From Understanding to Action: How Resilient L&D Functions Navigate What Comes Next

Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. Today, we will dive into a very exciting topic, from understanding to action, how resilient learning functions navigate what comes next. This session is eligible for HRCI, SHRM, and ATD professional development credits. Now let's meet today's speakers. We have Melissa Lobel, the chief learning officer from Instructure, and David Wentworth, managing director of learning and talent from Brennan Hall Group. And a huge shout out to today's webinar sponsor, Instructure.

Instructure is a global education technology company helping organizations build workforce skills and deliver professional learning at scale. Its learning ecosystem helps organizations create skills based learning experiences, support career growth, and connect learning to measurable business outcomes. Instructure is trusted by millions of learning and organizations worldwide. Please visit them at w w w dot Instructure dot com to learn more. Now before we dive into today's content, let me tell you about Brennan Hall Group and some incredible opportunities that could accelerate your career.

Brennan Hall Group is a leading research and analyst firm dedicated to advancing human capital excellence. Our vision is a world where every HR organization drives business transformation through human capital excellence. For more than thirty years, Brendon Hall Group has provided CHROs, CLOs, and workforce leaders with intelligence, insights, advisory, and community they need to make better human capital decisions and improve business outcomes. Our independent research strategic advisory, excellence councils, professional development programs, and globally recognized HCM excellence awards help organizations strengthen capability, reduce exec execution risk, and accelerate workforce transformation. Trusted by more than ten thousand organizations worldwide, Brennan Hall Group serves corporate organizations and human capital management solution providers across learning and development, leadership development, talent management, talent acquisition, inclusion, human resources, AI, and the future of work.

As a reminder, there's still time to submit for the excellence in technology and excellence in education technology awards with a deadline of September fourth. Excellence in action isn't due until September twenty fifth. And as a thank you for joining us today, you'll receive an invitation to experience the Brennan Hall Group eminence program with complimentary seven day access. During your trial, you'll be able to explore our award winning research, hundreds of courses and certifications, thousands of practical resources, and the tools our clients use to support learning, talent, leadership, HR, inclusion, AI, and the future of work. Because there's so much available, you'll be able to choose when you'd like your seven days to begin.

Just watch for the follow-up email after today's webinar where you'll find all the details and a link to request your trial. We also have incredible learning and networking opportunities happening this year, our AI summit on October fifteenth, and our leadership summit is going to be moved to next April. And don't forget to save the date for next year's twenty twenty seven HCM Excellence Conference happening January twenty sixth through the twenty eighth. All details for everything I've mentioned will be available in a PDF you'll receive within twenty four hours after this webinar. Now with all that said, I'm gonna launch a poll.

What would you like to learn more about? Please mark all that apply. Maybe it's our eminence program, the twenty twenty seven HCM excellence conference, one of our brick events, or one of our awards programs. You everyone for responding. I'm gonna keep this up for just a few more seconds, then we'll move on. Alright.

Thank you. And, David, I'm gonna pass it over to you for our second poll. Sure. Thank you, Ivy. I appreciate, all that information.

Very helpful. And we also have this poll question. This is part of our research, helps us develop our progression models. Some of you may be familiar with those, but, we like to ask these questions on a continuous basis just to see how folks are progressing. And, obviously, this one is focused on l and d.

So if you could take a look through these and just see if you were to describe your organization based on one of these choices, which would you pick? And, again, this helps us map out our progression models, lets us know, you know, percentage wise where companies are in these, journeys, as we map out our different frameworks and, solutions for helping companies, you know, progress with their learning and development strategy. So I appreciate any input you could put in here. You know, think about your own organization and just give us as honest an answer as you can. And thank you very much for participating. And so with that, we'll let that go.

And so, as far as participation goes, not only is it the polls, but, it's also very important that, you interact with us today. So at your job, please share it in the chat. We're gonna keep an eye on that. We'll try to answer questions that are relevant in real time. We'll also have a little bit of time at the end to answer more general questions or more discussion based questions, but we definitely wanna hear from you.

Share questions, insights, talk to each other, respond to one another if you if you like. That's great too. So, please do any of that. Okay. And so with that, let's just get into the topic at hand.

So, you know, when you think about the topic about, you know, resiliency and and how, organizations can can be prepared for what comes next, I think a real focus you know, it's it's pretty broad topic. And the focus for us today, though, is really about, you know, companies and learning leaders are getting really good at recognizing the challenges ahead, you know, and knowing how big they are and how rapidly they're coming and understanding what kind of an impact they're gonna have on the organization. The challenge is how do we make decisions about those challenges, those changes, those disruptions? And it's becoming increasingly difficult because let's face it, l and d has traditionally been somewhat challenged with having good evidence behind the things they do as far as what works, what doesn't, what we should do, moving forward. And so when you're in the position of trying to manage change, manage disruption, it's hard to make strong powerful decisions if you don't have the evidence and the proof to back it up. And our research shows that that's very important for learning leaders.

Right? We ask what their the the top priorities for learning functions were. And, improving alignment between learning strategy and business goals. This was a study that was done last year in twenty twenty five looking ahead to this year. But improve alignment between learning strategy and business goals. So that's critical to what we're talking about.

Improving the measurement of learning and analytics. Again, very important to have that proof. And then, again, prove employees can apply the learned skills on the job. Not only do we present them with the opportunity to learn, or to reskill, to upskill, but can they actually apply that? Is that actually occurring? So it's very important for our organizations, obviously, these elements. However, there's a mismatch there.

