L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Personalized Learning Tech: Facilitating Social Learning and Skill-Based Growth Opportunities

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

Every organization is teeming with untapped synergy between people. Especially in larger companies, there’s a plethora of opportunities for collaborative learning among employees who don’t typically work with each other. Mentorships, skill exchanges, and peer-to-peer feedback opportunities could be identified and capitalized upon… if only we had the right tools in place to help. On this week’s episode, Helen Marshall describes how ed tech can help us create personalized social learning experiences.

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. This week, our guest is Helen Marshall. As the host of Diary of a CLO, Helen is a fellow learning and development podcaster. And yes, Helen is in fact a chief learning officer, serving as such for Thrive, an all-in-one learning and skill development platform where she leads the vision for what makes great

learning experiences. Helen has worked nearly a decade as a learning designer, developing bespoke learning solutions for global management consultancies, financial firms, and other world-class organizations. She is also the founder of WomenIn, a community of and for women in L&D and human resources professions who hope to seek and provide mentorship, share resources, and empower one another. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Helen Marshall. Helen, it's wonderful to have you on. Thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for having me, Tyler.

I feel a bit like that Spider-Man meme right now. Just a couple of imposters pointing at each other, two L&D podcast hosts right now. And I'm going to start off by referring to a third L&D podcast host, in fact, Nelson Siblingham. He was actually on your show recently, and I spoke about him in my last episode with Aaron Shearer. And I realized that many different people, including those two, are having a similar thought, which is that learning should start with the employee, I think is exactly how Nelson put it. And I'd love if you could introduce me to Nelson to actually have him on the show for what it's worth. But when determining what employees should be learning, we should start with the employee. And it sounds like we're all sort of in agreement that we should actually be

sort of speaking to our employees and asking them and learning from them, what are they working on right now? Their skill gaps, what are their career aspirations? And that's how we should be starting our learning. That's the basis that we should start from. But what does this ultimately mean in terms of the onus for L&D practitioners is my ultimate question. So how do we determine that? Is it just by directly speaking to them? How do we do this without adding more work? And how do we make sure that what we determine is well aligned to the overarching business goals? Yeah. I mean, when you say it out loud, it sounds like common sense, right? That if you're creating and delivering learning initiatives for your wider business, you should be speaking to those people in your business to determine what they actually need.

That just is the common sense behind learning and development, essentially. But yeah, the trickier part comes in the actual application of doing that. How do you do it? How do you align any initiatives that you're running with those broader business objectives? And actually, I think that's probably a great place to start is thinking about what the business is trying to achieve and what those overall objectives are for the business, which potentially hasn't been the focus of some L&D teams, certainly that we've worked with and that we hear about within the industry as well. So there's a little bit of alignment required there from a business perspective. But ultimately,

yes, having conversations with people, understanding what their needs are, what their gaps are, where there's opportunities to either increase people's performance or increase their capability to do something within a role. I think the really exciting thing for me, but also I think for Thrive as well as a business, is that that balance between what the business wants, so from an organizational, overarching organizational perspective, and then maybe a values perspective as well balancing that alongside personal development opportunities of individuals is really interesting because there's not a huge amount of conversation around skills that individuals

might want to develop within their working environment that aren't actually on a day-to-day basis applicable to the role that they're doing. So I think there's a real opportunity there to kind of bring those two worlds together and yes, think about kind of skills development from that broader business piece, but actually what do individuals want to do? And yes, that might be upskilling within their role and thinking about how they progress from maybe one position to another or equally moving within a company so that talent mobility piece but then you know what skills do I think I want for future me and how do I develop them within an organization I think that's where L&D really need to be kind of getting their hands

dirty and speaking to people and aligning better in many areas that I mean that will that will increase their view of a lot of things, not just kind of skills development. But yeah, ultimately, getting into the weeds of it with your employees is really what L&D should be doing. And that's it's a hard balance to strike. I appreciate that between being the kind of go between between those broader stakeholders who have ownership of those business objectives to individuals doing the day-to-day essentially. Yeah. Ultimately it's those business objectives that I keep thinking about. Nelson also said that we're in a post-content age and that I agree with that. There's too much. We need to sort of discover what the relevant stuff is and really get to that. My follow-up question

then that, you know, to the conversation that you guys had, what is the criteria for most relevant? And how do we determine that? Because the conversations that we're having with our folks, how can we really be sure again, that we're getting back to those business objectives? So much of the impact of L&D is determined by qualitative surveys and that sort of thing and asking people how they felt and how they feel they learned from the learning that we just delivered to them. But I think it's pretty well known that's not always sufficient for really determining how successful something was, especially because sometimes there's that sort of stigma or inability to actually be honest about the learning that you just experienced

