RULE #6
6
EMBRACE ON-DEMAND LEARNING
If you don’t develop new skills, you won’t be fired but you won’t have much of a career in the future.
Using Learning to Prepare Employees for the Future
AT&T, nostalgically known as “Ma Bell,” goes back under a succession of names to when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. Today Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive, is reinventing the company to compete in the global marketplace. For the company to survive, Stephenson believes he needs to embed a culture of continual learning. He has gone on record saying that AT&T employees should be spending 5 to 10 hours a week learning online, or they “will obsolete themselves with technology.”2
What we are seeing is the ultimate connection between learning and earning where the development of new technical skills such as machine learning and app development will lead to higher-paying jobs at AT&T.
Learning at the Speed of Business: Employees Take Charge of Their Own Learning
The future of learning requires reimagining how we help learners, learn at the speed of business (Figure 6.1). A focus on continual learning is the answer not only for companies like AT&T that are upskilling their workers but also for workers themselves who want to take a more proactive approach to career development. What we are seeing is a movement for workers to become serial learners as one way to avert technological unemployment, defined as the loss of jobs caused by technology disruptions. Helping learners learn at the speed of business requires revisiting every aspect of the learner experience while scaling and measuring differently.
Figure 6.1 Learning at the speed of business
Serial learners possess some of the same qualities as serial entrepreneurs. They are intellectually curious, not satisfied with business as usual, always reaching beyond their current role to learn something new, make connections out of seemingly unrelated topics, and seek out different networks and experiences. The concept of serial learning was brought to life by Chess Grandmaster and marital artist Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferris podcast. Waitzkin identifies how to become a serial learner, namely to allow space in your day for the development of creative ideas, plan out your learning, think carefully about what you need to learn and when you can do this, and do small experiments with big potential payoffs that give you an opportunity to learn and test out your ideas.3
What does this serial learning mean for employees, organizations, and their learning leaders? Employees must “own their learning” and see the connection between learning and career advancement. Companies must embrace on-demand learning by offering employees a marketplace of learning opportunities including a mix of all types of learning, integrating TED Talks, podcasts, MOOCs, and other forms of informal learning plus the company’s own customized development programs. As the pace and rate of change accelerate, companies will no longer be solely responsible for providing all the learning for their employees. Instead, employees will shift to accessing on-demand learning to expand their current skills and prepare for the next set of skills needed in the marketplace. We are finding that what Louis Ross, former vice chairman of the Ford Motor Company, said more than 20 years ago rings truer today than ever: “In your career, knowledge is like milk,” says Ross. “It has a shelf life stamped right on the carton. . . . If you’re not replacing everything you know by then, your career is going to turn sour fast.”4
When futurist Buckminster Fuller created the “knowledge doubling curve,” he noticed that until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today various types of knowledge have exponential rates of growth—for example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years. On average, human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. But when we think about intelligent products like those built around the Internet of things, IBM is forecasting that this type of knowledge is doubling every 12 hours!5
Knowledge doubling every 12 hours. Think about it. Are companies and their learning leaders ready for this brave new world? Despite the urgency of the need, companies are facing a digital transformation of the learning function. Research from Deloitte shows less than 25 percent of companies feel comfortable with today’s digital learning environment.6
Shift Mindset to On-Demand Learning
The education marketplace is going through a seismic shift. The size of the education market in the United States, as estimated by GSV (Global Silicon Valley), is $1.6 trillion. This is projected to grow to $2.0 trillion in 2020. When the cumulative five-year growth of the education market between 2015 and 2020 is examined by sector, we see that:
• The lifelong learning sector is projected to grow 30 percent (composed of companies enabling MOOCs and other differentiated learning experiences such as CAEL, Degreed, Grovo, Edcast, Lynda, General Assembly, Iron Yard, NovoEd, and Pathgather.
• Postsecondary education is projected to grow 15 percent.
• Corporate learning firms are projected to grow 6 percent.
It is no surprise that greater growth is expected for the lifelong learning sector, given the rate and pace of change that companies and their workers are experiencing today.
As we move to 2020, we foresee employees selecting employers based upon the breadth, depth, and access to lifelong learning and career development. The transformation of learning from designing formal training to creating on-demand learning experiences requires leaders of corporate learning to shift their mindset, budget, and resources from developing content to identifying learning from a number of open sources. This move from training to on-demand learning is depicted in Figure 6.2.
