L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - DevLearn 2023 Recap: Solution-focused Approaches to Technology, Storytelling, and Quality Content

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Early Q4 every year, tens of thousands of learning professionals descend on the Las Vegas strip to share insights with each other and explore what’s new in ed tech. This year, your host joined the getAbstract booth at the Mirage Hotel meeting with dozens of attendees, vendors, consultants, authors, and other L&D practitioners. To discuss some key learnings from the event, getAbstract’s Head of Sales, America, Danielle Goodrum joins the show this week.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. In this episode, we're giving a recap of DevLearn 2023, which took place in Las Vegas last month, October. DevLearn is an annual conference where learning professionals from all industries gather, learn from each other, and see what's new in ed tech. Tens of thousands of training managers, instructional designers, HR leads, solution providers and vendors, and more,

exchange their knowledge and ideas as to what's most critical in corporate learning today. With me to describe the event experience is Danielle Goodrum. Danielle has been with GetAbstract for 13 years now and currently serves as Head of Sales America. She was at the booth with me in Vegas, engaging with waves of attendees, delivering talks from our tiny stage, and learning about other vendors in the expo hall. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Danielle Goodrum. She's here to talk with me about DevLearn, the event that we attended just a couple weeks ago.

Danielle, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me, Tyler. We had a great time. Who doesn't love a trip to Vegas? That's where DevLearn takes place. We are not here, however, to talk about the trip. We are here to talk about what took place at the convention center and in the expo hall. And right before we actually started the event and went to our booths, you sent a message to our team letting us know about a little bit of research that you had done on who was attending DevLearn. And you said there was going to be a lot of instructional designers, and you were absolutely correct as far as my perspective was. I spoke with a lot of different instructional designers and some more higher level learning leaders, some sort of training and development heads. But what did you notice about the demographic that was there? Was it primarily IDs? Did you see other kinds of folks as well?

there. But the most people that I had conversations with were instructional designers or leaders of those teams. So it was a very, very interesting group of individuals that I think we speak their same language, which was a lot of fun. They were working on different projects that they're coming to DevLearn to learn more about and how they can make it more effective, more engaging. And I think we had some really great conversations with the instructional designers. Yeah. Did you see any particular themes that really stood out in terms of the problems that they were trying to solve? I know that I talked to people from just such a broad array of industries and organizations. There's always seems to be a lot of military and government folks at these things. I think I spoke with somebody from each of the branches of the military, in fact, and then,

you know, local government, national government, foreign government, they always end up at these things. And they seem to have very, you know, structured systems within which they're trying to put specific resources. But then you encounter folks that are coming from, you know, smaller companies, but also some sort of like Fortune 500s. And the problems that they were facing were kind of all over the place. There was a handful that came in looking for entirely new systems, like looking to replace their LMS, as I heard that from two or three folks, actually. I'm not sure if there's, you know, something going on there. I do get the sense, though, that we'll probably talk more about technology soon.

But it seems like with all that's happening in technology right now, people are like actively looking for that next layer, that next level. It's going to, you know, take their learning or take something to a whole new landscape. But what did you think? Did you see any themes among the problems that you heard about? I think my conversations look very similar to yours. They were very specific to the target audience and the learners within their corporation. So what they're working on was very tailored to their learners. So when it comes to topics, I didn't notice a lot of themes, but there were definitely themes and making sure that they were ahead of what was coming out

technology wise, what's best practices with across the industry and other organizations to make sure that when they are developing these assets, this content and training for their learners, it is cutting edge. So I think the biggest trend there was making sure that they were creating things that were interesting, engaging, and helping them meet their end goals. So it was fun to be around a lot of people who were looking to be innovative in that space and really pushing the edge of what's next so they can be ahead of that for their learners. This is a good opportunity to listen to the conversation I had with Brent from Domino at DevLearn, actually. That's an LCMS, a learning content

management system. We talked about the problems that he's been solving for his clients. So I'm Brent Schlenker, B-R-E-N-T-S-C-H-L-E-N-K-E-R. I work for Domino, D-O-M-I-N-K-N-O-W Learning Solutions. My role is VP of Learning Experiences. And really quickly, can you just describe what Domino does, if you can do that briefly? So yeah, Domino is a authoring platform, a collaborative authoring platform, SaaS-based authoring tool, also known as an LCMS because of its content management capabilities. So very similar to a lot of the other authoring tools out there. We have a responsive design tool,

as well as a fixed pixel environment that folks can use all wrapped up into one tool, plus a simulation tool. I was talking to Kieran from your team earlier when we met at our booth, and he mentioned that one of the things that you guys can do is, I don't know if I have the right language for this, but you can update video content in a very effective way that sort of rolls out a new version of a course or some sort of video L&D world. And it's pretty universally accepted that things don't last more than a couple of years. And especially now that the

pace of technology is growing, things don't last very long. Like you're getting a course on the new way to work, the new productivity, the new tool or whatever, and that dies out pretty quickly. So is this something that you guys are actively thinking about in the solutions that you provide? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's part of the reason why we developed this particular feature in the platform that we did, because the nightmare has always been if you upload a SCORM package into a learning management system, you build the course in the learning management system, you bring in the SCORM package as a module. If you ever wanted to change that, you have to build a whole brand new course inside the LMS. You can't just update it.

