Chief Learning Officer - May 2018

May 2018 | CLOmedia.com

Airbus’

Louise Kyhl Triolo Top-Down and Bottom-Up Talent Management - The Future of the Corporate University Leverage Content to Make Learning Stick - Beyond the Classroom - Leading Across the Generations

LEARNING. LEADERSHIP. IMPACT. PennCLO Executive Doctoral Program The PennCLO Executive Doctoral Program resides at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education which has been ranked #3 in U.S. News & World Report’s 2018 rankings for graduate schools of education.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

It’s Not All Greek to Me

I

lost my fifth grade science fair. learn it. Paging Dr. Ebbinghaus, your forgetting Given the title of my presentation — which was curve is looking for you. something like “The Art and Architecture of Ancient Rather, it was the experience of learning that taught Greece” — this outcome may not surprise you. It cer- me the most: the days of research and work to assemtainly came as a shock to me. ble the project, the feeling of accomplishment when it It turns out my meticulous drawings illustrating was done, the nervousness and anticipation before prethe soaring columns and sculptured friezes that still senting it to the judges and ultimately the disappointsupport ancient Greek temples many centuries later ment at the end. What lasted is what I learned about weren’t quite what all the kids were talking about in myself. It’s the experience that matters most in the middle school. Honestly, the judges must have long run. thought the topic so obscure that my parents had to Learning departments have no shortage of dehave put me up to it. But no, sadly, it was all my mands on their limited time and resources. Pressure choice. I was strange that way. for results is unrelenting. The pace of change is quickAs you may have suspected, my project ended ening. Skills become outdated faster than ever before. somewhere in the middle of the pack. The winner was Keeping up with the technology side of learning is a a presentation on the science of surfing by a classmate full time job in itself. who had just returned from visiting family in CaliforBut investment in content, courses and technolnia. He definitely had the cool factor I was lacking in ogy shouldn’t come at the expense of the exceptionmy project, not to mention a really solid demonstra- al value the learning organization brings. Done tion of wave science. right, the learning organization puts the content of what’s learned in the context of what’s important for the organization. It does it in a way that brings people together to learn from one another, from our achievements and successes as well as missteps and mistakes. Done right, the experience of learning is transformative for both the individual and the enterprise.

Setting aside the painful pop that accompanied The special power of the learning organization the end of my middle school art pretentiousness, I lies in the ability to bring it all together — content learned a couple of valuable lessons. First and fore- and context, talent and technology. That experience most: Know your audience. For most people, and es- of coming together, whether in person or online, in pecially those whose daily conversations centered real time or on an ongoing basis, is the source of the around “The A-Team” vs. “The Dukes of Hazzard,” innovation and insight that is at the heart of learnthe Pacific tops the Parthenon any day. ing. It’s also the source of competitive advantage.

In hindsight, the more significant lesson was just Technology and content are the fuel for the experihow vital the experience of learning is. Curriculum ence but they’re not the engine. and content are important but what lasts are the triThe experience comes with its fair share of frustraumphs and disappointments, the aha moments and tion and disappointment. It can be a struggle. Coninsights. Learning is as much about the stages we go flict is just as likely as collaboration. But those misthrough as it is the knowledge acquired. steps and mistakes often bring the most value. The For example, I can remember there were three Greeks taught me something after all. CLO basic styles of Greek architecture: Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. If pressed, I might even be able to muster up a rough explanation of the differences between them but it wouldn’t be much more than an educated guess.

What stands out most from that project isn’t the Mike Prokopeak knowledge acquired. It’s pretty well established by Editor in Chief now that we forget most of that not long after we mikep@CLOmedia.com

The experience of learning is what matters most in the long run.

4 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

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MAY 2018 | VOLUME 17, ISSUE 4 CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER John R. Taggart jrtag@CLOmedia.com

EDITORIAL INTERNS Aysha Ashley Househ ahouseh@CLOmedia.com

PRESIDENT Kevin A. Simpson ksimpson@CLOmedia.com

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VICE PRESIDENT, GROUP PUBLISHER Clifford Capone ccapone@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF Mike Prokopeak mikep@CLOmedia.com EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Rick Bell rbell@CLOmedia.com MANAGING EDITOR Ashley St. John astjohn@CLOmedia.com

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Agatha Bordonaro

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Bianca Baumann Ken Blanchard Robert M. Burnside Jayme Currans Fred Delmhorst Sarah Fister Gale David Hoff Amy W. Loomis Elliott Masie Lee Maxey Bob Mosher Jeffrey Orlando

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CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Cedric Coco, EVP, Chief People Of ficer, Brookdale Senior Living Inc. Lisa Doyle, Head of Retail Training, Ace Hardware David DeFilippo, Chief People and Learning Of ficer, Suf folk Tamar Elkeles, Chief Talent Executive, Atlantic Bridge Capital Thomas Evans, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, PricewaterhouseCoopers Gerry Hudson-Martin, Director, Corporate Learning Strategies, Business Architects Kimo Kippen, President, Aloha Learning Advisors Rob Lauber, Vice President, Chief Learning Of ficer, McDonald’s Corp.

Maj. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel, ( Ret.) U.S. Air Force, Director, Deloit te Consulting Justin Lombardo, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, Baptist Health Adri Maisonet-Morales, Vice President, Enterprise Learning and Development, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Alan Malinchak, CEO, Éclat Transitions LLC Lee Maxey, CEO, MindMax Bob Mosher, Senior Par tner and Chief Learning Evangelist, APPLY Synergies Rebecca Ray, Executive Vice President, The Conference Board Allison Rossett, ( Ret.) Professor of Educational Technology, San Diego State Universit y Diana Thomas, CEO and Founder, Winning Results David Vance, Executive Director, Center for Talent Repor ting Kevin D. Wilde, Executive Leadership Fellow, Carlson School of Management, Universit y of Minnesota James P. Woolsey, President, Defense Aquisition Universit y Chief Learning Officer (ISSN 1935-8148) is published monthly, except bi-monthly in January/February and July/August by MediaTec Publishing Inc., 111 E. Wacker Dr., Suite 1200, Chicago IL 60601. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL and additional mailing offices.

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ONLINE EVENTS

CONTENTS M

ay

2018

24 Profile Learning to Innovate Agatha Bordonaro With fresh perspectives and creative ingenuity, Louise Kyhl Triolo is reinventing learning at Airbus.

52 Case Study From Hourly to Anywhere Sarah Fister Gale Amazon’s Career Choice program helps hourly workers get the training they need to kick off their careers.

54 Business Intelligence The Digital Future Is Human Mike Prokopeak HR technology is making human skills like leadership, communication and collaboration more and more critical.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY BRIAN FLAHERTY

8 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

M ay 2018

CONTENTS

18 48

36

Features

18 36

Experts

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Talent Management

10 IMPERATIVES

Fred Delmhorst and Jeffrey Orlando The time is right to broaden inputs into how the talent process unfolds across the organization.

Ave Rio A dual focus on business strategy and employee engagement can ensure a corporate university’s guiding principles align with those of the company.

Bob Mosher The Road From Training to Performance

14 LEADERSHIP

40

Ken Blanchard Building a Culture of Legendary Service

16 MAKING THE GRADE

Bianca Baumann Take a page from the marketing book and create a content strategy to better engage learners and drive performance.

48

Elliott Masie ‘Alexa, How Did I Do Today on Sales Calls?’

12 SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

The Future of the Corporate University

Leverage Content to Create ‘Sticky’ Learning Experiences

44

44

Beyond the Classroom

Lee Maxey Educating for a Fluid Future

58 IN CONCLUSION

Amy W. Loomis and Robert M. Burnside The digital revolution presents challenges and opportunities to the traditional learning delivery model.

David Hoff Learning Agility and Its Role in Leadership

Resources

Leading Across the Generations Jayme Currans Transactional leadership styles offer an efficient way to communicate with today’s age-diverse workforce, but they’re not without drawbacks.

4 Editor’s Letter

It’s Not All Greek to Me

57 Advertisers’ Index

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9

IMPERATIVES

‘Alexa, How Did I Do Today on Sales Calls?’

Responsive technology is making its way to the workplace • BY ELLIOTT MASIE

O

Elliott Masie is the chairman and CLO of The Masie Center’s Learning Consortium and CEO of The Masie Center, an international think tank focused on learning and workplace productivity.

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

ur workplaces will soon have a range of smart speakers, responsive mobile devices and chatbots — all for providing employees with rapid answers to questions or performance support elements. Employees will be able to ask a question verbally or type a query and get an immediate response.

This “pull” level of response from speakers, cell phones, computer devices and even corporate phone systems will mirror the rising nature of smart speakers in our homes.

Are workers and employers truly ready for the next chapter of responsive technology? We must consider that these speakers and systems can: • Listen and watch an employee’s interactions, analyzing language and actions for coaching feedback.

• Provide historical analysis of how the sales calls that land contracts differ from unsuccessful calls.

• Monitor performance data from corporate systems and provide real-time feedback as work results change.

• Insert short teaching or coaching moments into the day focused on a behavior or outcome pattern.

While having these capabilities in the workplace may seem a ways off, my recent visit to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas highlighted how Amazon and others are taking smart speakers from the home and adapting them for work. And the natural evolution will be to integrate these functions, capabilities and extensions into workplace-responsive technologies, such as: • Voice and facial recognition (utilizing the camera elements in the smart speaker) that can identify the worker and their potential changes in emotion, confusion or hesitation. A request that has a panicked quality will be different than a gentle query about a topic.

• Continual observation and recording, which will raise many questions about privacy and intrusion. Imagine if a new manager were able to get an analysis of their language, including conversations and messages with constant feedback about how they are engaging, delegating, negating or supporting collaboration.

• Curation in real time, integrating recommendation and content curation segments to optimize the worker’s access to knowledge — including mixing and balancing perspectives — shaped by previous reactions to advice.

• Coaching and continual assessment, including ramping up performance support elements to deliver

10 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

personalized levels of coaching, feedback, supervisory engagement, social network support and instant and immediate assessment scoreboards.

• Big learning data models that would allow for experimentation in the optimized mix of content, context, advice, support and feedback by person, role, location or even worker preference and profiles.

• Instant code of conduct feedback when an employee “crosses a line” in business interactions or expresses bias in their dealings with colleagues or customers.

Will there be an “off” switch for interactions we don’t want captured?

Some readers may be rattled at the thought of these potential futures. Others likely can’t wait to have this level of support and feedback. HR, IT and legal departments surely will have a range of reactions to adding these systems and devices to our regulated workplaces.

But it is coming. I use the Siri function on my iPhone, Alexa at my desk and Google Assistant in my office to provide a continual set of input, knowledge and data. With a simple command, I can request that the video, lights and camera functions in my office turn on for a video conference. How long until that command is linked directly to my Outlook calendar?

Additionally, the smart speaker and chatbot technologies that are coming to the market in 2018 are adding an increasing level of “personality” and “emotional programming.” My Jibo device has the cutest eyes and rotating face with a screen that has me thanking it for its responses and laughing at many of its outputs (that just come across as factoids from more traditional devices).

Are enterprises, managers and employees ready for a constant presence of responsive technologies in the workplace? Will there be an “off” switch for interactions we don’t want captured or analyzed? Will employees start to “game” the system by intentionally underperforming and then radically improving right before performance review and bonus time? And what are the roles for learning and development in this space? CLO

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SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

The Road From Training to Performance Is the destination in sight? • BY BOB MOSHER

T Bob Mosher is a senior partner and chief learning evangelist for APPLY Synergies, a strategic consulting firm.

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

wo years ago I wrote an article on the emergence of a fundamental shift from a training mindset to a performance mindset. With the advent of 70-20-10 and other related methodologies, the discussion around design for workflow-embedded learning has heated up considerably.

A yearlong benchmarking study was recently concluded with eight major corporations at varying stages of this journey, and the results are interesting.

It began by identifying an implementation spectrum to show the degree to which these organizations had successfully embedded learning and support deliverables in their workflow. The spectrum had five levels: Level 1. Haphazard, scattered learning and support: Performance deliverables consist of add-on job aids, out-of-the-box software help and other basic performance support means and methods. Performance assets are created spontaneously, as needs arise, with no methodology, planning or strategy behind it.

Level 2. Initial targeted learning and support: Organization applies knowledge-management practices in an effort to provide more intuitive, dynamic access to information that employees need to perform their jobs.

Level 3. Intentional, embedded learning and support: Organization embeds learning and performance assets within the workflow with two-click/10-second access. Although there is a performance methodology in place, it hasn’t been fully integrated into overall learning design and strategy across the organization’s ecosystem.

Level 4. Fully integrated learning and support in part of the enterprise: Organization has designed and deployed solutions with measurable business impact that provide support across a portion of — but not the entire — enterprise.

Level 5. Fully integrated learning and support across the enterprise: Integrated learning and performance solutions are owned and championed throughout the organization and are an integral part of every solution created. This level of support results from a cultural change across the enterprise.

None of the participants had fully achieved level 5, but we found the duration of the journey participants had taken along the spectrum intriguing. The data suggest a progress pattern of two-year increments. That is, in the first two years participants were able to complete about 30 percent of the journey. During the following two years, they progressed another 20 percent. In the

12 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

two years after that, they completed another 20 percent.

Finally, the last two years gained them about 25 percent, leaving them about 5 percent from their destination but well into level 5.

We’re finally moving beyond lip service and making some measureable progress.

