L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Integrated L&D: Taking learning from small to large, passive to active, and targeted to ubiquitous

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

The more an organization grows, the more complex its Learning and Development function must become. And in the modern business landscape, learning and development professionals have a duty to be increasingly ambitious about the impact their programs have on learners. As we observe greater competition, more scrupulous consumers, and an ever-growing pool of technology with which to optimize work, L&D can have a greater business impact than ever before. Join Litmos’s Chief People Officer, Kyile Stair this week for insight as to how to drive an organization through integrated, precise learning initiatives.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. This week, I welcome Kylie Stare. Kylie is Chief People Officer at Litmos, an award-winning learning management system. Kylie's career includes positions at Target, Zulily, and SAP before she split off from SAP during the sale of Litmos.

A decade into the HR world and having held various leadership positions, she focuses on integrated diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, building enthusiasm for learning and developing leaders. As an Ericsson-certified professional coach, Kylie is passionate about working with leaders to develop and grow their own brand and leadership styles, in turn elevating their entire organization. Side note, GetAbstract offers seamless integration with Litmos for those interested in optimizing their tech suite. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action.

I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Kylie Stare. Kylie, it's great to have you on. Thank you for joining me. Thank you, Tyler. Happy to be here. I was listening to some of my previous episodes and I realized that we beat around the bush a lot when it comes to learning. We talk about very specific things. Usually whoever my guest is, we get into sort of their niche and their focus. And we generally refer to the concept of a learning culture at various junctures. But I don't always get into what a learning culture actually looks like. And you strike me as the kind of person who would have a really strong answer to the question, what is a strong learning

culture? So if you don't mind, I'd like to just kind of start off there. What is a strong learning culture, Kylie? Sure. I'm happy to share my perspective and from my experience. I view a learning culture as something that's constantly evolving, where an organization is investing that time and resources in their employee growth and development, actual growth, skill growth, and development that's tied really to the business needs as well. And so how people feel the autonomy to learn and grow where they are, where they come to the table, and can contribute to overall the organization's success in their own personal and professional development. There's a lot of words that I would love to dig in further there you know evolving over time

investment in a serious way business oriented business needs all those things i think we'll cover them as we go over what we've already discussed in our pre-chat but what you've told me is that you have experience and knowledge of growing a learning department or growing a learning function through the different phases so kind of starting with the essentials and moving that up. So a lot of learning departments at companies of certain sizes have very specific roles. You're looking at trainings and like critical compliance, and it's all more or less straightforward, maybe teaching like software proficiency, whatever the software tools are. Then you get into the more complex things like upskilling and skill gaps as a company gets a little bit more convoluted itself, integrated learning and things more complex like corporate

universities, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a long journey to sort of get there. And my question to you is the way you just described a learning culture, is it possible if you have a bare bones team, you know, if you have a smallish team, or even if you have, I hear about this a lot, sort of like a learning averse leadership, where they do want you to just like handle those sort of critical things like compliance and trainings. A lot of leadership kind of seems to think that that's like the L&D HR function is, you know, you give us the trainings, you teach us what people need to teach to do their jobs, and you kind of stay out of the way. Is it possible with a minimal team or a leadership like that to still create a learning culture?

Yes. And I kind of think of those as two separate types of challenges, right? And so maybe we tackle the small team size, right? Or resource limited team size as well. And I've worked in very small organizations where there's one L&D individual and then very large, very robust, very resource-heavy organizations in tech. So I've seen kind of a gamut around the resourcing around it. And I think it really always comes down to starting with the needs of the business and where we need to start with the prescriptive, I would say, baseline for all employees. And a lot of times it does start with compliance, right? Or for the company, it starts with compliance. We do need something. And I think actually compliance is a really great place for people to start to build this learning culture. If a company needs it, we need the employees to go through it.

Compliance doesn't have to be this checkbox of an exercise. There are many things that you can do here to build an engaging compliance culture that is fun, that is setting kind of the tone to then start to make it more robust over time around other facets you can go into with L&D. I think it's a great way to start off. If there is an investment case that an individual can make in some sort of technology to help with that, to track the completion that's really key and compliance to be able to track everything. So you can get some sort of investment in a tool to do that. There are really great ways to start putting some sort of gamification around it or other things to do to like build that baseline. I do think a lot about this kind of ties to then

how do you convince people who may be adverse to investing in L&D first over other topics that they may see as more critical during that time. But I think there's a lot of case out here and stats out there that really demonstrate how critical it is to invest in LMD. And it's important for me to share, I think, some of these because I myself find them and share them with the leadership teams that I'm working with around why it's important to invest in these areas. And so some things that stand out to me that I've come across from Offered Business Review in a survey that they had is that 86% of professionals said that they would change jobs if a new company offered them more opportunities for professional development.

