Reimagining L&D: Bridging Gaps and Embracing Innovation

Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the simple and AI-powered rewards and recognition platform for employee engagement. What if we could unlock the hidden potential in our employees with a few simple changes to your learning and development strategy? Well, that's exactly what we're here to explore today. L&D is a crucial driver of engagement and success in today's fast-paced workplace, and we'll discuss how to help your teams thrive amid constant change.

Susmita Sarma: Hi everyone, you're tuned in to the Vantage Influencers Podcast. I'm your host, Susmita, and today we're excited to have Jessie Osborne, a global learning and development expert, join us. With an extensive background in navigating the corporate landscape, Jessie will share her insights on how L&D has evolved and the common gaps that organizations often overlook. We'll also explore innovative, budget-friendly strategies to keep L&D programs engaging, the role of gamification and VR, and the challenges of implementing personalized learning paths. Plus, Jessie will highlight the benefits of microlearning. Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Jessie.

Jessie Osborne: Thank you. It's great to have you with us today. I'm really excited to be here.

Susmita Sarma: Thank you. And to start, Jessie, I'd love to hear about your journey into the world of L&D and what inspired you to focus and shape your approach to L&D.

Jessie Osborne: Sure. L&D has been a passion of mine for most of my career. I remember when I was first in undergrad, I worked at a bank, and on the first few days of training, I was watching the trainers at the bank and thinking, wow, I like what they're doing, this is interesting. Look at all these people getting their skill sets going, and the way they command a room, I was really inspired by that. Over time, through my undergrad and my graduate degree, I developed a huge passion for empowering others, and it led me to focus on learning and development. From there, I've been able to create really impactful programs, and I think with each impactful program at each company I've worked at, my passion has grown even more. What continues that is I still see people I worked with 10, 15 years ago, and they'll bring up, oh my gosh, we can hear your voice in a recording on a training that's still used at their company. I love the long-lasting impact and scalability that L&D offers.

Susmita Sarma: Just over the years, we have seen the role of L&D evolve very significantly in corporates. Would you like to elaborate on how these changes have transformed the way it is now, and what do you think have actually driven these changes?

Jessie Osborne: Sure, this is actually one of my favorite topics. Like everything, brands and products, L&D is no different. It's an experience, it's consumed by employees, and so it evolves and changes with generations and with technology. I think one of the biggest changes we've seen is that it has shifted from basic training functions. I explained a few minutes ago how I was inspired by that training when I was working for that bank at 19, 20. And that was just training, here's how you do the job. But that's not what it is anymore. When I look at our new hire training now, it's so much more than that. It's not just a training function, it's a strategic necessity for businesses. It aligns our employees with business goals. The focus has moved to more continuous learning. We are more strategic in how people learn. It's not just, here's a slide deck, learn this. We get people to really get creative and think. And of course, technology has played a huge role in this evolution, as has leadership development, and people's soft skills and what they bring to the experience is a huge part of preparing people to join an organization.

Susmita Sarma: Yeah, and I think aligning learning with business objectives overall is so important.

Jessie Osborne: It is. What we used to see was more of, here's how you do the job. But now we look at it backwards. We start from the end, the outcome, the product that goes to our client and the satisfaction they receive from that. And we move backwards to make sure we are training that experience all the way through to the end product. So it is quite strategic, and we have to make sure it aligns with what we want our clients and our consumers to see at the very end of that line.

Susmita Sarma: So it has now become very integral to shaping the culture and driving performance within an organization.

Jessie Osborne: Oh, absolutely. It's no longer just basic skill training. It has started to create a full employee timeline. If you really look at how much learning an employee can get from start to finish, we've strategically created something that spans over three years, which sounds intense, but it's broken up into small micro chunks throughout each year and each role an employee experiences at the organization. A lot of other organizations are doing the same thing, because the business is changing and evolving, and employee skill sets along their timeline are changing too.

Susmita Sarma: So true. And moving on, if we want to talk about any gaps you see in L&D programs today, particularly in mid-sized and large organizations.