that you have to build a whole brand new course inside the LMS you can't just update it that's the problem and how we solve it is we host the content in the cloud and so all you have to do is upload a SCORM stub instead of the whole entire SCORM package into your LMS into the module and then when your user is launching the course if for some reason they get the content and they're able to see it and they're able to go through the course, maybe after six months or so, something changes and you have to update the course. Well, all you have to do is update the content in Domino, republish it. It publishes it up to the cloud, but you don't have to re-update the LMS and create a new course and all of that. It just automatically now has the new content in the LMS ready to go. So from a

process and a maintenance perspective, it saves boatloads of time, frustration, headache, gives you better analytics long-term, solves a lot of different problems. How about facilitating content creation? Sometimes working with the perfect subject matter expert is a bit of a nightmare. You know, getting the right person for the job that will truly have an impact on your people and take them to the next level in the learning that your clients are creating. So are you doing anything to facilitate the complexity of that process and make sure that working with SMEs, for instance, is much more effective? Well, I mean, a lot of that is up to our users. So we provide the tool and the platform for the users to be able to create and maintain and update all of their content and to keep it up to date and readily available. And it's their responsibility working with their subject matter experts and whatnot. But multiple ways that different clients do it is we offer a

simpler version of the platform, for example, that the SMEs can do it themselves. So all you do is you create the templates and then you give those to the subject matter experts. And all they have to do is fill in the content. So the subject matter experts can now start updating their own courses and doing their own thing. We just don't give them access to all the really fancy stuff, right? They just can change pictures, change text. So now you've offloaded some of the work off of your design and your development team onto the subject matter experts. They feel like they have a little bit more control over the content that they're creating and meeting to deliver, whether that's instructor-led

or knowledge-based content or e- course, or a micro-learning course. They can build whatever they want as long as there's already a template there, and we give them just edit access to deal with it, right? So that's one way. The other way is just using Convey, the hosting platform, you know, that makes life a lot easier for them. They come to the development team. The development team makes some quick changes. Boom, it's good to go.

It's not a whole big technical process or hassle to go into the LMS and to do all the changes, do a relaunch, get the new code for the course, all that kind of stuff. So we do oversimplify that process for everybody. That's great. So what are the kinds of clients that you work with? Is there any sort of theme or industry or type of business that you're primarily working with? And what are the specific problems that they come to you for solving? Anybody and everybody that has a training need or a training system that they have to provide content into. So anywhere from HR departments doing standard HR style training to sales enablement, trying to get the fastest, quickest, new up-to-date products into the sales force and to teach them on that product to manufacturing to operations.

You know, pretty much any time you need to go through the whole life cycle of an employee, learning always needs to follow along the way. So typically in the past, you'd onboard an employee and then cut them loose, and then they'd have to just be going and doing the work. Today, what we now know is that you have to support those employees, right? Help them upskill as they go along or help them to be able to have access to knowledge and learning content during that journey in that job. And so there's the learning journey that goes along with it. Yes, there's the onboarding piece, but then while they're working, you need to have content that's available to them in the moment of need, right? When they need it, short, small snippets of content. They may want to try

to upskill in a completely different department. So maybe they'll take some courses in that and you make those available to your employees, right? Or you have some follow-up snippets of, you know, little mini micro learnings or some spaced repetition courses, things like that, and just giving access to knowledge bases that you can build inside of our platform as well. So we don't do just e-learning courses anymore as an industry, right? We build a lot more digital content that needs to be supported by a tool like Domino. So that was Brent from Domino. a tool like Domino. So that was Brent from Domino. I spoke to a couple different vendors while there, and I love to just kind of wander around all the booths that are out there and just kind of see what's going on. And I remember very distinctly, I was at ATD back in, I think it

was May of this year, which was in San Diego. A bigger conference for sure, but very similar in terms of how it all works with the booths and the expos. The term AI, artificial intelligence, was everywhere at ATD. It felt like everybody was trying to slap AI on top of what they were doing. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure they had really strong solutions, but it was everywhere. And it didn't seem to be as prominent at DevLearn. I don't think it was quite as ubiquitous, but, you know, there are definitely organizations and products and services that are really trying to implement that in a serious way. But overall, did you see any technological trends or anything among the vendors, anything