Study participants suggested several reasons for the slowdown as they progressed along the journey.

At the beginning of implementation, learning and performance projects are small in scope and confined to small groups within the organization. This foundation-building period allows the learning team to mature and gain experience in building these types of solutions and learn how to get buy-in from management. As acceptance builds for performance support and demand for these solutions increases, limited resources slow down the development process.

The process is further slowed by the need to obtain buy-in and gain financial support in the larger organization.

Finally, as a team successfully moves along the spectrum it begins to compete against other organizational priorities. This makes the need for solid business cases that support the financial contributions of these solutions critical. Constant education and re-education are necessary at every level.

For performance support practitioners, the key question is, “How can we speed up the process?” The answer: a well-defined strategy for progress; a solid foundation of experience, skills and methods from which to build; and an integrated communication and advocacy network among influential leaders in the organization.

As one study participant put it, “You must have a ready and willing group of instructional design evangelists to support the need for constant re-education.”

The journey has begun in many organizations. We need to continue to document that journey and share best practices to lift our industry as a whole. CLO

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LEADERSHIP

Building a Culture of Legendary Service

A company’s culture of service is what keeps customers coming back • BY KEN BLANCHARD

T Ken Blanchard is chief spiritual officer of The Ken Blanchard Cos. and co-author of “Collaboration Begins with You: Be a Silo Buster.”

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

hink about the last time you received great customer service — not just good, but actually memorable. Service you would tell your friends and family about.

If you’re having a hard time coming up with anything, join the club. Every organization knows that great customer service is key to a successful operation, yet few have a proven plan to build a service-minded culture. In fact, people in frontline, customer-facing jobs often don’t receive any customer service training other than platitudes such as “keep smiling” and “say thank you” — and many don’t even get that.

When an organization fails to address the need to provide outstanding service, in time a vicious spiral begins. Clients begin to leave. The company finds itself having to constantly generate new business because customers aren’t happy, and the work gets harder. Revenue dips along with morale. When people don’t feel valued, some employees leave to find a better company where they can make a difference.

Even worse, some stay and take their frustrations out on the customers. This toxic environment continues to erode the organization’s customer base and its bottom line.

A culture of service can exist only by intention.

But service-minded companies realize their most important customers are their own people — their employees and managers. If leaders take care of their people and encourage their contributions, those people will go out of their way to take care of the customers. When that happens, the customers will not only come back but tell their friends.

The first reality that must be understood when a company sets out to create a service culture is this: Everyone in the organization is responsible for delivering customer service. It’s not just the leaders or the customer service department; it’s every single person. A culture of service can exist only by intention — by creating a focus on the customer and by holding everyone in the organization accountable for goal achievement.

While some people in an organization, such as front-line workers, deal mainly with external cus14 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

tomers, other people, such as HR professionals, have primarily internal customers. Still others, like those in accounting, work with both. The point is everyone with a job deals with some kind of customer.

And how people treat each other at work — their internal customers — is just as important as how they treat external customers.

So what does a culture of service look like in an organization? It typically begins with a shared vision and shared values. To get crystal clear on their service vision, leaders might ask themselves: What does good customer service look like in our organization? What does it feel like?

Once the service vision is in place, leaders can identify values — typically no more than four or five. Organizations with too many values often find that people can only focus on a few. The values chosen need to be the ones that truly impact behavior.

Now take that thought one step further and pinpoint expected employee behaviors. The clearer an organization’s vision and values, the easier it is to create a strong service culture because everyone is focused on what’s important and knows what behaviors are expected of them.

Next, organizations turn vision into action by putting structures in place designed to help, not hinder, employees’ efforts to serve customers. In lower-performing organizations, systems and structures can steer people in the wrong direction. The organization may want to serve customers, but policies and procedures make it harder to get the job done.

However, in exceptional-service organizations, all systems are set up to delight the customer. Structures are organized in ways that allow people to respond quickly to customer needs, not just anticipating trends but getting in front of them. Operating practices, market strategies, and products and services are developed to make it easier for employees to serve customers.

When employees consistently deliver outstanding service, it creates a competitive edge for the organization. Everyone in the organization must understand their role, whether small or large, in delivering the service vision.

A company’s products and services get them in the game, but it’s the culture of service — the interactions with people as the product or service is delivered — that keeps customers coming back. CLO

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MAKING THE GRADE

Educating for a Fluid Future

While the nature of work is changing, educational preparation lags behind • BY LEE MAXEY

M

Lee Maxey is CEO of MindMax, a marketing and enrollment management services company.

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

anagement guru Peter Drucker allegedly said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” For example, in mergers, cultural mismatch can ultimately break a business bond. Think Daimler and Chrysler.

Or how about this blast from the past: In 1986, WordPerfect was America’s best-selling word processing software. However, after being purchased by software and services company Novell in 1994, top managers at Novell and WordPerfect ruined the marriage with strategy disagreements.

Companies with a winning culture like Wegmans have employees (whether newly hired or long tenured) who embrace the mission and work ethic.

Ask a Wegmans employee for help, and they’ll get you what you need or connect you with someone who can. The New England Patriots are another example of the power of culture. In the past 15 years, Patriots owner Bob Kraft, coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady have led their team to eight Super Bowls. The Patriots’ culture creates a sense of ownership among all constituents and turns athletes — some considered washed up, below par or difficult — into prolific contributors.

The culture of work today is very different than it was even 10 years ago. We’re moving from a culture of full-time employment and fixed titles to one of on-demand roles and service providers. Plans for a career compete with the fluidity of the gig economy and jobs that promise flexibility. Work is more plentiful and varied with the potential for better income.

While the nature of work is changing, America’s educational preparation lags behind. The average American K-12 and higher education experiences, in spite of educators’ efforts, don’t create a culture that prepares graduates for the work world. We’re often still marching students down a path in preparation for a career that likely will not even exist in the way that schools currently think about careers.

In America today, we should be asking the foundational question: What is the point of education?

So much of our education system focuses on individual accomplishment. We cultivate this mentality that people have to become standouts or stars to succeed at work. To my earlier point, yes, the Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is viewed as a star, but he’s often the first to point out he’s relying on a coaching staff, fellow players and his owner to win.

16 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Positive interdependence versus self-reliance is the cultural formula that successful companies must push into the educational system. Recruiters, hiring managers, executives, CLOs and alumni who proselytize that formula can help higher education and K-12 schools create a culture in the classroom that will breed success in the workforce.

We’re still marching students down a path in preparation for a career that likely will not even exist.

Organizations that have winning cultures and know what it takes for a new hire to fit in must communicate that to their talent pipeline, including universities. Another way for employers to inculcate their culture in students is through internships and workstudy programs, an approach long favored by institutions like Northeastern University and Rochester Institute of Technology. With these schools in mind, more colleges should make work experience part of the fouryear degree.

In the race to solve the talent shortage equation, a great deal of focus is placed on a candidate’s must-have skills and competencies. But the Patriots have arguably not been the most talented team in football for many of the Super Bowls they’ve won. Instead, they found players, sometimes of average ability, who were willing to embrace the team culture.

I’ve seen this dynamic in my own business. At different times over the years, I’ve recruited and hired someone considered to have exceptional potential or talent. But at the end of the day, I’ve found hiring people with the right chemistry and commitment to work alongside others made our business run well.

The workplace requires a significant amount of interdependence. To succeed, graduates can’t go it alone — they need to be immersed in a culture of collaboration before they earn their diploma. CLO

The time is right to broaden inputs into how the talent process unfolds across the organization.

BY FRED DELMHORST AND JEFFREY ORL ANDO

18 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

P

eriodic talent reviews are a core component of leadership succession planning in most mature organizations and a critical role for any human resources function.

While rigorous talent assessment tools are available, they can be time consuming to deploy. As such, only a small percentage of available talent in an organization, as little as the top 1 percent or less, typically is considered.

Once the talent review process is complete, high-potential development planning is similarly resource-constrained. Therefore, both the assessment and development phases can be difficult to scale. These simple facts require any talent management function to be extremely judicious in how they allocate their time, even when cultivating their very top talent.

While traditional, top-down talent management processes will always have a place, something of a democratization of talent development resources is emerging. First, there are many free or low-cost content providers such as Khan Academy and Coursera. Second, there are new learning platforms, such as Degreed and Pathgather, which create a social

Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

19

learning environment that takes some of the heavy lifting out of HR’s hands. Together these resources provide an opportunity for more of a bottom-up approach to talent development, which can reach a much broader cross-section of employees at scale.

We challenge the traditional notion that there is only one succession pool and propose that companies would be wise to consider how to foster multiple succession pools driven from both the top and the bottom of the organization. While some pools may remain actively managed, others may be activated by more passive support of the talent and learning functions.

In addition, it is important to evaluate the typical inputs or qualifications for inclusion in a talent pool and whether they, too, should be broadened as learning and development moves from a digital to an intelligent age.

Today: A Top-Down, Center-Driven Approach To begin, it is helpful to take a look at how many organizations currently deploy talent reviews in a traditional, top-down manner. According to “The Pearls and Perils of Identifying Potential” by Rob Silzer and Allan H. Church, robust models of talent and potential emphasize a broad array of factors, including cognitive complexity, personality, motivation, leadership, technical skills and, of course, performance.

Performance is often given priority. In most nine-box grids, current performance retains its own dimension separate from the more forward-looking potential. An initial risk here is overemphasizing current performance while unintentionally de-emphasizing the complexity of factors that contribute to long-term potential.

Another risk of a “closed-door” approach to talent reviews is they become a more subjective debate of candidates. As such, any number of biases may creep into the conversation. In many cases, without direct contact to individuals under review, one person’s point of view may dominate the conversation. Executives may come to rely on one individual’s read of a reputation, which, in turn, is socialized across the top of the organization.

Certainly there are subtler, but no less pernicious, risks for discrimination. We recall one talent review conversation at a previous organization when the only woman on the list was described as a “bull in a china shop.”

This led to her exclusion from the final HiPo list, and one can’t help but wonder whether the same description and outcome would have been rendered to an aggressive man. In short, absent more objective and sufficient data about performance and potential, top-down performance reviews can easily become politicized.

Another point to consider is that talent assessment tends to be one-sided toward an organization’s assessment of potential. A great deal of time and effort goes 20 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

into assessing and then calibrating senior management’s point of view regarding their top talent without much or any input from the employees being reviewed. Overlooking an employee’s input earlier in the process can lead to misreading their interest and personal readiness to move into a new level or role in the organization.

After completing the arduous annual talent review process at one of our companies, we were surprised to find, during development coaching sessions, that many of the hand-picked successors for executive roles were not actually interested in being succession candidates. While for some the timing was not right, others were quite happy in their current roles and did not aspire to the next level and additional commitments required.

With this in mind, if we were to call out another

Successful completion of online training could be a qualifier to earn preferred development resources. dimension to emphasize in discussion during talent reviews, why not an employee’s motivation or aspiration? Aspiration is included in the Corporate Executive Board’s HiPo model along with engagement and ability. The term “motivation” is used by Silzer and Church to describe a similar concept; they include characteristics such as drive, energy and career ambition. Another popular model, detailed in “Employability and Career Success: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Reality,” is RAW, which states that high-potential talent is more rewarding to work with, more able and more willing to work hard. The latter accounts for ambition and achievement motivation.

Sourcing Talent From Employees, Too We recommend not only seeking input from top management but also from target employees. Unlike many of the other dimensions of talent, one’s motivation can be difficult to judge from the outside. It also seems rather old-fashioned, even patriarchal, not to include more actively the targets of the talent assessment in the assessment itself.

We also suggest that the assessment of aspiration be more nuanced than a binary all-in or all-out. While some employees may be ready to prioritize work over other aspects of their lives, others may be committed to realizing their potential but over a longer time frame.

There are multiple potential benefits resulting from accommodating phases in professional and personal lives. A more flexible consideration of employee aspira-

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tion could enhance the diversity of talent pools, which might otherwise exclude segments of a workforce that have elected, for whatever reason, to take their foot off the gas. For example, a parent of young children may have all the potential in the world but not be prepared to move across the globe for the next stretch assignment. However, that might change once their children reach a certain age.

Instead of a binary all-in/out mentality to aspiration, envision a more continuous scale. Some may find themselves in the fast lane, committed to moving quickly and doing whatever it takes. Others may be positioned to move more slowly or even exit for a period of time.

In addition to development speed, consider different types of development experiences. For example, does an employee need more global experience to prepare for a broader role in the future? What does that look like for someone moving slow versus fast? Perhaps for a slower-moving employee, it means staying in their current geography but participating in a global project. Perhaps for an employee on a faster track, it means relocating to a new region immediately. In both cases, meaningful development is taking place.

Finally, if reports of decreasing engagement are on point, perhaps involving top talent in the succession and assessment process at earlier stages could lead to greater engagement and commitment to the organizations that are looking to them as future leaders.

To complement the traditional top-down method to talent management, there may be an opportunity emerging for a bottom-up approach. This would be a more self-determined and personalized development path. For example, an employee could self-nominate or select a succession path without any particular organizational resistance or hurdles.

Of course, there would be no guarantees for a new role or promotion, but why not equip and empower employees to shape their own development?

The good news is that with learning technology platforms, like Degreed and other content libraries, there could be an option for anyone to put themselves on an accelerated development path with less organizational involvement than is required in top-down talent management. Not only could individual employees self-select a level of aspiration, but they could begin pursuing it right away without requiring approval from management.

