If you could have any superpower, what would you choose? (Don’t worry, I just pictured a 10-year-old version of myself in a cape too.) My answer to this age-old question has always been reading minds.

Maybe that wasn’t your first choice, but if you’ve ever found yourself scratching your head about how to get learners better engaged with the content you’ve provided, I’m sure it’s a power you wouldn’t mind having.

The right content for your learners can feel like a guessing man’s game. It can be hard to know what’s working, what’s not, and how to do better.

That’s where data-driven design comes in. There’s an abundance of data that can be gathered about how users are interacting with content. It’s just a matter of knowing what kind of data to look for, and how to use it to shape your learning design.

Lori Niles-Hofmann, Director of Digital Learning at Scotiabank, is a data-driven design guru. She’s a firm believer in pursuing the insights that we can’t see and leverage multiple sources of data to identify trends to get ahead of learner needs.

What kind of data are we talking about? Likes, dislikes, most viewed content, mobile vs desktop usage, popular content length… the list goes on. All of these pieces of information are the users’ way of speaking up about what they like and don’t like – and it’s time we started listening.

As Lori says, “It is not enough to just curate and push out links. You have to have a plan to engage in online dialogue and listen to the comments from the community.” Far too often, companies offer what they think learners need and never pause to find out if it’s actually what they want.

In her eBook, Data-Driven Learning Design, Niles-Hofmann summarizes it plainly: “We can no longer push out content that we believe learners should or must digest… not when there is evidence that tells us what learners are willing to consume as digital content. Instead, it is time to be bold and give learners what they want.”

So how exactly do we find out and deliver what learners want? Join Lori Niles-Hofmann in person at Degreed LENS for her “Upskill Yourself: Data-Driven Design Skills” workshop where she’ll discuss in-depth how to change your learning design to better suit your audience.

There has been so much change in Learning and Development in the last decade, it’s hard to imagine what the next 5 years will hold.

Consider these life-changing advances we’ve experienced in the last 10 years: in 2007, Netflix launched and the first Kindle was released, Android Software and the iPad were released in 2010 and coffee-lovers cheer, the first Keurig for home use launched in 2012.

The inventors of these technologies started their lifelong learning journeys in the same place – grade school. Did you know one teacher can impact 25 students every day and up to 4,000 students during their career? Teachers that receive quality professional development can impact student achievement by 21 percentile points. By investing in our teacher’s professional development, the return in learning is 25x.

To enrich the learning experiences of students across the United States, organizations like Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA)  are committed to offering professional development resources to K-12 computer science teachers.

In preparation for her speaking session at LENS, I recently interviewed CSTA Director of Professional Development, Marina Theodotou on the future of education and learning.

Marina believes that education is rapidly evolving, much like the shifts we’ve seen in technology. Theodotou predicts that in the next five years we will need to learn to sharpen problem-solving and social interaction skills at a faster pace to keep up with the increasing speed of information and doing business globally. These skills will also be required to differentiate ourselves from  AI robots that have already taken over activities that take 30 seconds or less.

“The way to ensure that the learning sticks is to break it down into smaller chunks and make sure it’s  implementable,” she added.

So what is CSTA doing to ensure knowledge transfer among their teachers and staff?

“Computer Science changes rapidly so we must constantly make new content and learning opportunities available to educators.  We partnered with Degreed because we can curate content and create pathways on a variety of subjects. Degreed’s daily feed serves users new content every day is especially popular. It makes teachers lives easier because they can take that content and use it in their classrooms every day,” responded Marina.

CSTA teachers appreciate the easy access to diverse learning resources. The daily feed breaks learning down into smaller activities and makes it easy for teachers to implement what they learn.

Additionally important to learning from others is the investment we make in ourselves. I asked Marina what her most memorable learning experience was and how she was applying it today.

“When I was starting my career, I was invited to lunch by the CEO of Bank of America at the time, Mr. Hugh McColl. The 1.5-hour lunch was like getting an MBA. I asked him what the 3 ingredients to success were,  he said: to succeed you need brains, guts and public speaking skills. The next day I signed up to Toastmasters International and a year later got my competent toastmaster certification. Since then, I added two more skills to the mix: heart, which includes values, emotional intelligence and empathy, and tech skills, including knowing how to code, problem-solving and navigating social media. These pearls of wisdom have carried me throughout my career over the last 25 years.”

