The organisational impact is 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 do it 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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Watch the episode

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Listen to the episode

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Timestamps

0:00 Why we need to tackle the big challenges
6:50 The Engagement Gap
13:59 Mapping and measuring skills
17:26 AI for the long term
27:59 Centralising learning
39:06 AI for L&D
42:11 Demonstrating impact
50:49 Tackling Incomplete data

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1. The big, scary L&D challenges often have the most impact

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There are still some big, strategic challenges that stop us having impact on our organisations!

And the answer isn’t to get caught up in trends, buzzwords and shiny new tech…

“How can we get an understanding of the skills we have and don't have in our workforce? And how can we do that at the speed at which business and industries are changing? 

“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.”

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2. 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?”

Every time we roll out campaigns without engagement, we waste time and resources.

And every time we scale things without the context of skills and performance, we raise the risk of scaling things that don’t work.

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3. Map and measure your skills, so you can close skills gaps

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Organisations want skills, not content, and for us to deliver value, we need to start looking at what we're doing from the lens of skills.

Nelson recommends breaking this process into three buckets.

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

The trouble is, this is such a manual process for L&D teams right now, that they can’t do it at the speed and scale required.

From working out the skills needed and current proficiency, to keeping it up-to-date and on top of emerging skills - too much manual input is required.

Nelson shared so much great advice on overcoming this, it’s worth watching this six-minute video:
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4. “We're underusing the potential of AI… for quite 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?”

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 essentially 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?

“We can also then contextualise that based on the jobs that exist within your organisation, plugging into your HR system, and then combine organisational context with job market macro data to come up with A, a skills taxonomy, and our skills taxonomy has just over 40,000 skills.”

And if you want to learn how HowNow AI helps you measure your skills and generate pathways to close them, check it out here.
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5. Creating a single point of access for learning is a HUGE quick win

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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 there's low engagement and ROI for those things.”

And it's not about everything having to live on one platform, it’s about creating a single front door to accessing all of your learning, knowledge and skills.

That’s where integrating your learning space with the tools you use everyday really comes into play.

“One of our biggest customers has about 25 different content libraries across the organisation. So get the best provider for everything you need, get the best tool, but you want to have a single point of access. That's the key. 

“The tools don't have to be all a part of the same provider, but the front door needs to be the same. What that allows you to do, it allows you to change the content sources in the background without changing the discovery experience for the employee.”
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6. 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 is not 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 use learning as a vehicle to build those skills and drive that performance?

Struggling to shift L&D’s perception in the business? You’re not alone!

Thankfully, Danielle Dziurun is here to help - with a proven framework for understanding current perception, shifting it, and aligning to business goals.

By the end of this episode, you’ll have the confidence and skills to improve L&D perception and impact.

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Watch the episode

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Listen to the episode

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Timestamps

0:00 Intro to Danielle
2:06 Understanding L&D’s perception
7:04 Next steps based on your learnings
10:21 Connecting development to core values
14:58 How we align to commercial goals
20:02 Using data effectively in L&D
23:22 Removing friction for learners

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Six lessons on understanding L&D's perception and aligning with your business

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1. Interview stakeholders across the business, using consistent questions…

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When you’re new to a business, you need to learn as much as you can, pretty damn fast!

What does the business do? What’s the context of the space it works in? How do the people and the culture work?

Danielle did this by speaking to as many people, at various levels of the business, using a consistent set of questions.

“These were really about figuring out how people perceived L&D, their place in the organisation, what challenges they were facing, what current L&D activity was going on… 

“And this helped me to really build up a picture of what people wanted and what they expected from L&D, and maybe redirect a little bit if the expectations were unrealistic, what their aspirations were and what their pain points were.”
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2. … then map out what you learn to spot common pain points and quick wins‍

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“I used Miro, but you could do it in any way. You could use Excel, you could use Word, whatever works for you. 

“And it just helped me to start identifying the patterns and spot the common needs and concerns and priorities and really start to identify some quick wins as well for L&D.

“Because you want to start building up that identity and start serving people's needs while in the background, you're laying some of that longer-term strategic foundation.” 
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3. Funnel what you’ve learned into your short and long-term plans.

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“The mapping exercise that I did and the insights I gained through that whole exercise were just invaluable because they were basically my compass. 

“They pointed me in the right direction and I used them to validate and add depth to the results of a preliminary learning needs analysis survey that I ran, and this exercise also started to help me build up a stakeholder map for L&D.”

This gave Danielle a platform to start forming key relationships and connections to internal experts, as well as the colleagues and leaders that had a passion for learning.

And both the pain point and stakeholder mapping make it far easier to get buy-in and support from people, and align leadership with your L&D vision.
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4. Ensure development is connected to core company values.

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Consulting is a knowledge-driven world, one that requires constant learning and adaptability. Hence why curiosity is one of DT Consulting’s core values, and why L&D was built around the idea of cultivating curiosity.

“It was extremely important for our leadership team that our core values, which for DT, are excellence, integrity, empathy, belonging, and curiosity, that they were woven into the fabric of what it means to do well within our organisation.”

“One of my first significant pieces of work at DT was to spearhead the development of a capability framework to outline what high performance looks like and to support our people's development and career progression.”