Right? Where only about half of companies say that they are using performance results to measure whether or not their learning is effective. So again, it's we've put the learning out. We measure that people took it whether or not they liked it, but we haven't gone the next step. We haven't said whether or not these things are working. Also, very few companies, are using those performance results to validate the investment that's going on in learning, And even fewer, are using what they know is happening from a learning perspective, those performance results, to justify their budget.

Right? So again, how do I make these high stakes important decisions if I don't have the tools and the ammunition, to to make those decisions or at least to back them up? So with, you know, understanding the kind of climate that we're in, I wanted to hand things over to Melissa to sort of walk through, okay, what do we do then? How do we get from here to there? So, Melissa, talk a little bit about what we're gonna do today. Yeah. Thank you so much, David, and it's such a a pleasure to be here in this conversation with you. For a little bit of context, as David mentioned at the beginning, I am the chief learning officer for Instructure. And as an organization, while we are a learning organization and deliver tools and capabilities for continued learning and development practices, we're also doing some of the transition ourselves as we look internally to think about how can we better serve the changing nature of our workforce.

How do we manage what David just shared a minute ago that's really sort of this challenge in this space. So today, wanted to share a little bit about this changing mindset, and there's there's a little bit of a dichotomy to that that we'll talk about. And then we'll get into how can we think about using this changing mindset to our advantage. And and how do we leverage that when thinking about practices for tracking success or tracking outcomes against business deliverables? But then also how do we turn back in and reflect on ourselves as learning and development professionals in how we're influencing employee growth, employee satisfaction, and even employee connection to their work. And then finally, as we look at both of these perspectives, how can we turn that into a high level model that can work really in any organization hopefully, as you starting to think about making pretty key either transformations or even just subtle incremental changes to better improve both your practice and the impact of your practice on your organization.

So let's jump right in. So so similar to the Brandon Hall Group, we had Instructure have also done some some really interesting research. And so you're gonna see much of that research being shared here. And we wanted to both understand the landscape, and then also unpack the opportunity. And we'll share a little bit later about this research report that we did and how to get access to it.

But if we start with the workforce itself, what's fascinating is we talk a lot in this space about how workers do feel unprepared for their work. And and they want to be able to adapt or have resilience or be able to manage a world of pretty significant change in the workforce. I know within our or my own organization, we are about twenty five hundred people strong, and that that body of employees is really asking a lot of questions around what does AI mean for me? What does the the changing nature of just technology more broadly mean for me? What does the the external forces on perhaps my industry mean for me? And there's a lot of angst or anxiety around how prepared am I to develop my own career. At the same time, that workforce aspires for growth and for direction. And we're seeing this particularly as younger and younger generations enter into the workforce.

This desire for not just addressing the fact that we feel unprepared, but also that I actually wanna build direction. Wanna build growth. I wanna build pathways for myself. So this is a bit of a dichotomy. Right? It's the workforce is not only feeling unprepared, but it's also saying, hey, I wanna be prepared and more.

I actually want to be I wanna understand career growths and paths. I have ideas for myself and I I have aspirations. I need help getting direction. So it was really an interesting anchor point that we then looked and surveyed the group. And if we'll go to the next slide, please, David.

We then we then surveyed the group to understand sort of what what kind of effect or or how do we think about these two things together? How do we understand what employees need or what are the core skills and and and the environment in which they need to serve to thrive in order to both feel more prepared and also meet those aspirations and desires. What can we provide as employers? And really this all, you know, leans or or anchors to retention and growth. Those are that's that dichotomy. We both work to retain our employees and grow our employees. And in order to do that, we really see three important skills that employees need, and it's that understanding that's confidence and that trust.

And that translates into, empowerment, and you were perfect going to the next slide, which gives us an understanding or a platform for how we might think about how to build the work that we do as L and D professionals. So for aiming towards confidence, understanding, and empowerment, what we found is that there are really three key steps or key foundational practices that that we can start to employ in our organizations to help drive to that. And these are ones that we too are ingesting in our in our own organization as our as our learning leader at Instructure. I'm thinking a lot about these and how do we make these very evident, very explicit, and how do we turn these into practice pervasively throughout all of our departments in our organization. This takes time.

So before I before I get into each of these, I you know, this isn't an overnight shift. This isn't a let me just turn the switch on or let me just change some OKRs over here. Let me play on for twenty twenty seven separately and this will happen. But with the right framework and focus, we can be on a path and see early success in each of these areas. So I'll quickly walk through each of these.

The first is redefining or I'll even say defining success. I spent a long time in the learning space and I've worked with a lot of individuals, l and d individuals. And for for a very long time, completion rates has been kind of the only metric and sort of the beacon that we've used. The challenge with completion rates is it it backs into hours. Right? Or check boxes or in some cases and and I appreciate this.

It's modernized into, let me just quickly demonstrate I already know something so that I I can gate to the places where I need to learn something I don't know. But what I would challenge us all to think about, and and we are thinking about this very explicitly, especially at this time of year. It's a planning for us. We're on a calendar year, so it's a planning time for us. We're thinking about what does actually indicate success.

And in fact, we are as an organization right now building what our objectives and key results are for twenty seven at a very high level corporate level and for each of our departments or divisions. And in that, we are thinking not just about the metrics that will deliver for success, but we're thinking about the metrics that our employee enablement can tie to that shows that success. So we're actually backwards designing for all my L and D nerds. I'm listening to this recording or on the live session. We're backwards designing that so that we can think about how are we saying enablement has led to the success of very specific business outcomes that we're targeting.