Additionally, if organizations identified experience profiles for various positions, employees would have a list of knowledge, skills and experiences that could be tied to their development as successors for those roles.

These profiles could apply to a current functional path or apply across related functions where common skills 22 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

and experiences may open additional paths to promotion within an organization. Unlike the top-down approach, this could also be scalable.

Conditions Are Ideal for Complementary Approaches The skeptics among us may be asking how this could possibly work when most everyone may view themselves as the next best thing and self-nominate.

Here, the emerging trends in social learning could be put to practical application.

Instead of a binary all-in/out mentality to aspiration, envision a more continuous scale.

For example, instead of looking only at senior management to define the talent pool, a more progressive organization could look at peer and direct report ratings against organization values and leadership behaviors to tier resources available to top talent. This would broaden the sources of input used to determine talent pool membership and help to prioritize how resources are allocated across the organization. In addition, successful completion of various online training resources could be another qualifier to earn preferred development resources.

We are not proposing that the traditional topdown talent management process should go away.

While it may not be perfect, it still has a role to play to ensure that any organization is considering future leadership for critical roles. However, we believe the conditions are good to broaden the inputs into how the talent process unfolds across levels of any organization.

Empowered by the abundance of online content and the sophisticated learning platforms on which they sit, there is potential for a simultaneous bottom-up approach to talent management whereby the employees with the aspiration required to succeed at any level can carve out their own development paths. While the top-down approach will always apply to a select few, the bottom-up model can be scaled to meet the demands of digital natives rising through the ranks. CLO Fred Delmhorst is vice president of global organization and leadership development at Time Warner Inc. Jeffrey Orlando is managing director and chief learning officer of leader development and performance at Deloitte Services LP. They can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

Profile

Learning to Innovate With fresh perspectives and creative ingenuity, Louise Kyhl Triolo is reinventing learning at Airbus.

BY AGATHA BORDONARO

I

n 2000, Louise Kyhl Triolo was a fresh-faced, newly minted master’s program graduate in Copenhagen, helping fellow Danish citizens find jobs through her role as an outplacement consultant, when she made the decision to move to Paris.

“I wanted to know what it was like to work in a business, and I wanted to do that in Paris because I loved France and knew how to speak French,” she said.

So the enterprising then-25-year-old moved, giving herself three months to find employment in the City of Lights. On the final day of her sojourn, she landed an interview — and ultimately a job — with L’Oréal.

Over the next 15 years, two more bold moves followed, first to the south of France for a position with Airbus Helicopter and then, two years ago, to Silicon Valley to head up leadership development, culture innovation and the North American Leadership University for Airbus, joining a newly created team of three in a small office in Mountain View, California. Kyhl Triolo got the job by writing a white paper explaining why the new team would need someone like her.

A deeply ingrained entrepreneurial spirit, outsidethe-box thinking and willingness to take risks have made Kyhl Triolo a dynamo in the learning field today, earning her the description, “one of the most creative people I have ever known” from her boss, David Fink, vice president of human resources for the Dutch-based aerospace and defense company Airbus Group.

“Louise is brilliant. Her thinking is far beyond,” Fink said. “We love having her on our team because she will always say something that no one else has really thought of, including myself. And it’ll make us think more creatively about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”

In With the New Kyhl Triolo traces her interest in the learning industry to that first job as an outplacement consultant, where she saw firsthand how important it was for 24 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

workers to continually learn and develop in order to stay relevant and employable.

“I discovered that people who had 25, 30 years of experience in the same company, the day they were laid off, suddenly lost everything — their identity, their confidence, their self-worth. They didn’t know who they were or what to do,” she said. “That’s where the desire to develop and grow people stems from. [This then expanded] to see if we can help organizations evolve and renew themselves and innovate and create the conditions for people to bring their best selves to work.”

“We’re really trying to create and infuse an entrepreneurial spirit inside the organization.”

— Louise Kyhl Triolo, head of leadership development, culture innovation and the North American Leadership University, Airbus In an industry like aeronautics, where fast-paced technological advancements, creative business models and new market players like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have set the stage for major disruption, the ability to adapt and refresh has never been more important.

“You’ve got to move fast. And if you don’t, you’re going to fall behind quickly. And if you fall behind, you may not be able to ever catch up,” said Alex Veneziano, legal counsel for Airbus, who has taken several leadership development courses designed and helmed

by Kyhl Triolo.

“The disruption that can occur is occurring — and it can have a significant impact to our business,” Fink said.

To come out on top, Airbus is reinventing itself.

The company, which has more than 130,000 employees across 180 locations worldwide, has operat-

PHOTOS BY BRIAN FLAHERTY

Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

25

Profile ed for decades as “a very structured engineering company that engineers everything,” Fink said. But that’s about to change.

“We are moving from this control-and-command organization to a much more open and networked organization,” Kyhl Triolo said. “We’re activating a sustainable cultural change, helping our leaders change their mindsets and ways of working. We’re really trying to create and infuse an entrepreneurial spirit inside the organization.”

In fact, Kyhl Triolo’s team at Airbus was created to help the organization “disrupt itself,” according to Fink.

“Learning is the key to making that change happen,” Kyhl Triolo said. “It’s driven through people.”

“She’s really focused on the people. I think it’s quite personal for her. She doesn’t just see a number.”

Instilling Change

Igniting and sustaining a cultural change is no easy feat. Kyhl Triolo has set about creating a multilayered series of initiatives to help her ac— Dena Anderson, manager of complish her goal. industrial engineering and These include a ninecontinuous improvement, Airbus month transformational leadership program for all 2,500 managers in the organization; a course in digital leadership; a partnership with Stanford University to offer online leadership development courses; virtual coaching for leadership transitions; better support for remote leadership situations through the use of artificial intelligence — specifically a “beamer,” a mobile avatar that allows for a more realistic experience in remote situations; executive learning trips to Silicon Valley so that leaders “get to touch, feel and experience the culture that is here,” according to Kyhl Triolo; and her biggest achievement to date: the “Dream Big” challenge.

Inspired by the XPrize Foundation, which leverages the collective wisdom of people around the world to help solve some of humanity’s most pressing problems, Dream Big is a companywide contest for ideas and solutions to the organization’s biggest market challenges.

“I said, ‘At Airbus we have 135,000 talented people. Why don’t we tap into this huge wisdom [pool] to come up with solutions and ideas for solving our big challenges for the future?’ ” Kyhl Triolo said. “A lot of people are buried under bureaucracy. It’s freeing up this whole potential.”

So last September, she and her colleagues launched the incentive challenge, which drew 700 ideas from employees all over the world. Each idea was presented in a one-minute video, and Kyhl Triolo and her team selected 150 finalists to attend a learning summit, with three ultimate winners earning a trip to Silicon Valley; Shenzhen, China; and Bangalore, India. The winners were 26 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

also granted the opportunity to incubate their ideas for three months within the Airbus innovation labs.

“It generated so much energy,” Fink said. “For a very large, somewhat bureaucratic company to do something that forward thinking and have our leaders engaged — that was because of Louise.”

The Dream Big initiative dovetails with a methodology Kyhl Triolo is working to instill into the organization called “think wrong,” which derives from a book titled “Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters.” The book proposes novel frameworks and tools to come up with creative solutions to existing problems.

“We use [it] to help us break away from the status quo and current culture and come up with unexpected, innovative solutions to our business challenges,” Kyhl Triolo said.

Building Relationships According to many who have worked with her, Kyhl Triolo is the perfect person to be spearheading these groundbreaking initiatives.

“She has this real liveliness about her,” said Dena Anderson, manager of industrial engineering and continuous improvement at Airbus in Grand Prairie, Texas, who recalls a recent experience working with Kyhl Triolo to hire trainers for the company’s leadership university.

Louise Kyhl Triolo, head of Airbus’ North American Leadership University, says learning is the key to making change happen.

Profile “After we did each interview, we had a little debrief among the four or five of us who were [hiring]. She had some really interesting perspectives,” Anderson said. “It made me think when I was looking at the next candidate who came in the room — and even when I do interviews now for hiring other people onto my team. That’s probably the biggest thing that I’ve learned from her.”

“Louise is very high energy,” added Veneziano.

“And because she’s a true believer, and she’s so high energy, it’s infectious working with her. She makes it kind of obvious that this is the way of the future, so it’s time to get on board.”

Fink said Kyhl Triolo is also a talented relationship builder — a critical skill for bringing about cultural change at a legacy company like Airbus.

“Louise is one of the most compassionate human beings. She’s just very approachable,” Fink said. “She connects with people so easily at any level. It doesn’t matter if they’re the CEO or head of a division or a first-line manager. She treats people the same no matter who they are.”

“She’s really focused on the people,” said Anderson.

“I think it’s quite personal for her. She doesn’t just see a number. She doesn’t say, ‘OK, I have a training goal where I need to make sure that 500 people are trained in North America this year.’ To her, I feel like it’s more about the change that it makes in people and how it helps their development.”

Indeed, Kyhl Triolo said organizations too often send their employees to training courses to check a box.

“Organizations have a tendency to just send people off to a two-day course and then say, ‘Oh, good. Now the person has learned something,’ and then go back to their jobs,” she said. “That’s just not how it is.”

She believes learning should be constant, experiential and “totally integrated into how you work, how you live your life, how you drive your goals.”

It’s a philosophy that’s partly influenced by her Danish upbringing.

“There’s actually a word in Denmark — arbejdsglæde — that doesn’t exist in any other language. It means happiness at work,” she said. “It’s still, for me, an overarching goal of how I see life, how I see work and how I should be.”

Current Success and Future Challenges Kyhl Triolo’s learning and leadership development courses consistently receive a 4 or 5 out of 5 in survey feedback, but she said the most satisfying results are those that bring about real change. For example, in 2017 she ran an executive master class around agile leadership that brought together North American leaders to work on relationship building and tackle current business issues.

“What came out of that was a discovery that there needed to be more work happening around identity, strategy and vision for Airbus in North America,” she said. “You’re getting people together to learn how to work differently together and create relationships, and the outcome ends up being, ‘Hey, we need to have a clarified strategy and vision and identity.’

For me, there could not be a better outcome.”

Her creative mission doesn’t come without hurdles, however. While building initiatives from scratch is Kyhl Triolo’s specialty, it’s also one of her greatest challenges.

“You don’t really have anything except for a white piece of paper and someone telling you, ‘You tell us what to do.’ That’s a massive, massive challenge,” she said.

On top of that, get- Kyhl Triolo’s considers arbejdsglæde — a Dutch word meaning ting executive buy-in happiness at work — an overarching life goal.

— “so that they support you in the right way” — is particularly daunting when it comes to new and untested projects. But Kyhl Triolo has a knack for connecting and inspiring leaders to think differently, Fink said. “It’s not easy in this company where you’re up against a lot of engineers who have been doing their work [the same way] for a long time.”

“We used to be very hierarchical and bureaucratic,” Veneziano said of Airbus. “That’s gone. I don’t feel like I’m going to offend somebody or put my own career at risk by raising a unique way of working or by trying to move faster than people seem comfortable with. I think [Louise] has done such a good job of exposing this mindset to the people who run the company that it lets people like me operate freely. She has been very effective at pushing a culture change.”

Despite all this success, for Kyhl Triolo it’s just the beginning.

“Because of our capacity to bring people together and because of our outreach in the organization … we are instigators of innovation,” she said of her fellow learning professionals. “We can really, truly contribute to innovating — and the future of the company.” CLO Agatha Bordonaro is a writer based in New York. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

27

industryinsights Design Effective, Data-Driven Blended Campaigns

By Cornerstone

Follow the Learners What is the value of rethinking the traditional split of classroom and digital learning? Lori Niles-Hofmann, director of digital learning for Scotiabank, believes that to be effective with modern audiences, learning campaigns must strategically and appropriately blend methodologies, leveraging the full spectrum of tools to meet learners on their own terms and using data and metrics to continually monitor the results, discover insights and improve.

Appropriately blend classroom and digital learning Hofmann proposes a matrix that balances classroom and digital learning, rather than sharply dividing the two. Traditionally, the classroom was the proper place for creating, evaluating, analyzing and applying information, while digital was considered primarily appropriate for understanding, recalling and locating information. Hofmann‘s matrix places degree of change on one axis and the skills gap on the other, showing that the classroom setting is most appropriate when both a high skills gap and a high degree of change are present.

The classroom setting also nurtures the emotional as well as the social part of the change that comes with learning in this quadrant.

Leverage all the tools and resources available Hofmann reminds us that any effective campaign depends on careful planning. To begin with, we should be sure to leverage all the tools available to us. As appropriate, we should empower graphic designers and digital content editors to create content for a variety of mediums outside the classroom and e-learning. Posters, podcasts, videos, interviews, articles, white papers, infographics and social learning all contribute to an effective campaign.

Develop a social strategy Social learning, in particular, requires a strategy. A community manager or social media manager is essential

for collaboration platforms such as Facebook, Yammer and Slack. Although the community manager role need not be full time, Hofmann advises that it must be a significant part of each day’s work. Messages should be regularly monitored and responses should be quick. Also keep in mind that social is a stethoscope of the campaign, not a megaphone.