technology-wise that actually sort of stood out to you or that seemed of particular interest to the attendees? I love this question because I expected to see a lot of the AI taglines as well. I think they were there. I think most of the vendors talked about the solutions or the outcomes versus how they were getting there. So when you talk to them, and similar to what we're doing here at GetAbstract, we're looking for a specific outcome and using AI to get there. So I was hearing more of the desired outcomes versus the AI tagline. I also think the audience that we are there, they're always ahead of this technology space. So I imagine many of them have been talking about

or using AI in some kind of aspect already within their roles. So it was refreshing to be in that audience knowing that even if the conversation led to AI, they had insights on it already. It wasn't new to them. They had questions to how we were using AI versus if we're using AI. So I think we're on that cusp of like everyone's expected to be using it to make their product more engaging, customized, efficient. So I did hear that a lot through conversation, but the details I wanted to learn about it was more so on the outcome that we at the opportunity to dive into a new technology that promises greater efficiency and speed and savings and everything. And I'm glad to hear that it feels as if people are focused more on outcomes than the actual ahead of the curve adoption of things. I think there are still examples of especially larger organizations where, you know, investment is so high in this technology. But at the end of the day, I think most organizations, most business leaders are going to more or less take their time, decide, you know, what really needs to be changed at their organization and then say, OK, this is maybe where we could implement AI. Let's see if there's a solution

out there and do proper research. I hope that's the direction we're going in, at least. Yeah, that's what I've been hearing. I know at DevLearn and outside of a few other conferences is right now it's assessing what they're doing now and how can AI assist. It's fun to jump into it. You have very early adopters who are going to look at the new innovations out and want to start using them. When you're moving on a huge company-wide scale, you have to be careful because I think you can do experimentation and look at how it can help your team, look at how it can help your employees. But that change management, that digital transformation, that takes a lot of effort.

So you have to do that in a very systematic way. And I greatly respect that and how companies are approaching it. Speaking of AI, our booth was very close to that of Synthesia IO. And they are a tool that you've apparently used. You told me at the event, they create like an AI version of you,

video AI version of you by taking a recording of your body and face and your voice. It allows you to put a script in and then you can just automate videos that way that look like you are speaking. I thought that was really cool. Actually, at first I went over to them and I said, you guys are going to put me out of a job because that kind of looks a lot like what I do for social media, you know, creating little head on videos. But then I realized this could actually be a great way to kind of supplement the work that I do. So I decided to have one of their leaders over for a conversation. Let's take a quick listen to that. My full name is Dan Vlad Kobles-Nano,

and I'm a head of product marketing at Synthesia.io. So I saw your booth yesterday at the start of DevLearn here, and you got a big video playing, which very quickly describes what it is that you guys do. So AI video, essentially AI generated video from text. And immediately I was fascinated because I make videos for Get Abstract and I spend a lot of time recording myself and editing the videos and putting a lot of things together. So my first thought was this theoretically could put me out of a job or it could probably help me a lot. And I talked to some of your team. They quickly kind of described what the current use case is for a product like this. But can you just describe, you know, what this sort

of thing is for right now? Yeah, so I think today what we see people creating with Synthesia is mostly instructional videos. That's why we are at DevLearn right now. And I would describe it usually, first of all, we are a B2B SaaS company, so we're selling in large enterprises. And that's simply because that's where we see the most need for videos at scale. And within these enterprises, obviously, the learning and development departments are the ones who are tasked with creating these training videos and are also the ones that usually don't have necessarily the biggest budgets or the time to actually achieve all their goals. So I'd say that learning and development teams are our flagship segment, let's put it like that. But when we look at instructional type of videos or

training videos, we see our customers from sales enablement departments because you want to train your sales team at scale in multiple languages. We have 130 languages available in the platform with more than 500 voice and tone variations. So you can train your sales team. We see a lot of information security training. We see a lot of system training from IT teams and customer service training. So there is a lot of information that currently in enterprise companies being shared through PDFs, PowerPoints, texts, or lengthy meetings. And as you correctly mentioned, we're not trying to replace anyone. We're just trying to augment people's capabilities. So the simplest way to think it is when you go home, you're watching Netflix, you're watching

YouTube, watching TikTok. Video is the most engaging way to actually transfer information. And when you come to work, what you're seeing is PDFs, PowerPoints, and text. So we're just trying to change that one video at a time, and we're trying to enable people to create those videos. So yeah, that I would say the main use case for us today is probably an instructional type of content. today is probably an instructional type of content. So one of my first inklings of thought when I see this is, you know, it's not a real video of a human, obviously. So there's that sort of uncanny valley is what we call it, where it's like, do people consuming this or viewing it? Is it weird? I mean, my question is, what is the feedback on this? Because honestly, it looks really, really good. It looks incredibly realistic. I know that my presentation style on

video is like very animated. It's highly animated. And what I'm seeing in the videos that your booth here is showing is that, you know, it looks animated enough and it looks pretty strong. But in general, I mean, what is the feedback like and where do you expect this to go? Is it going to just increase in sophistication and just become more and more lifelike and realistic? Is that the goal here? Yeah, we have mixed signals. Obviously, as you said. We are at our fourth generation of avatars. And obviously, the first generation was even more stiff and more presenter like and really no micro gestures and movements. Today, the avatars, as you mentioned, they're even more lifelike. So we get big signals. The vast majority of people, when they see it first