So then that's gonna mean different things to different organizations. Right? So so I think reflecting on that or even as we're L and D professionals, if you are being if you're in the conversations, which I hope you are around developing your goals. But even if you are taking a look at what those goals are and thinking about how can you backwards design, what success looks like through your programs, and how does that then lead directly to business outcomes. That's one. The second path towards this is now taking that same collection of outcomes and what are the metrics that we can track towards success and aligning them to capabilities that you need in your workforce.

And this may be it it may be in individual departments. It may be universal. I'm seeing for a lot of organizations, universal AI capabilities regardless of what department is becoming important. I think strongly about capabilities like building employee judgment. How can you use AI and then be able to critically analyze the outputs of AI in whatever way you're using it so that you can feel comfortable and confident in its results.

That's one of those kind of capabilities that might be universal. And then there may be, again, specific capabilities within departments. But even just taking those outcomes and and then alongside those understanding what are the capabilities needed, and then how do those two interplay? Or how can we now build paths that build those capabilities which should in turn directly define success or directly linked to those success metrics? And I know this sounds perhaps like a, of course, we should be doing this. We've got jobs matrices. We've got, you know, we we know the skills because we, you know, we're very clear in how we write job descriptions or or how we grow or promote our employees.

But stepping back and asking yourselves, are those capabilities and do those capabilities contribute to our business outcomes becomes important. Doing that mapping exercise, this is actually a great place for AI. It can help you with this depending on the body of work that you have. What was fascinating to us in our research is that we found that like over half employers don't actually even have real bodies of work around the capabilities, let alone this crosswalking. So so this this is what the first couple steps that you can take to then create an environment or a structure.

And you can do this with control of these capabilities or even if you're the ingestor of them. You can still think about how do I map these as I build my LND programs. You you know, Melissa, it's you you you've really pointed out something, I think, that's important, and it kind of all wraps up. So that the idea that this isn't an overnight thing, like you said. Right? This is a a journey, and we know that it's big.

But at the same time, I really feel like learning leaders have to realize you you've got to change something. If you're finding yourself challenged by these things, we've got to change something. And it has to be, like it can't be overnight, but it also I think we've been hobbled by incremental change for too long too. Because we're trying to make small changes in these larger environments and processes that are not allowing us to do the things that I'm just describing. Like, we feel like we've hit a point where we sort of need to break something because we keep coming back to completions as a measurement of how well the learning is going.

Right? And a completion doesn't prove anything really by itself. I'm not saying it's not important data. Important data to have in the context of other things, like these things that Melissa's describing because just the fact that people finish, all what you're doing is you're just saying, oh, by definition, everything that we create and deliver is good and effective. So all we have to worry about is whether or not people finish it. And that's clearly not the case.

Right? And so as Wilson mentioned, these what are these outcomes? Really focus on those. And that takes some rethinking and maybe some breaking of older processes and things, to move forward. So I I like the way you've laid this out. And, you know, like you said, yeah. I I know people get overwhelmed by, oh, it's so much.

And, yes, you can't change everything overnight, but we have to start to change things for sure. Oh, I could not agree more. And it actually is what really appealed to me about your poll question and the research that you continue to do, David, is, like, it's it's about that. It's, like, how are we making change and where are we seeing that change over time? And and, again, start with one department if you need to or start small, but start mapping this out just as David described so that you can you can really get some momentum. We've got we've gotta break something.

I love that. I'm gonna use that. We've gotta break something. Right? And even if it's something small we're breaking, for me, I I I told my organization, I'm like, I don't wanna hear the word compliance again. And let me tell you, our chief information security officer said back to me, no.

We're gonna talk about compliance. But I'm like, okay. Well, I'm a challenge us. Let's break us to not use it in as many places as possible. Do something small.

Okay. So if we wanna think about that connection that we're talking about together around development to real outcomes. So we need to remove and and I I can even fall into this category. You know, I think all of us as l and d professionals, I hope, and I imagine we all are very passionate about just learning. Right? And don't get me started on neuroscience, and I can just get so excited.

But the problem with the theoretical, because that becomes very theoretical, is that it doesn't turn into not only just break something, but take action. Right? So how do we drive towards actual outcomes so that we can understand and and employees can understand why and how and where they fit into whatever training pads you're creating within your organization. So we need to, you know, we need to see we need to see that connection. We need to see that identification that I need personally to go develop. These are the ways I need develop.

Or as managers, managers, we need to see our employees develop in these ways. And that that becomes very explicit, like I said at the beginning. That's really important. And employees need to be engaged in that. They need be part of the conversation.

They need to feel as though they understand how their engagement in that training directly relates to their growth that directly relates to business outcomes. So it's like taking a third step in that mapping that I was describing a minute ago. This doesn't happen a lot of places, unfortunately. It is something that isn't happening in-depth in our organization. I am trying to make this transition as well.

This is probably the next step of breaking things, but you need to I I envision a world of having, you know, your conversations on a quarterly blaze basis. A manager has one with employees. And they're sitting down and they're talking about here, you know, here's my observations of your performance. Here are the the training activities or the development activities that you engaged in, and let's take a look at your performance related to those. Oh, look, you're in sales.

I see that you've generated some more pipeline in sales. Well, let's connect that to that experience that you had with that learning. And now let's say by generating more pipeline, just so you can see this, look at how our company numbers have transitioned. Your pipeline, while you may think this is something just very specific to you, has actually contributed to this and it will contribute to to further sales in out years. And that's just a sales example.

I can think of support examples that are in all of our organizations. I can think of engineering examples. But this creating this, like, moment of connection for employees to this will change their perception or their engagement when they're in that training or they're in that development. It helps them now understand why and and and why their engagement, it is important. And and they can start to create meaning for themselves, which will drive deeper back to that being a nerd in neuroscience, it drives actually deeper pathways.

