Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:07 Hey everyone. Today I want to talk about learning technology, which is actually a very important and complex part of the HR and the HR tech landscape. And the article I just wrote this week is a pretty long piece about capability academies and what I'm calling mastery based learning platforms. And what it talks about is the fact that there are a set of new platform companies that have focused on an end-to-end, high fidelity mastery based learning experience that can be used to build capability academies. And the goal of these systems is not just to provide you an hour of training and education or an update or a D E I refresher or a compliance course, but to really teach you how to do something well and allow you to advance to a higher level of performance in your job, a new job, a new role, a more advanced role, an adjacent role.
Speaker 1 00:01:05 And that means learning from an expert, doing some developmental assignments, some projects, getting some feedback, having some collaboration experiences, and talking to other students. The kinds of things we used to do in two or three week classes when I used to work at ibm, which we rarely do anymore in corporate training because we've put everything online. Now, before I go into the space a little bit more, let me talk about the tech and why we're at this point where we need this new type of plat. So go back to 1998, which is a long time ago for many of you. I was working for a small company that was building and learning on demand system, and the internet was new. And the original initial foray into online learning and online education was page turning HTML based courses. Not a lot of video because you had to use flash and you would click through from page to page, you would take an assessment, you might listen to an audio, but probably not.
Speaker 1 00:01:59 There might be a few inter activities where you'd do some sliding things around and match them and you would learn something, but it certainly wasn't mastery based. And that was very revolutionary at the time. Skillsoft Net G, a lot of the companies that pioneered in that point in time, digital think was the one that I worked for worse than sold and evolved into bigger companies. But it was really the beginning of this idea of using the internet to learn. And along Kim's Apple and Steve Jobs and he says, flash is a piece of crap. We're gonna kill it. We're not gonna allow Flash to run our phone. We're gonna have a native HTML based video player. And around the same time YouTube was formed and we started putting videos online. And so the Learning Experience paradigm moved from page turning HTML and inter activities to videos, videos of instructors, videos of scenarios, small videos, large videos, many, many different types.
Speaker 1 00:02:54 And then of course we realized we could index the videos, we could transcribe them, we could do AI on them and see what their topics were about. We could learn about what skills were being discussed, and we could actually learn from the experts that were doing videos and gave birth to LinkedIn Learning, which was originally called linda.com, YouTube, you to me, Skillsoft, and many, many other learning companies that focused on building high fidelity video-based courses that were oftentimes like instructor-led courses, but they had chapters and they had interactions and tests and quizzes and scenarios and labs, which are basically places for you to try things. And the industry moved on and grew. And that has been very, very successful over the years. We've all learned a lot from these different activities. While that was going on, the management infrastructure behind this had to change too.
Speaker 1 00:03:45 The learning management systems that were developed for the original e-learning were using a technology called a ICC later called scom that tracked your progress through these pages so they could tell how many pages you had clicked through, whether you had completed an assignment, whether you got a score, what the score was, whether you had passed and so forth. And so there was a learning management system that you needed. And so everybody went out and bought those. The learning management system, by the way, also scheduled classrooms, scheduled instructors, scheduled slide projectors and resources for traditional training. So we had this one system with the learning management system and then all these courses. But as that continued and more and more content went to the non-traditional digital forms, smaller and smaller snacks of videos and so forth, we ended up at a point where we couldn't find everything.
Speaker 1 00:04:31 The LMS couldn't store all this. There was too much, it was hard to put it into a path. And so the Learning Experience platform, which I helped name in retrospect, the name's probably not correct, but was born. So companies like Degre and EdCast and others, created portals that allowed you to find all this content, including articles and other forms of content podcasts, put them into paths and create learning experiences. Not really learning experiences, but content experiences that would allow you to bypass the LMS and get access to the content you needed. And that was a groundbreaking change because now any training department could take any of these assets anywhere they may be between inside the company and outside the company and collect and arrange them so that they could be used for real business purposes, onboarding, leadership development, training skills, and various different customer service, other things.
Speaker 1 00:05:23 Okay? So that's really what's been going on for the last, from 2008 to around 2015, 2016, 2017. And then some smart guys a degree and a couple other companies said, well, maybe we really ought to be focusing on skills, not courses. Courses are just this course grained, topical taxonomy. Maybe we should go to core skills. And so we entered this world of very confusing technology, which I call skills, tech of tools, trying to infer what skills are being, being developed in a different piece of content. Infer what skills individuals have because of their experience and their profiles, and then giving you a tool set to build a skills taxonomy and talk about what skills we need. Now in the area of skills, as I've talked about in many other podcasts, it's a very, very complex problem because the number of skills is huge. There's hundreds of thousands of skills, and every day there's some new technology or methodology or process or procedure or algorithm that's being developed or tool, and that is a skill.