86% of people. Professional development is extremely important to people, right? When you think about employee engagement, you think about employee retention. And the ones that I always get that I like to share with the team fairly consistently is another article by HBR, the Harvard Business Review. Organizations with a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to develop novel products and processes. They are 52% more productive. They are 56% more likely to be the first to market with their products and services and ultimately down 17% more profitable than their peers. I mean, there is some data out there that really demonstrates

the importance of investing in learning and development for our teams. Wow, those are some big numbers. 92% more likely to create novel products? Is that what it was? In processes, yeah. Okay, so that is fascinating because I have had some conversations where the overlap between L&D and R&D is one of the topics, and maybe you and I can address that as well, but that's something that I think is very critical and I've learned through the people that I speak on this show is that a learning culture enables greater creativity. It empowers greater creativity, psychological safety that

hopefully results in innovation from all points in an organization, not just from that sort of central R&D team, but anybody who's dealing with customers, anybody who's dealing with the product, whatever it is, you know, that empowerment really results in that sort of innovation. Would you agree? Have you seen that in practice anywhere? Oh, yeah. I've had a lot of discussions around psych safety at conferences and other areas around, you know, people feeling comfortable to take risks to be in that kind of culture. How do we build a culture through L&D around psych safety? I've gone through specific trainings that have been created to build, as a manager, psychological safety in your normal organization and the benefit and the impacts that come from building that culture. I think, you know, as we give people the ability to feel

empowered and take those risks, we see a lot more innovation coming from our employees. And ultimately, again, that's great for business. Yeah, of course. So you mentioned a few things like gamification, and there's a lot that we can do to prevent falling into that trap of being like the boring content people, because I think historically training and especially compliance stuff, like you alluded to, it doesn't have to be boring, but like there's kind of an expectation that things that aren't your job, but are the things that you have to do in order to be able to do your job just often are not the most exciting. I get visions of those like really awkward conflict training videos for like airlines or McDonald's or whatever it is. And that stuff is, it feels like it's being advanced and made better these days. But that to me is like one of the more critical things that you can do is

set the expectation with the simplest of learning content, with the simplest of learning resources and say, this is actually going to be something that's fun for you, or it's going to be something that is actually really beneficial for you. Watch this, it'll be proof. And then from there, employees are more likely to appreciate whatever learning is sent their way. So how do you think this goes? Is this technology led these days? Is it technology that really makes learning more exciting, the systems that you couch it all in and what that enables? Is it always an iterative thing where you're rolling things out and assessing what actually intrigues your people, and then you're kind of creating something new from there? How do we make sure that we start hot with good

content and we keep it engaging and exciting from there? Yeah, I mean, I think everyone learns differently, Tyler, right? And so again, I keep coming back to this personalized learning. One science does not fit all and we need different people where they are in different types of programs that we build, different types of tools that we use, different channels of communication that we leverage to really get that out there for people but i think when we're talking about like how from a technology side of the house

like absolutely there are some great tech out there to one help maybe people test out of certain right so you don't have to have the same starting point for everyone we're looking at certain roles specific or skill specific training that's being assigned So people don't feel like they're wasting their time. And we don't feel like we're wasting the business or the company's time either. So there's really great tools around there, racking and getting some of this excitement. So for example, tools where you can build your own content, a content authoring tool, where you can also have the ability to pull in external types of content. So I like the idea personally of building content that is interactive,

multimedia, like let's pull in some podcasts, let's pull in some articles, let's pull in some videos, anything that's kind of public out there that would make sense for whatever you're building for your employee base, for your customers. And let's look at micro-learnings. I don't know about you, but I don't think many people like to sit in front of a computer for two and a half hours taking a training or really many trainings, right? Like it needs to be interactive. There needs to be assessments. There needs to be a break. Maybe we take it over a week of time in micro learnings or in months of time, right? Because what I like about this concept as well is that it keeps it fresh and top of mind. It's not a one and done. And I think I said this earlier, like learning is continuous. It's not a one time, boop, done, you know,