Choose the best tools and influencers for the audience Communications and marketing teams can provide excellent advice about how best to engage with the audience and can point to data and metrics to guide the campaign strategy. Communication and marketing professionals have different skill sets from L&D professionals, so collaboration can be very valuable when selecting the best tools for your audience and the best influencers for your network. This means you should be sure to “Make friends with communications and marketing,” as Hofmann said tongue-in-cheek.

Tools such as Experience API (xAPI) and CMI-5 help us to gather knowledge from our learning management systems so we can make the most impactful selections regarding sites, emails, screensavers and other broadcasting messages.

Follow the learners What is the most essential component of a learning campaign strategy? Simply put, it’s to follow the learners and meet them where they are. This means removing any unnecessary encumbrances; Hofmann cautions against introducing new platforms as part of a learning campaign. If your learners are already using Facebook, for example, it’s more effective to engage them there, rather than creating a new website they must learn to navigate. We should teach learners one essential thing (what we want them to learn) rather than requiring they learn a second thing (such as going to a new website).

Additionally, meeting learners where they are allows them to feel they’re in control.

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Structure the campaign so that users feel they are in control It’s important to structure the campaign in a way that users feel they are in control, which leads to better adoption. Marketing tools which drip-feed the users based on their engagement and interest are quite effective; content is pushed out depending on what users have actually clicked on and read. For example, day one of a campaign might be an email introduction with a curated set of articles and an installation app; week two might be a poster or screensaver and an AMA (ask me anything) session; month one might be an inclass event, app reminders and a module. With a dripfeed campaign, content is pushed in response to user interest, which allows them to feel in control.

Continually monitor and pivot In addition to utilizing feedback and ratings, we should make use of tracking tools such as xAPI or CMI-5, which provide valuable metrics and data regarding user engagement. These digital body language readers track how long people spend on a page, how far they scroll, what path they take through the learning, the time and dates of visits, which items are downloaded, etc. All of this data can be used to drive future campaigns. We should analyze the metrics, discover insights and design backwards based on this information. In this way, we can continually improve the blended learning experience.

Learn more about how you can apply blended learning to your organization at csod.com.

industryinsights Embracing Digital Using HR tech to better develop and grow talent, both in the public and private sector

By John Bersentes

Organizations and agencies alike are moving toward the adoption of more unified talent management solutions.

However, such solutions take time to implement. The end game of a cloud-based full candidate lifecycle talent management solution can take as much as a year or two to deploy. The goal of such a solution is to help establish performance-based outcomes with great efficiency and cost effectiveness.

The intent right now across the industry is the ability to re-skill and grow your talent. Performance, employee engagement, the desire to improve productivity through mobile app development, algorithms, AI and blockchain all create promise regarding talent development.

However, in today’s reality, what are some tools that can help us improve soft skills while embracing the emerging field of learning and development?

Working in response to the Office of Management & Budget OMD Directive 17-22 (and on the cusp of the passage of the IT Modernization Act) will provide an unprecedented opportunity to respond to recent trends across the commercial sector. Such trends have accompanied an infusion of capital and a multitude of new players. While working to foster a new spirit of innovation, talent management and career development executives must contend with limited resources, talent shortages and a fragmented and competitive marketplace while still developing and growing talent.

Changes caused by the disruption of HR tech will undoubtedly move the needle on public sector hiring reform efforts as we are beginning to see the adoption of more data-centric and analytical tools and approaches.

The following leading trends are evolving in the world of HR tech to support growth and skill diversification efforts.

The way enterprises hire, develop and invest in talent have been long overdue for major reform. Done in a sustainable and replicable way, new models of funding, collaborative partnerships and modalities of learning, like those being used to elevate the chief learning officer as a profession in the public and private sector by George Mason University, are gaining traction inside the beltway.

Training officers, human capital executives and staffing managers have had to adapt to the new normal through the use and adoption of more open source blended solutions, platforms and point solutions. As a number of trends influence the mission space, we have seen the enhanced ability and affordability to assist those seeking to provide just-in-time training and resources across disciplines. Such trends include the use of learning content, social media and mobile-friendly tools and hacks.

Trend #1: Toolkits Each stage of the employee lifecycle is gaining a digital footprint. Many organizations are using digital onboarding toolkits that have welcome messages from senior leaders across your operating divisions. Some of these toolkits are used for podcasts via tools that engage the new hire to learn about the challenges and opportunities in their new roles and provide enhanced connectivity between staff and C-suite leaders.

Trend #2: Communication The trend toward HR tech that enhances expediting business solutions through face-to-face contact instead of never-ending email trails and text chains is gaining momentum in many facets of the industry. Using tech that provides improved channels for communication and problem solving not only supports the learning and talent functions but the entire organization as well.

Trend #3: New digital modules The ability to grow and learn through digital modules at your fingertips via mobile solutions continues to grow rapidly as a way to keep the workforce agile and ready for change. Whether at home or on the go, apps provide a depth and breadth of access to skills training for expertise areas from analytics to mobile marketing and beyond.

As HR leaders move to use more first- and third-party data with social media, collaboration tools and matching

George Mason University Executive and Professional Education taps into the talents and expertise of the entirety of Mason’s faculty, as well as experts practicing in the field, to help companies address and solve mission-critical challenges.

The Federal Chief Learning Officer and Chief Talent Officer (commercial) Programs are specifically designed for public and private sector leaders to build their strategic capabilities and guide the organization in realizing the full value of its human capital. Learn more at clo.gmu.edu.

algorithms to better develop and grow talent, there’s an opportunity to share discoveries and emerging tools that help drive productivity and performance in your workspace. More importantly, engage with your peers in strategic development programs like George Mason’s Chief Learning Officer and Chief Talent Officer programs. They can allow you to participate in highlevel, strategic discussions about these future-forward tools and approaches that can positively impact your organization’s bottom line and advance your leadership path in both public and private organizations.

We are fostering a new paradigm of learning that will help in adapting and surviving at a time when disruption in the HR tech and learning management space are rampant and have given rise to many new

players. We cannot predict every twist and turn HR tech will take as the industry evolves, but we can embrace the opportunity it provides for innovation and growth in all facets of the employee learning lifecycle.

Learn more about how George Mason is preparing the next generation of HR leaders at clo.gmu.edu.

John Bersentes serves as an advisory council member for George Mason University’s Chief Learning Officer program, which builds the strategic capabilities of participants to prepare them to guide organizations in realizing the full value of their human capital. John is the vice president of client strategy at the MarCom Group and has over 20 years of experience in learning, development and talent management functions. Follow John on Twitter: @JohnBersentes.

industryinsights Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Intelligence Balancing STEM degrees with liberal arts education

By Adina Sapp

For many years, STEM skills have been in high demand to support the increasingly digital and technological workplace, and the number of students graduating with humanities degrees has begun to drop. Now professionals must compete with artificial intelligence (AI) as well. Estimates vary, but some experts anticipate that about 5 percent of jobs could be eliminated due to automation (which includes AI) and that up to 45 percent of tasks across all occupations could be automated. The big concern is how this will affect workers.

Melissa Goldberg, director of workforce insights for Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), suggests that as routine tasks become increasingly automated, the types of soft skills supported by a liberal arts degree will take on a new importance. STEM skills will remain relevant, but HR professionals will see increased emphasis on creativity, customer interaction and emotional intelligence.

Where will we see the biggest impact?

Anything repetitive, predictable or that can be routinized is at risk of being taken over by AI, Goldberg says. Automation is already disrupting many fields and industries. Taxi drivers, receptionists, factory workers, data entry clerks, cashiers, bank tellers and fast food workers are all seeing changes to their roles. These jobs aren’t necessarily being eliminated, but the skill set required now is different than before.

For example, more people used to go into banks regularly, but the rise of ATMs and online banking means tellers now deal with complex service and sales requests rather than simple transactions. Human customer service will never be fully replaced, but the skill set will shift. Decision-making skills, deep product knowledge and problem-solving skills are becoming increasingly important.

Cost and feasibility are always factors; just because it’s technically possible to automate something doesn’t

mean it makes sense to do so. ROI is tied to the customer experience, and there is an argument to be made that automated support is bad for business. Some businesses are now basing entire marketing efforts on the fact that they still have humans answering calls.

What skills are particularly valuable in the current climate?

Communication, complex problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and service negotiation are just a few examples of expected desirable skills.

What they have in common is unpredictability; they aren’t routine and require some form of creativity.

Communication skills will be particularly high on the list of skills employers will seek. Written skills are hugely important, Goldberg points out, because they’re used in so many ways — from answering support tickets to internal teamwork and collaboration.

How can students and workers prepare?

Goldberg believes that everybody should be prepared for lifelong learning, which continues to be required for career success. In addition, today’s job descriptions often require comfort with ambiguity and an openness to change — both on the individual level and in business. Success requires workers to embrace change, remain curious and develop new knowledge.

Some workers may find that automation works to their advantage, freeing up their time for more strategic tasks. AI-driven chat bots can gather information and identify the customer need before handing it off to the support worker behind the scenes. Eliminating repetitive actions can allow employees to repurpose their time to concentrate on what’s most important to their job or the company.

How can talent professionals prepare?

Goldberg suggests that a key priority for talent professionals is to partner with higher education.

“Universities and talent professionals need to have

Southern New Hampshire University partners with Fortune 500 companies to create measurable impacts through accredited L&D solutions. It’s more than offering degree programs to employees. Our solutions identify skill gaps, build internal talent pipelines, and improve customer experiences. Get in touch with us to launch your first strategic L&D solution today.

Learn more about SNHU’s Workforce Partnerships.

ongoing conversations about the changing needs of the industry,” Goldberg says. “At SNHU, we work with business leaders to understand their goals, gaps and learning needs. We can identify existing degrees and certificates to fill those needs, and even create new programs where none currently exist.” SNHU recently partnered with a leading health care organization to do just that, developing a certificate program that addressed a growing skills gap among frontline health care workers.

Talent professionals should also look for opportunities to build upon the skills employees already have through upskilling, micro-credentialing and other training. This becomes particularly important with today’s historically low unemployment rates as most

of the available talent is already in the workforce. An effective talent development strategy should include efforts to identify high-potential employees and build new, future-proof skill sets.

As AI becomes fully integrated in the workforce, it will be complementary to human intelligence rather than a competitor. The Greeks had it right with their classic value of the well-rounded individual. Rather than focusing on one or the other, we should find a balance between the two. Technical skills and the soft skills supported by a liberal arts degree are equally important to stay competitive in today’s economy.

Learn more about SNHU’s degree and certification programs at snhu.edu/workforce-partnerships.

“The State of the Humanities 2018: Workforce and Beyond.” Humanities Indicators ² Manyika, Chui and Miremadi, 2016. “These Are the Jobs Least Likely to Go to the Robots.” Fortune.

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Mastercard Motivates New Hires With Sleek Digital Learning Model Mastercard’s learning team rolled out a streamlined, interactive onboarding program that quickly immerses new employees in the mission of the firm and creates a sense of belonging.

THE CHALLENGE From the minute a new hire steps through the front door, they’re forming an impression of their new employer. Too often, they’re simply handed a binder full of documents to read alone in a barren cubicle, put through a meeting or two and are then expected to hit the ground running without an understanding of their place in the organization.

According to employee recognition company O.C. Tanner, 60 percent of organizations fail to set concrete goals or milestones for new hires. In a separate analysis, Harvard Business Review found that almost a quarter of organizations have no onboarding process at all. How an organization presents itself to new hires in the critical first few weeks on the job can spell the difference between an engaged, loyal worker and one that walks back out that door in six months. A lack of onboarding processes can cost an organization time and money through lower productivity and morale.

Figure 1. results: Engagement and Alignment Come from Better Onboarding

89%

Felt supported In learning about business

felt confident in ability to contribute to business

85%

Welcome

especially for global organizations like Mastercard. With more than 13,000 employees across the globe and healthy growth from new hires and acquisition teams integrated into its ranks each year, making workers feel connected, engaged and significant from day one is especially critical.

“When a new member joins our team it’s our goal to set them on a path to sustainable success by giving them a clear basis for understanding their roles within the company and how they can contribute,” said Jawanda Staber, vice president, learning & development at Mastercard. “The sheer amount of information new hires encounter can be overwhelming so we want to ensure the experience we provide is clear, cohesive and complete.”

It is also important for Mastercard to offer an onboarding experience that embraces, celebrates and leverages technology while engaging employees with a human touch.

“We wanted to build an orientation that was unique, engaging and compelling: an easy-to-use digital onboarding program,” said Janice Burns, Mastercard chief learning officer. “We hoped to accelerate employees’ time to contribution while creating a sense of organizational connectedness and belonging.”

to

MASTERCARD

According to some estimates, companies with an onboarding process turn in 50 percent greater new hire retention and productivity while manager satisfaction also increases by 20 percent when direct reports have formal onboarding training. Further, a study of the onboarding process at Texas Instruments found that employees who went through an improved onboarding program were fully productive two months faster than employees in a traditional program.

Clearly, starting employees off on the right foot is paramount to an organization’s long-term success

In 2016, Mastercard partnered with GP Strategies to launch “Welcome to Mastercard,” an online learning pathway that offers an interactive introduction and overview of Mastercard as part of the company’s “Getting Started at Mastercard” onboarding program.

The ambitious goal for the pathway was to tell Mastercard’s story in a way that enables new employees to connect the company’s business strategy and areas of focus with what they do in their new roles while providing a clear line of sight to how they contribute to the success of not only their teams but also the organization as a whole.