Speaker 1 00:06:30 So do you know how to use Microsoft Windows 11 or whatever is next from them? We need a whole bunch of skills on that. So these skills tech solutions have been really exciting for companies, but nobody's really nailed them because they're very dynamic. And as I talked about in another podcast, they're not at all like the competency-based things we did in the eighties and nineties. It's really a metadata management system about people and content. What is this about and what skills does it create? But nevertheless, with all of that evolution with the lms, A I C C, scom video, micro-Learning, learning experience, platform skills tech, it is still really hard to teach somebody how to become a master in something new. Because as you know, as a human being has gone through school, the only way you really learn something is by doing it. And the only way you do it is for an instructor or teacher or an expert or a coach to step you through it, show you how it works, read a lot, do a lot of background work, maybe take a few tests and try it and get some feedback and get better at it.
Speaker 1 00:07:38 And that is not gonna happen in any of this technology. Enter the world of academies. Now, I may be the one that started this craze because when I left Deloitte in 2018 and I wanted to build a professional development solution for hr, I decided it needed to be an academy. And the reason I did that was not because I thought it was a cool name, but what I realized was that the HR profession was a craft, by the way. So is every other profession, you can learn the basics, but you really don't learn it until you do it. And you wanna learn from other people. And so in an academy, like a safety academy, a police academy, marketing academy, a leadership academy, you don't just learn a bunch of topics and take a bunch of courses. You practice and test and discuss and evolve and improve and push the state of thinking in the company about what we need to do to implement this process or domain.
Speaker 1 00:08:33 Well. And as I was building our academy, I realized it was really, really complicated. We needed to have instructors, we needed to have courses, we needed to have resources, we needed to have background material. We needed to have a capability assessment, a framework, a model that people could work towards. We needed analytics, we needed a great user experience, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what I, I learned, and this was 2018, 2019, was that there were really weren't very many platforms designed for this. In fact, virtually none. I ended up using Nomadic, which is a very, you know, fascinating platform, which most of you'll probably see if you joined the J V A. Well, nomadic was, although they didn't know what to call it, a capability academy, they, they didn't really have any name for it, but they were building cohort-based learning programs that really pushed people forward in a significant way.
Speaker 1 00:09:22 There's some things missing in that platform, but it was the most advanced one I could find. And I looked at all of them. Well, since then, there's been a revolution of innovation in this space. And if you look at the vendors that are listed in the article that I'll link to in the notes here, these are kind of new companies. You may not have heard of many of them, but they're delivering really high fidelity mastery based programs. Oftentimes they start in it, but some of 'em start in soft skills, and they reflect the fact that instructors have to be involved. There has to be real assignments that are submitted and graded, and there has to be feedback, and there has to be collaboration, and it has to be easy to use, and there has to be the ability to put lots of content in there, and it has to be configurable because the Data Science Academy at Capital One is not the same as the Data Science Academy at Uber, or the Data Science Academy at Target, or the Data Science Academy at another company.
Speaker 1 00:10:17 So these vendors have built tools or platforms that are not only really good at mixed mode, multi-functional, cohort based learning, but also configurable. So you can put your own content in there and create your own academy. Now, let me talk about cohorts. Everybody talks about cohort technology as if it's something radically new. It's not. In third grade when the teacher broke you into little groups and you went to your little tables and talked about the book that you had just read and came back and presented it to the class you were doing. Cohort based learning cohorts simply means you take a large number of people, you group them into a small number of people, and those people talk to each other and work together on a project. There's many reasons this is valuable. First of all, you get to know each other. The second of all, you get to have individual interaction and test your own ideas and thinking.
Speaker 1 00:11:10 And the third is, if you do it well, you can do some nifty things, like cohorts can come up with different ideas and share them with peer cohorts. You can rank and rate cohorts against each other. You can create cohorts based on affinity groups in the company. You know this, if you've done instructor-led training, all the young people go over here, all the old people go over here, all the people in sales go over here, all the people in marketing over here. So all of these things, including many other, you know, innovative ideas, are really built into these new platforms. Now, why is this new and why is it important? You can say to yourself, and I know a lot of vendors will say, we've been doing mastery-based learning forever. Sava was a mastery-based learning system when it was first developed. I know Workday will claim that they have mastery based learning in their platform.