time and they've never seen an AI video, they can tell that that's an AI video. Only after you tell them, they start paying attention to the lip sync and everything, and that's when they understand it. And some people understand it from the very beginning, and they are unnerved, and they are worried about it, and it's uncanny. So we get both reactions, but looking a little bit into the future, in a month and a half or two, we're going into our fourth generation of avatars, and they are becoming even more lifelike. They are getting cues for micro gestures from the script. So it's not that you can control the

avatar and raise the eyebrow or make them smile whenever you want them to, because that's really hard and it's bad UX. So we're just trying to understand the script you're writing and the avatar should act in that specific way and get as close as possible to a human being. But the future is 3D. So right now our avatars are 2D and we have probably one of the few studios in the world where we capture 3D data of humans in London, and we're working on our own dataset that we're going to train our AI models on. And the future is mostly in 3D.

I have to say my first response when I saw the video that I keep referencing is, oh, that is an actor. And the tagline that I see right now is turn your text into videos in minutes. So my thought was, oh, you're kind of like sending this to actors and they perform it for you or something like that. And then I came over and was like, oh my God, that's an AI. So I'm one of those people who just like couldn't even tell. So it's very impressive at that level alone already.

And I'm not paid to promote this product by any means for my listeners. It's really good. It just looks really good. My last question, do you expect this to broaden in the education world, even to, you know, like schools and the education industry and that sort of thing as well? Do you think this sort of tool can be used for learning elsewhere? Yes, absolutely.

And we are working with a lot of universities today, the most innovative ones, of course, are already using us in kind of a blended learning approach. So they will include AI videos in certain occasions. So people are already realizing the fact that it's inevitable. We're going to probably get to a point where AI video is going to be everywhere. And it has made so good that we're not going to probably get to a point where AI video is going to be everywhere and it's going to be so good that we're not going to probably understand it. But I always say AI video and video in general is not a silver bullet. You always have to look at it as a tool in your toolbox. And today this tool, which is video, is really expensive and really hard and requires a lot of skills to create.

And what we're trying to do is actually to make it accessible. So you can use it in any situation you want. You want to use it in corporate training, you want to use it in education, sales videos, market videos, any kind of situation. We're just trying to make it accessible for everyone to actually be able to do that and not replace, again, I'll repeat myself, We always look at it from 1% and 99%. So when we look at enterprises is 1% of an enterprise, usually marketing and content folks can create a good video

because that's their job, they've been educated in that. The vast majority of people, 99%, they cannot do it and they default to text. And it's not that because they don't want to create videos, it's just impossible for them to do that. And for organizations, it's really hard. Video is super complex. The life cycle of video creation is from script, casting, editing, translation, maintenance, everything. It's really hard. There's a lot of skills in one. So what we're trying to do is to almost overnight give you these skills or let you acquire these skills in a very simple manner, in a very affordable

platform, in my opinion, so you can actually do that. So all of a sudden, 100% of your workforce can have access to video creation as a tool. Yeah, like I said, as a video editor myself and creator of video, it is quite a process. So I really appreciate that you guys are doing this. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. So that was Dan from Synthesia. Did you catch any of the keynote sessions or any of the expert sessions at all? Did you see any of those?

I did not see any of them on the main stage, but we had some great speakers at our booth. So I think we got the best of both worlds there. Hearing authors talk about psychological safety, coachability. I felt like I had a front row seat to some of the experts in the industry to hear what they were talking about. And we had a lot of people come through and ask questions about it or look for summaries on the books that they had. So we were still able to see some of the conversations happening, but not on the main stage, not this year. Yeah. And I was thrilled to be able to present our annual book award alongside Don Taylor on the stage as well.

We did have a baby stage there. It was a lot of fun. It was good. Anybody listening, come and find us next year if you do attend DevLearn. I didn't see any of the sessions myself, but I am familiar with some of the speakers on the main stages. Josh Linkner and Phil Rosenthal, I think, was one producer on there. I think everybody loves Raymond back in the day. And it did seem like a recurrent theme.