and like, let's all move on. But we had to keep it going, the momentum going and the topics going. So I see a lot of interactive multimedia that can come with the technology. There are some pretty cool tech features out there that can auto notify, can integrate with other systems, whatever system was, you know, maybe your sales team is working in, it can integrate those as well and give you reminders or security training can give you reminders based off of the other tools that you're in. But I still think it's all about putting a lot of excitement, gamification, how are we doing team challenges? How are we looking at rewarding and recognizing those that have gone through certain learning programs or

certifications or badges, and a lot of that does come from tech too, but just about the programs that you build overall. Yeah. Speaking of rewarding, I do want to ask you about that as well, because when you get up to really large organizations, you see corporate universities, you see things like hackathons where you're really pushing the innovation button and getting everybody involved. There's a lot of stuff that like celebrates learning just by default. Like this is a key part of who we are as our identity. Like learning is embedded in there. And to me, that's the ultimate celebration of learning is it's just

always there. And it's a part of what you have to do sort of. And there are plenty of organizations where learning is just built into everybody's job by default. Simon Brown from Novartis, that was one of the first shows that I recorded. That's a big part of his goal is to get everybody to spend 5% of their time learning. It's sort of an aspiration. But what can smaller organizations do to really get this feeling across? How can we celebrate learning in smaller organizations, would you say, where they can't really get into like a whole corporate university and that sort of thing? Is gamification one of the best solutions? Do you have anything else around that? I think it's also about the buy-in from leadership. I mean, how do we get them aligned and excited about people learning in their

organization? And again, spending the time away from their day-to-day job to focus on upskilling, reskilling, professional development, or even just what we have to do with compliance, right? And so how do you get the buy-in from the leadership teams who are building that, take time away, step away to be able to do this for yourself, right? We're encouraging that. We're inviting them to join sessions, to go into the tool and take an e-learning, or to spend five minutes reading a quick blog or listen to a podcast and into information share in team meetings, right? Like, hey, tell us what I did. Like, we're going to have a quick huddle as a team around like what we learned this week in sharing. One of my favorite things is like when other people share articles with me, just because they

know that I might be interested in reading it and learning about it too. I think top kind of buy-in down helps, but also it's just about, you will find that many employees want to drive that culture as well. And if they start to kind of build the excitement, whether you're using like some sort of teams or slab or channels that you communicate with about how you build some of that gamification, yes yes but there's also just organic i think excitement that can be built if you invest a little bit of time and structure around that yeah i'm hearing a few different references to like team type learning and collaboration and i've spoken a good amount about you know cohort based learning and that sort of thing on the show and i'd like to hear from your perspective, what role does collaboration play in developing learning habits and in just

like retention of learning and that sort of thing? Like, I've heard plenty of times that, you know, teaching is the best way to learn. And that's something that corporate universities actually do a good amount of as they inspire and empower people to teach their own expertise to others in the organization. So how big do you think that really is, you know, team-based learning or just collaborative learning? I do think you learn a lot from on-the-job training, a lot from job shadowing of getting an idea of like what someone else is doing in their day-to-day job. I've seen some really strong programs around that, around exchange programs of getting to, depending on the size of your organization, spend time learning someone else's role or whether it's prescriptive or whether it's just

a couple of hours that you were able to spend a month shadowing someone else. I've seen a lot of strong peer coaching programs that can come into play as long as you have a good structure around what that looks like. Mentorship programs, reverse mentorship programs, you know, like there's some really good, if you can get a little bit of structure into play for some of these, really great ability for people to just learn from others. And I think again, that yes, you do a lot of learning on the job, right? That 70, what is it? 70, 20, 10 model. And and so yes learn from others formal learning and just about i think again this what i mentioned earlier just like this organic kind of feeling that you build with others when you start to share and you start to ask about others too right there's a lot to be

said about how much technology can facilitate learning right now, the different tools and resources that we're already talking about, but also how much should actually be facilitated by a human, by perhaps one's own manager. just simply learning was probably mostly prompted by the people that you reported to your boss. Like, you know, that person knows your job most closely outside of yourself, and they are going to help you figure out what paths are appropriate for you to maybe grow into, what things you might need to learn. They probably, in some cases, you're looking for a job similar to theirs, so they know a good amount of that future role might entail. And, you know, leadership, direct management seems to be a critical place for learning, the ones who guide learning at organizations. So where do you see us right now between technology and management? How does management have to be involved in learning right now? What is their role as it stands? I think they can play a really big role in learning.