Speaker 1 00:11:55 Success factors for sure, because Plateau, the original core of success factors, LMS was a compliance and very rigorous training system used often in pharmaceuticals. So this is not a new idea, but how about a platform designed just for this, designed for many different content areas designed for a whole bunch of different mixed mode applications, and designed to do these things like mixing instructor led and coach based and teaching assistant and collaboration into one technology platform. And I think this is gonna be big. I think most of you in corporate training in l and d are going to end up buying one or more of these platforms because you can't do this stuff in an LMS or an L X P, and I hate to say this in the middle of all of the vendors scrambling to build skills engines, but the skills engine doesn't teach you anything.
Speaker 1 00:12:51 It just tells you a little bit more about what you need to know and maybe where you might go to find it. So to me, this is a pretty significant thing. Now, as I wrap it up, let me add one more idea here that might help you understand it, and that has to do with technology. The reason e-learning was what it was in 19 98, 19 99, that era was because that's all you could do. The technology of HTML and the Netscape browser was limited. There was no embedded video, there was no embedded audio, there wasn't a skills engine behind it. And so we built what we could build once we had ubiquitous video, we added video. Once we had search engines and advanced indexing, we added topics. Now we evolve that using AI to skills. Well, we also have this idea of the X A P. Most of you probably aren't paying attention to it, but it's a pretty interesting idea.
Speaker 1 00:13:44 The idea of the X A P is that just like advertising technology knows everywhere, you click on the internet and that data stream is processed and managed and used in real time to decide what you see next. We can do the same thing for learning. We can tell if somebody is stuck on a piece of content or spending a lot of time here versus there, and we can use that information for whatever we want. Now, the learning record store systems that we have today are mostly just analytics systems, but over time, the blended learning model or experiential learning model, whatever you want to call it, will have lots and lots of data about what content, what activities, what courses, what articles, et cetera are useful and how they're being used. If you look at systems like GitHub that are really the largest system used for computer scientists and software engineers to teach each other about software, they're basically sharing systems with great search and discovery technology.
Speaker 1 00:14:46 And we can do that in corporate training now. And that's, to me, one of the reasons that we need these Capability Academy platforms because we now have the ability technologically to bring many, many elements of the learning experience together. But you don't wanna be a systems integrator. I mean, I've talked to many, many, many training departments that have 12, 15, 18, 20 different systems, lash together to handle all these different use cases, and then there's no program management system on top of that to keep track of who's doing what. So there's a human being manually pulling this data together to figure out who passed or didn't pass a course or who's credentialized for this different activity. So, so these guys have got a big market ahead of them. And if you read the article, which you'll hear is I talked to David Blake about it and a few other people.
Speaker 1 00:15:35 By the way, degre is really into this now. So this is gonna be the rebirth of Degreed is gonna be around this area, is that once you figure out with your business counterparts, what are the most important capability academies to build, it won't be hard to get 3, 4, 5, 10 million of budget if it's a sales academy, if it's a marketing academy, if it's a leadership academy, if it's, if it's a safety academy, if it's a product management academy, you're not gonna be able to build 20 of these. But whatever you do focus on, you will have the money and you will have the roi. Because the ROI of a great academy is growth, it's individual growth, it's career growth, and it's company growth. The goal of our JBA is not to give you a bunch of tips on hr. We wanna teach you how to really change the way you do HR and become an advanced high performing HR consultant, analyst or technologist.
Speaker 1 00:16:30 And if we can do that for you, your company's gonna run in a different way. That's true for engineering, sales, marketing, leadership, everything. So a capability academy is not just a skill building system. It is a way to grow. And once you build these things, if you stick with it, you can use them during tumultuous times of change. Let's suppose there's a competitor or a new product offering, or the company reorganizes, or there's a new CEO or something goes bad and we need to re-skill people. The academy is designed for that. It's designed to have subject matter experts and business counterparts and, and great content and great models and skills data behind it so that you can evolve it and grow it over time. So, so this is a big, big deal. This is a business strategy, not just an l and D technology and something that I think you'll learn a lot about. So anyway, we have lots and lots of case studies of academies that companies have built. We are quite good at understanding this and helping companies build them. So take a look at the article and contact us if you'd like to join our corporate membership program or join the J B A and we'll show you all about how to do this in your company. Thank you.