Figure 6.2 From training to on-demand learning
A company’s commitment to provide learning of all types is increasingly important to attracting and keeping top talent. The most telling barometer of this importance can be seen in the results of Universum’s global survey of 49,000 generation Zers (born between 1994 and 2009) from 47 countries. This survey found 15 percent of generation Zers would consider joining the workforce instead of getting a formal education at a college or university. What’s more, 60 percent say they welcome getting information on the type of learning that companies offer to those with no university degree!7
Rethink the Vision for Learning
Best-of-breed learning leaders should consider themselves intrapreneurs who run the business of learning inside their organization. They must have an understanding of where the company’s business is going and what mix of skills and capabilities employees need to reach the strategic goals of the organization. For HR and learning leaders, this starts with creating a compelling vision of why and how a company is providing learning to its workers.
A global research survey conducted by PwC entitled “Millennials at Work, Reshaping the Workplace,” asked 4,364 millennials from 75 countries about what three benefits they would most value from an employer. Not surprisingly, a company’s investment in training and development was ranked number one, with flexible working hours and cash bonuses ranked numbers two and three, respectively.8
Some companies, like adidas Group, with more than 51,000 global employees with an average age under 30 years, recognize that learning must be engaging, relevant, and fun. The adidas Group vision statement for learning is simple: “You Learn, We Grow.” This shows the the power of a vision statement that is inspiring, memorable, and concise. As Christian Kuhna, director of HR, Strategy, and Think Tank for Innovation at adidas, says, “We are intent on going beyond designing distinct learning programs to creating consistent and compelling learning experiences.” The vision of “You Learn, We Grow,” requires adidas leaders to become learners and teachers and embed learning, teaching, and sharing into all their interactions with team members. The learning team at adidas recognizes that millennials, who have been raised on YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram, require a heavy dose of video, edgy headlines, and infographics to get their attention. The adidas Group challenge to employees is quite provocative with its headline, “If You Think You’re So Smart, Why Don’t You Share Your Knowledge?” This headline reads less like a corporate learning brochure and more like a campaign created by Vice Media, the hip online go-to news site.
The lesson for learning leaders is this: rethink why the investment in learning is so important and develop a concise and memorable vision that resonates with your company culture. Perhaps the best word to describe all this is exhilarating, or that mix of terror and excitement that motivates us to action!
Create Cross-Functional Alliances and Engage Marketing as a Partner
For learning leaders, bringing a new vision to reality requires developing deep partnerships across the organization. Learning is now very much a team sport. No longer can corporate learning operate as a silo, independently designing and developing learning programs. Instead, learning leaders must realize every employee is a potential customer and every customer is a potential employee. This blurs the lines among learning, communications, employee engagement, and marketing. Lincoln Financial Group has taken the bold step of combining HR, learning and development, and marketing into one function reporting to the chief human resource officer. Lincoln Financial Group’s EVP and CHRO Lisa Buckingham sees not only a blurring of the lines between HR and marketing but a mandate to combine both functions. This integrated function oversees Lincoln’s brand, enterprise communications, and corporate social responsibility activities, as well as the entire suite of HR functions including compensation, benefits, talent development, diversity and inclusion, HRIS, and talent acquisition. A view of the combined functions at Lincoln Financial Group can be seen in Figure 6.3.
Figure 6.3 Combined HR and marketing functions
The rationale for this is shared by Buckingham, who says, “I believe we need to create one consistent employer brand value proposition, internally and externally.” One of the key objectives for both CHRO Buckingham and the company’s former chief marketing officer, Jamie DePeau,9 is the ability to be both a destination employer and a top consumer brand. HR joined forces with marketing to create the Lincoln Financial Group campaign known as “Chief Life Officer,” which encourages consumers to take charge of their own lives and grow and develop on the job.
Are companies ready to merge HR and marketing functions? Time will tell. More pilots are needed where marketing and HR work together on talent-acquisition campaigns and employee segmentation research studies to see how these two functions can add value to each other.
Expand Learning Opportunities
For decades, the leaders of corporate learning have been the gatekeepers of what is included in a company’s corporate university. The process of identifying the skills and capabilities needed for success on the job has resulted in a fixed set of learning offerings pushed to employees. This is changing as learning leaders shift their focus to create more of a consumer experience in how, when, and where workers access learning. Why? Because employees expect an experience that parallels how they order a movie on Netflix or a book on Amazon. In both cases, they can easily select what they want, order it or add it to their wish list, and then, if ordered, choose whether to “binge” on the movie or book in one sitting. When they are finished, the entire experience can be rated and shared with others. Workers are looking for a similar experience in accessing learning, one that mirrors the consumer experiences they have in the rest of their lives. General Electric is doing just this with the development and launch of BrilliantYOU, a marketplace for learning and development.
