engineering of one part of the engine, but all of the other things that have been done over the, you know, hundred years of this company's R and D are very, very hard to assimilate. And you're going to spend months and months and months developing that. And as soon as you develop it, there's going to be something that's going to change. Well, I think another dimension to where l and D is going is we need to think about this as a branch of knowledge management. Now, you know, that's a tricky branch and it's not always the most productive way to build L and D programs, but this is going to happen, I guarantee it. And so there's going to be essentially a trillion dollars of legacy or existing IP in companies that's going to get sucked into our L and D systems that we're going to be able to access and use or just make available to people without necessarily going through formal instructional design. Now, as far as where the market is, I think we're right at the precipice of a massive change. Unfortunately for all of us, for the last seven, eight years or so since the introduction of the LXP, there really hasn't been that much innovation. I mean, VR has been very, very interesting and been an important new dimension, but we really haven't had massive changes in L and D. So what happened is that a lot of the vendors got bought, a lot of the innovative, most of the LMS vendors got bought by cornerstone successfactors and Oracle and SAP. Oracle has gone through multiple iterations of trying to build their own learning platform. Workday acquired a video learning company quite a while ago and has been building out their LMS, but there isn't any huge innovator in the market yet. I'm kind of a fan of dochebo because they're still independent and they went public so they have good access to capital. And there are many, many smaller companies that are starting up again. And there was a flurry of companies like Fuse, Universal and others that 360 learning, that built really innovative knowledge creator platforms where you could build content as an employee and share it with others. Well, all of these small to medium sized vendors in the market are now going to be poised to go into this new space. The traditional LMS vendors, most of them will not get there from here. They have two too much legacy technology, they're too wedded to the old job architecture approaches to learning, and they just have too many customers to drop what they're doing and get into this new area. That's my opinion. And so we're going to see a lot of very creative, new, innovative solutions. I mean, when I was looking at LinkedIn and I went to betterup this week, those are just two examples, but there's many, many more. And I talked to workera yesterday. I realized that this is not going to be hard. The AI technology can be implemented into most learning platforms relatively easily. And then it's a question of how creative is your vendor or how creative are you in asking your vendor to give you the use cases that you need. Now, one of the other things I'll just mention about L and D is it really isn't one big market. Sales training is very different from customer service training, which is very different from it. Professional development as engineers, as training to run an oil rig in an oil company, as training to drive a truck, as a truck driver, as training to be a Starbucks employee, as training to be a first line manager, as training to be a senior executive. I mean, these are, in a sense, different markets, not part of the same market. We group them together in companies to make them easier. But in most companies that are big, they've got a sales training group that's completely different from the customer service training group. That's completely different from the corporate L and D Group, which has a bunch of people working on professional development for different groups and a completely different group doing leadership development. So as these new technologies evolve, we're going to have to apply them in different ways and there will be custom solutions, solutions for each. What I would sort of advise you as an L and D and HR leader is spend some time in this space, poke around, talk to some of these vendors, talk to us, and go back to what we call falling in love with the problem. All of these tools are miraculously interesting. And you look at them and you say, wow, I think we need that. But I think we're at a stage where there's going to be so much innovation and so much change. You're going to be better off saying, how could we apply one of these new tools to our management and development leadership development program, or to our sales training program, or to our customer service organization, where we have lots of documentation and we want to do a more knowledge centered solution. I don't think one platform is going to do everything we need at this point in time because the innovation is taking place so quickly. We are doing research on several things. We're doing research on the vendors landscape. Of course, we're doing lots and lots of case studies. We have this miraculous story of Marriott that's going to be all over our conference in May. I think those of you that are coming really, really should come just to hear the Marriott story. And then we are also looking at how to do this in our own environment. If you're a corporate client of ours and you use Galileo and you use our academy, you're going to see the two of those come together over the next six to nine months, and we'll show you how we did it. And we'll literally just explain to you how it worked for us as a way for you to learn, too. I think it's a really exciting time, maybe the most exciting time I've seen in the corporate learning market for maybe a decade. And we're just at the beginning of this, so I hope this is a good kind of overview for the weekend. And please call us if you have any questions. And stay tuned for more.