because you feel like you have to talk positively about something that somebody created for you and spent time delivering to you. And just in general, it can be difficult to say, no, I didn't enjoy that learning because you know that in some way it's going to benefit you. Learning is always positive. So how do we really determine that criteria for relevance of the content that we have before weeding through all that there is? Do we need to be able to draw a line directly to revenue and to those business objectives? Is this something that AI like AI teaching assistants will help resolve in the near future? And what do you think? Yes, possibly, I think that idea of like happy sheets is something that, you know, potentially useful in the moment to get that kind of reactionary response. But ultimately,

it's not telling you what people are taking away from a piece of content and actually applying in their day to day job. That kind of tracking of knowledge retention or knowledge application is really difficult. But just because it's difficult doesn't mean that it's not happening. And there are certain ways to measure that. And I think when you're coming to particular pieces of content or initiatives that you might be rolling out within a business. It's really thinking about what success looks like, what benchmark data do you already have? And a single piece of content is very unlikely to be an answer to a much larger problem.

So content might be a part of the solution, but I think it's probably unlikely that it would be the only one. And yes, Nelson has some great points around this kind of post-content age, but ultimately what we need to be doing is ensuring that content we still have on our platforms. I guess there's a content management piece around this to making sure that it's kind of up to date, people are accessing the right quality of information. And that does take time. So that's where I think there's potentially some sort of automated approach that can help but

just because something might be old and not viewed that often doesn't mean that it's not a good quality piece of content it might just be the way that it's hidden or the way that it's surfaced that isn't the way that it's tagged that sort of stuff comes into play there so there needs to be a view of that type of information and how you can access it, whether it's accessed in the right time, the right place, and where it sits, what it's part of. Those things, unfortunately, do take a lot of time for L&D teams. And that's why I think thinking about what you want people's experiences to be, particularly from a platform perspective, from the get-go and the strategy you have around content

more broadly is so crucial because otherwise you're going to end up in a situation where you probably have loads of pieces of content that might actually be saying the same thing or replicating information across your business. And that becomes quite tricky to manage. As we know, L&D teams are kind of low on a resource and time these days, or always has been, but especially now under the current climate. So yeah, it's tricky, but I think there's room. There are kind of steps you can take there in terms of content management. It's thinking about what the problem is that people are doing, what they're trying to solve,

what they're looking for. So the kind of search terms and that sort of stuff come into play there. Are they accessing the right content at the right time? Is it being surfaced in the right way? That comes down to the way that it's tagged or the way that it's titled even. Just thinking about some really basic things there. And then if you're doing a kind of content review, checking the relevancy of it, because like I said, just because it was created a couple of years ago doesn't mean that it's not useful anymore. It could still be relevant. But on the other side of that, on the the flip side it's likely that

content has become outdated really quickly i think we're in a little bit of a tricky situation at the moment with generative ai and large language models because they're ultimately encouraging people to create more content when we already have a lot of content at our fingertips so i think there's going to be a real impact there eventually like Yes, it's great to be able to access and create content in this way. But in the same way that that might have been the case when you were looking at content in your organization a year ago, thinking, oh, we really need some content on our platform. We really need to deliver stuff to people. Why are you doing that?

You're going to be in the same boat a year down the line thinking, why did I create all this stuff? It's not actually solved the purpose. So again, bringing it back to that problem that you're trying to solve and thinking about how you're going to get there and what good looks like at the end of it in order to be able to measure its relevancy. One of the things that I've heard some rumblings about in terms of AI tech, machine learning, that sort of thing is utilizing the zone of proximal development. I've spoken with a few of my guests about this Terry Hart, also Aaron Shear on the last episode. That's just the idea that it's most easy to learn things that are more or less adjacent to the skills that you already have. So utilizing some sort of tool that assesses what you know and says, okay, this

skill set or knowledge base is similar to that maybe has some overlap, it would probably be pretty easy for you to learn those things. And therefore, you know, most beneficial in terms of efficiency for you to try to start there. Also, there are some platforms that are more or less doing this already, one of which I think is thrive. I took a look at one of your product demos actually on YouTube, and it looks like it offers some really cool ways of thinking about and looking at skills and then offering opportunities for collaboration and social learning within the organization that's using the tool. But my question then is about taxonomies, I guess. So I've had a few conversations about this as well, where those who are looking at the real deep future of AI involvement in our workspaces and what learning will look like in, you know, 50 to 100 years, even organizational learning, the language definitions and hierarchies around what it

is that we are capable of doing our skills and our knowledge, more or less need to be unified for us to be able to really benefit from the learnings that we do in the education that we share with each other. And if we wanna be able to go between jobs and advance and just have a solid career, basically, those taxonomies need to be solidified in some way. And like you mentioned, the tagging and titling of the learning that we're looking at is very important here.