I think in three of the four keynote speakers descriptions of their session, the word storytelling was in there. And I also heard this from a handful of people. I have to say there was also a number of, I guess, like solution providers. I don't think they were, I mean, I guess you could say vendors, but I don't think they had booths. I think they were attending the event and they were course creators of some sorts or course designer agencies that kind of came through our booth. And I had conversations with them

about what they're up to. And a handful of them, I would say at least three, I probably spoke to about five of them, at least three mentioned the importance of integrating storytelling more seriously into what they were creating and how they're so dedicated to, even in the sort of like simple stuff,

the soft skill stuff, but also in the hard skills. And if, you know, upskilling and reskilling, when you're actually kind of trying to adopt a new skill or adapt to the workforce and what's going on, they want to incorporate storytelling and narrative just because people just aren't as engaged as they used to be as learners. And that did seem to be a bit of a theme. Did you catch any of that as well in your conversations? Some storytelling and also micro-sized content. I think it's something that's still very prevalent. And looking at it from a wide scale, I would say things get really hard in the workplace if you don't focus on the soft skills. And so I think there's ways that they were incorporating these different aspects into

their efforts within their roles. But many of them, like I said earlier, were very technical in what they were producing content on. Even in that, where they're going deep in skill development, they were breaking up into chunks so they can keep people's attention. Things like the updating it and keeping it relevant. That micro-sized content has many different benefits for them as instructional designers and the learners. So micro-sized content definitely was something that sparked people's interest. I think that's one of the things that drew their attention to come talk to us and seeing how we were approaching that at Get Abstract, whether it be with our summary content or our micro-courses, the actuals.

It was a very prevalent part of the conversations I was having. Speaking of narrative, I had an interesting conversation with, I believe it was Rhianne from Breakthrough Beverages. And her job is to take minimal information from the suppliers and beverage manufacturers and turn that into a learning system, a whole sort of like course around the product and brand. And she relies heavily on story and narrative to be engaging in that system and to create something that's, you know, fun to learn about and memorable. Let's take a listen to that conversation real quick. Rhian Roach, and I'm an instructional designer for Breakthrough Beverage Group. Rhian, we just met and you quickly described to me that a lot of what you do is taking descriptions of beverages and products from suppliers and then delivering them to sales

teams and that sort of thing. Is that correct? Yes. Yeah. Okay. And you mentioned that generally you're getting something that's not super exciting from these folks and you have to turn it into something that will effectively educate your sales team. So I want to know a little bit about what is that like? Tell me. Usually the design process that I take is we meet with whoever is the subject matter expert. A lot of times that can be our supplier in this instance. And I have a teach me session. So I meet with those people and I take notes as they just brag about their products, telling me the story behind them, why it's important, why they are the best product that there is essentially. I pick up on kind of those key phrases or ideas or really the

story behind that product and try to take whatever it is they give me, if they give me anything at all besides this meeting, but usually in the form of a very dull, overwritten PowerPoint with zero imagery, maybe a logo. And I kind of wave my magic wand. My boss always calls me kind of the fairy godmother of taking something really dull and awful and not engaging at all and turning into something spectacular, engaging and very short and sweet to the point. Yeah. So the people that are giving you these things, like you said, they're probably just mostly bragging about their product. They don't really have any idea how to teach, like probably nothing about their history is how to teach somebody or get them to remember the important things. Do you go into these education sessions for yourself with specific questions to kind of hear their own thoughts

toward what you know you need to create in the learning that you're making? Yeah, yeah. I usually start it off pretty broad because I think just as humans, the thing that we love to talk about most is ourselves and what's important to us. And these people oftentimes have dedicated their livelihoods, their souls into producing

something wonderful or just about a product that is super meaningful to them or to the business in general. So always providing people the opportunity to brag and then diving in a little bit deeper. I really do focus on that story. And I find if you focus on asking them the story, it becomes a lot easier to understand and pick up on what the actual important content is that somebody needs to know about it. And as a consumer that's looking for perhaps a new whiskey to drink, the story is what I'm going to tell my friends about. This is where this is from. This is how it was made. This is why it's really cool. And you should try it versus not necessarily like the entire process of how that whiskey was made.

Yeah. I love the idea of really letting people just kind of go for it or just be enthusiastic about their product and then picking out those key points that, you know, obviously sort of make them smile and really shine. And to that point, by trade, I actually was a history teacher in high school, so I am learning about the products just as much as the novice consumer is. So I probably find it a little easier to ask questions that people who aren't from the industry would want to know, but don't really have the access to the resources to ask. So when it comes to actually creating the trainings and things, are you making that story forward? Is it narrative based when you're actually teaching the sales team? Are are you making that story forward? Is it narrative

based when you're actually teaching the sales team? Are you trying to keep it that way? Or are you then translating it into different bits and pieces that translate better for sales education? My company has a sales training program or curriculum. So we obviously always tie elements from those classes into whatever product that we might be creating a training for. But usually it always starts with a story and those key factors to make sure that somebody can remember in their presentations to a customer. Once again, that was Rianne from Breakthrough Beverages. Interesting conversation there. Yeah, I definitely probably had about five conversations where my interlocutor was very

enthusiastic about that. Actually, the first one that I had was one of my longest conversations. And I can't remember what his specific role was, but it was a large company and he was toward the top of the L&D team, basically. And he actually mentioned that for neurodivergent employees, having more bite-sized content is actually super helpful. I think he actually identified as neurodivergent as well. And he brought that up. He said, you know, I understand as a neurodivergent person myself that this is very beneficial for how I learn. But also I understand that, you know, it seems and I believe that the next generation of learners are going to come through with social media brain and it's going to require things to be abbreviated more. And I think he just appreciated that a lot. So