THE SOLUTION The “Welcome to Mastercard” onboarding pathway is a concise, interactive introduction to the company that offers new hires a broader understanding of their roles and vision of their future at the organization.

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“We needed to stick to essential information with the goal of keeping the material bite-sized for better retention,” said Jawanda Staber. “It was also imperative that we presented the information in a way that sparks curiosity and aids retention. GP Strategies understood the importance of these requirements and made sure that all content was clear, interesting and vivid.”

An additional aim was ensuring the delivery of the program was sufficiently engaging and could effectively convey the essence of the Mastercard brand and the intangible spirit of the organization.

With these goals in mind, GP Strategies helped keep each element short and sweet, paying close attention to the length of videos and articles used while ensuring the overall layout was consistently concise and engaging.

The pathway included a number of core elements including a corporate overview, industry introduction and information on Mastercard’s value to partners and stakeholders through the award winning “Employees Driving the Global Enterprise” (EDGE) program. New hires also view an engaging video of the company’s history and along with an interactive timeline, are given a deep dive into how Mastercard makes money in a dynamic presentation from the chief financial officer. The pathway also gives new hires a high-level overview of the company’s overall products and solutions.

Perhaps most importantly, the onboarding program immerses new hires into the driving principles of the company’s rich culture.

“GP Strategies’ understanding of social apps and eye for design were extremely helpful in the design of the pathway,” said Janice Burns.

To promote interactivity and engagement, the “Welcome to Mastercard” pathway was delivered in partnership with a curated technology platform which allowed participants to search for, share and track all aspects of their learning. They also have access to multiple learning resources that include courses, videos, articles and professional white papers.

New employees received an invitation link to the pathway on their third day and were asked to complete the learning within 30 days.

THE RESULTS Mastercard saw a dramatic increase in employee engagement and alignment to the overall mission after just four months.

According to post-program surveys, conducted after the first week and the fourth month of the employee’s hire date, 89 percent of respondents felt the “Welcome to Mastercard” pathway supported business learning, while 85 percent felt confident in their ability to contribute after four months.

Further, respondents indicated that the pathway helped them feel equipped for success, prepared to add value in their new roles and aware of the career possibilities during their future with Mastercard.

“It’s not good enough to ask new hires to spend time completing the pathway; they also need to enjoy the experience of the program,” said Chad Dally, a vice president at GP Strategies. “If employees are feeling connected to the space, the people and the work, they will thrive in their jobs.”

To supplement the digital experience, Mastercard introduced additional resources to help hiring managers create an effective and engaging onboarding experience for new team members.

Figure 2: Goal: Set New Mastercard Hires Up for Success connect what employees do in their new roles and the success of the organization

Founded in 1966, GP Strategies (NYSE: GPX) is a global performance improvement company serving more than 16 diverse industries. GP Strategies is a leader in sales and technical training, e-learning solutions, management consulting and engineering services. GP Strategies services, solutions and technologies empower companies to perform above their potential.

Make the information new hires have to digest clear and cohesive

Accelerate time to productivity and business contribution

Leverage technology to foster connectedness and belonging

THE FUTURE OF

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THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY

A dual focus on business strategy and employee engagement can ensure a corporate university’s guiding principles align with those of the company.

BY AVE RIO

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he first corporate universities were created more than 60 years ago as a place for employees to learn in conjunction with the company’s vision and business goals. General Electric’s Crotonville started in the mid1950s, McDonald’s Hamburger University opened its doors in 1961, and Disney University and Motorola University debuted in the ’70s. They became more widespread and prominent in the ’80s and ’90s and quickly became the “places to go” to learn in the business world. But technology’s pace of change and the emergence of digital learning aggregators have brought the effectiveness of the traditional corporate university model into question.

Daniel Gandarilla, vice president and CLO at Texas Health Resources University, said the corporate university is not dead — it’s being redefined. In his research on the subject, Gandarilla found roughly 10 different viable definitions for the corporate university that are continuing to evolve. This one by Kevin Wheeler and Eileen Clegg from 2005 exemplifies how the definition is evolving: “A true corporate university has moved beyond training and education and into the daily challenge of getting results. It provides leadership in supporting people and processes to achieve bottom-line success for the organization.”

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Some argue that the term “corporate university” shouldn’t even be used anymore. Northwell Health Senior Vice President and CLO Kathleen Gallo said the term is outdated. “Words matter. Even when I hear it, I think of 30 years ago. It pigeonholes corporate universities as an antiquated model,” she said.

“All business organizations need to have a structure in place that provides systematic processes to advance their organization through growing the knowledge, competencies, skills and attitudes of their employees — whatever they call that.”

David Vance, executive director at the Center for Talent Reporting and former president at Caterpillar University, said if he could run Caterpillar University again he wouldn’t use the term “university” in the title. He argues that for many people it connotes the idea of an academic institution. “It’s like you’re trying to bring the academic into the corporate world, and it brings up notions of a large course catalog that employees, like students, just pick from,” Vance said. “That’s the old, traditional training department model. The corporate university was supposed to be about strategic alignment and focused courses.”

Vance said he’s seen a concerning trend of CLOs changing the mission of corporate universities to simply “giving employees what they want.” But he said that attitude is reverting to the reactive model, which is the opposite of where the future needs to go. “They weren’t living back then, so they think it’s a brand-new thing, but really they are going back to where we were 40 years ago,” he said.

If the sole mission of the corporate university is to give employees what they want, Vance argues those universities will become extinct — displaced by aggregators who can give employees what they want at low costs and entirely outside the corporate system. “My objection is against the model that gives up on this corporate university that came out of the late 1980s and just goes to reactively meeting employee’s needs,” he said. “I would recommend we still have the traditional focus on strategic alignment meeting business needs, plus meeting individual learning needs using all the new tools that are available to us.”

Then vs. Now Fred Harburg, former CLO of Motorola University, said corporate universities have been evolving from the beginning to keep pace with changes in technology, learner needs and corporations themselves. He said one of the most significant changes is online learning. “People think of it as a relatively recent occurrence, but it started more than 40 years ago in the military when people did what they called computer-based training,” he said. “It was terrible and typically extremely boring and difficult.”

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Harburg said technology in learning has progressed slowly over time. “People think technology is moving at lightning speed — well, the technology of online learning moved at a snail’s pace over those 40 years in terms of the improvements from the very early times to now,” he said. “What we see now is this huge shift. Technology is changing the whole nature of work and the world.”

But Harburg said as the nature of corporate universities continues to change, they are still needed for talent acquisition, onboarding, performance evaluations, employee engagement and other aspects involved with growing talent and meeting the future needs of the company. He said someone will always need to steward those systems and processes.

“The two most important things in a business are its people and its culture. The two are so meshed it’s hard to separate one from the other,” Harburg said.

“Some companies have separated the talent management role from the learning role, but I think that’s an artificial separation.”

Harburg said the ideal corporate university today understands the business, the customers and the talent of the organization and helps close the gaps that exist between what is and what might be to provide better services, higher-quality products and a more engaged and empowered workforce.

A Dual Focus AT&T University was created in 2008 with a vision to drive alignment across the telecommunications company from a leadership, culture and knowledge perspective. AT&T Senior Vice President and CLO John Palmer said his company’s original model for the corporate university is still viable, as it’s always been aligned with business objectives.

“We used it in its early inception to drive alignment of many companies that came together through mergers and acquisitions,” Palmer said. “Now we’re using it as the driver for our reskilling program that will help us transform this business into where we’re going in the future.”

Palmer said AT&T prides itself on having direct alignment to each business unit at every level of learning. “That’s the key to maintaining relevancy as a corporate university — to ensure that you understand the business needs and you have the connections to the business units, so you are jointly driving programs and jointly driving the key decisions about the curriculums that are necessary to keep the employees equipped for the future.” Palmer said if corporate universities are heavily focused on business strategy, that itself will drive the employee engagement.

Texas Health’s Gandarilla emphasized that corporate universities should be used as a strategic tool with a situational focus. “If we know that our orga-

nization is struggling with engagement, that may be the most appropriate use at that time,” he said. “But if we’re struggling to make some sort of organizational transformation, it might be more focused on what the knowledge is related to the industry and how it’s changing.”

Gandarilla argues the focus should be achieving business results first. “We need to expand our mind to understand that a corporate university may not be a collection of classes or a curriculum,” he said. “A good corporate university knows how to listen and identify problems, come up with solutions and respond to the changing environment of the business that it operates in — whether that’s with traditional classes or not.”

However, Palmer said he wouldn’t bifurcate curriculum from business process execution. “One should complement and lead to the other if you’re doing the first right,” he said. Either way, most learning leaders agree executive leadership needs to be heavily involved in the corporate university so the university’s guiding principles align with those of the company.

At several organizations, including AT&T and Northwell Health, many C-suite executives are faculty of the corporate university.

Northwell Health’s Gallo said the leader-as-teacher model is effective at getting the senior leaders in front of employees. “It also helps drive culture change, which is another fundamental purpose of a corporate university,” she added. Palmer said having leaders drive the curriculums about leadership development helps employees understand where the business is going.

Changing with Technology During the past 10 years, Harburg said the digitization of business and the use of technology have dramatically changed the nature of how consumers and businesses operate. “And if you look 25 years ago, it looks like we’re on a different planet,” he said.

“The whole notion of algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning — to put those things in the context of the dignity of the human being, of the protection of privacy and of the great need for us to honor the diversity and uniqueness of people — that’s a huge challenge for the university to take on,” Harburg said.

He said corporate universities should step up and develop a point of view to help with the ethical, moral and technical dilemmas that technology brings.

Gandarilla said new technologies like augmented reality will aid in performance support-type training. He said a long-term focus for the universities will become to develop soft skills and partner with employees as technologies and businesses change.

“Imagine you’re going through a change, they put you through the corporate university and support you in the transition — that’s the future.” Gandarilla said the notion of a static corporate university must go away; it has to be agile and nimble to adjust to the needs of the time.

During the past year, AT&T has begun rolling out augmented reality and virtual reality in their curriculum. “Any time you can take the physical and turn it virtual, that will drive a lot of speed and accessibility into any business that’s out there,” Palmer said.

CORPORATE U continued on page 56

The History and the Future Fred Harburg, former chief learning officer and president of Motorola University, shares his thoughts on the future of corporate universities.

Chief Learning Officer: How have the fundamentals driving the need for a corporate learning organization changed over the past 30 years?

Coming from Motorola, I was fortunate enough to be a part of the first corporate educational efforts. That was when Paul Galvin, the founder of Motorola, realized that all the people who were assembling the radios and various devices that Motorola was creating at the turn of the century — many of them were illiterate. He said, “That’s going to change.” Not just as a gift, but as a responsibility, we need to make sure that everyone has basic literacy skills in the plants, to be able to live a more fulfilling life. What an inspiring way to start the idea of corporate education.

Is the corporate university dead? Have we outlived its usefulness and we’re on to something new? That question probably comes from the legitimate notice that online learning is available from many sources and having a traditional corporate university faculty and staff who do a lot of the training — it’s probably not as attractive as it once was.

CLO: Is the original model for the corporate university still viable? If not, how does it need to change?

It has always been changing. It wasn’t viable when it was identified. I look back with embarrassment at some of the things I created 30 years ago. Even at the time, it could have been better. If there was a model for the corporate university at the time, we might say it was brick and mortar, instructors, chalkboard and flip charts, overhead projectors and transparencies that became power points over time, attendance records, evaluations and smile sheets.

If that’s what we were calling the model at the time, which was probably a bad model, clearly that should be gone. But there is an element that should never be done away with and that’s the valuing of people as the most important part of a company and investment in their continuous growth. The extent to which it is done away with is a tragedy, not just for the company that will suffer the consequences of that attitude, but also for our entire society.

— Ave Rio Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

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e g a r Leve e t a e r c o t t n e t n Co

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g n i n Lear nces e i r e exp Take a page from the marketing book and create a content strategy to better engage learners and drive performance.

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BY BIANCA BAUMANN

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arketers are proficient in using a content engagement cycle, a practice for deciding when to engage whom with what kind of content during the customer journey. They plan months, quarters and even years in advance to create a content strategy that aligns with business goals and engages their audience pre and post-sale.

L&D professionals on the other hand often think about each training session or learning program singularly instead of looking at the overall learner experience. Mapping out the learner life cycle and assigning content that engages them along the way not only helps create unforgettable learning experiences but also aids in the transfer of knowledge after a training session ends. Let’s take a page out of marketing’s playbook and treat content as a business asset in order to create engaging and thought-provoking content, plan well in advance and drive performance.

According to Kristina Halvorson, CEO and founder of content strategy agency Brain Traffic, content strategy is the “creation, publication and governance of useful, usable content.” It looks at content, which can be text, images or multimedia, as a busi-

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ness asset. Ultimately, having a content strategy helps create meaningful, engaging and sustainable content and allows you to identify the right content at the right time for the right audience.

In addition to determining what content exists, what content should be created and, more important, why it should be created, putting measurements in place allows you to see what content is in high demand and sheds light on how content is being accessed.

Where to Begin Before creating content or a content strategy template, establishing a framework in which to embed that content is essential.

A starting and reference point for establishing this framework is Brain Traffic’s content strategy quad infographic. At the center of the quad is the core content strategy, the overall approach for using content to achieve an organization’s business goals — or in this case, L&D’s goals. To achieve that strategy, four critical components must be addressed across two different groupings.

