Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

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.

Knowledge is only as powerful as the individual’s ability to demonstrate or articulate it. Fortunately, video is a great way for individuals to practice synthesizing their knowledge by practicing how they would apply it, getting feedback, and modifying their delivery. However, the logistics behind a solid video workflow is often more complicated than many L&D organizations or learning tech tools are prepared to manage. However, video workflows are overcoming these challenges. In this episode with Julie Zinn and Josh Kamrath from Bongo we’ll explore how can you use them to transform the way you assess knowledge, measure skills, and develop talent in your organization through practice, demonstration, and feedback. We’ll also take a look at how technology is making it scalable through automation.

An LXP is nothing more than a fancy front end for an LMS, right? Not quite! Seamless user experience and central interface for employee learning are important features when considering a learning experience platform, but you can’t just stop there. For one, an LXP needs to also consider the social connection between employees whether it’s helping shape what content is relevant to a learner or enabling the actual creation of it. In this episode, I talk with Danielle Hamilton and Mark Ward while taking a closer look at Thrive Learning’s swing at the Learning Experience Platform. We’ll see how they’re connecting the ecosystem while personalizing learning through relevant content and actionable data giving more time to employees to focus on the things that matter.

Making the jump from in-person to virtual events is about a lot more than copying and pasting your content into a new environment. To do it well, we need to think beyond delivering content to delivering experiences. It requires rethinking the content, architecting an experience, and measuring whether the resources invested in the design and time spent by the participants actually delivered the desired outcome. While we’re all familiar with the latest video conference tools, they often lack the features and functionality required to deliver an impactful experience. In this episode I’m talking with Matthew Parson from Benji about the platform they’ve designed to take some of the powerful tools we use for in-person events and and apply them in the virtual world to transform the learner experience.

Neglecting or poorly managing the front-end analysis of the L&D supply chain has consequences for everyone involved. It’s here where decisions are made to fill gaps or solve problems that don’t exist. This leaves everyone working on things that don’t really matter. Add to that, inefficiencies and poor management in this area have dire downstream consequences. It doesn’t get any easier when you start collaborating with SMEs and Stakeholders to build your content. Unfortunately, cleaning up these processes can prove to be a more challenging task than people often realize. In this episode, I’ll be talking with Ryan Austin about Synapse and how it’s designed to take control of these critical steps by creating standard processes and workflows designed to collect and manage the critical data and feedback while ensuring you’re working on the right needs and managing the status of everything.