BrilliantYOU operates much like the Apple Store for Learning. As described by Mani Gopalakrishnan, senior leader, Digital Learning & Technology at GE, “Our learning market network, dubbed BrilliantYOU, is a curated list of learning experiences organized by topic. GE employees access this at any point of time, and can download learning that best meets their personal and professional goals. Now that we have a product catalog and have employees around the world accessing, rating, and leaving a data footprint, we are exploring ways to bring in personal recommendations. Our role in L&D is now about connecting employees to the world’s best learning opportunities.”
The business model at the heart of BrilliantYOU allows GE employees to pay for learning each time they access it via a code funded by their department manager. Mani goes on to say, “In this new world of learning, employees are the ones selecting the learning that meets their needs rather than having GE pre-pay for an entire library of content. I think of this as employees voting with their dollars for the learning that best fits their needs.” Figure 6.4 shows how BrilliantYOU is organized for ease of access by GE employees.
Figure 6.4 BrilliantYOU—a learning market network
Mani and his team have come up with a way to add course ratings and comments much like buying a product on Amazon. Ratings are based on a five-point scale: courses with ratings of 4 and 5 are voted up, and those with a 1 or 2 are removed from the course offerings. So the marketplace determines the quality and value of learning. Lastly, if GE employees can’t find what they are looking for on BrilliantYOU, there is simple form to request what they are looking for by noting, for example, “I’m looking to learn data analytics and I am a novice, and I want to learn in an on-demand online course.”
While this ability to easily access learning in multiple formats “on the go” is an obvious need as proliferation of mobile devices grows exponentially, it is not the norm. According to the Institute of Corporate Productivity, only one-third of employers based in the United States have learning programs accessible on a mobile device, and less than 20 percent of learning management system shoppers make mobile a “must-have” requirement.10
Build Learning Partnerships
Incorporate MOOC Design Principles to Scale Corporate Learning
Thomas Friedman, op-ed columnist for the New York Times, wrote the forward-looking column “Come the Revolution,” where he summed up the disruption of MOOCs on higher education this way: “Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” This is the case with the MOOC movement inside corporations. According to data from Class Central, the total number of students who enrolled in at least one MOOC has reached 35 million, up from 18 million since inception in 2012. More than $400 million has been invested in Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, and Udemy, and MOOC providers have emerged as learning marketplaces for on-demand learning.11
In 2012, the first MOOCs were on IT topics such as artificial intelligence, computer science, and programming. Today, MOOCs cover a wide range of business and management topics, with a MOOC called “Learning How to Learn” ranking as one of the most popular MOOCs offered with over 1 million students enrolled to date (see Figure 6.5).
Figure 6.5 The 10 most popular MOOCs
The revolution in MOOCs has moved from higher education to corporate learning as a way to incorporate credentials, provide access in multiple languages, and, importantly, redesign e-learning using an engaging cohort model.
Corporate learning officers are now partnering with MOOC providers to offer these credentials as one way to upskill the workforce. For example, let’s assume you work in marketing and graduated from a university 10 years ago. That was before you needed to know about how to design a social media amplification campaign. So what better way to keep a company’s marketing employees current than by including relevant MOOCs that also offer a credential for completion to employees.
A second reason MOOCs are growing inside companies is that many MOOCs have been translated into multiple languages and are offered in places where companies are growing their operations. For example, the popular Learning How to Learn MOOC is offered in English, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Dutch, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Companies are starting to pay attention to potential employees across regions who complete a MOOC and receive an accredited non degree credential. The engagement required to complete all the assignments, participate in threaded discussion groups, and become a peer reviewer of other students’ assignments says volumes about a learner’s dedication to the topic, and recruiters are taking note.