Content components: • Substance: What kind of content do we need (topics, types, sources, voice, tone)? Substance fulfills business objectives by meeting the audience’s needs.

• Structure: How is content prioritized, organized, formatted and displayed? Structure makes content findable and usable.

People components: • Workflow: What processes, tools and human resources are required for content initiatives? Workflow creates efficiencies across content properties.

• Governance: How are key decisions about content and content strategy made (policies, standards, guidelines)? Governance empowers, facilitates and aligns.

For example, consider a content strategy that aligns training initiatives with quarterly product releases (substance/topic). One part of this could be an internal excitement strategy (structure) run by the marketing department (workflow), and another part is the actual face-to-face training session accompanied by hands-on exercises and role-plays run by L&D. The content is provided by product managers and maintained by the L&D department (governance).

Once the framework is in place, the next step is creating an actionable and reusable content strategy template. The purpose of a template is to align all stakeholders in the organization to focus on creating the right content for your audience based on the four core components.

Whether the content strategy template lives in a 42 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Google sheet or is more elaborate, leveraging cloud-based project management tools, think about the elements that need to be covered to reach organizational goals. Each organization’s content strategy template will be different and will evolve over time, but areas to consider might include topic/theme, stage of employee life cycle, description, target audience, objectives, delivery channels, media used, maintenance cycle and key performance indicators, to name a few.

A content strategy allows you to identify the right content at the right time for the right audience.

Meeting with stakeholders and thinking through these considerations can help an organization create the right content for the right audience at the right time — and that content will also be reusable.

Implementing a Content Strategy When faced with a new initiative, L&D professionals don’t always think about content as a standalone element within the initiative. They often create learning based on the ADDIE model — analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation — which may be an outdated approach when the goal is to give training a boost and make changes to an organization’s bottom line. Nevertheless, it is a starting point, and used in combination with the following seven steps for creating a content strategy, it can help leverage content as a business asset.

1. Identify learning content requirements. Explore whether training is needed and, if it is, what content will help fill the gap. For example, assume that, after successful completion of onboarding, staff still doesn’t perform as expected. Analyzing the reasoning behind this by interviewing stakeholders, gathering historic documentation, looking at data and evaluating the content environment (i.e., where and how the content is being consumed) will lay the foundation for a content strategy. Data is often only looked at after a training has ended, which means L&D professionals are missing out on crucial information such as best time to push content or how many times content has been shared.

2. Develop a sourcing strategy. Following ADDIE, L&D professionals typically dive into the design of a course. When it comes to the content life

cycle, an additional step should be added to determine topical ownership areas and processes for content creation. For example, who writes content for staff onboarding versus content for process updates? How is content being maintained and how can it be it used for future training? To achieve this, it is best to develop a sourcing plan outlining human resources such as SMEs, experts in a particular field, graphic designers, etc., who are needed to create content. This is where the four core components of content strategy come into play again and content needs to be developed according to the organization’s business goals.

3. Develop the content plan. After strategizing, L&D professionals will either realize they have everything they need or that some sources are missing.

For example, they might want to recommend staffing solutions to help write content or bring in a specialist. Most important, create a communication plan that includes responsibilities and timelines for everyone, as well as content or LMS distribution and customization. Use any of the free online project management tools available to help plan this stage and work collaboratively with the team.

4. Create structured and engaging content that is reusable. For example, content for process updates will most likely find its way to the onboarding program. If marketing created an e-book for clients, leverage this and create engaging webinars for staff.

Collaborate with co-workers who are responsible for writing such content. After strategizing and planning, this step will feel less cumbersome and decrease production time. Go back to the data from step 1 and identify the ideal length of content and where it will be accessed. Optimize content for online or face-to-face delivery, or both.

5. Deliver the right content at the right time and place. For example, not everyone needs to attend the latest product update training if they are already aware of the content and using this knowledge successfully. For learners who do need training, identify how they will access it: online, on their desktops or tablets, or via face-to-face sessions.

Leverage historical data, Google Analytics, the company’s learning platform or intranet metrics to identify how, and how often, content is being accessed.

Push content at times when a learner is most aware to increase engagement rates.

6. Measure training success using both ADDIE and a content strategy measure. For example, is staff able to talk about the newest product update and decrease call duration times based on receiving the right content at the right time? The best way to create successful measures is to align them with business objectives and ensure they are

realistic and attainable. If the training doesn’t hit the mark, the content wasn’t on par and needs to be revisited. It is important, though, to look at the content itself, not the overall training, and to use learning platform data to better understand when content is being accessed, where learners drop off and how they access content. In the end, the content might be spot on but the delivery time or mechanism isn’t. A pure ADDIE evaluation will not reveal this crucial information.

7. Keep content fresh and up to date. Maintenance is a step hidden in the evaluation stage of the ADDIE model and is often overlooked. Identify one person to be responsible for the content strategy (though it should live in a central space where it can be accessed by all team members), plan for periodic audits, continuously improve high-value learning content and set regular intervals for maintenance. Maintenance also means removing content completely if it didn’t hit the mark and wasn’t consumed as expected. If the first cohort of learners did not leverage the content as expected, the second cohort likely won’t either unless something has been changed.

Tips and Tricks There are a few simple steps to begin creating and implementing a content strategy: • Create a content task force. Most organizations have an abundance of content with no central repository or one person responsible for maintaining it. Get all stakeholders together, including instructional designers, facilitators, copywriters and someone from marketing.

• Summarize what already exists. Create the aforementioned content strategy template. List existing content and content that is being used on a regular basis.

• Repurpose content. Think about upcoming training initiatives, look at existing content and mark reusable pieces. This will help identify current gaps and show what additional content is needed to drive performance.

ADDIE gives us some basics when it comes to a content strategy life cycle. By adding additional considerations such as topical ownership, voice, branding and a maintenance plan, everyone can be a great content creator.

Start advancing content strategy planning and think beyond repurposing content. Content marketing platform Curata suggests that 65 percent of content should be created from scratch, 25 percent should be curated and 10 percent should be syndicated.

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Beyond the Classroom The digital revolution presents challenges and opportunities to the traditional learning delivery model.

BY AMY W. LOOMIS AND ROBERT M. BURNSIDE

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n the university model that emerged in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, the professor faced the class and expounded wisdom. The class debated it. The professor summarized it. Done. Knowledge formed and agreed to by the community.

In the 21st century, nothing and everything has changed about the classroom learning experience.

Look around at the explosion of digital, mobile, cloud and AI technologies and it’s easy to think we have entered a completely new era of learning. And yet much of the behavioral mechanics remain the same. Is virtual learning different from face-to-face learning? Can digital learning at scale accomplish the same depth of learning that a classroom can provide?

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“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”

— SOCRATES

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Digital learning did not turn out to be the panacea promised but neither has it gone away as detractors predicted. It has evolved alongside other technologies. Cloud computing allows for sharing and creating multimedia content at scale.

Data analytics enable user experience tracking and personalization. The best MOOCs are socially interactive, track learning behaviors and offer incentives for completing courses. Artificial intelligence helps us understand learning behavior patterns and predict challenges.

In the traditional university classroom, the Socratic paradigm of eager learners receiving wisdom from seasoned professors has not changed much in the past eight centuries. Early digital and distance learning merely transferred the traditional lecture to a visual medium. The introduction of social media, mobile devices and new conventions for digital learning created in the era of cloud, data, analytics and AI — along with the cultural expectations of consumer culture they’ve built — have blown it apart.

The Digital Disruption Digital learning challenges fundamental assumptions of intellectual authority in the classroom. Instant digital access offers students the opportunity to validate, expand, challenge or substitute for traditional classroom knowledge.

At the same time, the small-group experience of the classroom competes with broadly defined communities such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. But the echo chamber present in those communities threatens to replace the debate and discussion of contrary perspectives that happens in the classroom. False facts and suspect online news makes the job of teachers all the more critical as arbiters of the tools to critically analyze what counts as truth.

Information consumption at scale is endangering our ability to think, reason and learn about what we know and don’t know. In the digital learning era, much has been written about the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve — the notion that over time information is lost when there is no attempt to retrieve it.

So what? We can just search the web.

Yet Google is both a tool that inspires curiosity and causes information retention to atrophy. Because we can so easily search for information, our quest to find truth through deductive reasoning or other thought experiments diminishes. The ready availability of answers on the web is causing passivity in our mental exploration. Digital and mobile tools provoke a laissez-faire approach to learning.

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tal recordings of the most amazing phenomena — from 360-degree videos of remote and exotic global locations to reproductions of ancient artifacts indistinguishable from the originals. This poses both challenge and opportunity for traditional classroom experiences, inspiring curiosity and simultaneously satisfying it. Why travel 6,000 miles to Egypt when you can explore an ancient Egyptian room remotely?

Human-to-human interactions are decreasing while human-to-machine interactions are increasing.

Of course, human-to-human relationships are also being created digitally yet those relationships are defined by a click, not face-to-face engagement.

The era of cloud, data, analytics and AI along with the cultural expectations of consumer culture they’ve built have blown digital learning apart.

These points have in common the variable of time: time contracted through immediate, immersive experiences that don’t require travel; time extended through online debate that offers pause between call and response. One might argue they also share a lack of depth — the picture is sufficient, the tweet tells all, the meme makes the point.

Where is the awkward silence, the opportunity for learning while in transit, the ancillary messy elements that come with often uncomfortable but rewarding experiences that happen in the hybrid live-digital world in which we live?

The good news is we can use the technology of digital learning to create a new university model informed by and intertwined with the tools and tropes of online engagement. Here are three examples: Digital learning frees us from the constraints of physical space and time. The place of digital learning is free from the physical limitations of the classroom. People gather from wherever they are, meaning cross-pollination of ideas happens across the planet. It also gives us the ability to stop time and listen again to a key point in a presentation or jump ahead.

Digital learning offers an opportunity to gain knowledge through conversation within a broader community. Classrooms have always been about creating a context for shared conversation and learning.

Digital learning offers an opening of that aperture and a means of documenting and codifying the collective knowledge the classroom is building together. Here the professor as class moderator over orator takes on new urgency and importance.

Digital learning has the potential to alter the power dynamics between the traditional knowledge giver (professor) and knowledge seeker (student).

Digital learning platforms offer a more level playing field for conversation, shared understanding and the creation of shared experience. We can make use of the conversational conventions of online learning as an experience that is in itself a collective voice of authority.

The Evolving Practice of Digital Learning To successfully create a digital learning community, you need more than a digital learning platform. Shaping a community of people interested in what is being discussed and who have a stake in the outcome of the conversation is hard work.

Traditionally, professors have offered the guidance and guidelines for learning. Digital learning can formalize the voice of the community to engage, digest and join with the knowledge leader. It also allows an audience to be broader and for knowledge to be made permanently available to all.

By building core knowledge from thought leaders and other experts alongside tools for discovery, the organic conversation can allow you to develop, inform and build on canonical knowledge. This is equal parts discovery, recovery and application of new knowledge.

In the new model, digital tools can be used to debate, probe, evolve and grow knowledge and allow for broader sharing across larger audiences, geographies and belief systems. The digital environment offers more opportunities for learners to ask questions, share opinions and get a sense of whether their ideas are resonating or not.

To be successful, though, requires building more than modes of collaboration and communication. It also requires modes of conclusion. Set timelines that allow for reasoned conclusion and closure to arguments. Establish end goals and purpose at the outset. Summarize, share and confirm the outcomes. Creating a collective artifact of learning documents reinforces the work of the class, and conclusions can be introduced into a conversation that extends beyond the lifetime of

any one class or classroom environment.

Blended learning also increasingly bridges digital and in-person worlds of learning. Digital tools and classroom experiences easily embrace, engage and reference real world events and examples in ways that quickly reinforce learning through application. Mobile and digital recording devices bring parity between the text of formal content, the text of the class dynamic and the text of each individual’s experience. Real examples can be stress tested to see if they fit abstract principles and then absorbed or discarded for the next iteration of the teaching experience. By expanding the digital experience to reinforce core material with co-created content by design, digital learning builds a virtuous cycle of memory reinforcement.

AI extends personalized learning even further beyond any given class. With the help of analytics, digital learning experiences are personalized, from the duration of particular materials to the ways they are delivered to badges, credits or degrees awarded. Analytic tools offer students and teachers a bird’s-eye view on their learning journey.

AI can automatically answer routine questions and grade basic materials in order to free up time for professors to engage more deeply on a personal level. Gaming and leaderboard approaches can motivate students to seek out support and push performance to new levels. Technology can track completion, understanding and rating of ideas by others in the community — and improve the learning process.

The insights of one cohort become the curriculum of the next. Digital learning gives every cohort an opportunity to create new knowledge and share it — not only as validation of the work they have done but as a means to evolve and improve the materials and experience for the next cohort.

Effective digital learning builds in methods for students to co-create content by mining dialogue and soliciting examples or case studies. It is also an opportunity to expand the conversation beyond the classroom, college or work community, engage newcomers and continue the digital relationships forged in the original class itself.

Moving Toward a Model for Hybrid Digital Learning When these thoughts come together, it’s clear digital learning must draw from the pedagogical core of traditional classroom learning. Similarly, traditional classroom curricula must critically apply digital learning.

CLASSROOM continued on page 56 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

47

Transactional leadership styles offer an efficient way to communicate with today’s age-diverse workforce, but they’re not without drawbacks.