Right? And and and it enables us to build more talent. Yeah. It it's just to oversimplify it. It's it's like we spend so much time trying to train people to push a big red button. That's what the training is.

Training is here's the where the button is, and here's how to push it. Okay. We never tell them what happens when the week when they push the button. We never tell them why. We never tell them what happens if they don't push the button.

We never show them, the results that have gone on after the button was pushed, right, to to come back and say, oh, oh, I get it now. I'm invested in pushing this button now. Instead, it's always like, well, it's really important that you push the button, and we never get give them the other things, that investment of here's what's happening because you've done x y z. It's so powerful. So it's like part of the whole measurement piece.

Right? You're not only measuring for yourself as a learning leader to find out, hey. What impact am I having? What's my ROI? But you can then turn that back to the learners, like, look what's happening because of all the good work you're doing and get them more invested in the next time, learning interventions come around. They're a little bit more likely to pay attention if they realize, oh, you know, these are the ramifications of me doing this or not doing it. Absolutely. I love the button example.

I worked with some manufacturing a manufacturing company and, you know, they would do training on how they repair machines and they would always do it prior to you ever put the person on the line to work with that machine. And so, you know, they listened like, okay, this is important. But but instead they shifted their training to in the moment when those teams are on the line, how do you invest there? Because suddenly that employee is like, oh, I see my line shut down. Right? I'm seeing the impact on the business. Oh, I see.

My body could be at risk. Right? I could I could have a safety issue because of this. Wow. This feels really present. And so it's it's it's, that transition and it was interesting that organization that just made that transition.

Technology aside, all they do is made that transition. They saw significant improvements in line performance and actually faster line performance because people are able to solve problems faster. Employees weren't they were engaged and and they their understanding of how to solve the problems when they were trained in the moment actually applied to how they use the machines altogether. It was really an interesting path to watch and a really impactful one. That's fine.

So that's that's that leads to really the next principle here is thinking about it as a partnership. Right? So we've already talked about being very transparent with employees. Let let us be the the red button. I just we're gonna do a slide, which is red buttons on it. I swear.

Because that example is such a good visual example of transparency as well. And I think in organizations, I've seen my organization at times be hesitant of sharing that throughput. Is it too complicated? Are they gonna understand it? Do they have the business acumen to understand? All of those questions surface. Right? Will support agent under understand if you try to explain to them how how they support the tickets that they did in a week actually produce two years from now more revenue for the organization. Is that too far? Is that too heavy? And and I would say no.

Because it again, not only does it promote that engagement, but that transparency, you never know where empowerment can be hiding. And transparency, even if I don't understand something, I've seen a ton of research just again, some some sort of you know, how we as humans act research that transparency alone, even if I don't understand what I'm seeing, makes me feel more comfortable, makes me feel feel more psychologically safe. So that becomes really important and then comes in wrapping in a feedback loop. So having paths not just for engaging in a learning in a one time moment, but how do you then have discussions? So that same example I was sharing about the line and the mechanics on the line or the machine workers on the line, well, not only did they have training in the moment. Right? But then they had they facilitated on the clock paid exchanges where line managers or supervisors would come together and talk about specifically those problems and the training in those.

And what did the you know, was it too late that training? Did it hit the button? Did it miss pieces of it? That part, that feedback loop, it became that, became a feedback loop about the training, and also it became a way to then reinforce the actual training itself because feedback does two things. Right? It it gives you an opportunity to learn about what you've developed as an L and D professional and how can I improve it? But it also it's a little bit like they always say you you always learn something best when you teach it. It's a little bit of that too. So you're now locking that back into that employee of what did they learn because now they're taking a step further to give feedback on what they learned and how they learned it. And then finally, this is a great place for some personalization.

So understanding and thinking about how do we in this whole process, give people opportunities, give employees opportunities to connect to and relate to that learning uniquely. So one of the things that we're working on developing internally is using AI, and I know lots of organizations have been working on on various parts of this. A coach that will help somebody use all of our our L and D resources, all of our micro courses, our certificates, and all of our knowledge bases. And then get coaching so they can interact with the agent and say, hey. I'm, you know, working on planning for this meeting with a customer.

And I've done this training, but I don't remember parts of it and I'm concerned. Where do I go get these other resources? I'm trying to build this presentation. That coach will come back and say, well, let me coach you. Not let me give you the answers or source them, but let me coach you through how you work through that, how you get at the content, what was that course that you remember? Go watch this video again. And and that becomes like a very personalized learning path because that's gonna look different than the next employee that's struggling with maybe the same question, but in a different context.

Or what's to have it dished to them differently because of their unique needs or what they bring into that situation. So the transparency is step one, that feedback step loop step two, and really encouraging a personalized experience step three. Yeah. And, you know, on their own, these are all very, very important, but I think you you started to touch on there. When you put this now through the lens of what we're seeing today with, you know, varying degrees of an AI environment within an organization, these become even more important.

Right? This idea around transparency, especially, we have shown in our our AI progression model and all the companies that we talk to, one of key founding elements of being successful with any sort of AI deployment rollout project, whatever you have in an organization currently, is the transparency part. People want to know what's happening. AI can't be this black box that just well, you put this in and this comes out, and we should all be happy about it. To a degree, everyone wants to be aware. You know, not everybody needs to get down into the nuts and bolts and the data science behind it, but they wanna understand what's happening and why.

So that's even, like, even a sharper point in that kind of environment. But even generally, though, transparency is never a a bad idea. Right? And and then the same thing with the feedback loop and and, like you mentioned, the individuality piece, AI really, helps us, establish that. You know, you think about the this transparency piece, not just from the AI perspective, but more generally. It's always interesting to me what we seem to hold back.