Finally, perhaps the biggest reason the MOOC movement has entered corporate learning departments is the power of the MOOC design to engage, inspire, and personalize the learning experience. This includes flipping the classroom, where learners engage in learning prior to the actual formal class experience, watch short engaging videos (usually no more than two to three minutes), participate in threaded online discussion groups, and have the opportunity to be both a learner, a peer reviewer, and a learning coach, all while the learning leader has access to a learning dashboard monitoring how each learner is proceeding through the course. Several companies have integrated the MOOC model into their corporate learning offerings, ranging from Microsoft to McKinsey, Tenaris, and Anthem.
Microsoft is on a mission to transform learning so the experience of learning is more like a consumer experience than a corporate training mandate. According to Chris Pirie, general manager, Field Readiness and Learning, “The relentless and accelerating pace of change now makes it impossible for our employees to learn effectively using traditional approaches. Long design cycles, weeks of classroom training and detailed roadmaps are being replaced with learning on demand. The result has been the creation of a strategy to scale learning across multiple cultures and time zones.” Pirie continues, “Our journey began when Ludo Fourrage, Head of Virtual Learning at Microsoft, signed up for the Yale MOOC ‘Financial Markets’ on Coursera and was impressed enough with the quality of the online pedagogy that he proposed taking this inside at Microsoft.”
The financial costs of producing a corporate MOOC for Microsoft were low enough to encourage Ludo to create a MOOC pilot for Microsoft’s top salespeople. The MOOC Business Strategy and Financial Acumen course was created in partnership with INSEAD Business School targeting Microsoft’s top sellers, nominated by their managers. Ludo shares his vision for the first MOOC created at Microsoft: “This one MOOC drew over 1,000 Microsoft sales people over a six-week period and incorporated the key aspects of the Coursera MOOC I had taken: the feeling of being a fly on the wall with unprecedented access to best-of-class learning, the reward of a certificate from a university paired with the fear of failure, the application of the learning delivered via a final assignment and an innovative peer-review mechanism. We took this formula and made it even better with small cohorts of learners working in teams, gamification of learning with the top 10 percent receiving a ‘distinction’ badge, threaded discussion groups, and finally a leaderboard recapping weekly engagement. The results were impressive: 85 percent completion rates and a certificate from INSEAD, which participants who finished the program could add to their LinkedIn profile. But it was the emotional connection of the learners that was impressive and something we frankly did not see in current classroom programs.” An important goal for Pirie and Fourrage was to ensure the MOOC had a tangible impact on the jobs of the Microsoft salesforce. They accomplished this by creating a capstone project where the learners created an account plan using the course concepts and then had their account plan reviewed by peers and the instructional staff.
Since the start of this journey, Microsoft created four MOOCs in partnership with INSEAD, Wharton Business School, and London Business School, as well as with internal stakeholders for product training, marketing, user design, and manager training. Fourrage believes not only that Microsoft has reimagined learning to be scalable, engaging, and on demand but that the MOOCs have created a global dialogue on each topic where Microsoft employees network and share their best practices in driving sales in their accounts.
McKinsey, with more than 1,500 senior partners, has also gone on a similar journey with its partners. According to Liz Gryger, director of Functional and Diverse Profiles Learning at McKinsey, “Typically our partners learn about trends through conversations with peers. We wanted to find a way to scale that.”12
The solution: Partner University, a set of carefully crafted learning experiences including SPOCs (small private online courses) and followed by content developed by two live experiences—one at Harvard and the other at Oxford University—where McKinsey partners convene in person to discuss and debate what they are learning and how this is being used in client engagements. Partner University started by identifying 10 critical questions a partner’s client might ask, such as “How can I grow revenues while still serving customer needs?” Then Partner University set out to build content to answer those questions. “At the heart of Partner University is the active engagement of our partners who regularly reflect on what they are learning,” says Ashley Williams, COO and deputy CLO (chief learning officer) of McKinsey in Atlanta. In addition to Partner University, McKinsey has gone on to create McKinsey Academy, an online learning portal targeting McKinsey mid-level professionals and customers, offering learning on such topics as business strategy, team management, problem solving, and corporate finance.
At Tenaris, MOOCs are being used as a lever for building the Tenaris employer brand globally. Rolando Lange, the global director of Tenaris University, has extended the scope of MOOCs to include current employees, university students who may become new hires, and customers. Tenaris’s MOOCs range from industry-specific courses such as Introduction to Computer Numerical Control and Introduction to Steel to broader business courses such as Relationship Marketing and International Trade. Says Lange, “Our driver to launch MOOCs was to reduce the cost of corporate education while improving the quality. Our results to date show we did this. Tenaris saved $800,000 and improved the quality of the learning experience as well as winning recognition such as ATD’s (Association for Talent Development) Excellence in Practice award.”
