Five Key Themes from Learning Technologies 2024

TLDR: 5 Key Themes from LTUK24 -

1. AI (surprise, surprise)

2. Learning in the flow of work

3. Skills (based organisation

4. Social learning

5. Proving ROI & Impact of learning

Prelude:

LTUK was last week and a lot of teams were excited to meet in person and explore the latest in learning technology.

It was an amazing event, and I am proud to be apart of with it with team Docebo!

🏆 From NowComms exit poll of all participants.

🥇 Which must see companies did you have on your hot list? Docebo #1!

🥇 Which company stood out the most for you at the show today? Docebo #1!

🥇 Who do you think you had the most profitable conversation with? Docebo #1!

After seeing the best and brightest in tech, I would encourage you to take a step back and revisit your learning strategy.

Consider what problem you want to solve before diving headfirst into new tech (ehem AI).

Fall in love with the problem and spend time to clearly define what needs to be solved.

I call this "putting the cart before the horse" and in the age of AI, it’s very important.

Start by understanding the business strategy, and then build your learning strategy around that.

1. Understand the business problems your organisation is facing
2. Align your learning strategy to these problems
3. Uncover what technology will solve your learning problem at hand, which again is aimed at solving the wider business problem.

If you are not solving a business problem with technology, you are putting the cart before the horse.

Theme #1: AI

I got asked about this more than anything else on the stand. So I thought I'd write a summary of how I think AI is impacting L&D (and how you should approach it).

How I see AI shaping workplace Learning in 2024:

• Content creation will be quicker, smarter and more accurate than in its current state (as the model trains and retrains itself).
• Skills will be smarter and more accessible across enterprise systems and skills will often be added from a “source of truth - SOT” into an external system delivering upon the AI-based skills intelligence from the SOT. Skills in the flow of work will become the norm and the demands from HR/Talent/Learning teams will be higher from vendors/providers.
• Search will be smarter, and our demands for search will be higher. For learning teams, this is critical as learners’ needs and demands for accuracy and speed will increase. If learners can’t find personalised content recommendations quickly, they will disengage.
• Virtual assistants/chatbots will become smarter and more personalised. It’ll become a learning coach and learners will demand more from the chatbot. The experience people have with ChatGPT will be the expectation from the learning chatbots, and it’s critical for vendors that the AI engine/brain is intelligent enough to provide a personalised and curated learning experience in a quick manner.

A lot of teams follow AI in this order

1. Content creation

2. Skills Development

3. Learning Strategy

4. Business strategy.

I would argue it should be the opposite.

Start by understanding the business strategy, and then build your learning strategy around that.

AI can help your business strategy, and be a key enabler in building learning programs that support this. But it can also be approached in the wrong way.

What should you avoid when working with AI?

1. Do not assume AI will solve all your problems.

2. Do not assume that AI is a Learning Strategy

3. Do not solve the wrong problems, faster.

4. Do not use AI without thinking of your end users.

5. Do not jump right in with no upskilling on AI -

6. Do not assume AI is always ethical, without bias or privacy concerns

Want more info? See my AI reading list for learning teams below:

Resource 1: A Learning Team's Guide to AI (My Newsletter)

Resource 2 - Buyers Guide to AI Learning Products (Docebo)

Docebo posted an amazing resource for learning teams. It is called a Buyer's Guide to AI and covers the following chapters:

💡 Part 1 - The evolving AI landscape

💡 Part 2 - The Promise of AI

💡 Part 3 - What is AI for learning?

💡 Part 4 - Basic concepts of Learning AI

💡 Part 5 - Generative AI (GenAI) Explained

💡 Part 6 - Potential Challenges with AI Solutions

💡 Part 7 - Frameworks for Successful AI Deployments

💡 Part 8 - Overview of Docebo AI

See the link here: Buyers Guide to AI

Resource 3 - Responsible AI Principles (The LPI)

This is a very important resource for learning teams and vendors alike. We need to ensure that the AI being built is ethical and equitable for all. These principles are key to this, and I highly recommend all to read them.

Theme 2 - Learning in the flow of work

Going forward, I see headless”/embedded experiences/learning in the flow of work becoming the norm.

Learning tech will shift to flexible, modular architectures for highly tailored experiences - embedded in the tools learners are using day-to-day.

Why is this the case? 1) System fatigue is real, 2) demands from learners are higher than ever, 3) time to spend on learning is lower than ever, 4) technological developments are allowing this more and more.

Statista ran this study called identifying the “Average number of software as a service (SaaS) applications used by organisations worldwide from 2015 to 2022”.

In 2015, 8 systems were the average for a company. In 2022, this was 130. Think about that, your employees, customers or partners are using 130 systems in their corporation on average.

Today, learners want information within their “flow of work”, meaning barriers are removed to access key things they need everyday.