To hear more about her learning journey and how CSTA is specifically supporting our educators, please make time to attend Degreed LENS, September 28^th in Chicago. Marina Theodotou will be speaking alongside UC Berkeley and Accenture for the session Upskill, Reskill, Repeat: How to Get Ready for Career-Long Learning with UC Berkeley, Accenture, and CSTA.

Today we announced the launch of Degreed Skill Certification, a new way to measure and communicate your skills. This new offering, only available through Degreed, will score existing skills and rank expertise levels using a scientifically backed method and technology.

Degreed Skill Certification is a way for people to prove their expertise, regardless of how they acquired their skills.

How It’s Different From Other Certifications

1. It’s all about skills: Degreed Skill Certification is purely skills based. You are evaluated and ranked based on submitted evidence of current skill knowledge.
2. This is not a course: Degreed Skill Certification isn’t a training program, course, or class, but rather a credible way for you to prove what existing skills you have, regardless of how you acquired those skills.  Unlike other companies, Degreed does not funnel you into a “one size fits all” training program before certifying your skills.
3. It’s flexible to your learning style: If you don’t like the score you receive or want to challenge yourself to get to a higher level, you can improve your skills in whatever way suits you. Take a course, get more experience, self-train using internet tutorials; use whatever resources are available to you.
4. This doesn’t have to be a one-time certification: As you learn and develop skills, you can level up your expertise score.
5. We’re changing the way people work: Degreed Skill Certification allows companies to benchmark the current skill levels of employees, target skill development resources to improve those skills, and then measure the improvements. Companies get codified transparency into the skills of their employees. Employees get the benefit of having their skills professionally certified.

How It Works

To get certified you will have to submit evidence of your skill mastery, have your evidence endorsed and verified, then it will be anonymously peer and expert reviewed. Now until Oct 13, 2017, we are offering a lifetime pass so you can get certified at any point in the future for no additional fee.

Why You Should Get Certified

“Degreed Skill Certification is a scalable, standardized way to rate and get recognized for the skills you have in whatever scrappy way you obtained them,” said David Blake, CEO of Degreed. “This should unlock opportunities in people’s lives because it will remove the lack of transparency between the education and labor markets. We’re looking to connect everyone to relevant, fulfilling career opportunities.”

For more information about Degreed Skill Certification, or to apply to be certified, click here.

What would you do if you could build a vision and strategy for learning at your company completely from scratch?  What would your structure and plan be? What specific things would you continue doing and what would you do differently?

The world of learning and work is changing dramatically so you may want to consider a few different areas as you think about your learning vision of the future.

Culture

How would you imagine the perfect learning culture? Company cultures that support learning as a core, fundamental part of everything employees do every day are realizing their competitive advantage. Also, cultures that identify learning as a key guiding principle enable employees to continue to build the skills that they need for the future. Does your culture put learning front and center?

Content

I know when I ran learning organizations at Sun, Yahoo, and LinkedIn, we thought that we had to create most of the learning content ourselves.  But now, there is so much content out there, you may not need to create all your own anymore. The perfect balance is probably a little of both. What would a new content strategy look like in your company?

Technology

Technology is another component of your vision and strategy that can easily be re-imagined.  Your employees want to learn on-demand and they need personalized content that fits their particular needs. How can you think about learning technology in a new way – in a way that supports what the learner really wants and needs to build relevant skills for the future? Imagine a technology that incorporates curated content, personalization, social features, analytics, and skill plans as the platform that could support your learning strategy.

Analytics

Learning analytics and insights are key to understanding what your employees are learning and what skills they are building.  Does your learning strategy incorporate analyzing learner data and agile improvements so that you can validate and refine your strategy on an ongoing basis?

Internal Skills / Team

What about the people in your learning organization?  Do they have the skills and expertise to take you to the future? They are expanded and different than what might have been enough in the past.

For example, do they know how to curate content and analyze learning data? Can they facilitate online peer-to-peer learning or incorporate video content into in-person training? These are just some of the skills that the learning organization of the future will need.

Vision, strategy, culture, content, technology, analytics, and people. These are just some of the topics I’ll be discussing with Christopher Lind, Learning Experience and Digital Transformation Leader for GE Healthcare at our upcoming LENS conference in Chicago on September 28. I hope you’ll join us so that together we can develop the structure for making your vision a reality.

Every week. Every day. Every few hours. You’re challenged with immediate problems to solve and issues to overcome. In another hour, something is going to come across your inbox or instant message window and you are going to have to react. You will have to respond. You will have to drop what you’re doing. Some burning item will come up and you’ll need to fix it.