Jessie Osborne: Sure, it goes back to what we were just saying. It's the lack of a coherent strategy. We go into an organization and say, okay, we need our employees to learn this, they need this to get the job done, but we don't have a strategy for how we get there. We haven't defined it, and we don't have an organizational understanding of it. We're not prepared for any of the detours we're going to come across. It can really create gaps for organizations, and it's a waste of time and money, quite frankly. I think that's where some L&D organizations get a bit of a bad name, they end up being time and money wasters. But if you start from the beginning by creating a coherent strategy that's aligned with your business goals, it becomes something that helps you produce more, helps you retain employees, and saves money in the end.

Susmita Sarma: And I think regularly reviewing and adjusting programs based on employee feedback and data can also help bridge these gaps.

Jessie Osborne: Absolutely. We use a piece of technology that helps us get live data regularly, to understand whether employees are experiencing the autonomy they need, the manager support they need, whether they're getting continuous learning, and whether there's some sort of block somewhere in the organization we don't know about, so we can remove it and create easier on-ramps for employees. That constant feedback loop is essential to creating a strong strategy in an L&D program. It can't just be about gathering information from the top on what business outcomes need to be. You also have to hear from people throughout their employee journey, their life cycle, so you know what kind of practical learning experiences they're actually looking for and how you can make it easier for them to access those experiences.

Susmita Sarma: And do you think budget is a challenge for some organizations trying to maintain a very impactful L&D program? What can they do to have an impactful program despite a limited budget?

Jessie Osborne: Budget is always a constraint. When you look at an L&D department in any organization, you can't always see the immediate return on it. It doesn't show up on paper, and so it can look like a cost. You have to be very creative in how you get budget, how you use it, and how you actually measure what you've done with it. I think that's also a common gap in L&D, people aren't being creative about how to be cost-effective. And I think you can be. At AML RightSource, we often make interesting decisions and get creative about how to get the most out of our learning budget. But it always comes back to making sure we can measure it. A huge gap is that L&D leaders aren't measuring their work. One of my leaders challenged me a few years ago with this: how do you measure something that's qualitative? When you're not producing a widget, how do you measure the return on it? So what we started doing, and I think this has been genuinely different in how we use our time and energy, is that we don't execute on any program unless we're partnering with the stakeholder of that department. So if a department stakeholder comes to me and says, I need training on Excel for my team, or I need training on how my team gives better presentations, I'll say, okay, what's the baseline of where we are, where do we need to be, and how do we measure that against what it gives our clients? Will we see retention, whether that's client retention or employee retention? Will we see more business from a client because of it? Will we be more efficient? What can we actually measure? So I make sure I partner with every leader in the organization before agreeing to build anything, and that helps us be far more intentional with our budget. The other piece is how we deliver it, and that's where we really focus on microlearning. We recognize the generation we're working with and how little time is actually available, but that's fine, because you don't need a lot of time to learn, a lot of learning happens on the job. So we make sure we have high-impact microlearning that maximizes efficiency and is built in partnership with the department leader.

Susmita Sarma: And what benefits have you observed particularly from this approach?

Jessie Osborne: The first thing is that we're getting fewer requests from the business that don't make sense or don't have real impact. Typically, an L&D function gets overrun with training requests, because there are always gaps somewhere in employee development. You might get a request about two people, and five of those in a day, and then another request about a group of thirty or four hundred people missing a particular skill. But really, we need to know what the scalability is here. Making sure the business knows they have to partner with us and help us measure has made a huge difference in how we focus our own time, on the highest-impact areas of learning for the business. That's the first benefit. The second, and probably the one I'm most proud of, is that we have so many returning employees and leaders coming back to us regularly because our programs have been so impactful. That's really where you see your efforts pay off, when we have a waitlist for several of our leadership development programs and some of our technical training programs, and people keep wanting to come back for more learning. It means they're enjoying the experience and it fits with their day to day.

Susmita Sarma: And having said that, Jessie, what do you think about gamification and immersive technologies like VR becoming popular in the L&D space?

