Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

If you’ve ever been involved in system training, you know how much work goes into preparing all the materials, getting everything out, and getting everyone up to speed only to discover most people didn’t retain much of anything. Here’s another acronym to add to your learning technology library. The DAP or Digital Adoption Platform. Designed to provide employees with the support and guidance they need at the moment that they need it, this technology can dramatically change the way you think about system training and enablement. Listen as I talk with Raj Sundarason from WalkMe about ditching a large majority of the traditional methods for system training and thinking about enabling performance through real-time guidance instead.

Too often in L&D we execute first and then seek to measure the impact when we’re finished. This leaves us scrambling as we try to find and makes sense of the right information after we’re done and frequently leaves us shaking our heads. Add to that, technology often masks itself as a turnkey solution to help us achieve the measurement we seek. Unfortunately, that’s never the case However, when you start with the end in mind, you can map out the desired outcomes and measurements you’ll need to achieve along the way to ensure you’re on the right track and can demonstrate the value of the work you do. Once that roadmap exists, you can augment the map with technology to improve the effiency, effectiveness, and scale at which you can measure. Listen as Kevin M. Yates, Fact Finder for L&D, and I talk about how you manage to pull all of this together and slay the mythical learning measurement dragon.

Let’s stop the debate about whether instructor-led or digital is good or bad and focus on optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of both. The reality is, they are simply tools and whether the execution is good or bad is our responsibility. And, when you look at running instructor-led training, it’s a highly specialized operation that requires careful attention to finance, processes, and operational efficiency. Without this attention, you can find yourself struggling to justify the resources you need to drive your organization forward, or worse, in some very uncomfortable conversations with business leaders. Listen as I chat with my friends at Training Orchestra about how their platform is designed to streamline the operational activities of L&D enabling our function to do more with less or, better yet, reinvest the savings into innovation and continuous improvement.

With growing regulations like GDPR and CCPA combined with digital savvy employees, the need to proactively consider data privacy and ethics is critical. Ignoring it will result in severe consequences for you and your organization. Conversely, remaining uninformed and at the mercy of IT and compliance will unnecessarily limit your success in digitaltransformation. Navigating it well requires understanding the implications and proactively connecting them to the digital efforts we lead to ensure you and your business partners can strike the right balance of remaining compliant while not avoiding transformation due to unnecessary risk aversion. In our first practitioner episode Bas Debbink and I talk about the implications of these important topics on digital learning transformation and share our personal experiences and best practices for navigating them effectively.

While many associate RPA, or robotic process automation, with assembly lines and warehouses, the reality is it’s quickly proving it’s capability in developing elearning content. However, just because something can be done doesn’t necessarily mean it it should. In this episode, I talk with Micah White from CGS to explore how they’re experimenting with RPA for elearning content development and finding it to be effective in speeding up the process and improving efficiency along the way. However, it’s not without risk, and we talk about what considerations organizations should take before jumping in. We also address what this means for individuals who have committed their careers to elearning development and how their roles might change as a result.

We know practice is the best ways to improve a skill and role play is a great way to practice conversations. Unfortunately, the synchronous nature of traditional role-play is difficult to coordinate, often fails to scale, and requires a great deal of effort to measure. In this episode I talk with Andrea Laus from SkillGym to hear how they’re taking digital role-based simulations in a different direction. Hear how they’re using interactive video to create dynamic, asynchronous simulations that allow a learner to practice their skills when it works best for them while simultaneously assessing their progress and deconstructing the experience into actionable chunks.

Developing strong leaders takes a lot more than blindly pushing leadership development and hoping something sticks. Listen to Joel Beasley and my lively discussion on why so many solutions struggle to make an impact and what makes Leaderbits stand out. You’ll hear how what started as a leadership podcast for technology professionals grew into something far greater. We talk about how they’ve taken the data from their hundreds of interviews with successful leaders and translated it into leadership journeys that include rich content and action-based challenges designed to develop the behaviors that matter.

Learning and development is often tasked with demonstrating the impact of the work we do with data, which can prove a lot harder than it sounds. But there are technologies out there dedicated to helping solve this challenge, the LRS being one of them. What on earth is an LRS? What does an LRS do? Does an LRS replace an LMS or an LXP? Can an LRS overcome failures to identify meaningful outcomes or magically identify the right measurments for success? Listen in as I chat with Tim Dickinson to answer those questions and more while taking a deeper dive into how Watershed’s LRS is successfully pulling together data from across a multitude of business and learning systems and helping tell a compelling story about the impact of our work.

Despite the overwhelming speed at which mobile technology is changing, there’s one capability that seems to be standing the test of time, is always in the hands of learners, and is readily available to users who lack high-speed mobile connections, text messaging. But what does text messaging have to do with learning and development? Find out when I talk with Michael Ioffe about how his quest to teach entrepreneurship to teens in conflict zones led him to discover the power of text message education. With astonishing completion rates and learner feedback, is it something you should be exploring for improving the way you deliver your content? Listen to find out.

What if the latest in emerging technology could create meaningful experiences in the digital world and provide the speed and scale required to reach our employees without sacrificing the human interaction? Impossible? Maybe Not! Listen in as Mark Atkinson and I talk about how Mursion can create virtual environments and combines AI with human interaction to make the impossible possible.