Podcast | Turn Your Big L&D Challenges Into Wins

Organisational impact lies in the big, scary L&D challenges you’ve been putting off!

Take skills.

We do it manually right now and it means it’s too hard - we can’t map and measure them at the speed or scale required.

So we find an easier challenge to solve, to show we solved it.

But to have true impact, we need to take on the hardest challenges.

From using AI to mapping skills, and engaging learners to centralising information, learn how in this conversation with HowNow CEO, Nelson Sivalingam.

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Here are five big takeaways on solving big L&D challenges.

1. Don't get caught up in trends, buzzwords and shiny new tech!

Let's take skills again, and that struggle to map and measure them.

“That's a really difficult challenge to solve! And so I think it's trying to bring our attention to let's not do what's easy to do.?

“Let's actually push ourselves out of our comfort zone to look at what are those challenges that are stopping us from having meaningful impact. And let's see where we can use these shiny new things to solve those.”

Nelson recommends breaking this skills process into three buckets:

• Understand our workforce from the lens of what skills they need to have.
• Do we know what skills they have? What are their strengths and where are the gaps?
• Do we have the learning resources to be able to bridge those gaps??

Given that this is such a manual process currently, by mapping it out, you can then ask yourself which tech tackles these key parts of the problem.

2. “We're underusing the potential of AI… for short term gains.”

“Right now, we're using it to create content faster because it gives us that gratification - we've done something. We're doing it to automate routine tasks. But are we using it in a way where it's going to have that long term benefit?”

Again, like skills mapping.

This typically takes organisations nine to 12 months, and involves a lot of manual effort.

Speaking to managers, working out the skills needed for a role, building a skills taxonomy, measuring proficiency and trying to keep it updated - all for it to end up in a spreadsheet where it goes to die.

“This is where we used HowNow AI to solve that big challenge."

"Looking at real-time job market data, and then inferring, what are the skills required and what are the proficiency levels required for someone to be able to do that task and responsibility?"

And if you want to learn how HowNow AI helps you measure your skills and generate pathways to close them, check it out here .

3. We need to close The Engagement Gap

We can put out all the great learning initiatives we want, but if people aren’t engaging, none of the other good stuff we want to happen, will happen.

Behaviour change, skill development, performance improvement - it can’t happen without engagement.

And that doesn’t mean it will automatically happen if people are engaging, because they might engage with experiences that aren’t the right fit to achieve these things.

“But engagement is 100% the primary requirement in order to be able to even have a chance? at driving those desired outcomes.”

And the key reason for that Engagement Gap is the focus on content and creating content, over skills and building skills.

So if we start with problems people want to solve and skills they want to build, we’ll build contextual content that drives skills and performance.

“Fundamentally, we're pushing out the wrong learning to the wrong people at the wrong time and therefore we're getting the wrong results. And this often happens because of a very content-heavy focus.

“But we're ignoring the context in which employees exist, right? What's the overall business strategy? What are the skills they need in order to be able to do their job better? Have you marketed the problem that your solution is trying to solve?”

4. Creating a single point of access for learning is a quick win

Let’s be honest, we’re spoiled outside of work. We have access to great consumer products that remove friction and get us what we need super fast.

When we want something, any amount of friction is inconvenient!

“Now you apply that at work where we're already saying we think we're busy, time poor and trying to manage a lot of things.

"And then you add to that any amount of friction to find the knowledge or learning that I need, I'm always going to choose the path of least resistance.

“And so if it's too difficult for me to find internally, I'm just going to go to Google because it’s easier."?

Now, that's not a problem for the employee, but it's a problem for the organisation because they’ve probably spent a lot of time and money building or buying learning resources and capturing internal knowledge.

But they’ve done a such a bad job of bringing it together that they've got low engagement and ROI for those things.

5. Want to show impact? Measure metrics aligned to your business!

“You achieve what you measure, And it’s a problem if you're measuring a metric that isn't aligned to business impact…

“When your go to market function shouts about the net new revenue they've made. Everyone in the business gets that! They're all like, yeah, we made more revenue, we’re happy about that.

“But if you went and shouted to the business that we got 70% course completion rate, don't expect to get a high five from any other function because it's not had a business impact."

So let's start measuring the things that indicate impact!

What does the business care about, and how can we use learning as a vehicle to build those skills and drive that performance?