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Learning Is The New Working — Technology
Learning Is The New Working

‘Learning Is the New Working’ is a new podcast from Chris Pirie, ex-Microsoft Chief Learning Officer and now independent investigator of The Future of Workplace Learning. A set of stimulating conversations with some of the leading thinkers and edge practitioners in the modern Workplace Learning space, from Chief Learning Officers  to Learning Experience Designers, from Neuroscientists  to Technologists, vendors of Learning Tech, and the HR leaders charged with developing human capital potential.  Our topics are everything from the American skills crisis to our scary, but fascinating, century: how the rise of the robots, AI, employment and demographic change are re-shaping all our lives – in work and out of it. We will also explore how the process of Learning is itself changing with current and emerging technology, share war stories about which new ways of delivering Learning work, what Sales Enablement is versus what it could be, what a ‘Learning Science’ might offer… all with the ultimate aim of empowering the CLO.

Copyright: © Copyright The Learning Futures Group

Latest Episodes:

De-constructing Training For Work: Maryana Iskander, Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator Feb 26, 2020

Show notes

If the age of permanent work is over, should we start talking about 'trampoline careers' instead? This week, we talk to a Learning Influencer at the eye of the storm of just that very trend. Born in Egypt but educated in both the US and Europe, that's Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator's CEO, Maryana Iskander, is now based in Johannesburg. To use her word, 'priviliged' to have exposure to both the private, public and now social enterprise sides of the world of work, in this episode my 'Learning 4 Good' mini-season co-curator Lutz Ziob works with Maryana to understand how she sees many of the core issues in modern Workplace Learning, including: the value of a personal 'board of Directors' to mentor a professional; Harambee's roots, why it does what it does, and why a combination of the human and technology has been best to do this; the problem of the mis-match between traditional education pathways and
traditional employment structures in South Africa (but is actually increasingly global); why young people have to change - but so do policymakers and employers, too; how help with social skills and guidance is sometimes more important than brushing up a young person's Math for a job application; insights into a very useful HR tool, the Harambee Youth Employment Map; why giving young women some weight-training overcame a hidden barrier to entry changed an 8% job offer to rate to 77%; South Africa's emerging role as a global employment source; and much more. Enjoy!

Reimagining Education - At Scale: edX's Anant Agarwal Feb 12, 2020

Show notes

MOOCs are getting bad press - that student engagement and completion rates are very low. But at edX.or, 60% of all and paid-for work gets completed, it has 500 corporate customers up- and re-skilling their workforces, and its new modular ‘Micromasters’ credential, which offers 25-50% of a traditional Masters has been accepted as an onramp by over 90 global Universities as an on-ramp to their traditional Master’s programs. So maybe the idea of MOOCs isn’t that screwed after all? To find out, we engaged with the Founder and CEO at edX Professor Anant Agarwal, an Engineer, Computer Scientist and a real giant in online pedagogy to get his perspective. Our conversation ranges from how hard it is to change something that hasn’t really changed in hundreds of years - Education, to a reminder of what the ‘M’ and ‘O’ stand for - Massive, and Open, and how central those words are to what edX does, as well as the deep interest in the edX user base for critical thinking, communications and story-telling education as much as business or tech. We also hear about his early years studying Electrical Engineering at school at Madras, India, followed by his move to study Computer Science in the US, as well as: the original MOOC idea, and how much it’s changed and 9-10 years a - improvements not everyone’s caught up with, ita portrait of the average edX user and their motivations, extreme geographical spread and what they want from their experience; why technology is a double-edged sword; edX For Business - a new set of partnerships and opportunities; why it’s time to stop saying ‘soft,’ and start saying ‘powerful skills’ instead; the challenges of creating an appropriate self-directed Learning culture for the enterprise; the concept of Learning Science and the possibility of neuroscience as a way to tune up our understanding of how we learn; and finally, how his team is looking at how are brains our wired like active learning, and deriving highly suggestive analytics and data out of those EEGs.

"Social Media? Don’t Mention It - It’ll Never Happen At This Company:" ‘The 2020 Workplace,’ Ten Years On Jan 29, 2020

Show notes

This week we mark the tenth anniversary of landmark L&D manifesto 'The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today' with its co-authors, analyst at Future Workplace Jeanne C. Meister, and Visa's Chief Learning Officer, Karie Willyerd. With glittering CVs at Fortune 100 organisations, corporate Universities, major IT companies and consultancies, as well as many other engagements, the guys were happy to work with complex diaries and recording tech co-ordination to share their insights on everything from: their respective bases San Francisco/Colorado (Karie) and New York City/upstate (Jeanne); the original writing journey for ‘Workplace,’ which began back in 2008; the insights you get from working both as an L&D business creator and customer; what’s going on with the Corporate University; a look back to the book and a very different time - which they started in the context of The Great Recession and the first mention of ‘Millennials’ and which they now see as a wake-up call for Boomers; their big miss: Mobile, and the chapter they wanted to include and wished they had on the Democratization of Work; what’s next for L&D as we’ve moved from tech enthusiasm to a tech backlash; the new normal: AI, ethics, privacy, the law and the future role of the corporation.

