To stay competitive in today’s rapidly shifting market, companies can’t rely on a once-a-quarter course or workshop to upskill and reskill employees. The most successful organizations are weaving learning into employees’ daily workflows. In this episode, we spoke with Steve Young, global head of employee experience and leadership assessments at Caterpillar, and Heer Kansal, global technical L&D leader at Novelis, to learn more about learning in the flow of work.
Listen now for insights on:
- How to embed learning into employees’ day-to-day routines.
- How to measure the impact of on-demand learning.
- How enabling on-demand training can support a culture of learning and growth.
Listen Now:
Additional Resources:
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- Infographic: Develop a Strategy for Better Learning in the Flow of Work
- Article: Develop Leaders in the Flow of Work With Learning Technologies: 8 Strategies for Success
- Article: Eliminate Stress and Motivate Learners With On-the-Job Training
- Article: 5 Tips to Improve Your In-the-Flow Learning With Video
Interested in learning more about on-the-job training and other delivery modalities? Download a complimentary preview of Training Industry’s research report, “Deconstructing 70-20-10.”
The transcript for this episode follows:
Speaker:
Welcome to The Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from Training Industry.
Sarah Gallo:
Hello and welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, senior editor at Training Industry, here with my co-host, Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, our editor-in-chief.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Welcome. Today’s episode is brought to us by Training Industry Research.
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Sarah Gallo:
The world of business is continuing to move at a rapid pace. Things like digital transformation and the rise in remote and hybrid work among additional factors are changing the way we work and learn. To put it simply, to stay competitive in today’s business environment, companies can’t rely on a once a quarter course or workshop anymore to upskill their people. The most successful companies are weaving learning into employees daily workflows, so that training is readily available when they need it. Today, we’re speaking with Steve Young, global head of employee experience and leadership assessments at Caterpillar, and Heer Kansal, global technical L& D leader at Novelis, to learn more about on-demand learning. Heer and Steve, welcome to the podcast.
Heer Kansal:
Thank you, Sarah. So looking forward to the discussion today.
Steve Young:
Yeah, thank you. Great to be here.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Yes. Welcome. Before we begin, I think it would be helpful if you both share your definition of on demand learning for us to help kind of baseline the discussion today.
Steve Young:
Sure, yeah, happy to do that. Before I give my one sentence definition, I just want to reinforce what I think sometimes overlook point that everyone who has a job, regardless of their title, we’re constantly learning, whether it’s intentional learning or not. Most of that learning is happening on the job. It’s not in a formal training program. For me, the on-demand learning is that range of digitally enabled technologies that now exist to meet individuals where they are most often, right, on the job. The technologies to me are really exciting because they offer a really highly personalized approach to development in the flow of work if they are grounded in evidence-based learning practices.
Heer Kansal:
Yeah, for me, I think very much aligned to what Steve is talking about in the flow of work, on-demand learning is all about learning available anywhere, anytime, any place, and of course, very much related to the business. How my job is directly impacted by the learning that is available to me right at my convenience is what really on-demand learning is today. And then how they’re digitally upgraded and the whole technology that’s been readily available can make it more easy for me to use it. That’s about on-demand learning for me.
Sarah Gallo:
Perfect. That’s super helpful. I love what you mentioned, Steve, too about that point that if you have a job and you’re performing, you are learning, whether it’s intentional or not. And with that in mind, can you both break down what this on demand learning might actually look like? How does it show up in today’s digital work environment specifically?
Steve Young:
A colleague of mine a couple of years ago, we were interested in that question too and really within the leadership development context. We did a study, a benchmarking study, in late ’19, early ’20 to find out more of what people were thinking. We got about a hundred talent management practitioners across a range of industries and said, “What does digitally enabled assessment and development look like in terms of what you’re using now? What are you interested in adopting to assess and develop competencies, behaviors, personality, health, well-being, those things?” While we found out the most popular tools were still traditional online-based assessment, we did find half the organizations are providing tools that do allow leaders to pulse people anytime, anywhere. That points to the importance of these applications that give you immediate on-the-job feedback. When it came to what are they willing to buy within a year, we did find that they used or said they were going to buy a gameification learning experience platforms that had mobile collaborative learning and peer-to-peer coaching capabilities. And then when we asked for three years into the future, three of the top five technologies were a variety of AI-based coaching. This was right before the pandemic. My sense is probably these trends have gone the way that people were predicting they buy in the future.
