A look back: The most asked for learning features for medium sized organisations in 2023

What does the wish list from 2023 tell us about 2024?

As we stride into 2024, medium-sized organisations are starting to re-asses their learning programmes, I am in the fortunate position of having had a lot of conversations with learning leaders from these companies so I thought I would compose an aggregated wish list, with the idea that it could tell us more about what could be on the table in 2024.

Heres the content:

1. Scalability
2. Tech Stack Consolidation
3. Personalised Learning Environments
4. Automation
5. Reporting
6. AI

Check below for the detail!

1. Scalability:

In the digital age, scalability is not just a convenience; it's a necessity. Most organisations I spoke to asked about leveraging scalable learning solutions to accommodate growth and adapt to changing demands and its not just me, according to a survey conducted by LinkedIn Learning, 78% of learning and development professionals identify scalability as a crucial factor in the success of their training programs.

But why? For me the key seems to be about future proofing any tech purchases, buying a learning platform in 2023 was a more carefully considered decision than in previous years and will be more so into 2024, making sure that your new tech wont creak and need replacing in 1 or 2 years is crucial for providing value.

Scalability isn't only about internal teams either, I have been having more and more discussions around extending learning programmes to customers, imagine being able to improve your CSAT scores by 16% with an existing platform?

Which Segway's me nicely into:

2. Tech Stack Consolidation:

The digital learning landscape is rich with tools and technologies, there are a number of fast growing organisations out there that have been buying tech through 2020 to 2022 at a ferocious rate, I read recently that the average company had 8 solutions in their tech stack pre pandemic that has now grown into over 120. I even had one conversation where a potential customer said that they needed to check before purchasing that they didn't already have a learning solution in place that the organisation wasn't aware of!

I have had many conversations in 2023 where it was revealed that there was individual tech looking after learning in sales enablement, compliance, customer education as well as an overall learning platform for generic content. Imagine cost saving in consolidating this all into one platform, let alone the ease for your teams, they know where to go to consume their learning and that can only help engagement.

Think of this, a survey by Gartner found that organisations that consolidate their learning technologies experience a 35% reduction in administrative overhead, updating content on one platform for your product teams is much easier to do on one platform than 3.

3. Personalised Learning Environments:

The call for personalised learning environments is louder than ever, according to a recent survey by McKinsey, organisations that implement personalised learning experiences witness a 44% improvement in employee satisfaction. If I log onto my learning platform to find out about the latest happenings I want to see content that is relevant to me and my team in a recognisable and easy to navigate environment.

Tailoring learning paths to individual needs not only boosts engagement but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement and skill development because I will keep coming back if it makes sense to do so, especially if I can see my development pathway clearly with each step defined.

The main reason people change jobs is to pursue growth opportunities. 86% of professionals said they’d change jobs if the new company had more opportunities for professional development. That’s the bad news. The good news is that a whopping 94% would stay with their current employer longer if they had better learning opportunities.

So make those opportunities clear, because with small team sizes and limited resources keeping good people is they key.

4. Automation

The non-automated process involves a lot of manual work in terms of data entry, paperwork, and distributing content to the correct audience. This puts a lot of strain on People teams to keep human error at a minimum and their own workflows under control. It also often leaves them struggling to form personal connections with employees, who may themselves experience a negative experience because of it.

Automation eliminates many of these time-consuming manual tasks, yet many companies still rely on manual tasks for even their most critical workflows. I have heard so many times about solutions that are not fit for purpose and teams manually inputting data or even hosting content on Google Drives rather than their learning tech because it is easier to find and access.

When People teams are overwhelmed by too many administrative tasks, they tend to neglect their audience, failing to answer their questions or engage with them directly. In fact, 40% of new employees say it takes too long to get a response to an HR-related question. By automating those repetitive tasks, your People team is free to focus more on its people and their needs which increases employee engagement and retention.

5. Reporting

I heard a lot in 2023 about teams pulling data from the learning tech and creating manual reports on Excel spreadsheets. Now I love spreadsheets as much as the next person, however investing 3 hours a week in compiling data into a single place could be much better spent actually drawing the insights out of that data.

One of the most important objectives of any training program is getting analytical data to better understand how learners are using training programs and achieving their learning objectives. Data can also provide insights that will allow you to improve your learning and development programs and drive organisational success.

We are not just talking about completion rates here, but tangible data that shows the ROI of learning programmes

6. AI

The big one, and thats why it's last.