And I do think that that's a part of what I'm talking about. Thrive has a cool labeling system for the skills that your clients sort of customize and they choose. But what do you think about that sort of unifying idea where skill language really needs to be brought under one umbrella as technology advances? Would you agree that that's important in some way? I think it's really important. I think there's two aspects to it. I think there's unifying language across an organization and unifying language across industry um the latter i'm not sure will ever be possible because of the way people just because of the way we are in the

industry and the way that we do like to have to put our own spin and tone and voice on things so i think there's some there's potentially a conversation in there around digital standards and what that looks like across products and across various different things within the industry and how we communicate and how we convey that language use. But then the problem exists actually within organizations themselves, especially with larger scale enterprise customers, that the terminology that one department's using might be vastly different to another, despite the fact that they're actually talking about the same thing. So it's working out at the stage at which you're focusing in on certain skills about what, you know,

what do we actually want this to say? And are we saying things in the same way? And then the other side of that is, of course, the L&D team, if they're responsible for that overarching terminology and bringing people together with the same language. The other side of that is the employee. And really on a day-to-day basis is an employee, if they're going to be sharing their knowledge on the platform from a kind of user-generated content perspective, are they really going to be aware, as aware as the L&D team at least, of how they should be uploading and tagging content? So that is a communication piece there,

but you can't always rely on someone remembering the exact phrasing that you're using on certain tags. So there's still kind of a piece there to do with looking at how content is tagged ultimately across our platform, certainly. I think that unification of language, whilst it's important to have those conversations

and bring people into the conversation to say, actually, we're going to be talking about leadership development here but but over here you're calling it management and you know do we actually mean the same thing what does that what do those definitions mean for our business it's your ultimate even though you're doing your best intentions trying to think about how you do that on on a day-to-day basis it might not be that simple for people to remember to do it. So we have a thing called Merge Tags on our platform where L&D team can,

admins of the platform can look across the tagging of certain content and say, actually, all of these tags mean the same thing. So we're just going to merge them together under this new title. So that's, you know,

really useful for customers because of that, especially if you've got user-generated content and it just keeps things kind of nice and neat and tidy. But ultimately, yeah, I think there's a bigger question from an industry perspective. And I don't know what the answer is here to unifying what the language is across platforms. The really interesting thing is, is if you're an employee at an organization and you're

developing in, I don't know, let's say authentic leadership, what does that actually mean for you and your organisation? Probably means something slightly different to another organisation, although your skills will be transferable. So if you then go into another organisation, you're obviously taking your skills with you, but how you then communicate about that within a new business might be slightly different. But if there's a way of unifying that experience for the employee, as they move around different organisations, that sounds great, because you know what you've developed and how that's transferable and applicable within different roles. And then

talent mobility becomes much more than moving around within your own organisation, it becomes how you then progress and your career develops outside of that because ultimately if there's no opportunity to grow within a business a business a good business would want you to kind of spread your wings and go somewhere else to be able to do that so yeah interesting interesting i don't have i don't have the answers to that but it's certainly something that we're seeing kind of people talk about that kind of unification of language just a very basic tagging level but then there are obviously those broader concerns like you've mentioned. Yeah. These thoughts generally come from, like I said, those who are thinking into the very deep future. Michelle Weiss is one of them who's thinking about much

longer careers and her research is dedicated to long life learning, which means that we may have 10, 20, 30 different career changes in our lives if we're living past 100 years old and working for 70 years or something like that. Hopefully we can, you know, figure out a better solution than just longer, more complex careers. But theoretically, we're going to need maybe a more unifying language system, you know, more clear definition of what skills are just to kind of accomplish those things in a more clear way. But I want to talk about the social learning component of Thrive. And I don't fully understand this because I haven't used the product and what it is that you guys do. But again, based on the demo that I saw,