Ingrid Urman, head of Learning Methods at Tenaris University, goes on to say, “Our MOOCs were first designed for internal employees to update their skills. Now we are applying MOOC design features across the corporate university, such as introducing each course with a short engaging video, creating small learning cohorts of 30 per course, and incorporating an online certificate and badge. For Tenaris, our MOOC journey has resulted in rethinking our learning model for all our employees.”
Flipping the Classroom
Companies are not just creating their own MOOCs but also embedding MOOC design principles into their current learning offerings. Anthem identified individuals in three customer-facing roles: sales, clinicians, and customer service representatives, to pilot a “flipped classroom” approach pioneered by Sal Khan of Khan Academy, where learners are in charge of their own learning, receive individual coaching and mentoring along the way, and practice in the classroom what they learn online in discussion boards and in micro learning video lessons. Figure 6.6 shows various components of the flipped classroom model.
Figure 6.6 The Anthem flipped classroom model
The Anthem flipped classroom model is the outgrowth of a learning strategy developed by Mike Melloh, chief learning officer, to provide scalable learning to customer-facing roles while also embedding peer-to-peer collaboration in the learning design. Melloh and Jennifer Hammond, staff vice president of Learning & Development, identified customer service representatives as a key to pilot this new learning method as there are several thousand customer service representatives at Anthem.
Anthem has already started to see results in learner feedback and satisfaction, as well as improved job performance. Anthem is on target to “flip” more than a dozen curricula to be used in over 100 classes. This will result in freeing up over 10,000 hours for the Anthem training staff to be redirected to other training needs. Of course, this just represents the beginning of where Anthem intends to apply flipped learning. By 2018, Melloh and Hammond estimate the majority of training will be in a flipped classroom format.
Design New Roles for the Learning Team
As learning shifts from a single classroom to being able to access multiple forms of learning in either a MOOC or a flipped classroom, the roles within a learning department are evolving to incorporate a focus on marketing, community building, curation, and editorial planning.
As the rate and pace of change accelerate, more companies will migrate from designing transactional learning programs to designing learning experiences. And as this happens, new roles will be created not only for the learning team members but also for the chief learning officer, who will focus more on orchestrating and facilitating learning rather than leading a team to design and deliver learning. After interviewing a number of chief learning officers and their staff, we are seeing five new roles emerge, which are outlined in the sidebar. These roles may not translate into new full time jobs but a rethinking of current roles to incorporate this new expanded focus on creating learning experiences.
Five Emerging Roles for the Learning Department
• Community manager. Seeds, feeds, and weeds content so employees can share, debate, and learn from each other
• Learning experience manager. Creates memorable experiences on par with consumer experiences to inspire and engage a learner
• Communications manager. Develops a communications campaign building learning investment into the employer brand
• Editorial manager. Designs, curates, and embeds learning into all aspects of the learning experience
• Marketing manager. Creates a marketing plan for the experiences, touting benefits for individuals and companies
Consider the Employee a Learner and a Teacher
American companies spent more than $130 billion on corporate learning in 2014, an increase of 15 percent over the previous year. This demonstrates the need of companies to close the skill gaps among their employees. According to research by Bersin by Deloitte, “Not only do more than 70 percent of organizations cite ‘capability gaps’ as one of their top five challenges, but many companies say it takes 3–5 years to transform a seasoned professional into a fully productive employee.”13
Is the money invested in learning put to good use? Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google and Work Rules! author, believes this investment is often insufficiently targeted, delivered by the wrong people, and measured incorrectly.
So how does Google design and deliver its learning? Google has reimagined the learning model altogether by having Googlers deliver most of the learning. This is known as “Googler to Googler” and places employees from across departments into teaching roles that would otherwise be filled by the HR department (or, in Google speak, the People Operations department). It is estimated that about 55 percent of the programs offered at Google are taught by Googlers.14
Laszlo says that telling employees that you want them to learn is different from asking them to promote that culture themselves. Giving employees teaching roles, says Google’s head of People Operations, Karen May, makes learning part of the way employees work together rather than something HR is making them do.15
Laszlo Bock elaborates on this in Work Rules! He explains, “It is generally far better to learn from people who are doing the work today, who can answer the deeper questions and draw on current real life examples. They understand your context better, they are always available to provide immediate feedback, and they are mostly free.”16
The pace of change is simply too fast to create a hard-coded curriculum. Instead, at Google the goal is to create peer-to-peer learning where Googlers become teachers and share their knowledge will grow as a key mode of delivering learning to employees.