yeah, I definitely saw a little bit of that too. But I did see a trend at this event and having longer conversations with the people who came by and talked with us. So everyone was very engaged to learn from each other, which was very nice to have a group there of people from GetAbstract and be able to have that time. People were coming there and sharing what they're working on, understanding what GetAbstract could support them with. I had a lot of great follow-up conversations and messages on LinkedIn and really inspiring each other to whether listen to a podcast or read a summary. The conversations for me were very interesting, engaging, and people tended to stick around a lot longer than at some of the other events that we've been through. And, you know, it kind of seems like a rat race. They were very

engaged in learning more from each other. I agree for sure. I do want to ask, did you have any conversations about deeper learning experiences, not micro learning? Because you said, you know, with all the technical folks, and I encountered a lot of them too. One woman was in charge of firefighting education for Canada, I think. Okay. It may not be as broad as that, but she was one of those folks who sets up education programs for firefighters remotely. So, you know, when the pandemic happened, something as serious as fires still take place. And if we can't be together actually practicing the firefighting, she was actually helping create the sort of online education programs for how to fight massive forest fires. And we got to talking like, you know, I

think anybody, any team, you can benefit from soft skill education and abbreviated education in some worlds. But then there are the ones where the depth of the education that you're undergoing is just really, really important. And I think usually companies or organizations that focus on that sort of thing, they're more or less developing their own content. But did you have any conversations in that world at all? I did. So there was a few individuals that were creating like mandatory training programs that were like year long, where they were tasked to keep updating them throughout the year to keep up to compliance. Or you've said something very specific like firefighter training we want them to go through a longer training i don't want that to be maybe

my chris slides in that space but whether they were developing that deep learning there was a lot of conversations of i can imagine this can be helpful to this person this department so i kind of think of it as like a pyramid a lot of the individuals we were talking with operate the top of the pyramid where it's a smaller segment of users, very specific, more of that deep learning. Some of the essential skills Get Abstract that don't have to be customized as specific for their individual learners. So we were talking to the top of the pyramid where the segments are smaller, deeper learning, but they were very keen to introduce Get Abstract to the concept of micro learning or summarize content to a wider audience. It just wasn't their main focus for many of them. But that being said, you know, they're looking at that Microsoft's content. They understand

the need for knowledge retention. They understand how it can be used even with their own teams. They were excited to use something like AdAbstract to support their individual teams. There was a lot of conversations that talked about that deep learning, individual teams, there was a lot of conversations that talked about that deep learning, longer development paths, and I would say more structured in the sense of what that development looks like and that journey they would take for those skills that they were developing. Yeah, I spoke to somebody from Applebee's actually, and he actually kind of rose up through the ranks as he was working at like a physical Applebee's location. And then he moved up into the L&D world. And he was talking about how they do have dedicated programs for educating their sort of frontline workers, you know, those

who are serving, hosting in the kitchen, whatever it is. They don't just stop at teaching them how to do those things. They do have a more robust system for teaching them beyond that. And he said that, you know, it was pretty critical that that is a value that they maintain across the entire organization and across the corporation. So that was kind of fascinating to hear what that actually looks like, how it's implemented and how he goes about it. Actually, I did record my conversation with that person. Editors, why don't we throw that in here real quick? Let's take a listen.

My name is Carlos Ricardiz. I am a senior instructional designer. So, Carlos, at Applebee's and in the restaurant industry, obviously trainings and onboardings when people are first starting as, you know, servers or kitchen staff, food folks, people that are sort of on the floor, you know, that's a very specific kind of training and education. But there has to be sort of ongoing learning as well there, I assume. I'm just curious as to how that sort of gets instituted, because I think of knowledge workers and folks like me that just kind of work behind a computer, you know, it's relatively easy

to put learning into my daily work. But when somebody is, you know, boots on the ground on the floor, I assume that's different, right? So what does that look like? Well, no, I mean, that's a very good point because yeah, there's definitely a lot that they jump into when they're onboarding. But I think that continuing education is also really important because you get tons of opportunities every day to interact with different types of people, right? And different things that come up, different instances.

And so it makes you think. And so one of the things that we do, we do campaign training almost every month. We have about nine campaigns a year. And, you know, we like to use those opportunities to not just educate our staff on what the new cool campaign is coming out, but skills about, you know, engaging with guests and skills to improve their cooking techniques or serving or creating a cocktail, right? So there's other touch points that we do also make sure to maintain throughout the rest of the year, but it's tough because it's a very fast-paced environment and the information has to get to them really quickly. And it's a very wide audience, too.