BY JAYME CURR ANS

I

n today’s workplace, miscommunication is more likely than ever before.

This is due in part to the proliferation of communication tools, technologies and ever-evolving ways to communicate in increasingly rapid ways. But it’s also due to the different values and life experiences that shape the different generations at work.

With the various generations come differing communication styles and knowledge gained throughout lifetimes of experience. Each generation has a preferred way it likes to be led and by using these preferred leadership styles managers are better able to build trust and communicate with employees in the best possible way to boost understanding, motivation and results.

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When attempting to lead people representing multiple generations, it is important to remember each is unique and can contribute to success through different strengths and weaknesses. Examining the primary generations at work today is a good place for managers to start.

Generations in Today’s Workforce With an increasing number of generations working alongside one another in organizations, a trend of miscommunication between those of different generations has developed.

For the purpose of this article, there are three main generations visible in the general workforce today: baby boomers, Generation Xers and millennials. Each has its own set of characteristics and values that makes it unique. How these generations are separated varies from study to study, but for our purposes, baby boomers are those born between 1946 and 1964, Generation Xers are those born between 1965 and 1980, and millennials are those born between 1981 and 2000. Each generation has different likes, dislikes, attributes and attitudes surrounding work.

A balance of flexibility and structure makes transactional leadership an appealing approach for each generation.

Of the main miscommunication issues that arise when dealing with people of different generations, one of particular importance occurs between a manager of a certain generation when communicating with employees of differing generations, whether that is a boomer managing Generation Xers or a millennial managing boomers.

There are leadership style differences between the generations as well. Some prefer a more autocratic leadership style while others prefer a hands-off leader.

While there is no right or wrong leadership style, some work better when communicating within and between the generations. Generational differences have a large impact on reaction.

The preferred leadership styles of each generation should be important to managers for many reasons but primarily because using the preferred leadership style when communicating with people from different generations builds more trust. This will in turn increase communication among managers and employees as well as possibly increase employee motivation 50 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

and performance. If a leadership style is not working for a certain person, they are less likely to be motivated to work hard.

Leadership Styles Overview For purposes of this discussion, the five main leadership styles are: laissez-faire, autocratic, participative, transactional and transformational.

Laissez-faire leadership, the most relaxed of the styles, should be used for employees who are highly experienced and trained. Because it does not value direct supervision, it also fails to provide regular feedback, which can be a problem for employees who are not well-trained and require direct supervision. In autocratic leadership, on the other hand, the manager has total control over the employees and will often make decisions without their input. This leadership style benefits employees who require direct supervision but not those who are more creative.

Participative leaders value the input of the team but realize the end decision rests on the leader. This leadership style is known to give responsibility to employees, which in turn can boost trust in the manager as well as morale among the employees. Transactional leadership involves a give-and-take relationship between the manager and the employee. This means that the manager and employee are predetermined to meet goals together and the manager provides rewards or punishments to team members based on their accomplishments on the predetermined tasks.

Transformational leadership depends on high levels of communication and requires the involvement of management to reach goals. This means the manager will focus on the bigger picture within an organization and delegate smaller tasks to contribute to the overall goals of the company.

Leadership Styles Across the Generations In a 2010 paper published in the Journal of Diversity Management, Mecca M. Salahuddin writes that baby boomers have characteristics that were shaped by events like the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the high-profile assassinations of political figures and social movement leaders. Baby boomers tend to be more positive about authority, hierarchy and tradition and are also optimistic, driven and team-oriented, according to the paper. That combination means some baby boomers are willing to respect authority as long as they know their opinion or contribution is being considered in decision-making processes.

From a leadership standpoint, participative leadership styles and techniques can be effective. Approaching boomers with respect for their achievements, challenging them to contribute to a team in an attempt to

solve organizational problems and involving them in organizational change initiatives are techniques that can work, Ahmed Al-Asfour and Larry Lettau wrote in a 2014 article in the Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics. Doing this ensures they feel part of the decision-making process and could motivate them to work harder in an attempt to contribute more.

Where baby boomers are more team-oriented, Gen Xers tend to be more individually motivated and self-reliant. Often described as cautious, skeptical or unimpressed with authority, Generation X tends to be fair, competent, straightforward and at times brutally honest. According to a study of perspectives on leadership conducted by Kathryn Eileen Holden and Deana M. Raffo of Middle Tennessee State University, Generation X admires competency and honesty. They do not value achievement as highly as other generations.

Due to their straightforward nature and need for honesty, Gen Xers are often the most difficult to manage and may not fit into one set traditional leadership style. To gain their trust, tell them the truth, offer learning opportunities and respect the experiences that shaped their values, beliefs and ways of thinking, wrote Al-Asfour and Lettau. For some organizations, Gen Xers have become a major focus for managers due to the retirement of baby boomers.

Like generations before them, millennials were shaped by events. In their case, 9/11 and the Great Recession have influenced their beliefs and way of life.

Many millennials have the mentality that they do not live to work but, rather, focus on their life outside of work. They often prefer fast and immediate processing as well as working in teams. They also prefer to work in a more relaxed environment than a hierarchical structure and because of their unlimited access to information tend to be assertive with strong views.

Many millennials prefer to receive continuous and instant feedback from their managers. According to Al-Asfour and Lettau, they like to know that what they do matters as well as like to be praised in public for things they accomplish. Even though they prefer to be rewarded, it is best to tell them the truth about their work. If they are told they are underperforming, they will likely increase their productivity in an attempt to reach a reward.

A Transactional Solution for Multiple Generations While each generation many have a preferred leadership style, that begs the question of how best to lead teams that include members of each generation. A manager may not want to treat one employee differently than another, if simply to avoid the appearance of discrimination based on age.

The best option for managers may be to use a transactional leadership style. While this is not the preferred style for any generation, it includes aspects of each of the preferred leadership styles and is easiest to relate across generations. Transactional leaders tend to value structure and operate according to clear rules and regulations. They are focused on results and recognize and reward employees on a practical level, such as with money or perks.

Along with being able to recognize and reward employees based on pre-established rules, regulations or goals set by a company, transactional leadership also favors structured policies and procedures. Employees can either work independently or in a tightly organized hierarchical structure. This balance of flexibility and structure makes transactional leadership an appealing approach for each generation. By maintaining one consistent leadership style when communicating with different generations, it ensures the message is received by all and does not appear to be discriminatory or biased toward one generation.

While transactional leadership can be a good fit when dealing with multiple generations, it does have advantages and disadvantages. Advantages include clearly defined rewards and penalties, the ability to achieve short-term goals quickly and clear structure.

On the flip side, creativity is limited because goals and objectives are already set and it may not be the best fit for organizations where initiative is encouraged.

If You Build It, They Will Come It is ultimately up to managers to determine the best way to lead and develop the people under their supervision using a style that builds trust in the process. Each generation has a preferred way to be led, shaped through their life experiences and the values instilled within them. However, it is critical to avoid discrimination in communication and remember that what works for one person of a certain generation may not work for another person from the same generation.

When a manager knows their employees and establishes trust with them, they learn about the life experiences that have shaped their individual employees and can then figure out the best way to communicate with them. This analysis is just a stepping stone to help managers get on the right track to communicating with employees in a way that is most beneficial for the employee rather than the manager. By building trust and opening the communication channels, performance and results should rise. CLO Jayme Currans is a graduate student in business and professional communication at Bellevue University in Bellevue, Nebraska. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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51

Case Study

From Hourly to Anywhere

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

T

uition reimbursement programs are nothing new. Companies have been providing employees with financial support to pursue advanced training and expand their company-relevant skills for decades.

But Amazon, the e-commerce giant that generated $178 billion in revenue last year according to MarketWatch, does it differently. “Most tuition assistance programs target white collar workers and junior managers in pursuit of MBAs,” said Juan Garcia, director of associate career development and head of Amazon’s Career Choice program.

“Our program is more peculiar.”

Career Choice is a tuition assistance program launched in 2012 that specifically targets Amazon’s hourly workers. Through the program, Amazon prepays 95 percent of the cost of tuition for any employee to pursue courses in any in-demand field — even if that training has zero relevance to the company. Employees, including those who work part time, are eligible to participate after one year of employment, and Amazon will spend up to $3,000 per year for up to four years to help them launch their careers.

It’s no small investment considering the company has more than 560,000 employees and is expanding daily. While it doesn’t break down what percentage of the workforce is hourly, more than 12,000 employees have already taken advantage of the program, securing certificates and degrees in everything from aircraft mechanics and computer-aided design to nursing, truck driving and medical lab technologies. Once employees complete their training, Amazon even provides stipends to those transitioning from Amazon to their new career fields to cover the gap in their paychecks.

“We do end up training a lot of people to conceivably leave Amazon,” Garcia said. But he’s OK with that, and so is the leadership team. “In the end, we want to help our people do what they want to do.”

A Stepping Stone to College It may sound a little too altruistic for a company best known for crushing its competitors with low prices and same-day delivery, but Amazon doesn’t see it that way. The rapidly growing company was responsible for 52 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

SNAPSHOT Amazon’s Career Choice program helps hourly workers get the training they need to kick off their careers.

44 percent of all e-commerce sales in 2017, and to meet this enormous demand they are in constant need of hourly workers to manage their fulfillment centers.

On Aug. 2, 2017, Amazon conducted a mass hiring event, called Amazon Jobs Day, during which job fairs were held across the country to fill 50,000 positions.

Many employees were hired on the spot.

Garcia noted that many of the employees who take advantage of Career Choice were unable to attend college and see it as an opportunity to get their careers on track. He recalled one young employee at the company’s Seattle fulfillment center who had intended to join the Air Force to pay for college, but a medical condition prevented him from enlisting. “He thought it was the end of his dream,” Garcia said. But now he’s in his final semester for a degree in supply chain logistics that will pay $35 an hour. “He was thrilled to have that option.”

Jaspinder Brar also took advantage of the program.

Brar had been working at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Tracy, California, for two years when he joined Career Choice. At the time, his father was phasing out his trucking business and needed additional drivers.

Brar heard about a 14-week commercial truck driving course the Career Choice program offered, so he signed up.

For the first seven weeks he studied eight hours a day, two to three days a week in a classroom at the fulfillment center, and for the second half he attended classes at a nearby trucking facility where he worked on trucks and practiced for the exam. His manager adjusted his shifts to accommodate the classes, and once he completed the training Brar left Amazon to work with his father and to complete a degree at UC Davis in economics.

Last year, Brar was rehired by Amazon as an area manager. “Career Choice was a great opportunity,” he

said. It helped him help his father, and he appreciated that his managers supported him even though they knew he would use the training to leave the company.

“They wanted to help me do what I wanted to do,” he noted. “It’s one of the reasons I came back.”

How It Works In the more than five years since it launched, Career Choice has become a popular program. Even a company as large as Amazon has limited resources to spend on training, and Garcia needs to be sure the courses they support align with community needs. To determine what programs are in high demand, he works with the Department of Labor and local economic development leaders to identify what skills are in short supply and then partners with community colleges and training centers to develop targeted offerings for employees.

“Every community has different needs,” Garcia noted. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, the thriving aerospace industry is struggling to find aircraft mechanics, whereas other communities are in need of nurses, programmers and commercial drivers. “Our goal is to identify those roles in each region and align them with the future aspirations of our employees,” he said.

By partnering with local education providers, Amazon ensures employees have access to certified training programs that will help them take the next step in their careers without having to create the content internally, said Corey Pruitt, chief operating officer of Maricopa Corporate College, which delivers training for businesses and nonprofits in and around Tempe, Arizona. Amazon first partnered with MCC in 2013 to develop an on-site pharmacy tech program as a pilot initiative within Career Choice.

At first, the request was a little surprising, Pruitt said.

“It sounded like they wanted a training program that had nothing to do with what employees do at Amazon.”

But when he heard about the goals of the program, he was on board.

It was one of the first courses to be offered on-site at Amazon, which was logistically a little challenging.

Pruitt’s team had to figure out a way to create a secure and sanitary environment at a fulfillment center to support pharmaceutical equipment and to do blood draws and other medical tests. They eventually created a classroom that met the requirements, and 25 people took the first course.

“It went so well they wanted to do more,” Pruitt said. In the years since, MCC has run multiple programs for Amazon both on-site and through its own classrooms covering accounting, emergency medical training, dental hygienist training, medical coding and even English 101. “It’s an innovative approach to corporate training,” Pruitt said. “Amazon knows these employees have choices in where they work, and this is a

great incentive. They see that Amazon will invest in their professional future.”

It’s also been very successful. Since beginning their partnership, MCC has seen an 82 percent completion rate among Amazon employees. Pruitt credits low dropout rates to the fact that the on-site courses are easy to attend — and hard to skip — when the class is right there in the workplace. “Nothing gets in the way of attending,” he said.

“We want to help our people do what they want to do.”

— Juan Garcia, director of associate career development, Amazon Since 2013, the company has built on-site dedicated Career Choice classrooms at 25 fulfillment centers.

The classrooms have glass walls and are located near the entrance of the centers so employees have to pass by them on their way to work. “It’s the first thing they see every day,” Garcia said.

That is a key component of Career Choice, Garcia said. “We want to get rid of all the barriers to participation.” Whenever possible, classes are hosted on-site, and the company even provides babysitting services.

“Instead of having to leave work, pick up their kids and then go to college, we bring the coursework to them,” Garcia said.

