Learning Live 2021

After 18 months of relative isolation, imagine walking to your first conference surrounded by wonderfully talented Learning vendors and professionals. Safe to say, to begin with my anxiety was at peak - though it didn't last long taking a wander around the exhibition and the beautiful Central London venue, the anxiety was gone and along came the excitement!

Excitement of seeing people, listening to interesting colleagues, like Sarah Lindsell (& the panel at L&D Question Time), Adam Littler, Dina Alvarez, David Rowan, Caroline Ford and Liz Williams. To engaging my brain to see what I could take from the event and use in Rocko's L&D Strategy.

The LPI team had done a great job, in taking an evidence based approach to the conference agenda. Kudos LPI! Before the event we were surveyed to establish what the 5 top challenges are for Heads of Learning:

1. Building a digital learning culture
2. Embedding learning into the flow of work
3. Dealing with the return of face to face learning
4. Keeping informed of best practices
5. Developing leaders and managers

I don't think there are too many surprises in that list. There was also lots of discussion about innovation, digital-fatigue, inclusion and the rise of Mentoring. But, what was my biggest take away's from #LearningLive well, there was almost too many to list but I'll give you my top five...

1. 13% of the people currently employed in the UK Tech Sector lack Essential Digital Skills to do their job. 17.1 million people in the UK are according the the CDI, live in digital poverty and lack the essential digital skills for work. Yet we have a massive talent shortage in UK Tech?
2. Skills for Learning Agility, Inclusion and Remote Leadership are key to successful leaders in successful business that sustain growth.
3. Diversity and Inclusion is most definitely an L&D responsibility. We have all benefited from the move to a more inclusive and diverse workplace, "the foundations of this are definitely in education and communication" said Gori Yahaya. The magic is created when people from different backgrounds come together, but to start with this can be tricky, if the foundations of understanding and communication styles are missing. L&D must support and facilitate this development at all levels of the organisation, to establish a truly inclusive organisational culture.
4. Mentoring is on the rise, catapulted by the pandemic. The use of mentoring by business has exploded. But, how important is that Mentor's know how to Mentor? Critical according to Dina Alvarez, who has had huge success building a Mentoring network, including searching, accrediting and evaluating internal mentors.
5. The importance of a growth mindset (which means, so many different things to different people!). A key theme through the whole conference, one challenge for growth was definitely thinking about friction in Learner Experiences.

Sorry that was a bit war and peace, but it was so hard to narrow down. One of the less tangible take aways that I have to write about is just how inspiring the L&D community are, who else in business can take a business issue, articulate the result they are trying to achieve and deliver something amazing that drives and enables people to solve the issue with NO (yes, really ZERO!) budget. Just the networking chats over coffee, lunch and the free beer left me really inspired, to not revert to traditional learning practices (just because I love them) but to think out of the box and raise the bar.

The team are now looking at how we can put some these learning points into our L&D strategy to benefit our clients on their explosive growth trajectories. A day really is a week in #UKTech.

Finally, thanks to the LPI for putting on an excellent event - really really well done.