Heer Kansal:
I think in the last 20 years, specifically more 10 years in the last 10 years when I’ve been in the industry, I’ve seen a very big shift in terms of the approach towards learning overall for organizations. It has moved from absolutely what Steve was mentioning, the traditional approach to a more technology-based and online, e-learning, virtually instructor led approach. This has made organizations think a lot about how can we make things available for the employee right at the doorstep of maybe a plant where they’re working or the offices or the shop floors they’re working at. I think that’s what I have been seeing this shift as well, especially in the last two years, the whole disruption that has happened in the technology area and the whole consolidation that’s happening in the market industry of learning experience as well, creating that learning experiences for employees within their role. If I am, for example, a process engineer or a data scientist, I will look at learning from my perspective, from my lens, and that lens is when the learning is more contextualized to the skills and knowledge I’m looking for. That might lead to multiple roles, but then I have to develop and I will be looking for more developing my skills, which I am more interested in. That whole experience journey, which is very personalized, and then providing the right content and the platform is then backing up with that. I think that whole learning experience platform becomes extremely critical today. That’s something most of the organizations are looking for. In fact, my current organization, we all are looking for those solutions and upgrading it to that level.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Definitely. Because as you mentioned, the acceleration and need, especially over the past few years to access learning and the flow of work, is just so important. Especially as we’ve gone to remote workforces and distributed teams, it’s really more important than ever. I’d love to expand on that kind of idea on why is on-demand learning more effective than more traditional instructor led programs.
Steve Young:
I don’t think we can make that statement yet actually, at least, again, my area is leadership development. A study a couple years ago summarized the findings of hundreds of other studies that have been done over the last 50 years. What they found is that traditional leadership development when designed well, it does have ROI when it comes to improving job performance and other organizational outcomes. As much as I love that we’d be in this place with on demand learning, it’s just not there yet in terms of that kind of evidence for impact on organizational outcomes. With that said though, traditional programs, they require a lot of time and money, of course. And as a result, not enough leaders have the opportunities to attend those courses, build those skills. And I mean face-to-face and live online when I say traditional. But those that do have the opportunity, they too reported being difficult to apply what they learned into the flow. I think there’s a real opportunity for the scalable technology to address a lot of the limitations of the traditional approach. As organizations design, develop, deploy, I think we’ll get a better understanding of how they stack up compared to the traditional, but that’s going to take some time. But in the meantime, I’ll offer a prediction, which is that I think that traditional is still going to have their place as some of the best approaches though for supporting the more complex nuance skills that we’re really require working with people and learning from others. Mindsets, for example, how to handle ambiguity and uncertainty. I think that on the other hand, the scalable approaches we’re going to probably find are the best and most efficient way to develop the more straightforward, simpler skills, fundamental skills like formal communication, giving feedback where you have a model and follow these steps, or managing stress. I think that the on-demand approaches too and they can also support and enhance what’s going on in the classroom to help people create habits around things they want to do in the flow.
Heer Kansal:
I agree, Steve. On-the-job has always been critical, right, from day one. It has been always required and important to really give people that experience and exposure-based learning more. Yes, the traditional approach is investment and time, both. Therefore, what we are seeing now is a more need, especially on the technical front, and I’m sure leadership as well, is more on speed and agility, both. That will come from two things, few things. One, when you look at the microlearning concepts where you are bringing those bite size learnings. I have an issue with the machinery. I don’t have time to go to a classroom to find solution. I might quickly need a solution. I might go back to my learning platform, which is available on my mobile, or I have a VR set which gives me complete solution. I look into it and then I apply it right next hour. That’s the speed and the agility in the sense that if I have issues in my workplace and I want to connect to my same profile people within the organization, but across borders, how do I do that? Those cohorts, those collaboration tools, that really make both the speed and agility available to people to share best practices, do those knowledge exchange, and quick resolutions. How does microlearning concepts and cohorts and collaborations really bring in those macro solutions to people? That’s where the whole learning industry is moving and they’re moving very fast, especially after the pandemic, because the need has all of a sudden rise very high. Yes, I agree [with] Steve that in terms of traditional approach will always be critical in an extent, for example, some leadership programs where you need the leaders to come together and talk about, for example, culture change. You have to look at the culture of the organization. You have to talk through it, or really some of the critical topics you need to discuss or want to bring face-to-face interaction and connectivity to people. But more and more from the technical side, I have seen the demand going absolutely virtual and more and more microlearning, bite-sized [training] and collaboration platforms.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Definitely. Those are all such good points, because really formal training is always going to have its place in corporate training. It really takes a blend to create an impactful learning experience. Could you both maybe share a little bit on how learning leaders can help determine when to use on demand training versus formal training? I think that would be really beneficial to our audience.