Amazon also pays tuition up front rather than reimbursing students, which ensures employees who may be living paycheck to paycheck can participate without financial hardship. Managers are encouraged to adjust employees’ work schedules so they can attend classes.

Even with these incentives, there are employees who fail to complete the training. Those who drop out aren’t penalized, but if they return to the program they have to pay the cost of the class they failed to pass before Amazon will cover tuition for future courses, Garcia said.

Still Growing, Still Relevant Garcia expects 20,000 employees will participate in Career Choice programs by 2020, and the program recently expanded to include courses in robotics, photovoltaics and programming.

Amazon’s leadership team hasn’t wavered in its support of the program, believing that it helps the company attract and retain quality talent. “It has become an important part of the Amazon experience,” Garcia said. CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

53

The Digital Future Is Human HR technology is making human skills like leadership, communication and collaboration more critical.

BY MIKE PROKOPEAK

T

he robots are coming! The robots are coming!

But as automation takes on the burden of tasks and entire jobs once carried out by people, it is putting more emphasis on the skills and abilities that remain, for the time being, the exclusive realm of humans.

The ability to think critically, adapt to change and communicate effectively in a variety of situations are the currency of the new economy. According to a survey of 4,000 professionals conducted by LinkedIn Learning, the most important skills employees will need — and that learning organizations must develop — are leadership, communication and collaboration.

This emphasis on the soft skills at the heart of modern management is increasingly driven by the digital technology transforming many industries. Nearly three-quarters of executives surveyed by The Hackett Group, a consulting firm headquartered in Miami, expect digital transformation to disrupt their industry and change the competitive landscape (Figure 1). Eight in 10 expect it to fundamentally change how they operate.

That insight is not new. The past decade has seen an exponential increase in data processing power paired with increasingly sophisticated and user-friendly technology tools that have sped up the transition from the industrial economy to a primarily digital one.

What is newly apparent is the gap this rapid change has created in organizations’ ability to execute against their strategy. Only 40 percent of surveyed executives are confident their organization has the resources and competencies to execute their digital transformation strategy (Figure 1).

Understandably, that gap is making business leaders nervous. While there are technical skill gaps that will need to be filled if companies are to make the most of the digital tools and technology available to them, a majority of executives nevertheless see soft skills as the priority for employee development.

54 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Among business executives, front-line managers and learning and talent developers alike surveyed by LinkedIn Learning, leadership, communication and collaboration are seen as particularly important to driving the change and transformation agenda (Figure 2).

That finding holds up when looking at the plans of learning executives. According to a survey of the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, coaching, communication and engagement were the top three skills targeted for development among managers (Figure 3). Business acumen, emotional intelligence and critical thinking rounded out the top six skills, reflecting the need for managers on the front line to be hands-on and people-focused.

The Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board is a group of 1,500 professionals in the learning and development industry who have agreed to be surveyed by the Human Capital Media Research and Advisory Group, the research and advisory arm of Chief Learning Officer magazine.

According to that same survey, classroom-based instructor-led training remains the method of choice for nearly 6 in 10 learning executives surveyed when it comes to leadership development, often the place where most soft skill development takes place (Figure 4).

But when it comes to future plans, coaching, mentoring and mobile learning are getting the most emphasis (Figure 5). Nearly 60 percent of executives surveyed plan to step up their investment in those core areas in the coming year.

While the future is increasingly digital, it appears to be making the kind of skills that humans can uniquely deploy more, not less, important. CLO Mike Prokopeak is vice president and editor in chief at Chief Learning Officer magazine. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

Figures’ sources: “Key Issues Study,” The Hackett Group, 2018; “2018 Workplace Learning Report,” LinkedIn Learning; Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, N=419. All percentages rounded.

Business Intelligence

FIGURE 4: EXPECTED DELIVERY METHOD BY CONTENT AREA

FIGURE 1: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CHALLENGES

Agree

Strongly agree

Digital transformation will disrupt our industry and change competitive landscape

48%

26%

15%

Digital transformation will change business operating model

63%

6%

19%

7%

Our company has the resources and competencies to execute digital transformation strategy

32%

8% FIGURE 2: SOFT SKILLS KEY TO FUTURE

Talent developers

People managers

Business skills training 59% 49% 42% 30% 16% 9%

Executives

74% 66% 65%

66% 66% 64% 54%

50% 50%

Leadership

Communication

50% 49%

Collaboration

42%

31%

Role-specific skills

Onboarding and new-hire training 56% 44% 34% 32% 12% 9%

27% 21%

Leadership development 58% 40% 51% 31% 19% 9%

FIGURE 3: TOP SKILLS TARGETED FOR FRONTLINE MANAGERS 34%

Classroom-based instructor-led training Self-paced e-learning Coaching or mentoring Formal on-the-job training Simulations Mobile learning

20%

20%

Core competencies Coaching

Communication

Employee engagement

Business acumen

Critical thinking

52% 46% 35% 39% 15% 9%

Emotional intelligence

FIGURE 5: CHANGE IN USE OF DELIVERY METHOD IN NEXT 12 TO 18 MONTHS

Increase

About the same

Decrease 66%

64% 58%

58% 53%

52%

44% 37%

52%

51%

43%

51% 51% 28% 43% 22% 11%

57%

56%

44%

39%

41% 35% 30% 24%

24%

19%

5%

Mobile learning

3%

4%

5%

Coaching or Collaborative Self-paced mentoring e-learning

6%

Video

7%

9%

Technical skills

10% 6%

Simulations Instructor-led Formal Classroom- Text-based e-learning on-the-job based ILT training training

Compliance training 36% 56% 12% 20% 8% 6%

Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

55

CORPORATE U continued from page 39

CLASSROOM continued from page 47

Gallo said the future of corporate universities should be about the application of knowledge and the assessment of that application through casebased learning. “Back in the day, lecture was king.

Now lecture is one of the last thing’s that’s effective,” she said. “What would have been lectured now goes out as pre-work. We trust our employees to acquire that knowledge by themselves. They don’t need to be spoon-fed through a lecture.”

With technology comes the question of whether or not a physical space is still needed to house a corporate university. Most learning leaders seem to acknowledge there is something symbolic about bringing people together physically. Gandarilla said it depends on the size, geography and scope of the business. At Texas Health, the farthest employees are only 2 1/2 hours from the organization’s headquarters, so the firm is in the process of building a conference center to host training.

At Northwell Health, they do both virtual and in-house training. A lot of knowledge training that used to be done in-person is now done online, and the in-person training focuses on applying what’s been learned. “In health care, safety is dependent on teamwork,” Gallo said. “Trust is key, and we can only facilitate that in person.”

However, at the multinational AT&T, Palmer said the need for a physical space will lessen as technologies continue to advance. “We’re driving a lot of our curriculums to the virtual space so we can be more nimble and flexible and drive a lot more velocity into getting curriculums out to the masses, when it comes to the size and scope of our workforce,” he said.

Similarly, Caterpillar, a global company, never had a physical building for its corporate university, and Vance said there’s never been a need for one.

However, he said when it comes to leadership development and performance management there will always be a need for live instruction versus virtual.

As the delivery methods of learning have become more engaging, whether it be through online learning, gamification or virtual reality, Gallo said staying relevant by helping the organization thrive as it changes in response to the marketplace should be the most important goal of the corporate university. She said the corporate university will only become more important and will be a competitive advantage in the future.

“It keeps the company on their toes,” she said.

“As you develop your employees, they are good prospects for the competition. It forces the company to be the employer that these high-performing individuals want to stay with.” CLO

Digital learning needs a surrounding structure that enables creation of shared meaning as well as a clear end goal. In the classroom, the university and the subject are the structure within which learning can occur, and a degree or certification the means of communicating learning.

Simply creating a digital version of a course as a substitute for in-person learning is not an end goal. This is merely an export of a traditional paradigm to a new medium rather than a new model of learning.

Digital learning needs an active facilitator who curates the conversation to provide high-quality interactions that can lead to new useful knowledge.

The professor can guide this process in the classroom. Online conversations need the same attention to quality interaction. In small groups a human can act as a facilitator while in MOOCs with tens of thousands of participants an AI acting as an intermediary can take on this task.

Successful integration of digital and classroom learning requires a map that takes into consideration: • The stage of learning being pursued, from introductory to specialized learning, from learning known facts to co-creation of new knowledge.

• The scale of the learning group, from small to massive.

• The desired outcome of learning: personal or collective, project-based or organizational.

Digital learning is challenging everything from business models to the classroom dynamics of traditional higher education. But this challenge is an opportunity to benefit from the inevitable disruption. The technological advancements that are distracting from traditional classroom conversation, homework and retention of key information are also prime teaching resources.

Education, like most industries, will evolve to thrive in a digital age just as retail, entertainment, medicine and others are doing. In broadening the scope of our approaches, we have an opportunity to expand our definitions of the digital learning life cycle from an a la carte tool to an ecosystem for discovery.

We will always have the professor who lectures and the students who listen from their seats. But we also will have the ability to make that experience part of a digital metamorphosis and road map of lifelong learning that extends well beyond the classroom. CLO

Ave Rio is an associate editor at Chief Learning Officer magazine. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

56 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Amy W. Loomis is co-founder and former director at IBM’s Think Academy. Robert M. Burnside is former chief learning officer at Ketchum. They can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

STICKY continued from page 43 Keep in mind who contributes to each step and how those different contributors come together to define the final product.

There is value in including multiple perspectives on deliverables by inviting other departments and specialists to the team. In the end, we don’t create content for ourselves, but for learners.

Additionally, use data wherever possible.

Instead of waiting to evaluate until training has ended, get in the habit of using data to create training in the first place.

Learners will have a preferred time to access content, a preferred medium and an average time in which they consume training. This information is crucial to timing content delivery.

ADVERTISING SALES

Modern learners want information at their fingertips. A thorough content strategy will help identify exactly what content is needed to drive each individual’s performance.

Put measurements in place, such as video views or click-through rates, and leverage learning platform metrics to see which content is in high demand. Don’t be afraid to delete content, but recycle whenever possible.

Most important, always keep the learner journey in mind. This will help create learning experiences that stick. CLO

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IN CONCLUSION

Learning Agility and Its Role in Leadership Learning agility can be a leadership game changer • BY DAVID HOFF

O David Hoff is chief operating officer and executive vice president of leadership development at EASI Consult. He is co-author of “Learning Agility: The Key to Leader Potential.”

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

ne of the great mysteries of leadership development programs, succession planning initiatives and high-potential efforts is how effective they are at capturing the results of past efforts and predicting the capability to master as-yet-unknown challenges.

Those of us who have spent our careers in talent management have long been in search of the “silver bullet” or “secret sauce.” Competencies were thought to demonstrate what great looks like, but the problem is they are retrospective, not prospective.

Learning agility, which focuses on the ability to perform in the future, provides an answer. Warner Burke, professor of psychology at Columbia University, has studied learning agility for six years and describes it as being in an unfamiliar situation, not knowing what to do and figuring it out.

D. Scott DeRue, dean at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, summarizes learning agility as involving two elements — speed and flexibility. Speed is the ability to act quickly, discarding ideas that don’t work to accelerate other possibilities.

Flexibility is being open to new ideas and proposing new solutions. Burke built on DeRue’s work and identified seven additional dimensions involved in learning agility: experimenting, performance risk taking, interpersonal risk taking, collaborating, information gathering, feedback seeking and reflecting.

Burke’s research led to a set of 38 questions that, with a high degree of validity and reliability, measure these nine dimensions. The questions comprise the Burke Learning Agility Inventory, which provides a way to measure learning agility to determine a “baseline.”

But just because someone knows what to do doesn’t mean their motivation will be sufficient to overcome the unknown and apply the level of effort needed to succeed. DeRue cited motivation and context in his research as factors that impact learning agility.

Learning agility can be a leadership game-changer. It has the potential to be a major difference-maker for leaders and their people, and it doesn’t have to be adopted systemically like total quality or knowledge management. Wherever an organization chooses to embrace learning agility (individual, team, function or organization), it needs to become part of the vernacular. If a leader is working to strengthen interpersonal risk taking or collaborating, for example, then their coach, mentor or leader must know what those things mean and what

58 Chief Learning Officer • May 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

that person is doing to improve in those areas.

The learning agility dimensions act as a lens to view the specific objective so all stakeholders can support or reinforce learning and development. Reflecting should be part of every activity so what has been learned is explicit and what can be improved going forward is identified.

So, what are the applications for leaders?

The impact of learning agility can begin with onboarding, where new employee leaders complete the Burke LAI and learn how their results demonstrate strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Wherever an organization chooses to embrace learning agility, it needs to become part of the vernacular.

Then, in their performance management and development meeting with their supervisor, the supervisor can talk about learning agility in the context of development plans. The performance objectives will be the “what” and the learning agility dimension part of the “how.”

Learning agility could be one of the assessment tools used in different leadership training programs.

Since all these experiences are supposed to be about learning, what better way to emphasize that than to provide those results to participants at the beginning of the program? In subsequent activities, ask participants, “What learning agility dimensions could you use here?” Improvement goals could include learning agility dimensions that will be used.

Succession planning programs have struggled to address potential. Learning agility is about potential. If your company uses the nine dimensions to array your talent, you now have an objective measure of potential at the overall score level. The specific learning agility dimensions that need strengthening are available and can be integrated into the person’s new assignment. CLO

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