Communicate the Value: Focus on the Why, How, and What of Measurement
Most organizations measure training success based on the learner’s satisfaction. “Did the employees like the training?” This form of measurement only scratches the surface of measuring success. Satisfaction surveys immediately following a training session typically determine how happy the students were with the process and the environment; the surveys ask subjective questions focused on whether the students felt the information was helpful.
CEOs are requesting a much more strategic approach to measuring learning investment. In a survey conducted with 96 CEOs by PwC’s ROI Institute, 96 percent said they want to see the business impact from learning and development investments, but only 8 percent currently see this. Meanwhile, 74 percent of respondents say they want to see the ROI in people, projects, and initiatives associated with learning. Unfortunately, only 4 percent are receiving that information.17
Indeed, analytics should drive an organization’s decisions on recruitment, development, and engagement. By applying Simon Sinek’s model of the Golden Circle in his bestselling book, Start with Why, we propose three simple yet powerful questions to frame a company’s learning investment in the language of business. The first question is “Why is the investment being made?”—what is the business problem that the training is solving for? The next question is “How is the organization analyzing the data?” In other words, what methodology is being used to measure learning? Finally, the last question is “What specific business impact is being measured?” Applying these three simple questions to measurement of learning sounds simple, but most measurement is done backward. This means that companies start with the what, then move to the how, and often neglect to focus on the why. And more alarmingly, many of them don’t even know why they do what they do!
If we start our analysis with defining why the organization is investing in learning, we can more clearly communicate the purpose of creating a learning experience rather than designing learning content. Let’s return to the members of the adidas Group. Imagine if their vision for learning was simply, “We design and deliver high-impact training to meet business needs.” (We have seen versions of this learning vision at many companies.)
Instead, the members of the adidas Group figured out that they had to inspire employees to join them on a learning journey. Hence their vision of “You Learn, We Grow,” starts with why. People want to be emotionally connected to the why rather than being told about the what.
After firmly understanding the why of investing in learning, then identifying the how, the what falls into place. In explaining a company’s investment in learning, learning leaders often become enamored with the how and what without a solid understanding of the why.
As Simon Sinek says, “Leaders don’t have all the great ideas; they provide support for those who want to contribute. Leaders achieve very little by themselves: they inspire people to come together for the good of the group. Leaders never start with what needs to be done. Leaders start with ‘why we need to do things.’ Leaders inspire action.”18
Let’s rethink the entire learning process to better meet the needs of our employees and our strategic business priorities. Consider stepping back and asking why your organization is investing in learning, and remember that employees will more easily rally around the why rather than the what of learning.
The Future of Learning
As companies shift learning from designing transactional courses to creating transformational learning experiences, the role of the chief learning officer becomes more strategic and expands in the process. Originally hired because of their background in employee and leadership development, CLOs and learning leaders must now grow their expertise in communications, digital and consumer marketing, and learning technologies. The learning leaders of the future must understand that employees, regardless of their age, want learning to be personalized, leverage the expertise of their peers, and be available at their moment of need. Our workers take for granted they have ready access to “Siri-type learning,” or instantaneous answers to their questions, whenever and wherever they are. Shouldn’t learning incorporate the same type of consumer experience?
The challenge for CLOs is to navigate this new world of learning with a consumer mindset and understand the needs and expectations of learners in the same way as chief marketing officers know their customers.
The future of learning will be about developing this mindset shift inside training departments so that learning is inspiring, engaging, and on demand! It’s a brave new world for learning. Are you ready?
MY ACTION PLAN
Myself
• What can I do to rethink my role as a learning leader from developing learning content to designing learning experiences? (Learn by example!)
• What opportunities and barriers do I see as my role expands?
• What new learning programs should I enroll in to develop new skills in digital marketing and communications?
• How do we move our team from creating transactional learning programs to offering transformational learning experiences?
• What roles on our team need to be reimagined, and how will we lead this effort?
• What criteria does my team need to select new learning partners?
My Organization
• As we adopt a new direction for why our organization learns, what types of new measures must we put into place?
• How could we communicate our value back to the organization?
• How could we work with and learn from our organization’s chief marketing officer?