Urgent matters come in all varieties in the Customer Success and services world. Each one is more important than the last and desperately needs attention. The issue might be finalizing a single sign on integration for an upcoming launch or it could be some metrics needed for a client briefing that snuck up on you.

Many of your HR and Learning & Development peers are presented with similar challenges. Their situation might be about a deliverable getting off track on a timeline or a group of people not completing their past-due compliance training.

Meanwhile, your “To Do List” is getting longer and longer on the other side of your desk. The important projects you have been setting aside, the ones that will require planning and work across functional lines are not kicking off. And you’re not strategically advancing the big things that matter most.

What are you going to do? How do you manage what is urgent versus what is most important?

Solving this daily challenge takes planning. It takes finding the right balance on how you allocate your time.  Dedicating time to strategic efforts takes rigor and discipline. Always attending to the most pressing topics (and putting off the important ones) doesn’t let your organization efficiently progress at achieving larger goals.

This is what works for me and how I deal with what is most important.

I usually go outside with pen and paper for the focus part.  I unplug and change the scenery.  It works every time.

Now it’s your turn to get it done.

Urgent requests are not going to stop. Look…there’s another one that just came in on your phone. Carve out the time to plan ahead before you don’t have time at all. Focus on what will lead to the best results. Strengthen this behavior by making it a habit. You’ll be more successful by committing time to the important things and your customers will be better off for it.

Many of us have been there. You pull in to LaMars or Krispy Kreme and there is a 10×10 case full of at least 10 choices of donuts. You’ve got sprinkles, filled, iced, cake, yeast, chocolate, vanilla, maple, circle, log…the choices go on.

The same goes for learning. You do an online search on a subject area in which you need more information, and poof – 200,000 results. You’ve got a library of content to sift through. This many choices can be confusing and maybe even paralyzing in some cases. People think, “Where do I begin” or “How can I find the best of this?” In some spheres, we can rely on expert judgment or crowdsourcing for the initial vetting (think Consumer Reports and Amazon’s star ratings).

But here’s where curation is like donuts – both are better in moderation.

As said by the Oppenheimer AVP of Organizational Development, Patrick Osborne, “There is a diminishing return in having too much content.  One donut is a treat.  Five is a tummy ache.  Ten donuts is a trip to the ER.”

While ten donuts seems like a good idea (been there, done that!), the after effects – not so much. Same goes for content. Too many choices means the user will make no choice – they are too overwhelmed.

In a world of virtually limitless information and learning content, the curator provides a valuable service by simplifying what people see and sifting out all the noise, junk, and inferior options.

Osborne’s advice? “Measure by weight, not by volume.  Be ruthlessly selective. The curator is also a de facto editor.  She decides what people will see, and what they won’t.  There’s an awesome power and responsibility in that.”

It’s good advice, but how does the rubber hit the road? How is Oppenheimer using curation? Well, you will have to come to Degreed LENS in September and attend Patrick’s workshop, “Upskill Yourself: Curating Skills” to find out. Kidding. Kind of.

Like many organizations, Oppenheimer is increasingly hearing from individuals that they have “no time” for learning.  Patrick thinks that’s partly reality but also a statement of modern learner preference—employees want things to be as short, convenient, and interesting as we can make it.  We used to be able to sell 20-30 minute online learning programs.  Now people want 2-3 minute microlearning.

Thanks to curation, the best, most relevant resources for the individual have already been served up in a single place. Oppenheimer is now offering a much broader range of options for learners than they have in the past, and shifting resources away from developing and delivering traditional learning (or outsourcing it) and concentrating on building an infrastructure based on learner centricity.

Patrick’s favorite thing about curation? “I enjoy the challenge of the hunt and the thought that goes into crafting something well.  The mechanics of creating learning pathways are trivially simple.  The challenge (the art?) is in creating a pathway someone would willingly and voluntarily spend time using.  That requires thought and skill and creativity.”

For real this time – Patrick will be speaking about Oppenheimer’s curation journey, alongside Harley-Davidson and St. Charles Consulting Group, at Degreed LENS in September. There are still spots for the conference and his workshop – register and get more information here! Who knows – donuts may be included.

A single, integrated, all-in-one technology ecosystem may work for some organizations sometimes, but it won’t work for everyone all the time. Learning is already too fragmented, and it’s only getting more diverse and complex as new ways to learn like video, chatbots and augmented reality become mainstream.

So to future-proof their investments, innovative L&D leaders are shifting to more flexible ecosystems – dynamic networks of tools, content, platforms that work together and share data to provide workers with on-demand access to all kinds of learning, performance, and career development.