one of the features it seems is that it will show you other folks at your organization that maybe are sort of maybe in that zone of proximal development, like I mentioned, have maybe a similar skill set or something that's maybe a degree up from you and that you could learn from or learn with something along those lines. And this actually made me think back to one of my earlier episodes, I was speaking with Christopher Lind. And he mentioned that it's really important to keep leaders involved in these moments of learning across your organization, especially when you're maybe taking like a serious step away from your department or away from the people that you typically work with. Because humans know the politics of what's going on within an organization. And they might know some social quirks and be able to say, oh, yeah,

you're being recommended to go and speak to Johnny over here in sales. But be careful because, you know, maybe, you know, Johnny feels this way about people that are approaching him or this team, this sales team works a very specific way and they're very insular or something like that. So this is just an interesting little thing that I feel like we need to figure out with our tech. Maybe there are solutions for this already, but what do you think about that? How important does leadership have to remain in the learning process, especially when it comes to social learning and maybe figuring out those little quirks and idiosyncrasies that

might make a learning scenario more challenging than it seems from the surface? Ultimately, leadership should have oversight of what is going on in an organization from a learning perspective, but that comes through the communication of the L&D team directly. But if there is, let's say, a platform like Thrive, that leadership want to go on and look at what is going on across their organization, that's an ideal, right? They're looking for kind of positive stories to tell and to see what's going on and to see how the platform is being utilized and what skills people are developing and how that's kind of feeding into their wider business. Ultimately, for someone to take the step to do that, there's got to be a reason why they're there

and why they're doing it. So I think that comes from a communication with the learning and development team or the admins of the platform to think about what you want to see because they can be guided in a certain way to look at certain areas of a platform to make it kind of a quicker process

rather than just having a look around. But obviously, being able to just explore very intuitively is ultimately the aim that's what we'd always encourage people to do that the other side of it from that social learning perspective is from at a very fundamental level people learn from each other that is how people learn it's how you learn as children it's how you learn throughout life. And so in a situation where when you're coming into any organization, you should be able to leverage the knowledge of other people to help you upskill. And likewise, you should be in a position to share the knowledge that you have and the skills that you have with other people with the intention of upskilling those around you as well. So that's really the very basics of what our platform does.

And so you can access the profiles of other people to see what skills they have and the content that they're consuming and thinking, well, they're in this role, maybe I should be doing that as well. There's also kind of skills levels that you can work through. And the social element comes into that from looking at who's working through what skill levels. So it's all about that kind of sharing of information as much as possible, you know, when it's possible, it's not possible on everything. But then the other side of it is, so there's the user generated content side that comes into that. So people actually,

like I said, sharing their knowledge, but actually doing that on the platform themselves. So they can record a video and upload it to the platform. They can create a quiz or they can upload a resource document that they know is useful for either for their team or for their teammates, whatever that looks like. And it's that kind of suggestion that they're sharing with other people to enable other people and to empower other people to do the same. And then the other side of it is the just very practical kind of inspiration from social media. So the likes, the engagements, the shares, the pins, like that sort of stuff that you can tell. So you've got a problem, you go on YouTube, you think, how am I going to fix this brake light on my car? And that YouTube will tell you. And the

way that you choose a video is based on the amount of likes or the amount of comments or thumbs up on YouTube, whatever it is. And that's the same on our platform so we know we can endorse content admins can endorse content but other people can endorse it through the likes so there's that kind of social reinforcement aspect going on there as well so whilst there's a kind of like the fundamental basics of how people learn from each other and how we encourage that in a very intuitive way as i said and then the actual kind of reinforcement of content itself the stats of that whilst useful to to look at engagement i guess are the things that are called vanity metrics but they show that if a piece of

content is being utilized and liked and endorsed then it's ultimately it will have an impact on other people so you've got to make sure that quality of content that is getting likes and is getting endorsed is the right type of content. And that's what, that's got the right messages in it. But that feature is really interesting. I think platforms that don't have that kind of social element to them really miss a trip because like I said, it's the fundamental

of how people learn at the end of the day. What do you think about that though? The audience determining what is quality through things like those vanity metrics, likes and shares and all that. Because I would argue that a lot of our social media platforms, in some cases, are raised to the bottom. There's a lot of lowest common denominator humor and those sorts of things. If you just look at social media, very simple, but mass produced and mass consumed example, a lot of success on YouTube and TikTok is like prank videos and simple things like that. And the things that we really enjoy. And obviously, when we're in a learning and development mindset, we're not looking for that level of entertainment,