You're getting different types of people from different backgrounds, from different education levels. Some are English is not their first language. And so you have to be able to communicate everybody in the simplest, clearest way possible. And how much of this boils down to the managers of these folks, the ones that are directly overseeing them? Is it up to leadership to help institute some of this learning kind of on the job where it matters most? There's certain aspects of a campaign or the guest experience that you reach. But when you're a manager, it's a little bit more high level. And it's not more like boots on the ground. Even though there's a lot of managers that also, they do the critical path. They walk and they make sure that everybody's satisfied, guests are happy.

So you try to send that message, whatever message you can convey to one group, you have to have that message to be complimentary to the other group. Because they're all working together for the same goal so yeah some of the nuances are different but the overall messaging can still be the same when we first started talking you mentioned it's important to sort of put yourself in the shoes of the folks that you know you're going to be teaching so what is that like like i was saying you know behind a computer might be relatively easy to kind of envision what somebody's doing on a daily basis and stick some training in there. But again, how do you envision that with folks that are boots on the ground, as you said? I've had the opportunity to go to the restaurants to

do staff training. So I can get a sense of that. I've had experience working in restaurants for about 15 years, so I'm very familiar with it. I did a couple stints as a busser when I was learning training previously. But even if you just go as a busser when I was learning training previously, but even if you just go to a restaurant, right, when you're sitting there having a meal, look at how everybody's running around, you know, they're focused on their task. And so you have to put yourself in their shoes. And also too, like you want to make sure that I can design something that I think is cool when it's going to be like, wow, this is great graphics. This is a great message and all that. But, you know, if it doesn't resonate with the target audience, you're just kind of sending it out into a void. And even worse,

it's wasting their time. And so being able to actually, you know, be there, engage with them, talk, ask questions, do surveys in your course training just kind of keeps you focused and making sure that you're staying on target with what they need. Again, that was Carlos on the learning team from Applebees. I don't know if you heard a lot in your conversations. A lot of people talked about the pace of how their organization was moving. So they're very fast paced. We need things that can be consumed quickly, but valuable. And I heard it across many industries. Normally you hear it in different spaces, how fast the organization is moving, how fast they need to upskill their employees. I think it's something that a lot of people are feeling. A lot of different industries, corporations,

teams are feeling this pressure to move quickly, but they do not want to lose the value in what they're learning or how they're doing that. So I think that was one of the common threads I heard in the conversations I was having as well. Yeah. I also just like on the spot learning in the moment. I can't remember what the exact term is that I heard a couple of vendors use, but I saw a few different booths that were dedicated and some demos that were dedicated to pop-up learning almost. And a lot of this has to do with the systems that you're using and making you like a better maybe Salesforce user or a better whatever sort of logistical bureaucratic work that you're doing, the systematized stuff on the computer, you know, the things that pop up as you're taking actions in there and say, hey, maybe you should, you know, go over to this page and try adding this in there. technologies and some of them actually are incorporating AI is to be more of that sort of like platform intelligence or workforce intelligence even where when you go in there

it kind of tells you based on how you're speaking with people or the actions that you're taking like what you could do better or like here's a little lesson on this facet of marketing because I see that you're working on a social campaign or something like that it almost seems like we're starting to really incorporate those things and we're doing it at the simple level, which is like a platform usually has its like knowledge space online, like how to use all of Salesforce or whatever. And you can more or less integrate that in if it's not integrated by default as like on the spot learning. Kind of seems like we're going in the direction of, will we be doing this with everything? You know, every time you're using something and as you're typing in and talking about

a specific topic, could there be a pop-up that says, hey, you want to learn more about this? Here's a little resource. Here's a quick resource. And, you know, I can imagine a world where that becomes a little bit too intrusive, but it seems cool. It's almost like a little tutor or a mentor at your side to help you with whatever it is that you're working on.

And that's an interesting piece of progress that I noticed from the last few events that I went to. Yeah. And I think that on-the-job training is something that a lot of companies have been trying to achieve. Technology is going to help them do that better. Because when I think of on-the-job, it's not, I ran into a problem, I have to stop and go do something else. Like you said, this is prompted for you to get the answers so you can move forward in a different way, address that pain point right when you have it. So it'd be interesting. I imagine we're

going to have to do a lot of training and sessions on receiving feedback because if I was receiving feedback constantly, you know, you wouldn't be able to take that in and be able to use it. So that will be interesting to the trends and receiving feedback and moving forward in that space as well. Yeah. The one reference point that I have for this is like Clippy from Classic Microsoft Office, which I wanted to just punch him out every time he showed up. So I, and you know, who's working on this is Microsoft. So I'm sure they have that feedback and they'll know how to make it a little bit cleaner. I think Copilot is actually going to incorporate a lot of this kind of stuff in your workflow, but we'll see.