Steve Young:
To follow up on a little what I shared earlier is thinking about the outcome you’re trying to achieve and the skills required. From my perspective, I think that for leadership development, if it’s developing leaders, the more complex nuance skills, I would definitely really do the live online or face-to-face because that’s the time you need to develop those because it’s really expanding mindsets at that point. Now, if your outcome is people aren’t giving each other feedback, and so we need to teach behaviors around giving feedback, I do think that there’s on-demand solutions that can work for that. Because if you use, for example, a research-based model on how to give effective feedback, you can chat a bot and it will give you that model. It will give you in the moment before you’re ready to go into the job to deliver difficult feedback to someone, because research has kind of bared that out. Coming from my past experience, you can use a model like situation, behavior, and impact. If you do that in most contexts, it will be effective, but you can deliver that because it’s kind of a very straightforward sort of approach. Of course, do it with empathy. It’s not a mechanical kind of fix a machine, but hopefully that helps kind of tell the difference. Think about the outcome and then surround that with the right set of training methods or technology.
Heer Kansal:
I mean, in technical [training], the approach usually is what really the business issue is and how complex it is. If there is a business issue and the demand is to be fast delivery, then of course, the inclination is definitely towards going with the technology solution and e-learning or the virtual world. But when it comes to… As the technical leaders move up the ladder, the need for then having those phased approaches, a stitch, of course, with eLearning, instructor led, face-to-face, the 70-20-10 methodology, that becomes extremely beneficial and also required at that time. It really depends. I think that’s something very critical for any learning function to do is to get connected to the business, especially on the technical [training side]. I mean, I’ll talk more from the technical side. But for me, it’s extremely important that I am absolutely aligned to what the business concerns are, what the business priorities are. And not just today. I have to look at the future. If the business is talking about five years down the line, then what is that solution, or what is that learning I need to bring in that will help people to develop for those five years down the line? For that, the solutions could be… I mean, you can definitely go for multiple solutions. It could be anything, whether virtual, face-to-face. But what I’m seeing the demand is also more towards technology solutions, eLearnings, microlearnings, co-horts [and] collaborations. For technical learning, a lot depends on the business context.
Sarah Gallo:
I think that’s something our listeners definitely need to keep front of mind. L&D leaders really are business partners, and we do believe that at Training Industry too, so that’s really helpful advice there. I want to touch on another factor here, which is really about learning in the flow of work and how that can help create that learning culture, which we know so many of today’s employees are looking for. Do you have any insights on how on-demand learning can really build that culture of learning in an organization?
Steve Young:
I think that providing these tools or platforms in an organization, it signals that organization believes everyone has the potential to develop to be a leader if they so choose and leadership development. When employees are consistently given those opportunities, they’re more likely to be engaged, inspired, more productive. I’m a firm believer when everyone’s given an equal opportunity to develop, not just the top five to 10%, you should see more individuals revealing their potential, which should be a positive outcome for a lot of organizations that are facing serious leadership pipeline challenges. And then just from just signaling that learning and growth is valued, when you provide these technologies, they also really drive a culture of actual learning and growth because everyone is being given opportunities to do their actual development on the job board. Be it by providing more real time feedback, more challenge, more support to leaders as they lead. Actual engagement and development should become more common as an attribute of your culture. That notion that learning only happens when you step in a classroom or log on to your content library is more than that. You should see more of that through provision of these kinds of technologies.