but it can sometimes be hard to determine upon consuming something, what the long term value of that is going to be is really my point. So you watch a video, you say, wow, that person was a great presenter. The concepts are very clear, but you can't tell until maybe much later how that actually came through and how you applied it and how successful that application was. Whereas somebody who had a, maybe a more boring version of a similar presentation with the same outcomes designed actually could have had more impact because the ideas were just that much more actionable. So is there any sort of care taken there or are you mostly trusting the audience to kind of determine successfully, you know, what should be most popular based on those likes and that sort of thing? I think there's probably in that situation, there's probably a little bit of

an experiment to play. And if there's kind of a couple of pieces of content that have the same message ultimately, but they're delivered in different ways i don't know the answer to that quite i've not experienced that specific scenario but i think it would be good to see like you say from an application point of view what's the goal of this piece of content why are people consuming it and then to follow up with that later down the line and is the one with the likes the one that did actually have the the biggest impact or not i think it's different like people coming to the to a learning although we're utilising kind of elements from social media, it's a very different experience. So we're not, it is focused on that moment of need resource type approach. So

people are coming to the platform and finding the things that they want or need. And there might be stuff that's been assigned to them, obviously, that is more mandatory. But if they're looking for content or accessing information, and they're giving it a like or giving it they're pinning it to their profile there's just an element of reassurance in that um but yeah like ultimately that's why they're vanity metrics they're not showing that like the bigger impact down the line that because that's more of a broad look at what success looks like for a particular initiative or the reason why that content was created in the first place. But yeah, ultimately, it's a challenge for any piece

of content, right? That kind of what's the application, what's the impact further down the line. But yeah, it would be interesting to do a bit of an experiment on that and see the delivery of content and how it impacts the way people perceive it. And there is an element of social reinforcement in that, which is useful because you're bouncing off the ideas of other people. But there is some, I guess there is an element of caution in that, in that you could just be going along with other people. And actually, is there something different that has been done better? So yeah, I can see both sides of the picture there. That's why I asked earlier, you know, how do we

determine what relevant really is? Like as you and Nelson were discussing on your show, there is so much content out there. We really are just so full of content that it can be difficult to determine what is the best to even get to what could potentially be the best. And the metrics that we usually have are usually simple, qualitative vanity metrics. So I just think that's always a question is really determining the best thing. And what I feel like is a decent enough answer is incorporating other people, i.e. leadership to help you along with that learning. And that's sort of the reason I brought this up because you founded Women In, which is an organization for women in the business. And that to me is it's some sort of an indicator

that can't always maybe achieve what you're hoping to learn even from within your organization or from within the tools that you're provided that you in fact need to seek help from others outside, or you just need to seek help from other places and build a sort of community to really support you. And I feel like whether it's directly true or not, that probably helps in cases of learning where you don't have a very clear indicator of how something is going to help you in the long-term future and bringing somebody in to, you know, who maybe has experiences beyond what you have, who's more advanced in the industry can help you understand what will be beneficial in the long-term. I think that's why

I'm poking at this a little bit, but ultimately I'd like, if you wouldn't mind just to, I want to give you the floor so you can explain a little bit about women in and what brought you to founding that. Yeah, thank you. I think in what you're saying that there is a bigger conversation around kind of mentorship or even coaching within businesses that we're definitely seeing a push to a positive push towards at the moment. So and that is it's useful to be able to get those kind of fresh perspectives from someone outside of your direct environment to think, you know, how can we approach this differently? Are we doing it correctly? That sort of stuff. And, you know, this is where we want to get to and how can you help me get there? Or am I doing the right thing? Like it depends what situation you're in. So I think there's

something to be said there for how organizations encourage that level of mentorship within what they do as well. But certainly within Women In, one of the reasons I founded it was because I'd noticed a pattern in the conversations I was having, particularly with women in L&D teams, was that they needed that kind of sounding board for things that they were doing within their own organisations to say that, you know, I think I'm approaching this in the right way, but what are you doing? Am I doing it right? Is there anything else I should be thinking of? There is as much as they'd like to be able to do that within the organizations they work for. It's not always possible because either you've got a small L&D team or you've got such a vast L&D team that have such different

priorities and so many demands on their time, but it becomes hard to, again, come out of the weeds and take that kind of bigger view of, are we really doing the right thing here? And there's almost that kind of consultative element that comes into play of let's bounce these ideas off someone to see how we can approach something differently and how are other organizations doing that so I started to notice his pattern in conversations and thought we need to create this element of community to allow that kind of safer space for women to share best practice to ask for advice and to do it in a way that doesn't make them really vulnerable. And a lot of people I've spoken to were kind of returning from maternity leave and not knowing what was going on in the industry and feeling kind of a bit disconnected from those

broader conversations. So Women In was really there to help, was set up to help people understand what's going on, to ask what's going on as well, because sometimes you don't want to do that on platforms like LinkedIn, because it does put you in a bit of a vulnerable situation. We set it up at the beginning, at the end of last year, and just as a WhatsApp group. And it's just really snowballed from there, essentially. I've not actually checked numbers recently, but I think we've probably got about 300 members on the WhatsApp group. There's about 500 people on the platform. And it's just a bit of magic, really.