“Building and sharing knowledge and developing oneself and others are essential performance expectations within our framework and they’re key milestones for advancement at every level of a person's career with us.”
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5. Here’s how L&D can build a commercial understanding of the business…‍

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“To do this effectively, you just need to develop a really deep understanding of the business that you're operating in, how it makes its money, its internal and external environments… find out which areas are profitable and which offer those growth opportunities.”

This will help you connect your L&D efforts to revenue generation and the overall business goals.

And when you’re having conversations with leaders, it’ll help you connect and build crddibility, because you can show that you understand their business priorities and can help support them in achieving their business goals.

“Start by engaging in conversations about business drivers and identifying key dependencies on people and their capabilities to execute that business strategy. And this is a big thing!  To engage business leaders effectively, you need to talk about competence gaps and needs, not training.”
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6. A lot of the data you need is out there in the wild already

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“And it's up to you to go on a bit of a treasure hunt across the organisation to discover what already exists.”

It’s a case of identifying those business KPIs we want to influence and then the sources of data that we can look at to help us demonstrate our impact.

Danielle has been inspired by Will Talheimer's Learning Transfer Evaluation Model, which has helped her think outside the box when it comes to learning data that could be useful for demonstrating impact.

“It basically ranks the relative value of the measures of effective learning, and it starts at attendance and engagement at the lowest level, goes up through learner perception and knowledge, which gives some evidence of effective learning, having taken place up…

“Up through demonstrating decision and task competence on the job and through to the top, which is the wider impacts of transfer of learning being the best evidence for learning effectiveness.”

Danielle credits this model for broadening her thinking beyond the usual L&D data, like attendance/completion rates and smile sheet results, to those sources of data that would demonstrate impact on performance and the wider business.

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Useful links

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• The First 90 days – Michael Watkins
• The Ramblings of an L&D Professional – Helen Bailey‍
• Learning Transfer Evaluation Model – Will Thalheimer

😤 My resources are scattered. 

🤦 Our skills are hard to track and manage. 

😬 We can’t create all the content we need.

‍Enough is enough! We’ve heard these too many times and it’s time things changed.‍

It’s why we’re making HowNow your one home for learning and skills.

Are you ready to create, discover, track and manage all of your learning and skills under one roof?

Good! Here are six ways we’re making learning feel like home...
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1. We’re the front door to your learning

Bring all your scattered learning into a single, searchable platform in HowNow.

From your internal content that’s created by experts to course libraries and shared drives, our Unified Search brings everything together in one central place.

Now your employees can find the information they need, when they need it most, and when it can influence performance.
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“One of the things we love about HowNow’s platform at DT consulting is that it has the integrated search that pulls everything together and just has that seamless user experience,” Danielle Dziurun, Learning & Development Manager, DT Consulting

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‍2. Content for every need, under one roof

People don’t want lots of learning content, they want the right content!

HowNow+ offers more than 9,000 learning resources - carefully curated from the providers you trust and specialists in their space - in one single subscription.

We also curate learning resources from informal sources across the web: podcasts, blog posts, webinars, newsletter and youtube channels.

“As an L&D team of one, HowNow+ prevents me from spending lots of time trying to put together lots of content. And we have 5,000+ courses available to us.” - Jack Burge, Learning And Development Partner, FitFlop.

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3. Create a skills blueprint for your organisation

Our powerful AI-driven Skills Framework lets you map skills to every single job role in your organisation with precision. 

HowNow AI also sets target skill levels against industry benchmarks, allowing you to focus your energy into the work that matters.

And our AI-Powered Pathways address your most critical skills gaps, using AI to take the pain out of content curation by setting learning objectives, Skill targets and refining your content sources

“HowNow has really provided us with the tools and resources that allow us to effectively curate learning pathways around that skills architecture and different skills gaps.” - Kayshia Kruger, Director of Organisation Development, ORC.

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4. Cook up a storm in our content kitchen

Whether it’s hosting live workshops, creating courses or creating pathways, HowNow is where you create like a boss.

And your internal experts can too, using Nuggets to capture all their knowledge that’s specific to your business.
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“HowNow is so user-friendly, especially when it comes to the creation of content. My learners also find it so easy to learn within HowNow.” - Holly Flickinger, Head of Learning and Development, Ardoq.

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5. Learn in the flow of work

People are most motivated to learn in their moments of need, and HowNow helps you deliver learning in those moments and in the tools people use every day.

Whether it’s through our integrations with tools like Slack and Teams or our Browser Extension, our customers love bringing learning to the flow of work.
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“We’ve focused on building the habits of learning so that it becomes an everyday activity. Making sure any learning is accessible at their point of need, we’re integrating HowNow into tools like Microsoft Teams and other collaboration tools.” - Henry Litchfield, Head of Talent and Learning, Lucid Group.

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6. All your L&D data in one place

Say goodbye to report-running fatigue and hello to our one-stop shop for all your L&D data needs.

Create meaningful reports in clicks using HowNow reporting and make data-driven decisions about people’s development. 

From keeping track of compliance to mapping and measuring skills, HowNow really is all your L&D data in one place.

“We needed somewhere to have a central home for all the learning content that was being created at pace and we wanted to support modernised learning… where learning is integrated and at the point of need - we knew HowNow would be the perfect platform.” - Harriet Perks, London Academy And Onboarding Lead, AND Digital.

Ready to bring all your learning and skills under one roof?

‍Book a demo today and see how HowNow helps you create, discover, track and manage all of your learning and skills in one beautifully smart platform.