And it's not just learning. It could be any function within the business, but what we hold back from the employees from a transparency standpoint. And it it just kinda boggles my mind when, you know, we would used to talk about, collaborative learning and and and peer to peer learning and allowing people to sort of socially connect with one another and the big fear around that. And while we need guardrails, we have to put this in place and that in place. There's something about companies when they hire people, they're like, well, we only hire the best.

We have the best process, and we pick the best candidates. We hire the best, smartest people. But as soon as they hire them, nobody can be trusted to know anything. Nobody can be trusted to talk to one another, and we just lose that for some reason. It's like, well, you should probably trust the wisdom of the people that you have in your organization, to whatever degree, but providing that that transparency.

And then just to wrap up on the on the individually part from from my perspective is, you know, it's come a long way from a personalization standpoint. Obviously, AI makes it far easier to to do these kinds of things, but we're still at a place where for a lot of companies, personalization is, oh, I opened the thing and my name is there with my picture, and I know that it's me. And like, no. There's so much more, to it than that. Right? And it the in your your slide, it puts points out, like, it isn't personalization isn't even just that.

It's not it's it's how am I accessing, kinda how am I interacting with it, when am I interacting with it. Those are all individual personalized pieces that get left out when people are like, oh, I made sure that it had your job role, you know, there. There's so there's many, many dimensions to it. But your your comment about personalization made me laugh too because having spent, you know, a long career in this, for a long time it was make an avatar. Right? That's personalized too.

And I always chuckled about that. Was like, it's just you're still getting the same outputs. And so you're so right about everything that you just shared. And and we want as employees as humans, we wanna be treated uniquely and individually. And so I think this is a particular place like we were saying earlier in the conversation too.

Baby steps are good. Don't feel like you have to get and everything has to be personalized. I think that's where people get overwhelmed too. It's like, oh my gosh. How do I build this? It's so much content.

It's like, it's really comprehensive. It's baby steps. And and every little bit can move you on a path to that. Absolutely. Yep.

Yeah. Alright. Yeah. So so at a very high level, we're gonna open it up, I believe, to questions. But at a very high level, if we wanna think about these key takeaways and and and this really combines a lot of the incredible research that David and team do alongside their research that that we recently did is that, you know, we need to think custom while thinking scale.

And I know that probably sounds scary to a lot of leaders. I would have, you know, in my career, I there's been points where, oh my gosh, I don't know how I can scale something that's personal. But there are paths to that. We've talked about some of that. And and some of that that that thinking about custom while scale comes in that transparency and that feedback loop and the conversations that you wrap around the kinds of l and d opportunities you bring to your employees.

Also, you know, if we can just continue to emphasize the importance of understanding how skills, credentials, certifications connect to your contributions, your growth as a personal employee, and your contributions to the organization. One of my my favorite examples, I think we all go through in our organizations cybersecurity training, critical training, and really important. You know, thinking about how that training, like being very evident, not just in the training in and of itself, but in practices, finding moments as managers, as leaders to bring up. What would you do in this setting? Or how do you apply in this setting? Or we just read this article. We've done this.

I've done this within my own team of as you hear other actions or events happen to organizations. Okay. Let's actually talk through and think back to our cybersecurity training. What are we doing now and how would we apply some of that was, you know, how thinking those you know, using it and helping people deeply understand or grok how the training even in the most extreme compliance situations actually connect to them in their experiences is really, really important. Also, compliance is is is is a floor, but not a ceiling.

Right? So that my example that I just gave, yes, there are places we still need to do this, although I'm determined, like I said, to not use that phrase. But there are still places where that's really important, particularly in safety and and and and high risk situations. But let's think of that as the floor. So, okay, we need to make sure we have achieved compliance, but what can we do more with that? How can we actually use that compliance opportunity to deepen skills deepen skills behaviors or competencies that we want in our employees? So for example, how can cybersecurity train training also then bring building of judgment with AI as I talked about earlier? So think about it not as the floor, but as not as a ceiling, but as the floor. And employees want transparency.

They wanna influence. They wanna be part of this exchange. They may not know how or how to articulate that, but they do. Our research showed, and I know much of the Raman Hall research shows that employees want to be part of the solution, part of the exchange. And then finally, making sure you're thinking about your tools, your technologies, your internal, you know, organizational and operating models enable actionable or enable that connection to business outcomes through your L and D programs.

So it's at the high level, I think, a summary of all that we've been talking about. Did I miss anything, David? No. Well, I mean, I don't think you missed anything. I just there is a lot. Right? There's and there's so much in between the lines here too that comes in.

But I think it's important to focus pick things to focus on. And, you know, for me, looking through one of the things I wanted to dive on is is the compliance piece. Again, it's you're spot on is that it doesn't have to just exist on its own as this is the thing that we do and we have to do it and it's done this way. It does it's a it's a great actual floor to platform into building capabilities because you most companies put a lot of time and energy and effort into compliance because it's a big part of what they do. It touches just about every employee in the organization.

It touches just about every organization. They have some degree of this they have to do. So it's ubiquitous. Right? And so we should make the most of it. And the truth is, it's more of that why am I doing this? And the compliance training isn't about, oh, you have to do this or you get in trouble.

That that's not enough. It's there's a business reason behind why it exists. Whether that business reason comes from the organization itself, some third party regulatory agency, whatever it happens to be. But there is a business reason this exists. So it's like, hey, here's why this is so important.