These ecosystems are all designed differently, to fit each organization’s unique business, operations, infrastructure, and culture needs. The ones we see most often share some common features and functions:

Open: They give people access to resources from inside and outside the organization, anywhere they need, anytime they want
Diverse: They provide a diverse mix of macro-learning (like live and online courses) and micro-learning (like articles, videos, and search)
Social: They enable people to learn with, and from, their peers, managers, and mentors, as well as from external experts
Personalized: They are personalized, targeting each workers’ specific roles, career paths, and interests, as well as their skill-sets
Insights: They track and analyze learning wherever it happens — in classrooms, on computers, on tablets and smartphones, and in real life
Career-long: They give people credit for informal as well as formal learning, and they allow workers to take their data with them through their careers

The challenge is, building an always-on learning environment requires a range of tools, content, and systems. It can get complicated, and it takes work. There are literally hundreds of solutions to choose from…and a lot of them look and sound alike. Plus, they need to fit in with (or replace) your existing processes and legacy infrastructure. So where do you even start?

One place to start is by joining us at Degreed LENS! At the session, The Robots are Here: How to Navigate Next-Gen Learning Technology, Caterpillar, Mastercard and Airbnb will dive into how each organization is adapting and evolving their strategy and ecosystems to confront the digital disruption of L&D.

Tickets are selling out fast. Make sure to save your seat now.

Whether you’ve been in L&D for decades or days, you’ve probably been asked to bake a cake for your company. While you might have also been asked to bake a delicious chocolate cake for a birthday, the cake I am talking about is The Magical Training Cake – the cake your L&D team makes to solve a business pain point.

Typically, the cake needs to solve a problem overnight with a one-time, eight-hour workshop with the goal of naturally sticking forever in the employee’s brain and behavior.

Mmmm, delicious?! Maybe not.

You’re likely nodding your head “Yes!” when I say many L&D teams have this two-fold struggle:

1. Stakeholders come to your team with requests to bake/make a training. It might sound like, “We need you to bake a cake to improve frontline managers’ leadership skills.”
2. You stir and bake for weeks and maybe even months. You pull it out of the oven. You serve the cake to managers. But they report not liking the taste, and some haven’t even taken a single bite.

You feel like you’re pushing the cake in your learners’ faces. You thought the cake was good – why don’t they?

You’d rather feel like you’re creating a pull effect, where your learning products and programs are magnets. They draw employees in.

Here’s one framework you can start using today to clarify a request up front, making sure everyone will like the cake.

Clarify projects with the 3×3 Walkthrough Method

Tom Cavill, a designer based in London, created the 3×3 Walkthrough Method. Cavill created this framework to focus his explanation and storytelling of a new app he created. (You can read here how Tom uses constraints for clarity.)

I think L&D teams could use this framework to clarify internal training initiatives. It helps distill the essence of the initiative so the stakeholders and execs feel empowered to become champions and sponsors of it.

At its most basic level, the 3×3 Walkthrough method also helps learners get instant clarity about the value of a program.

How It Works

The 3×3 Method constrains you to focus on solving this problem by answering why, what and how with only three-words. Here is an example:

3×3 Walkthrough for Leadership Development

A common challenge high-growth teams face is developing leadership skills in younger employees when the company is growing rapidly.

These young stars quickly move into leadership roles, but they don’t have the support and opportunity to learn how to be good managers.

Many companies adopt the same old approach to building leadership programs. Take what other people are doing, find the latest popular leadership framework, force people to go through workshops, and then expect them to become great managers overnight.

Instead, if you understand what’s really going on in your organization, you can use the 3×3 Walkthrough to distill a highly relevant leadership program like the following:

• Why: Equip new managers
• What: Leadership Foundation program
• How: Daily micro habits

Filling out this template when receiving business requests will help you form the foundation to build a compelling case for human-centered learning design as the future of business growth.

Next steps

Take time today to think through the why, what, and how of the latest requests from your business leaders.

Here’s a 3×3 template you can copy and paste:

Why? (… does your product/program/project exist?)
__________
__________
__________

What? (… does your product/program/project do?)
__________
__________
__________

How? (… does your product/program/project differ from what exists?)
__________
__________
__________

Instead of baking cakes, this helps you building a clear, concise path toward an integrated design approach.

Degreed will be hosting a hands-on workshop on Marketing in Learning at the Degreed LENS event on September 28^th in Chicago. To register, visit the LENS website here.