The Beauty That Comes From Constraint, With Chris Proulx From Humentum Jan 15, 2020

Show notes

Wherein we sit down with Chris Proulx at Humentum, the global membership association providing training, convening, and support. Working towards social good by helping non-profits and NGO by helping organizations manage compliance and risk, juggling finances, designing programs and helping people perform at their best, Humentum is a long-time supporter of The Learning Futures Group, and we were delighted to sign them up as the official sponsor for this run of episodes. As global director for member engagement and learning at Humentum, Chris is responsible for leading the global convening, learning, and conferences activities for the organization, focused on helping members derive the most value out of their involvement with the group and their engagement with the membership community; previously the CEO of eCornell for ten years, he’s superbly placed to offer informed comment on a range of Workplace Learning issues, including: why he’s based in Ithaca, NY; what he learned trying to create a pro-profit business out of an Ivy League; what it’s like to work in an environment with permanently-constrained budget goals; his work in trying to get a common financial reporting standard for his sector; the central role of Workplace Training in what Humentum’s trying to achieve (at least 50% of focus, from certification creation to course development to a ‘Learning-as-a-Service’ offering); the strange link between really high levels of engagement and really tight Learning circumstances; the importance of ‘use what you have;' why the metaphor of ‘moving’ Training from A to B maybe isn’t really enough any more; and much more.

Arist: The Mies van der Rohe School Of Microlearning? Jan 01, 2020

Show notes

We take a deep dive into a new take on Learning: doing it 1,200 characters at a time. That’s via an app called Arist, a text message-based Learning platform which is claiming a 92% completion rate versus only 5% for video equivalents, and we find out a whole lot more from its two founders, Michael Ioffe (CEO) and Ryan Laverty. Both of these impressive young men are still at University, both Seniors in Bachelor of Sciences in Business Administration at “The Best College For Entrepreneurship” Babson College (Boston), both joking they also have “a concentration in changing lives and having fun while doing it.” (In case you’re wondering, Arist is short for ‘Aristotle.’) As they say, it’s an incredibly intimate medium, where over a typical 5 to 30 day course you can get “frictionless Learning” via assessments, overviews, case studies and more. After a walk-through of the proposition, we then cover a set of topics from how they started with literally no more than $100 but just got significant funding, the deep personal value they see in education, use cases that involve Kenyan deaf seamstresses are learning financial literacy through to: how you get to 92% engagement levels; the Babson project-based experiential learning experience, where you have to start a company at a time most of your peers are still playing Beer Pong; why we no longer have a content problem, but a content delivery problem; condensing a 3-hour lecture into six texts as proof of “less is more” design thinking; what trying to teach in an education context broken by war can do for your approach to pedagogy and tech; Arist’s interesting consumption-based business model, which involves non-profits as well as Higher Education, brands, and (soon) B2C; the specific modalities of working in text as a delivery medium, such as consent and privacy; their ambition to get to 1000 user organization customers from the current 24 - inside a year.

‘There’s Just Not Good Training For The Global South:’ Nick Martin, President and CEO, TechChange Dec 18, 2019

Show notes

TechChange.org is a social enterprise all about providing online professional development in technology and social change. In this episode of the ‘Learning 4 Good’ mini-season over at ‘Learning is The New Working,’ I sit down with its President and CEO Nick Martin, educator, technologist, and social entrepreneur with 15 years of experience in international development and social innovation, to hear about both his and that of TechChange, and why what he thinks is doing is very much ‘Anti-MOOC’ thinking but which is also more than ‘watch a video, take a quiz.’ Along the way, we also dip into: how his job consists in the company of doing ‘what no-one else wants to do;' why a modern poetry major didn’t end up in the CIA, but in Costa Rica; the kind of work you need to put in to develop 800 courses for customers from the government of Sudan to Microsoft; the challenge of engaging Learners with training they don’t get paid to attend; why data literacy and monitoring and evaluation are buddying up, as well as the (perhaps surprising?) appetite in the NGO sector to engage with things like Blockchain and AI; why even his students think they have to work in management consulting, not non-profits, to support their financing issues, and much more. Enjoy!
Resources
Nick is always looking for partners to build good learning, online or blended; he’s also working on ideas for low-cost, high quality online Master’s programs as a practical way of dealing with the Student Debt Crisis. Connect with him on these or other ideas over at the TechChange website, here.