I can't really put my finger on what it is about it that is so good. It's just people come into it and just are willing to be there for each other in a very honest way, free of charge. And so it's just created this magical community of women from across L&D and HR who are there to support each other, to have each other's backs and to say, actually, this is what you're doing is good. Or actually, can you think about it in this way? Or do you know anyone who's a really great facilitator? I'm looking for someone or those kinds of things that you just don't really know who to turn to to ask for. And we're definitely hearing that, I don't say definitely hearing now, but consistently

throughout my career in L&D, community and leaning into community has been so important for practice and putting things like you say into practice and figuring out whether you've done the right thing or not. It does extend the reach of whatever it is you're doing too. So it's really important and we're definitely seeing the benefits of it in Women In, but it's not unique to Women In. Other groups have the same feeling at the moment. So people I know that run similar communities have this sense of understanding the impact that they're having in enabling those conversations to take place. And that's really positive to me. And ultimately, I'd love to see the community continue to grow. But with that comes a challenge of how do we retain that magic that's currently happening

within this, I'm going to say smaller group, there's 300 of us, but how do we retain that magic? And how do we make sure we're still creating that psychologically safe space for people? I guess as long as we're thinking about how we do that on a practical level, then we probably will retain it. It needs to be quite purposeful. But yeah, it's definitely a value add, I think, to L&D at the moment. And people are really leaning into that, particularly teams that are having their resource and budget cut and headcount cut as well in challenging times in the industry. Congratulations. That's very exciting. Those are some very impressive numbers. I'm glad to hear that. It seems like this is an example of cross-organizational

learning in many cases, the mentorship and the coaching that you mentioned. I don't see a lot of this deliberately done among L&D teams. I mean, for reasonable enough reasons, I guess, competition, and it may not be the best methodology for, you know, learning certain skill sets, if you're advocating that somebody work with another company who might, like we were talking, have different taxonomies around skills. But theoretically, this sounds like a really good way to gather some critical social skills, and maybe cultural skills, that sort of thing to learn more about the people that you're working with and the industry that you're in. So are there ways that L&D teams can actually take a nod from what you are doing in Women In and maybe implement this sort of thing?

I mean, I've heard of exchanges, employee exchanges between companies that are maybe not affiliated in some way, but often happens in those that have, you know, the same owning body, that sort of thing. But what do you think? Can L&D teams implement this sort of learning, this sort of mentorship, coaching, community learning? Yeah, I mean, for sure. And I think a lot of organizations already are. The challenge is once you set up how you continue to maintain engagement in those initiatives. I know I ran a webinar last week for learning technologies. And one of the questions there

was around how you sustain engagement in communities or even get people to come in the first place. Now, the thing I'd say here is there needs to be a problem in the first place that you're solving for and that you identify. Because otherwise, if you set up a community that you think might be a solution to something or create a catalyst for something, but it's not actually based on the needs of anybody within your organization, then it's going to fall flat because the problem wasn't there in the first place. And that loops right back to the beginning of the conversation where we were talking about that kind of what do your employees need? What do they want? And if you're not, if you have an ear to the ground and you start to, and this is where patterns in conversation

become so important. So we often talk about data as very quantitative data that seems to be like the holy grail. But actually, in the patterns you start to notice within qualitative data like conversations, you're able to then think, well, actually, there is something here that we need to start addressing. And what is that? And you can start having the deeper conversations to figure that out. So I think that would be my advice in the first place is, yes, whilst communities and mentorship approaches can be really valuable, what is it that you're actually trying to solve by implementing this in the first place? And if you have an answer to that, then great. But just because you build a community doesn't mean that people will come. And that's a lesson that I kind of learned at the time when I first set up Women In. I was thinking, I think I've identified the problem. I think there's going to be an uptake for this. Thankfully, I was right. But yeah, and then the other side of that is like the marketing side of it within your organization. So if you have these groups already in existence, how are you making sure that people are aware of