They want to learn at their own terms and at their own pace. They want more time to learn, as not to spend time moving between all of their systems.

Key Use Cases of Flow of work Learning:

🏄 In-app/in-product education: 

Surface product training directly from your own product. Products like Docebo Flow can allow you to inject code into external applications to surface learning directly from key systems. This can be a desktop or mobile app (for frontline/retail/deskless workers). If you have built a piece of proprietary technology as a business, Flow from Docebo can be crucial to allow learners to access learning in this set app without ever leaving it. 

Imagine you run a customer or partner learning program for a large global audience. Now imagine that each of those users can get learning from within your proprietary tech you’ve built (mobile/desktop app etc). You will remove barriers to learning and spark engagement, directly from their flow of work. 

🏄 MS Teams,

Embed learning from your learning platform directly inside MS Teams Chat. For MS Teams users facing system fatigue, this will potentially allow them to get content directly to their familiar surroundings, reduce the barriers to learners, and help boost engagement and reduce the system disparity many users face. 

If you want to go deep into this topic, I wrote this article on it (preview below).

Theme 3 - Social learning & communities

Communities of practice or learning communities are becoming more important than ever. People learn from people and building learning experiences that allows people to interact, share ideas and learn together will be table-stakes in 2024.

I love this topic, and have written two articles on it,

See this one on Social Learning from a research perspective  -

This one on how Customer Education + Community is merging into one discipline,

Theme 4 - Skills and skills-based organisations

A plethora of people asked me about skills during LT this year.

More and more HR/Talent/Learning leaders want to build a Skill-Based Organisation (SBO).

This describes a shift in the way we think and go about work from thinking about job titles to looking at individual skills.

Or as Bersin calls it, we are moving from “Career 3.0 Your Work as Your Career” to “Career 4.0 Your Skills as Your Career”.

AI will shape skills, as shown in theme one. More and more organisations are moving to become a skills-based organisation. This is hitting L&D now more than ever, and I have spoken to lots of learning leaders recently who are faced with this task.

This is why I wrote the article below about how to build a skills-based organisation. It's a dense but very worthwhile read if you want to build an SBO.

Trend 5 - Measuring Impact & ROI of Learning

90% of CEOs believe that learning is a business solution, but only 8% report that learning is impacting the business.

How do you build learning projects that changes this trend?

If you can't quantify ROI and impact, your learning budget will get the axe from the CFO 🤔👇

I see the following as critical for learning teams in 2024:

Working jointly with your sponsors. If learning is a vehicle to achieve revenue goals, you need to ensure you are helping that to take place. If your sponsor fail, so do you.

Demonstrating the impact and ROI of the issues you are solving. This is constant with your sponsor, and needs to be done concurrently (ideally month or quarter-specific metrics).

Being an effective storyteller with data. Learning data is great but your ability to provide causation and subsequently translate this into the language of your sponsor and your execs is vital. If they don't constantly see your value, your influence diminishes.

Why being the 8% is hard for L&D teams:

A lot learning teams are stuck in a maze. I call this the learning measurement maze, and teams can't prove how their programs are impactful to the business, nor how they are impacting ROI.

Leaders want clear evidence of how learning programs are growing their business and improving bottom line.

Getting there, however, is hard for a lot of teams who are stuck in a learning measurement maze. To buck this trend, you need to measure training effectiveness and understand the impact of your programs.

Why measure training effectiveness?

1. To determine if the training benefits employees.

2. To see the effect on business performance and determine the training’s ROI.

3. To uncover issues in the training process and improve it.

Best practices for measuring training effectiveness

The following five best practices will make sure you will be able to assess training effectiveness:

1. Have a reasonable number of KPIs. Be selective when making your choice. The more measures you include, the more information you’ll have to work with. But don’t overwhelm yourself with too many.
2. Identify your KPIs before the development phase of your training. Knowing what you want to measure first will enable you to select the most suitable measuring effectiveness method. You may want to consult with key stakeholders first to know which metrics are most important to them.
3. Plan your data collection schedule in the design phase of your training. Know when you want to measure effectiveness and how you will do this, and build it into your training timeline to ensure you stay organised and manage stakeholder expectations.

Kirkpatrick Model:

- Level 1: Reaction – The first step is to evaluate the learners’ reactions and responses to the training.

- Level 2: Learning – The second step is to measure the knowledge and skills learned during the training.

- Level 3: Behaviour – Step three assesses the behavioural change (if any and to what extent) due to the training.

- Level 4: Impact – The final step is to measure the training’s impact on business goals and results.

Reading list for more info:

🤔 What did you see as the biggest themes from LTUK last week?

🤔 What trends are most important to you and why?

🤔 What trends do you want more info on?

Would love to hear your thoughts ✌️