And then show the results of that. Because we've completed this training, we've had, a dramatic decrease in phishing incidents from our email. Right? Whatever it is. And that means this. But being able to provide that, you know, it helps so the idea around something like that, like that cybersecurity phishing training, it helps people they're thinking critically about what they're reading.

Right? It isn't just, oh, I took the training and clicked it. It's you're starting to think about things differently. So, you know, using the tools already at your disposal to just sort of elevate a little bit because those things are connected, to things. So I think that's an important one. And, between compliance training and sales training, those are two things that most organizations have a pretty good handle on.

They're pretty ubiquitous, and they're really, really easy to measure at a basic level. So then you can expand out from there. So those are great areas to start if you wanna try to get a little more strategic and expand your approach on, you know, how you learning can prove that what they're doing, is working and that they should move forward in those directions. Hold on. So I love all of that.

If I can just add a really great example to the phishing example, you just because you as you're saying that it made me think of this. So within our organization, we do compliance training and phishing is is part of that compliance training for cybersecurity. So what we did in order to personalize it now the training is the same for everyone. But in order to personalize it, I got an email that was personalized to me. So we do an internal program where our IT team will send us deliberate tests of spam or phishing attempts or things like that.

And then we have to put it into like, we just have to market as a phishing attempt or whatever it might be. So I got an email going into my training saying, Melissa, it's time for your compliance training. Did you know that in the last six months, you categorized, you know, ninety percent of the phishing emails we sent you correctly, But ten percent you just dropped in spam and you didn't notify us about that. And what or or nine percent, I figure it was, there was one that was a phishing attempt that I actually read. I did not open any attachments or anything like that.

I'm like, I did not know that. And that was a really interesting motivator for me to go into the cybersecurity training and to think about that. And then, I got six months later, like, hey, mid year review. Here's how you're doing on our internal program to see specifically around fishing for us to see how you're doing. And I'm like, oh, wow.

It wasn't a leader board or gamification, but I could see, hey, I actually improved. And that was a it was a really it changed my behavior. It was a small tiny personalized thing that was very easy for our IT team to do because they're already tracking, right, these stats behind the scenes. And, you know, it it took I think they use AI to help just create auto generate for all of us the the first part of the email, but that was actually really meaningful for me. So, like, even little things like that.

It just your your fishing example made me think of, oh, yeah. We did this, and this actually really worked. Yeah. You know, and we have a couple questions that we're gonna get to, and I appreciate the questions coming in. But, you know, I what's interesting is that and not to go down a rabbit hole on that, but you you also make me think of that.

When you said, oh, it wasn't a leaderboard or or a game like that. And I I said, oh, yeah. Because so often companies wanna default to that. They wanna use, oh, a leaderboard, get points, get people really motivated. But what are you incentivizing in that specific example? You know, it's like, oh, now you're gonna have somebody who's hyper fixated on Whether or not they're gonna catch a phishing thing in their email.

And they might start miscategorizing things that aren't. And they're not actually paying attention to what they're supposed to so the way you described it makes way more sense. You get a personal, hey. Here's where you are. We can do better.

Thanks for all your effort, that kind of thing. It doesn't have to be this leaderboard that sort of incentivizes the wrong things. And I always say too, when you have the depending on the group you're dealing with, once people get out of, like, the top ten of a leaderboard, they kinda check out anyway. They're like, well, I'm never gonna be up there. So but I that's a a great example to me of why how the right kind of personalization and incentivization works where something slightly different might have an adverse outcome.

Absolutely. Yeah. So the one of the questions that came in, and it's a pretty big broad one. So let's see if we can tackle it though, if you don't mind. And was asking for skilled trades professionals like electricians, that kind of thing.

So very, you know, clear cut skill levels, capabilities, training, and so forth. What's the best way to identify and prove the skills employers need, especially when transitioning to a new country or industry? And so if you can, if you wanna clarify in the chat, there's a question about, like, is this for the the the people themselves? Right? How do they know what it is that they need? And that's my understanding of the question. I honestly think that it's just being really plugged into the industry. If you're an electrician, being very plugged into the the industry. There's plenty of groups, that are created around electricians, all all kinds of standards.

Especially if you're moving to a new country, There are different industries for that country, different regulations, and so forth. So just being up on that for those kinds of trades, I think it's very important. Getting very familiar with the different trade groups in the different countries. Switching industry is a whole other ball of wax. Right? But it's doing the same thing because it's trying to find those industry trade groups and understanding what their needs are and what and there's usually a thing about what skills are needed to be a certain level of electrician or other elements.

So I I think it's just about doing broader research. And, you know, beyond regulatory and industry standards, companies are gonna have their own definition of what the skills they need. So when you say what skills employers need, beyond the things that are pretty standardized, then you start to get very particular. And you have to be you know, you have to check-in with those organizations and find out sort of what they're looking for from their job postings, their job descriptions, those kinds of things. I don't know if you have any anything you wanted to add to that, Melissa.

It's just a it's a pretty specific, but yet broad question. Yeah. No. And I totally agree with everything you shared. I I think about this also in context of it's an interesting job market around the world right now.

And, like, what are what are the practices people are doing in order to understand those skills that's needed? And then how do I go if I if I can reflect on myself and I have those gaps, where do I go get them? Whether you're in like, whether you do that within your organization or your team or your, you know, your own in your own business or whether you do that for an organization itself. And excuse me. Two two tricks that people have shared with me recently. One, you know, even with a a a free chatbot, whether whatever one you prefer. Right? The Gemini, ChatGPT, Quad, whatever you prefer.