Babbel’s Geoff Stead Talks To Us About What Hipster Tech Language Enthusiasm Can Give You Dec 04, 2019

Show notes

Helping us all learn a new language since its 2007 foundation, subscription-based language learning app and e-learning platform Babbel offers more than 10,000 hours of content in 14 languages, from Spanish to Indonesian. In this episode, we had the very welcome opportunity to sit down with the company’s Berlin-based Chief Product Officer, Geoff Stead — an internationally regarded thought leader on emerging technologies and how they can be used for learning, communication and collaboration. Geoff, a native of South Africa who originally trained as a Computer Scientist, told us why the unique cultural milieu of the Federal Republic’s capital suits him and Babbel’s specific internal culture, about a career that has included stints at mobile chip leader Qualcomm as well as English language certification leader Cambridge English. We then cover a set of topics ranging from his personal journey from South Africa to San Diego to Cambridge (England) and now, Germany; the central place of tech in everything Babbel does, and its mission: to help everyone fall in love with learning a language (again); the profile of the kind of people Geoff wants to join his team (from data experts to behavioral scientists to instructional designers); why embracing ambiguity is a good way to avoid the dangers of generalizing about your customers; why 'nudging' has to be different in different parts of the world to work; and finally, how the brain may not have changed… but maybe the way we use it has.

‘Platforms Are Neither Good Nor Bad - They Simply Are:’ Matt Donovan, Instructional Design Leader Nov 20, 2019

Show notes

Meet Matt Donovan, 19-year eLearning veteran who’s now Vice President at GP Strategies Corporation and who’s an all-round expert in everything from e-Learning to performance improvement, experiential learning events and Instructional Design (ID), and usability. As someone who has personally led the production of more than 400 custom online courses for Fortune 500 companies in everything from sales to ethics, Matt is perfectly placed to give us a view from 30,000 feet on all things L&D, and in our verbal journey we go from his decision to not pursue his original career of teacher to a day job that encompasses leading a team of no less than 1400 learning professionals; the (disruptive) forces at work on the ID community; aka ‘the app-ification’ of the learning industry; the central place of empathy - What are you trying to achieve with all this? What it’s like to be a ‘recovering’ Instructional Designer, and the six Design mindset ‘shifts’ that we should look to encourage; what the example of the Microsoft Hackathon can mean for us all; why Waterfall can still make a contribution to the GP Strategies’ ‘Innovation Kitchen,’ and what it’s trying to do.

‘Connecting Young People In East Africa To Big Ideas:’ Informal Education Media Youth Brand 'Well Told Story'’s CEO, Rob Burnet Nov 06, 2019

Show notes

In a really stimulating conversation, my colleague Lutz Ziob talks about all kinds of futures with the CEO of Kenyan-based training, media and communications leader Well Told Story, Rob Burnet. Sitting not in his usual office in Nairobi, but in an 'unusually sunny Scotland’ while on a short family trip back to his native country, Rob tells us about how the power of storytelling has helped shaped so much of his life and work, his understanding of what ‘social responsibility and social good’ is, as well as: balancing the excitement of building a successful commercial entity that also improves the lives of young Africans; highlights of an eclectic career: from Big Game hunting to African contemporary art dealer, from philanthropic funding to media, arts and culture to launching a comic book brand to help young people; the concept of ‘hustling' in an African context, and what an MBA for such ‘hustlers’ needs to offer; his ‘Shujaaz’ project; the importance of measurement in what he does, from SMS sentiment to predictive analytics; what it looks like when your education system is effectively broken, as only 5% of school-leavers will ever get a conventional job; the concept of ‘cruel optimism’ and the ‘broken promise of the 20th Century’ and how it links Brexit, MAGA, ISIS and other major social phenomena; the power of mixing Big 5 leaders and young, young people inside some ‘guide-rails;' and much more.

Getting Away From Charity And Achieving Impact At Last; Devex's Raj Kumar's On Global Aid Trendlines Oct 23, 2019

Show notes

Listen in on over an hour of discussion on the huge changes the $200bn global aid sector is undergoing with someone at the center of the debate - Washington, DC-based Raj Kumar, Founding President and Editor-in-Chief at 130-strong Devex, the media and recruitment platform for the global development community. In my chat with Raj, we look at his journey from Georgetown via political campaigning to starting a dot com at the urging of his professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard - a dot com which now has a database of a million aid professionals round the world, as well as: the comparison between a $200bn aid industry, the $200bn global Workplace Learning industry - and how much the world spends on iPhones every year; the Devex offering - from news to recruitment services, from market and business intelligence/opportunities; the move from charity and state aid to heavy commercial (Microsoft, Starbucks) to private philanthropy (The Gates Foundation); the complexity of his world - from the legacy of Colonialism and humanitarianism to today’s geopolitical economic and security motivations; the China factor, the tectonic metric shift: from ‘charity’ to ‘results’ - from ‘projects’ to ‘process;' the ambiguity of 'capacity building,' and much more.

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