them? And that because, you know, you need people to champion them. You need people to talk about the success of them. And you need to be tracking the success of them as well. For Women In, for example, we're doing, we do feedback forms, but I also make a conscious effort to reach out to people and check whether they've secured work or contracts through connections they've made via Women In, because I know that's been happening, which is brilliant. On the other side of that is people taking on the ideas and kind of making their own little subgroups and creating little hubs of knowledge for themselves, which is

ultimately, that was ultimately the aim. So yeah, I think organisations are already doing this. It's not a new thing. I just think the importance of it, particularly off the back of the pandemic, that we, you know, I think we're still suffering the consequences of that lack of face-to-face connection or even just communication skills in general. So I think there's something around those type of communities that foster the ability to network and develop those skills to do with networking and communication that you don't necessarily get in many other places. So I think that's a real benefit of community groups as well, and from a more, I guess, from a softer skills perspective.

Yeah, I think that question of how to actually track progress in such communities is a big one. One of these types of resources is ERGs, employee resource groups, that's at least what we call them in America. Those are more and more common these days, and generally, you know, fighting for representation and giving less represented groups community to work with each other in the same vein as women in it sounds. And I'm not sure that those types of groups would want oversight at that level to really determine the progress that they're making because I think those are the kinds of groups that are more likely to determine their own progress and want to have the authority to determine their own progress. What do you think about that ultimately? Is there a modicum of having an amount of power in those groups as well within your organization and actually maybe building up power that was previously lacked because that community or that group of people was more disparate? Yeah, I think it comes back again to what are the aims of the community.

And I mean, there needs to be a way to communicate that to other people in the organization in a way that is relevant and safe and you know and protects the identities of individuals that are part of those groups that oversight is important to enable the business to empower that change to happen because it's not it's not going to be yes the group there to support each other and to push for positive change a lot of the time and to create kind of safe spaces to communicate. But if there is an outcome they're wanting to drive as a result of the conversations they're having, of course, they need to lean into stakeholders across the business to do that.

It's not so much the people outside the ERGs that are coming in and saying, what are you doing? What's the impact of what you're doing? It's the people who are in the ERGs communicating out to say, these are the issues we're taught, we're seeing. This is what we might suggest, but how can we work with the business to think about that? You know, is it going to be a focus of the business or are we going to have to do this in a different way? And what does that look like? So I think there is that kind of element of responsibility within the community to, again, identify patterns, identify goals, work out what it is that they're hoping to achieve. And whether that is just creating a safe space to talk and share their experiences, that's great. That might be the aim of the group. great, that might be the aim of the group. And if the impact is the people across the organization who might see themselves as part of that community, ultimately come to that community

and share in that experience, creating a safe space, and then potentially either stay with the business for longer, or you can attract talent from outside the business that would feel supported within the business. That's a success. There doesn't need to be another goal. But then in other instances, people might be thinking, let's talk specifically around hiring diversity in tech. There might be an ERG around women in tech, for example, or other diversity groups in tech. And what are the outcomes of those conversations?

What are you trying to push for within your business? And there might be kind of more specific goals around that, that you communicate and talk to the wider business about. I want to spend the last few minutes talking about learning design, because you've done a lot of instructional design in your career. My first question is, when designing content, really of any sort, how do you think about the target learning population? So what data do you have to have about that collective in order to make content that is most appealing to the most number of people? What do you need to know about them? Do you categorize them as you're going through that?

Do you try to make different options for different people? I know we're not really talking about learning styles anymore, but based on the initial access or knowledge that somebody has about the learning, that sort of thing. What do you need to know about people in order to make the learning most effective for the group? This is a question that has been a bit of a gripe in my career. One of the reasons that I suppose I potentially moved away from content development in some instances, because having when particularly from a bespoke e-learning background, when you're creating hour long, 45 minute, hour long courses for a particular

part of a business or a particular audience, there isn't the ability to personalize the experience in as much depth as is needed, I think, to make an effective learning experience. And so I've always kind of felt a pushback against asking too many questions. So ultimately, you need to know what an individual, what their role is, what they're doing within an organization, what their day-to-day looks like, why the piece of content you're creating is going to be useful to them and what the impact of creating that content is. Now, the other side of that is if you get all that information how do you go about delivering something in a way that they're going to be able