**This post appeared in original format on the LinkedIn of Charbel Semaan

Most organizations are feeling the burn of the changes happening in L&D. 60-year careers, multiple generations, a dispersed workforce, decreasing skill tenures. It’s a lot to take on, and it’s putting more pressure on our team’s than ever before. As practitioners, we must be continuously well-versed in at least several areas of expertise to remain relevant and contributing.

Enter the villain in the story – time. It’s something we’re all short on.

So what if you only had time to get stronger in 3 places – where should you focus? Sarice Plate, Xilinx Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition and Development, has advised her team to get savvy in the following:

1. Curation

It’s crucial to be able to make sense of the plethora of content that’s available with the click of a button. Not only are we inundated with options, but how do we determine quality on the fly? There are tools like Facebook and Instagram that benefit from causing distractions, not to mention our phones buzz constantly at new alerts and Google returns hundreds of thousands of search results. It’s important to cut through the noise and quickly find relevant content in the moment of need. Hellooooo curation!

“Curators are the great librarians of our time, cataloging and prioritizing the best content,” commented Caroline Soares, Director of Curation Services at Degreed.

2. Marketing

For today’s L&D teams to be successful, they must also act as marketers, selling the need to continuously learn. “We need to appeal to our learners, and being ‘appealing’ is a marketing problem, not a learning issue. As learning people, we need to inspire employees, influence how they behave and compel them to engage with us and our learning, with the goal of motivating engagement,” said Susie Lee, Director of Client Engagement at Degreed.

In her experience at Xilinx, Plate’s team uses their marketing skills almost daily, working to influence the business, and increase stakeholder engagement. As digital transformation continues to saturate, they continue to find themselves more involved in curriculum design rather than just designing and setting up training courses.

3. Technical knowledge and data analytics

Technology is constantly changing, so, L&D practitioners are required to be more digitally savvy, and more technical than ever before. We must understand the tech our employees are already using, write and curate content that’s exciting and consumable. To do that, we must understand consumption, behavior.

These might feel like these skills are completely untraditional for an L&D professional to have. And you’d be right. But with 56% of current workforce skills set not matching organization’s strategy and goals (ATD, Bridging the Skills Gap, 2015), we should do something different than we have been if we want to be successful. And it’s not all bad.

“With the roll out of our new [learning] strategy, every member of my team is now engaged, helping with content curation, consulting with the business to build pathways, designing curriculum to best meet the needs of the business. It’s truly been a shift for some, including myself, but we’re embracing it and we’re making the shift so far successfully.  I think the team overall feels more energized now and excited about our roles and how we can impact and build organizational capability,” said Plate.

Looking for a way to grow your expertise in some of these skills? Skill development workshops at Degreed LENS will cover these themes and more. Join us in Chicago on September 28th!

Technology is changing how we work and collaborate. One of the hottest trends right now is cloud-based team collaboration tools like Hipchat and Slack, which are sweeping the market. There are indications that these types of tools will replace email as the primary tool for workplace communication.

Slack was launched in 2013, and Hipchat launched in 2010. In a short period of time, the number of companies using these tools has grown exponentially. In four years, Slack has grown to 5 million daily active users and a $3.8 billion valuation. These tools have been so popular that Microsoft and Google are getting into the game as well.

The perks of these cloud-based collaboration tools include a great mobile experience, private and public channels that you can drop in and out of as you need, the ability to search across channels and discussions, integrations with other tools like Degreed, calling, video chat, and even screen sharing.

Some say that these types of tools will bring the end to email. And more than just email, features like file sharing, screen sharing, calling, and video chat mean that these tools are becoming the center of all work-related activity. Some companies even tout the use of these tools as a workplace perk.

But, if there’s no more email, how are you going to get that awesome Today’s Learning email from Degreed with all those personalized recommendations tailored to your needs and interests? Well, we have good news. Degreed offers integrations with both Hipchat and Slack.

Once you enable the Slack or Hipchat integration on Degreed, these tools immediately begin notifying you when you receive a recommendation in Degreed. Each morning, you’ll see your Today’s Learning list, five items of personalized content just for you, delivered in Slack or Hipchat.

The integration also allows you to scroll through a list of all your Degreed recommendations and Today’s Learning in one place.

Takeaways

Cloud-based collaboration tools, like Hipchat and Slack, are becoming the center of all workplace activity including, messaging, calling, file sharing, video chat, and as an integration point for other enterprise tools. Stay on top of this trend by leveraging the Degreed integration with Slack and Hipchat.

Contact your client experience partner for details on how to enable these integrations for your organization.