Having it scan Reddit has been one that I've heard. So particularly if you're coming into the US, but but having it scanned Reddit, having it scanned other industry specific exchange boards. Again, if you're embedded in those for the discussions around this. You people have told me I've started to uncover, like, where, you know, what are the latest things? People are talking to each other about I'm trying to do this work, I'm trying to do that work, but they keep asking me for these skills or that skills. Does anybody know where to find these? We've also seen it around, like, education or or organizations.

So I know for electricians, there are different organizations that provide apprenticeship models and skill training. What are they also talking about? Like, doing a search and a very simple even with a free AI tool of some of those locations that David was talking about to get at what are the things that are being talked to the most can be a good way to to do that. Also joining in LinkedIn industry specific groups and watching what do people post on. It may seem subtle, but like what's the latest conversation where people are writing about or talking about or exchanging or posting articles? That can also give you insight into what kinds of skills are needed. For example, you know, I'm in the education in the ed tech industry.

You know, I I have been posting lately a fair amount in LinkedIn around how do we think differently about using AI. And again, I mentioned this earlier building judgment. That's been a real big thing for me. Well, okay. So that's probably an indicator that something that I'm seeing as a gap in my industry is judgment.

Okay. How do I go then start to build that skill? So so get creative too around your searches in those communities that David was describing. How are you analyzing some of that that information? And then the last thing I'll say is it doesn't hurt to ask if you're in an interview situation. And as an employer, if you're all on this and and all of our l and d professionals listening to this as you're coaching your teams internally, It's not a bad question to say, what do you think the top three skills are for this role? That doesn't show that the employee doesn't know. They're trying to rationalize against what they believe they are to what you need.

And then as that person come back with, okay. I under I have to understand that. Here's how I was thinking about it. But that's also a way to get at this in in this space of trying to figure out how do I grow for myself and create, you know, identity and autonomy for myself. Nice.

Thank you for sharing that. So, going back to, you know, earlier, we were both kind of coming down **** **, completion rates in our own way. But the the truth of the matter is it that it's it's pretty easy to collect that data. It sort of happens automatically. Right? And and it's instant.

It's the minute someone is done or not done. We know. So when we start to start and but but if we sit here and say, well, that's not enough. Right? So then how do organizations how should learning leaders be thinking about proving their ROI when they take this sort of capability based approach to learning? When the results of that kind of learning, the things that you're after, obviously, take a lot longer to to show up. Yeah.

Yeah. This is where the whole debate around lagging and leading indicators and timeliness of indicators comes into play. Because I can think of indicators, you know, that are gonna take time to show up. I I actually think maybe this is a bad answer to the question, but I think we have to create a culture in which we do give time for development. And we do understand that it's not just about, you know, who completed it, but it's about what in that quarter of time, like, right.

And I and when I say time, three months can often be enough time to start to see changes in behavior. What it does ask of the organization though, if we're gonna, you know, give ourselves more time to build on top of completion rates. I love the emphasis on that data too around, like, there's still a role for them. Absolutely. But how do we do more on top of them? I think this is where organizations need to find paths to make the conversations that managers are having with their employees more evident because there's there's like golden nuggets in there of performance improvements.

I think about, I recently one of my employees is is working on a content project. And and and he will fully admit this and we've talked about this. This is part of our plans together is he's not always the best with deadlines when they're vague. So but we we deliberately set this content project with vague deadlines, and he blew it out of the water. I was so impressed with his work.

In that though, I did ask him, how did you hold on to the debt? In fact, you delivered early. What was it about this project? And he's like, well, I applied and he started walking me through this. That is a metric. Right? That is a nugget that the because he went off and did some project management and personal time management training. That is a nugget that I have, but that's not normally capturable in something as simple as compliance.

Right? So how do we start to make that more evident? Again, I know I've been saying AI a lot, but that could be something that without exposing any employees or or any personal information or or or creating any sort of concern about safety could, you know, could AI track highlighted notes or something like that that then can then go pull these things out of conversations and show, okay. In the last three months, these ten employees took this training and they've had manager conversations where there have been pieces from that training that had that had made their way into the manager conversations. That's great. Right? Oh, and then even better for me, he did delivered early. Right? So it's even better.

I've got a metric there. But we're not collecting them. It's it's been hard for so long. So finding ways I don't have the best answers for how to do that. I'm I'm playing around with AI.

I know our organization is finding ways to get at that. It's there. It's how do we extract it out and then start to show it, and it's there even in short periods of time. Does that make sense to you, David? It it does. It's like, we're we're entering a phase with the the, you know, how whatever your position is on AI, personally, whatever it happens to be.

But I think it's presenting us with opportunities to do the things that we've been trying to do for a really long time. You look at the period where xAPI was all the discussion. Right? And you'd be, oh, I can show more than that somebody finished something. I can show that they opened this or they watched that. And you see the word and that was groundbreaking.

Right? But now the idea is, oh, applied properly and with the right tools, I can actually see exactly what somebody did to get from point a to point b. And I can analyze that, and I can figure that out, and I can see what the patterns are when other people do that. And so there's just a a lot of opportunity. But, again, it then then it becomes almost overwhelming because there's so much opportunity. So it it's really narrowing it down, figuring out.

And I and I'll just wanna throw in that that that Becky threw in in chat, just reiterating what you were saying while you're talking about it. It's business results, not learning data. Thanks, Vicky. And it's like that reminds me of what we say all the time at Brannen Hall Group. My colleague Michael Michelle and I have been saying this for probably fifteen years is, the outcome of learning is not learning.

It it can't be. It's it's so much it has to be so much more than that because or otherwise, you're selling the whole thing short. Right? It has to be something else. It has to be some sort of behavior change, some sort of performance outcome, some sort of business outcome. So, cool to keep that in mind.

