Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

When it comes to skills, it can feel like they’re changing so fast it’s impossible to develop them before they’re extinct. However, one timeless skill not only remains at the top of nearly every priority list but spans across every role and function. What skill am I talking about? Communication. However, in order to improve a diverse and complicated skill like communication, you have to start by breaking apart the broader skill into the unique capabilities and create a personalized development pathway. Unfortunately, this type of assessment and personalized pathway was almost impossible to scale across an organization. On today’s episode of Learning Tech Talks, Noah Zandan and I are talking about what it really takes to tackle this kind of challenge and why technology is the only way to make it a reality. We’ll also dig into the unique and measurable ways Quantified Communications is solving this problem.

The landscape of #learning and #hrtech continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, and it can sometimes feel impossible to stay current. In the first Learning Tech Talks of 2021 Matthew Daniel, Jeff Lowndes, and I decided to collectively share our predictions and insights into what we’re seeing in the market as well as the growing maturity of organizations around the globe. We discuss everything from the continued progress of #AI to #talentmobility, the real value behind the rapidly growing talent marketplace. We also highlighted some practical ways you can embark on this journey regardless of where you are on the learning maturity curve or the size of your team and budget. This is a conversation you won't want to miss.

Whether it’s curating content from a variety of sources, improving the learning experience through personalization, developing employee skills, or predicting and measuring the impact of the work we do there’s no shortage of opportunity for technology to enhance the way we work together. Historically we’ve patiently, and sometimes impatiently, waited for the LMS to improve its capability stack to meet these needs. However, perhaps we were waiting for the wrong acronym to solve our problem. Enter in the LXP. Now, while there’s a growing number of platforms out there aligning themselves to the acronym, far fewer truly fit the LXP mold. In this episode, that’s exactly what we’re talking about as I chat with Janne Hietala. We’ll discuss the current state of the industry while highlighting the different ways Valamis has designed its platform to solve these monumental challenges.

Keeping all the assets, resources, and programs organized while analyzing needs, delivering and forecasting what will be needed in the future is a piece of cake, right? And, it’s not as if the events of 2020, distributed workers, and global organizations make things any more difficult. There’s a lot more complexity in managing a successful learning function than people often realize. After all, when done well, it takes a lot more than throwing together a problem and shoving it out the door. In this episode, John Pebbles and I are going to break down the complexities of the learning supply chain and talk about many of the different ways technology like Administrate are making the management and measurement of our efforts easier.

Preparing for your first job or transitioning into a new field is overwhelming. Developing the skills you’ll need, understanding the terminology, and being able to tell a compelling story during an interview is a lot for any individual to take on, especially at the pace roles are changing. This overwhelming task has only been made more challenging by the events of 2020. Fortunately, technology is making it easier. Not only is today’s tech able to rapidly and continuously evaluate market skills, curate resources, and create a personalized path designed to land you the job, it’s also connecting people to the jobs where they can put them to work. In this episode, Ahmed El-Sharkasy and I are going to be talking about how machine learning is simplifying this overwhelming process and how KnowledgeOfficer is taking the skill measurement and development a step further by connecting that development to landing that new job.

Everyone is talking about modifying and developing the skills of the workforce, but so many are struggling to figure out what to do about it. One of the most significant challenges is that each individual is different and brings with them their own unique skills, experiences, and opportunities for growth. While formal training can play a role, research shows us that coaching can dramatically improve the effectiveness and sustainability of the change. Unfortunately, organizations often fail to include or limit this necessary layer due to the limitations of traditional coaching. In this episode I’m talking with Kristy Mccann Flynn about the importance of coaching at all levels of the organization. We’ll also talk about how that need led her to co-found @GoCoach to help organizations address this need at scale.

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.