Heer Kansal:
That’s been my experience that something that’s very beneficial when it comes to technical learning. A lot of organizations I’ll say want to do this, is always to create those competency frameworks. Not the traditional ones. They are going really failing out, but competency frameworks rather than role wise more process related. Because nowadays people want to be in the process and not stick or boxed in a role, because automation and changes in the digital world is so much that the jobs are evolving. Really making it process specific skills and knowledge competency framework, and then those skills for assessing the abilities in the technical front help people to develop skills beyond what’s right in front of them. Yes, for sure, what’s now and for the future. I think that’s been very helpful, especially my experience is that organizations when they’re shown that how this agile competency frameworks can really help, that’s bringing a lot of connect between people and learning because then they connect to it. As I mentioned before, the experience journey. If you create those learning experiences, helping people to develop within the processes irrespective of the roles being boxed and giving them opportunities not just within the organization, but overall in their career growth, then there is a lot of buy-in on learning. And also, I feel that there needs to be an ecosystem of connection between talent acquisition, talent developmen and talent management. All these three functions have to be so well integrated and work together to provide that really good learning and career experience journeys to employees. Today the technology is making it possible. You have solutions which integrate these three platforms and give you your nine boxes, your business pool, everything ready. I think that’s where organizations need to build that foundational infrastructure of identifying process-based competency skills and the abilities skills that can help people to assess where they are and where they would like to go using the right technology systems, the leadership programs. And then as a learning function, you provide… You’re enablers. You enable. You’re enablers for the business because what the business is doing, you have to be enablers. Your work has to help them to achieve. Similarly, for individuals, what they want to do in their career, in their work, you have to be like an enabler for that. Your content, your activities, your opportunities as learning professionals you provide to them have to enable them to achieve what they’re wanting to achieve. That’s what my experience has been working within the learning function.
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah, that’s great. I want to circle back to that point we were making before really about learning leaders, being these business partners. And of course, a big part of that is measuring your value in terms of the training that you’re putting out there. Of course, that isn’t easy. Do you both have any recommendations on how our listeners can really measure the impact of their programs?
Steve Young:
Sure. Being by training an IO psychologist, I always love measuring the impact of what we’re doing on the business and people. The first step is just evaluating where these things are being accessed and even used. That should not be underestimated the importance of that. But obviously not stopping there just in terms of output and usage. Doing quick reaction surveys to the end user to make sure these tools and platforms are easy to use and the content is relevant and applicable to their job. And then after you find that adequate usage and good applicability ratings, the next step is putting in place other methods that assess, is behavior change happening say two to three months after usage. Since many of these tools they capture digital behaviors as a matter of how they work, you can track aggregate behavior trends, digital trace trends across leaders or employees during that period. An example, you might have leaders using virtual AI coaches trying to improve on formal communication metrics. Things like pace or tone or clarity, you might see that, “Wow, they’re increasing over time.” But at the same time, I highly recommend surveying them directly and others for subjective perceptions of impact. Because you might have those leaders getting presentations that on average are more clear or pitch and tone is better, but they’re not getting enough real world opportunities to show up and actually put those skills to use. Or you might find that peers are saying that leaders are improving in how they deliver communications according to AI, but the content of those messages is not addressing the needs of different stakeholder’s concerns. Those are things that today’s AI can’t detect and won’t for some time. And then finally, it’s only after say six to 12 months that you should start looking at whether those changes in the behaviors are leading to significantly better team engagement, for instance, or just general leadership effectiveness. Hopefully that helps.
Heer Kansal:
Data analytics have never been so important, what important it holds today. Learning data track today, learning analytics done today, the tools that available are amazing because then you can really track… You can really do a lot of analysis when you track the right data and use it. And then how this learning data, it’s like a two way connection on the KPIs the overall organization is looking to achieve, the lead and the lag indicators, the balance scorecard. I think from the technical side and whenever we have partnered with the business much before the learning has been executed and looked at what are those business KPIs or what are those lead indicators that are going to get hit by the programs or the interventions or whatever you’re doing from the learning perspective. That brings a lot of visible ROIs I’ll say to the organization. That’s where I think learning gets a seat at the table where you start discussing with the business that this is what you want to achieve. Let us know. Give us a target what you really see learning creating an impact for you. If you connect that piece, I think the measuring post the program becomes all the more kind of I’ll say not easy, but it’s still relevant. Yes, from technical side, I’ll say it’s a little more easy because you’re talking about really within the job how people are going back and changing their approach while they’re learning technically, and then they’re going back and applying that change, that becomes a little more visible. However, I think that partnership right from the beginning for the business is extremely critical. I think as learning professionals, we don’t come in the picture when the business decides that, okay, this is what I need as a learning intervention. No. You come in the picture the minute there is a business concern or a need. Then you partner with the business to find the solution. That brings the change. That brings the KPI, the right KPI even for the learning function, and then the data and the analytics that you can track. The technology is absolutely brilliant today. You can track so much of data. I think that partnership is extremely, extremely critical from technical perspective.