Another question I wanted to get back to because we we did talk about a little bit together, but I wanna dig a little deeper. He's coming back to the personalization piece because, you know, bring it up a lot. We're talking about personalization long before AI came around. But then the the perennial question now is even as we get better at personalizing, these larger organizations are like, okay. But I've got, like, ten thousand people.

How do I, you know, how do I personalize that? So how do you balance the fact that you've got these very, very, very large employee audiences, that all still need some kind of, you know, individualizations and personalization and learning. This is where, I think two things come into play. First of all, you really need to know your employee base. This one always surprises me. It's happened to us in my own organization.

You know, do we know the basics of where do our employees live? What languages do they speak? What how you know, what are their general ages? What what's their education? I'm just basics. Right? What's their interests? Like, we do as organizations oftentimes, e n p s or employee surveys, and we get at sentiment and things like that. But let's back into, do we know who our employees are first? Because that in and of itself can lead to some personalization. If you are in a smaller organization and the majority of your employees are, you know, sixteen to thirty five, that's gonna look different and that then and your l and d is going to look different than if you're in an organization where the majority of your employees are from thirty five to sixty. Right? It's just little things that we know about humans and how they learn.

And I would encourage you to look at some of the generational, just high level research. You know, there's a lot of debate around learning preferences and some of that stuff, but just things we know about humans or ask your employees in some of those surveys. Drop an extra question that just gives you more insight into who they are. So I always I always talk about this like movies. You wanna audience align, and you need to know who your audience is.

And that's well, it sounds like a a duh moment. Organizations often don't. But then the bigger and that becomes even harder in a ten thousand person organization. But my bigger answer to that question, and and it's it's I think we're all figuring this out together, so I don't think any of us have the answers yet. But it is about using the technologies available.

There are a lot of things that we've learned from consumer industries around how to tailor and not tailor experiences to individual people and the kinds of technologies behind that. So I do encourage l and d investment in technology, whatever it whatever you might choose. This is where AI can play into it. This is where how are, you know, how are you thinking about storing and accessing knowledge, and how are you giving people access into that in their in the moments? How are you pulling through the threads that we talked about earlier with managers? Manager, I cannot emphasize manager and leader development enough in being responsible for some of that personalization. And and how are they pulling that through? How are you giving them checklists and and and tools in front of them so that they can do some of that personalization? That becomes really important.

And then finally, I think giving employees forums for conversation. For we've gone through waves in my organization around when we do quarterly town meetings, do we have open questions or not? And, you know, we're in a big big place that I know with ten thousand people, this can be risky in their ways to do it, but just have have forums. We do follow-up q and a's where people can just come with their questions. That feels personalized. Right? Thinking about maybe not the learning itself may not feel personalized, but the moments that you wrap around it, I think is what I'm trying to say, can be personalized.

Yeah. And I think in a large organization, I mean, context and relevancy will take you a very, very long way into personalization without having to get down to the individual level of each person. Right? There are times and places where that makes a lot of sense to get right down to the the individual person. But you provide the context around something, you've suddenly cleared up a whole lot of the challenges that were maybe that seemed like it was a personalization issue or same thing with relevancy. So you start there.

Right? And then you then you you don't have to apply personalization to every last detail. Soon, you're focusing on the things that really are important to be personalized. So we have a couple minutes left, the thing one of the things that you mentioned in the end there was, you know, the the hearing from employees and and having the forum. So it comes back to something you and Brent mentioned earlier about feedback loop, employees. And and how do you build a feedback loop that actually gets used, not just, you know, a survey that people ignore? And the one piece that I'll say is is response to that question, to me is whatever it is, whatever that looks like, and I'm I'm I'm looking to help describe, you know, that.

But whatever it ends up being, do something with it. Like Yeah. So often companies will create some sort of employee feedback loop and be like, man, that's fine, and just leave it in the background running. No one looks at it. No one reads it.

No one does anything. So if you're actually looking at the feedback, incorporating it, showing people how their feedback is impacting things around the organization, that's gonna go a really long way to garnering more and better feedback. But I'll turn it to you Could agree more. Last word on that. Oh, could not agree more.

And the only thing I'll add to that because I would've yes, yes, and yes on that, is model what good feedback looks like. It's it's it's interesting how that is not a natural skill. We if you think about it, we're never taught that. Right? As we Right. You're never taught what good feedback looks like in your elementary school or junior high or high school experiences.

And you're often never taught it, although you start to get opinions on it even if you do, you know, post secondary education. So people need to know what good feedback looks like. We you know? And and even what bad feedback looks like. And not bad, like, we don't wanna hear it, but just this isn't constructive. This isn't, you know, that kind of thing.

So we had a spoof video at one point running internally where people were giving us feedback on what food was in our kitchens, and it was really fun. It was actually a really great way to demonstrate what good feedback was, what what bad feedback was. You know, there would be somebody that would post a picture of an empty mayonnaise jar and be like, what's this? Well, that's not good feedback. Right? Right. But then there would be the example of, hey.

There doesn't seem to be enough sandwich spreads on by the time it hit Friday. That's feedback that's actionable. So you can even have fun with it with it with it, but model it is would be my one addition to what you shared, David. Awesome. Well, thank you.

And I thank everybody for sharing, your afternoon with us or whatever part of the day it happens to be for you. We appreciate your time. And, Melissa, thank you so much for for sharing your thoughts and insights. And, of course, Instructure, thank you for, for the time as well. So thanks everybody, and we hope to see you again on another webinar. Thanks. Thank you so much.