Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

Developing talent is about more than designing and delivering learning content and experiences. It’s about connecting employee development to their workplace performance and enabling their ongoing career development. And there’s no denying mapping the skills of an individual, measuring those skills, identifying the interaction between employees, and connecting all those dots in order to develop your talent and create a pipeline for the future can feel like a complex mess. While this requires more than a new system or platform, doing it well at scale and with any degree of consistency is impossible without the right technology. But what if it didn’t have to be that way? We’ll be exploring that possibility in this episode of Learning Tech Talks when we talk with Matthew Brown about the complexities we face and how they’ve designed Schoox to be an end-to-end solution capable of pulling it all together.

It’s easy to underestimate the amount of learning content that is created and maintained within an organization. However, when you even begin scratching the surface, you’ll quickly realize the negative impact a lack of visibility into that content can have to your bottom line. And, while streamlining your internal content operations may not have the same dramatic allure as a new learner experience platform, the value to your bottom line cannot be overlooked. Whether reducing content development and maintenance time or reducing financial waste on duplicate assets and translations, streamlining your content can free up the resources you need to do more with less. In this episode, we’ll be demystifying another of the big “L” acronyms, the LCMS or Learning Content Management System when I talk with Leslie Farinella from Xyleme. We’ll unpack the different opportunities this technology can address and explore what it takes to maximize the potential.

We all know travel costs and operational downtime have been significant barriers to the critical support and engagement required by business leaders and employees, and that didn’t just start with COVID19. And, while the desired outcome of functional training is to improve operational efficiency, legacy methods often require a significant loss in that efficiency in order to achieve that outcome. Thankfully, technology is removing these barriers by reaching employees where they are, reducing the need and time required for face-to-face learning, and having an overall positive impact on employee performance. In this episode, Udi Hazan and I dig into the challenges we face when reaching front-line workers and highlight how these challenges were accelerated by the coronavirus. We’ll also learn more about how Enabley was built to address these challenges by enabling L&D to create and deploy interactive content through a seamless user experience.

While the dynamics of working in distributed and virtual teams weren’t new to 2020, the gaps and challenges some teams were already experiencing reached a new high as the entire workforce transitioned almost overnight, vaporizing work as we once knew it. As a result, the demand to develop more than just the individual reached an all-time high as teams struggled to connect and engage with each other, develop their skills, and learn through realistic experiences. Given that’s the case, why is so much of our effort focused on content targeted at individuals? It’s a good question and one we should be asking ourselves as we evaluate our strategy. In this episode, Graham Hogg and I discuss what this new way of working means for team development. We’ll highlight why the way we’ve always done things simply can’t work in this new world. You’ll also hear some of the different ways see6 is addressing these gaps by taking business simulations to a new level enabling team development like never before.

Creating video content should be a piece of cake right? After all, everyone has a webcam or cellphone that can be used to record themselves from anywhere. Not quite. If you’ve ever led a user-generated content initiative, you’re familiar with how hard it can be to get people to produce a video with any degree of production quality. Even if they can make the thing, the logistics alone may have you throwing in the towel. On this episode, I talk with Christopher Weeks about the challenges we often face when it comes to curating production-quality user-generated video content. We’ll also explore their hardware solution, RapidMooc, that’s designed to bring the quality and capability of a full production studio to your office.

Talking about creating a culture of continuous learning, unlocking the potential of your existing talent, and providing employees with an extraordinary experience while improving productivity and reducing costs is one thing. Delivering on it is another. As a result, organizations frequently make the costly mistake of first looking for talent externally because they are unaware of what they can do with what they have. In this episode, Kelley Steven-Waiss and I will be talking about the many challenges organizations often face when making the shift from words to action and about the importance of talent operations and how visibility, planning, and adaptability can serve as a monumental advantage in today’s competitive environment. We’ll also talk about what makes Hitch unique and how they’re positioning themselves to be the complete technology platform for the Future of Work.

With 63 episodes over 12 months paired with an entire career dedicated to learning, learning technology, and digital transformation, I should have all the answers, right? Spoiler alert. I don’t and won’t pretend I do. However, I have managed to acquire some pearls of wisdom here and there while forming a candid perspective on where things are and where they’re going. On this special 1-year anniversary episode of Learning Tech Talks, I’ll be sharing some of my biggest takeaways, answering your questions, and demystifying what it means for our industry.

Knowledge, content, and expertise don’t distribute itself to the right places. Unfortunately, it’s distributed across the organization, often in silos or buried where people are unable to find it, but technology is helping. Today’s tech is capable of aggregating, curating, and recommending it right where you need it while automating rudimentary tasks to enable the highest degree of performance. In this episode, Annee Bayeux and I are talking about some of the ways we can transform the work we do by tapping into the existing infrastructure and resources that drive the #flowofwork. We’ll unpack what it takes to bring together the vast, often undiscovered, knowledge and expertise in our organizations and bring it to life. We’ll also dig into the way EdCast has been designed to seamlessly pull this off and ultimately allow our employees to work smarter, not harder.

The kind of solutions we can create to help employees see, touch and experience is changing dramatically. We’re no longer limited to text, images, and video that’s to augmented and mixed reality. Even better, augmented and mixed reality isn’t just for large organizations with big budgets and teams of technical designers. This technology allows us to take passive content and bring it to life by connecting the digital and physical world. In this episode, we're talking with Caspar Thykier about what it really means to bridge the gap between these two worlds and how Zappar is helping. We’ll dig into different ways to use this form of technology to move beyond the trend and solve real problems while improving the user experience.

Regardless of what you call them, competencies are fundamental elements that guide your talent strategy and provide the framework required for managing employee skills. However, managing skills and competencies well takes more than a fancy chart that looks nice on a PowerPoint slide. It requires comprehensive tech capability that allows organizations to create and assess the frameworks while assessing where employees and designing a path that gets them to where they need to be. And, while you’re not alone if you’re not currently using technology to manage the competencies and skills of your employees and unlock the power of a competent workforce, it’s a gap that’s too important to ignore. In this episode, I talk with Jai Shah and Tom White from Kahuna Workforce Solutions to define what it means to manage competencies and skills and explain why this critical step will help solve the skill dilemma at the apex of every organization’s priority list.