Steve Young:
Yeah, I want to stress that I totally agree with that. Really starting with the business outcomes first and foremost, and then saying, “Well, how are we going to get there in terms of behaviors? And then how are we going to get there in terms of just making people like our content?” I totally agree. Charting out that kind of logic chain up front, and then using that to evaluate, do we have the data? Or if not, which data are the best data to get to supplement it? The technologies have the data, but certainly subjective perceptions you really want to think carefully about, where along that pathway you want to collect it to also validate and triangulate against the objective data.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Definitely. Those are such good points. Definitely starts with the business challenges. Well, before we wrap up today, for our listeners who want to adopt on-demand learning, but don’t know where to start, what’s one step they can take after today’s episode to get started?
Steve Young:
I would recommend… My colleagues and I, we wrote an article that trainingindustry.com published. You could take a read of that. It’s called Using Technology to Support in the Flow Leader Development. And in it, we review eight research-based practices that could really serve as your roadmap for developing leaders at all levels really quickly, effectively, and at scale. Just borrowing a little bit from that article, we recommend, as we just talked about, first understanding the outcomes you want to achieve, the business outcomes, and then select the technology to experiment with, if you haven’t gotten started in this area. It should produce better development outcomes than your current approaches. I f your current approaches are working, no reason to break that, but be clear on how and why the technology will enable better outcomes. Some of you also maybe have been experimenting and implementing these kinds of things. I still think if you’ve already started and you’re experimenting, create a matrix around the eight learning practices for each level of leader that you’re targeting for development, because you could write down what are you actually doing at each level and doing a high level audit like this, you could find that right mix of in the flow development and out of the flow with the right supporting technology. You get the most out of the technology. And as I said earlier, I don’t think it’s a panacea for developing all kinds of skills at this point if you’re talking about leaders, but I think there’s tremendous opportunity to do a lot for a lot more people that we can touch with the technology.
Heer Kansal:
I agree, Steve, some very good point you mentioned. In addition, I think that there are two valuable routes people can take. One is while they are building those foundational infrastructures by identifying those skills and competencies which are more fluid and agile based rather than role based and stuck in one. Finally, you need to look at as an organization where you are on that maturity curve of technology. There are a lot of globally available maturity graphs that the big fours have really thought through and come up with these where you can really map where you are as an organization. Once you identify that, internally partner with the right audience like, for example, the HRIS teams, the IT teams, get the Gartner studies or some external studies, get those organization assessed and then see where you are and where you want to go from the technology perspective, while finally you are building those foundational skills and knowledge identification with the business. And then I think what has always been my learning and what I feel is very critical is start with little pockets. Start with a small pilot. See. Test it out. And then from that learning, go to the next. That helps in not going big time and then looking out for a lot of issues, rather than going small, testing it out, and then slowly progressing. I think that’s extremely critical. There are a lot of panel work that has to happen and then start with small pilots.
Steve Young:
Yeah, yeah, I just want to stress that too. It can be daunting, I think, in a big company or a company that values IT security and other things to go through your process to bring in vendors. But once you bring them on, don’t put the pressure on yourself to think, “I’ve got to try this out in a huge division.” Try it with a little business unit, even, if it’s leaders, maybe 50 just to see do they like it or not, because it may not be what you think it is. In that case, you don’t lose any reputation loss, I guess, by kind of promising something big and enterprise wide and then falling flat. Start small for sure.
Sarah Gallo:
Perfect. Great advice and we’ll make sure to link to that article you mentioned, Steve, as well in the shownotes for this episode too. With that, before we wrap up, can you let us know how our listeners can get in touch with both of you if they’d like to reach out after today’s episode?
Steve Young:
Sure. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Stephen Young I think is what I go by on there, or Twitter. I’m on there as @DataForLeaders.
Heer Kansal:
Same with me. I’m on LinkedIn by the name Heer Kansal. You might find me now as Heer Angra. I’m starting with my husband’s second name. It’s H-E-E-R A-N-G-R-A. You’ll find me there. Please feel free to connect, or you can connect with Sarah and she can share my contact details.
Sarah Gallo:
Perfect. For more insights on on-demand learning, visit the show notes for this episode at trainingindustry.com/trainingindustrypodcast.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
As always, don’t forget to rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. Until next time.
Speaker:
If you have feedback about this episode or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us at info@trainingindustry.com or use the contact us page at trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to the Training Industry Podcast.