Ai is such a huge topic mainly because it is so new and interesting, it was by far and away asked for functionality that I came across, but interestingly, the one that had the least specificity. Most of the questions posed to me were "What AI capabilities does Docebo have?" The reason that this was the hot question should be clear, the tech is in its infancy and, in general, learning practitioners are not yet sure what each vendors capabilities are and how these solutions could assist them in their day to day work.

When digging down and finding what people actually want I found that it came to 4 main subjects:

1: Content Creation/translation

2: Chatbot/virtual assistant

3: AI-powered Deep/Semantic Search

4: Skills Intelligence/Tagging

I have listed this as the most asked for at 1 and least at 4 and below, to try and describe how we work in these areas I have added some detail

Content Creation

Traditionally, authoring of content is a skillset reserved to central teams. Whilst the quality is often high, the speed of creation makes it a bottleneck for L&D operations.

This leaves subject matter experts feeling removed, and reliant on learning teams to get their expertise to the masses.

By using AI, you can transform an input source (PDF, free text, links) into learning videos in minutes.

You can auto-translate it into a plethora of languages so users can consume it natively.

You can empower your SMEs to own the creation process and be an active part of your learning program.

When empowered, they will share knowledge in your learning communities, forums and build a whole new learning culture.

Thanks to AI, organisations can save time and money by using this technology that has been trained to create effective and engaging content based on modern learning techniques.

Virtual coaches/Chat bots/Virtual assistants

AI-powered virtual coaches are proactive virtual assistants for users on your platform. They can guide learners through learning activities and work within the learning platform to recommend content, monitor progress, answer content-related questions, and send push notifications related to content or deadlines.

Essentially, a virtual learning coach is like a chatbot, similar to the ones used for customer support on various websites and platforms.

Virtual coaches help learners and make the learning process more streamlined. That’s because, unlike human trainers and admins, they’re available 24/7. A virtual coach can answer many basic questions about learning content thus saving time for learners and admins alike.

Deep/semantic search and auto-tagging

On an AI-powered learning platform, AI analyses both formal and informal learning assets and improves their discoverability through search. It’s like the advanced search engines you see on Google or Amazon. When someone shares a new learning asset or creates new training material, the AI synthesises the information in the asset to produce the most relevant search results.

During this process, AI identifies key phrases and creates tags for assets automatically to make learning content easier to find. Auto-Tagging function identifies key phrases from uploaded learning content and assigns tags automatically, cutting down on the time-consuming task of manual tagging. This helps admins with categorising content properly and also makes the Deep Search function easier to use for learners.

With Deep Search, if you share an interesting article in your LMS and your coworker needs to reference it a few days later, they can just search for it and find it in seconds. This prevents anyone from needing to dig through a bunch of irrelevant search results.

Skills Intelligence/mapping

To successfully implement your skills strategy, you need to define your “source of truth”, or in other words, which system are we going to build our taxonomy from?

Start with the end goal - and build your requirements from there. Then look at capabilities of current systems and where you want to go in the future.

AI can help you as a learning team by taking an existing ontology and mapping it to content that then gets surfaced to learners inside of the learning system. The ontology can be built inside of your learning system (Docebo), from your HRIS (i.e Workday), Talent Marketplace (Fuel50/Gloat) or Skills Intelligence Tool (Eightfold/Techwolf etc).

AI is interesting here as it allows you to use a specific ontology (inside or outside a learning system) and index/tag content with that specific skill-set. For a learner, they can then find the skills they want to develop and content automatically inside of their learning system. I call this “skills in the flow of work” and it takes the concept of learning in the flow of work but it adds the skills mapping/intelligence on top of this to make it relevant for a user’s upskilling or reskilling journey.

So then to a sum up.

I hate cheesy quotes but....

“If you want to know the future, look at the past.”

Albert Einstein

And well its true isn't it, trends in learning are glacial rather than expeditious and anyone who says otherwise should be treated with a heightened sense of suspicion. Even so I found it a useful exercise to look back over my 2023 discussions and I am sure that these same topics will be similar at least for the first few months of 2024. For medium sized organisations they key is to discover which of these topics are essential to your business and how they can improve the efficiency and productivity of your functions because it is unlikely that you can have everything, but you can make the right steps to discover which can make a real difference to your learning function.

The big one as I mentioned is AI, I’m fortunate enough to work for a learning vendor investing heavily in AI and I can see the incremental improvements day-by-day. Our acquisition of Edugo has made a real impact on our roadmap for generative AI features in learning.

AI will transform learning as we know it and make it better for everyone. The question for you as a learning team is how will you use it to transform your organisation and your learning experience you provide.