to remember it we know that our brains can't cope with too much information so creating stuff that comes in kind of bite-sized chunks but for me is always going to be the way forward now bite size the term bite size or micro learning i think is a debate because yes in my mind that's something that's quite short five to ten minutes but ultimately if there's an enormous topic on something bite size for something that is days long could be half a day for example you know it's i think it's all comparative however ultimately what we want to be doing is setting people up to learn effectively. And when you're listening to something, watching something, reading something, there's going to be maybe one or two key things that you take away from something that you're able to then action or remember as you leave whatever it is that you're doing. So creating

content in a way that leans into that, I think is really important. But again, that was a challenge that you had from a bespoke e-learning development background. E-learning was often not the solution for the problems that people were coming to us with, but that was what we did. That's what we delivered. That's what we had to create. And that obviously, again, didn't sit too nicely with me. But then the other side of it is that they'd say, I want a 60-minute course. And you say, well, why do you want a 60 minute course and you say well why do you want a 60 minute course like what are you hoping to cover and there's no there was never a real answer to that but ultimately it's what had been sold to them in the first place so as

a there's a whole other conversation there around like what those needs are and like digging into what those needs are at a pre-sale stage ultimately as well and making sure you what you're creating is relevant to the users the business and making sure it's a good fit ultimately which i'm really pleased to say like from a thrive perspective we're really great at doing that it's one of the things i love about my job is that you know the quality of the conversations we're having at pre-sale stage it's really interesting that kind of content development perspective is as much my answer to your question is you need as much information as possible about the role about the individual but there's only a certain and get to the lowest common

denominator in terms of personalization that you possibly can given the constraints that you're working within because those look different for every business but yeah it's it's very difficult and it's a challenge the impossible question i admit i asked you the impossible question but you know we got to make progress toward it the impossible question. I admit, I asked you the impossible question. But you know, we got to make progress toward it. The last question I want to ask you then, you spoke with Lauren Waldman, the learning pirate on one of your episodes as well. And as soon as I heard that episode, I reached out to her instantly because I love what she's doing. She goes on social media and she kind of responds to claims about learning science and posts about learning science that she thinks are not doing justice to

the science or in some cases just using bad science or false representations. And she tries to let the community know this is really how the brain works or this is really how learning works in psychology. I just want to ask you about learning science. So as a practitioner, where on the priority list should learning science come when we're developing content? Because getting really deep into the brain and how it works is obviously critical for making sure that we're maximizing retention and the outcomes and the long-term impact of this learning as we've been talking this whole time. But can we reconcile it with things like agile learning and lean learning like Nelson says, for instance, and can we reconcile it with

making the content exciting enough? One example of this is when I was working in publishing, one of our major, one of my company's major competitors released a textbook tool that actually locked students out and forced them to undergo distributed practice. So they would have the textbook, the digital textbook open for a while, they'd be reading, and they'd get to a section and it would literally lock them out for 12 hours because that was a part of distributed practice. You learn most effectively if you, you know, come back and continue to read later and you learn in those chunks basically. And it basically said you're not allowed to cram anymore. This was just kind of a pilot. It did not

go over well, but this was just one was just kind of a pilot. It did not go over well. But this was just one example of kind of forcing learning science into place where it just didn't really seem appropriate. Obviously, this is students, whole different population. But what do you think about that? Where does the science of the brain and learning really come into play when we have to make sure that people are listening, that they're entertained enough? And we also have to make sure those long term outcomes are being met.

entertained enough. And we also have to make sure those long term outcomes are being met. Yeah, well, I think broadly speaking, in my experience, it hasn't really factored into the equation for a lot of people when actually it should be a massive priority. It should be the way that we design is with the brain in mind, understanding what impacts people in the decisions they make and the way that they approach anything. so that i think there's a huge piece that is required from not only we talk about kind of how lnd teams upskill themselves more broadly in terms of their day-to-day but actually from a learning science perspective we all need to kind of get a better understanding of how the brain works and how we can set ourselves up and therefore those people we're responsible for and how we can set ourselves up and therefore those people we're responsible for and how we can set them up for success as well. Because otherwise, you know, what are we actually

doing at the end of the day? So yeah, it's not, I don't think it's a current priority for people, but I absolutely think it should be is my short answer there. Well, Helen, before we wrap, can you just let my audience know where they can learn more about you, the show and what it is that you do? Yeah, absolutely. Anyone can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active. You can listen to my podcast, which is Diary of a CLO, which is available on Spotify, Apple and any other platform, essentially. And then you can also find me as part of the Women in WhatsApp group as well. So just drop me a message if you want to join into that.

All right. Wonderful. Well, thank you again for joining me today. It was a wonderful conversation. And for everybody listening at home, 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.