But it's exciting. Could you imagine not feeling that pain point between the next training and that was shortened until like the end of the day or till you have that time for that learning moment? And that's the thing where I say, like, if it's valuable, no one's going to be annoyed by it. You know, you're going to be excited that that moment came up and you got that piece of feedback or that resource that you need to move forward. Or even in this conversation, when we couldn't think of the name for on the job training or who knows if we even got it right.

Yeah, that could pop up like this is the term you're looking for. Those things would help us feel powerful. And I say that confidence helps you feel confident. And if we can help people get to that point faster and they don't have to live in that point of insecurity and that friction there for longer than they need to, we're going to be in a very powerful spot as individuals. I just need to get over the embarrassment of being wrong or forgetful first, and then I will join you on that other side, I guess. I do not have the memory for it. So you'll probably hear my paper rustling on this recording about some points there, but it's good when you have those resources there. It's like building the second brain in the world of

things. So I'm excited about all these advancements. Yeah, yeah, me too. So one more question, I guess. The topic of subject matter expertise always comes up at these events. You know, who are you working with to teach your folks things? How do you engage with them? Are you building your own content and are you working with external experts and that sort of thing? And it's always fascinating to hear the different stories and sometimes the horror stories of those sorts of collaborations. But through this show, I've met a lot of different SMEs, SMEs as some of them say, and a lot of experts, particularly in the L&D world. And it's been really cool developing sort of like a cohort around people who solve certain issues and getting to know these folks. And I mean, first of all,

did you have any conversations about subject matter expertise or working with experts? Did that ever come up in your conversations at DevLearn? It did. And I greatly respect that question. I love that they are making sure that the quality of the content is something that's going to be valuable for them, whether it's external or internal subject matter experts. I think it's very important to start to lay that foundation very early on. I think there's great power in it. You know, there's one thing to research, and I can imagine there's individuals who see the power of tools that are coming out that you can get these answers very quickly and can shy away from reaching out to subject matter experts. But there is so much

power in that collaboration if it's done well. So I think if you're setting the right expectations early, you can imagine if they're internal, they're very busy being that expert at whatever you're reaching out to them for. But that collaboration there can really help to make sure that not only is it the information you need, but it's delivered in a way that is going to be powerful for people that you're trying to get to that expert level as well. So when they ask us at Get Abstract who we're working with to develop our content, I'm very proud to say the subject matter experts that we're working with, I think it carries a lot of weight.

I think it talks to the quality and level of quality and expectations that we have at Get Abstract that we want to make sure that we're pulling the right people into the conversation. So whether it's an instructional designer working with somebody internally, a solution provider like Get Abstract, who's making sure that our network is strong and we know who to reach out to. I think there is so much power in working with these individuals. One thing I did notice, though, is sometimes when people talk about subject matter experts, they think of like industry-wide. But this could go down to a very granular level, like when you're thinking about someone

in your organization who uses a tool or a methodology very well. There are so many people who are experts on different things that it is very worth building networks, setting that expectation. And I always say anything is going to work greatly better if it's top down. So if there's an expectation from your leadership team that they're going to be involved in being subject matter experts, that we want a collaborative network in the way we work together within the corporation, I think it's such a powerful resource to tap into. profession sometimes there's you know a bit of like a curriculum development approval process but i've read i think there was an hbr article from maybe 2019 that looked at like 16 different organizations that were really really successful at lnd and a couple of banks had systems where

they just let anybody in the company propose a course and then they would like help sort of market it internally to the other employees and that seemed like it was a really effective thing. And in some cases, I think those courses were not even something that is directly beneficial to the business. It could be something that's external or just maybe even like a hobby. But that level of autonomy, that level of freedom and internal empowerment, I think that's really, really critical for learning. And at the end of the day, at least what I've read is, you know, you learn something best when you teach it to others. So I think that sort of system is really, really cool. I agree. And also for knowledge retention, when you think about the turnover that's happening, I think one, it plays

into, like you said, this continuing learning culture internally, but you also have to make sure that when you have those subject matter experts, what happens if they were to leave? Well, if you did not have a system in place that you're working with these individuals and sharing this knowledge, it becomes very risky for that person to leave who is the go-to person for everybody. So I think documenting it, having them do something more formal. And I say it doesn't have to be a high level of investment money-wise. We're so used to watching things on YouTube and the videos I watch, the content is great. I think there is an understanding that the quality doesn't have to be amazing. It's just what you're learning out of it.

So I think there are very low entry ways for people to start doing this within their corporations now and start to work with their SMEs. Is that what you call them? Yes, the SMEs. I learned that term from... Actually, I think I have a segment with him. But yeah, interesting. Subject matter experts, SMEs. Cool. Well, Danielle, I think I have a segment with him. But yeah, interesting. Subject matter expert, SME's. Cool.

Well, Danielle, thank you so much for joining me today. I will catch you on a Zoom meeting quite soon, I'm sure. But everybody listening at home, thank you so much for joining us. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating, leave a comment and share the episodes you love.

Help us keep delivering the conversations that turn learning into action. Until next time.