Jessie Osborne: I love gamification personally, because it speaks to my own personality, but I'll tell you that while it's the hot thing being sold everywhere right now, not all employees actually care for it. Some just want the information quickly so they can apply it. So it depends on the type of employee, but I'm a huge fan of anything that's quick, high-impact microlearning, and if a gamification tool delivers that, then I'm here for it. We do things like leaderboards, which really motivate certain populations of our employees, especially on one side of our global team. With teams on the other side, there's more interest in quick links they can access and apply immediately. It just depends on the group I'm working with. For some groups, it's about recognizing the effort they've put in to earn a certification or advance a skill set. So it varies, but we do have a meaningful population where gamification matters, and we've even made our compliance training more interactive using it. We've also started using VR and simulation training for leadership development, which has been incredibly impactful. I'd say simulation training is one of the things that really captures people's attention, keeps them engaged, and lets them apply what they've learned in a more meaningful way once they leave the training.

Susmita Sarma: Some really interesting points you've put forward, Jessie. As we look to the future, what do you think are the emerging technologies in L&D, and which do you believe will have the most significant impact on transforming traditional corporate learning?

Jessie Osborne: There are so many emerging technologies. I think the biggest thing we're going to see is that it's going to free up time for L&D leaders and instructional designers. It's going to change the L&D department in organizations, because so much time is spent on content creation, and AI is going to change how much time and energy goes into that. On one end, you could say it's taking a job, but on the other end, it's allowing a different kind of job to emerge, one focused more on measuring how impactful that content actually is on employees, and whether it's really landing. The outcome will be more of an analyst or quality-check role than the original content-designer role that existed before. I think that's a big shift we're going to see, and it's going to cut down on time significantly. I went to a conference recently where someone cited a statistic that it takes about ten hours on average to create one hour of training content. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but when I think back to how much time I spent early in my career building training content, it was definitely time-consuming, so that's a huge amount of time freed up. I also think we'll see real changes in how people get to practice their work. I believe strongly in the idea that most of what we learn happens on the job, that seventy-twenty-ten framework really holds true in a lot of ways, because we have to practice what we're doing to really understand it and get live feedback. I'm already seeing more of that with the simulation pieces we just talked about, especially for leadership development, and more simulation environments where people can practice their work, not just in leadership but in technical roles too. People are building sandboxes of client systems so employees can get early hands-on experience with their technical skills. There's going to be a big shift of weight off the administrative side of learning and a lot more energy put into the actual application of learning, through AI and other emerging technologies.

Susmita Sarma: So we can definitely be hopeful that these developments will enable more precise, targeted learning and help organizations stay agile in a rapidly changing landscape.

Jessie Osborne: Absolutely. And what's more, it's going to be more respectful of current generations' learning styles, which I think is so important. One of the gaps we're seeing is that the workforce coming in right now wants quick information. They want quick links to get where they need to go, they want to be engaged, they want games, and then they want to be done and move on and apply it somewhere. So our learning content has to reflect how these generations are actually working and moving through the world every day.

Susmita Sarma: Jessie, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. So before we wrap up, any final thoughts or advice you'd like to share with our listeners about navigating the future of L&D?

Jessie Osborne: Sure. If I have one big takeaway for most organizations, it's that you should be approachable. All leaders in L&D, and trainers in any area of L&D, need to stay approachable, because if you're not approachable, you're not going to hear what's actually going on in the business. It's going to be hard for you to align with the business, and hard for you to set a strong strategy and scale your learning. You need to know what's going on in the business, so stay approachable. That's one key skill L&D professionals always need, staying approachable and staying involved in the business.

Susmita Sarma: And also staying alert to coming trends and continuously evolving your strategies, so you can drive meaningful growth and development within your workplace.

Jessie Osborne: Absolutely. Don't get pigeonholed into one way of doing things. I always tell everyone on my team, if I say we need to fix this training or change it, and they say, but we just made it, I'll say, that's L&D, we move with the world, so we need to constantly change with it. The world is changing, business is changing, and how we approach learning has to change with it. Never get too comfortable. Always be prepared to look at what's out there, another way of doing things, another way of getting learning and information across.

Susmita Sarma: Brilliant. Thanks, Jessie, once again for your time and energy. And thank you to our listeners for joining us today. We hope you find this discussion on cutting-edge L&D both informative and inspiring. Until next time.

Jessie Osborne: All right, thank you, appreciate it.

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