I think that, however, if you have resources and tools where employees can drive their own learning journeys and programs, that that's really important as well, because like adult learning is different than other learning. Yeah, we don't really need teachers anymore, professors. You're not necessarily told what to do by certain people or assign certain things. And so there's, I think, a rightful role for managers to play in opening the doors for their employees to get access to the resources that they need, whether it's connecting them with others, whether it's giving them maybe support from a budget perspective on something that's required. I think as far as assigning something specifically as a

tool for someone, it really comes down to, you know, maybe the role that they're in and where the individual has identified, like maybe in their one-on-one conversations or their development conversations, where their gaps may lie, where they want to specifically focus at the manager if you help them with.

But I think there's a lot also in the tools just around being able to self-learn and self-assess. And again, when your interests may be where you can leverage that technology and resources to really learn again where you are in your own journey. So I see a manager playing a role around helping break down the barriers, providing access and connections as it relates to that individual specific development or coaching as needed around certain skills and maybe assigning something for a certain skill if there's an identified gap. But a lot of times as well, I see a lot of people want the autonomy to be able to

also learn what they believe they need in their own learning journey as well. Yeah, the topic of autonomy has been front of mind since the first episode I did of L&D in Action. There's got to be some degree of choosing your own path, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge that 86% of people would switch jobs with greater development opportunities. What is it in between there? Obviously, a company offers the resources to somebody, to their employees, to learn. The more, you know, the more autonomy you can actually take there. So is this development that's referred to by this 86 percent? Is this more like opportunities to actually advance that are encouraged by the resources that are being given? Is it just a greater swath of resources from which you can

select and choose your own path? What do you think it actually is that that 86 percent envision when they say, yes, I would switch jobs? Not being great at surveying, I don't quite, you know, I can't quite speak exactly to that. But my perspective on like being engaged in learning is that you are getting access to what you believe is growing your career at that time and moment of the company that you're at. But also, I think really key, again, we're building L&D programs that still ties back to the business objectives and business goals, right? We still have a certain number of people who need certain skills in our organization around sales and customer and coding and engineering, right? Like we have to have kind of that baseline

and that upskill of what we're able to have from a skills-based perspective too. And so every person, I think, obviously recognizes differently. Like it's not just career advancement of moving. I think, you know, a lot of people have talked about this concept that it's not just a career ladder, right? Like they're so develop and grow in many different ways. And how do you help people recognize that it's not just about the size of the organization and what jobs we have available to them. For your growing and learning and developing in many different ways, let's help you figure out what that means for you and give you the resources that we can to help you with that. And I think if people feel challenged and feel like they're

getting the resources they need, then they may feel comfortable at that point with the organization that they're in. So let's broaden the idea of growth and upskilling and actually learning in a concrete way. So return on investment of learning is a big challenge. A lot of people struggle to really relay this and quantify it and qualify it. It's just one of those things. It's a sticky point, learning ROI. And I'm curious what you think about this. So you work at Litmos. I'm sure that there are solutions kind of built in there. We can talk a little bit about them, but ultimately from a theoretical standpoint, what is the best way to demonstrate success in cases where quantitative improvements of learning just aren't always clear or available? What are the things that we need to

demonstrate if we can't really get like hard numbers on something? Yeah, and I do think the hard numbers are important, right? We should, where we can, doing pre and post assessments, whether that's a self-assessment that an employee goes through and then a post self-assessment or whether that is a skills assessment that we can take them through with the tools that we have pre and post and really get some data around that even things such as like thinking about sales doing demos and a pre and a post with an assessment demo, are there any metrics tied to, you know, the time to close have changed or the deal size has changed? You can get some pretty good metrics. I mean, your data needs to be pretty clean to do so many things, but you really should be looking at some of these pre and post before implementing certain programs.

You can also think about incorporating questions into other types of forums like one how are you getting feedback from our learners at the end of sessions that we hope right was this a valuable use of your time have you learned any new skills and so not necessarily it's opinion based from their perspective we're not assessing a skill or something in particular or learning objective but was this a good use of your time? What have you learned differently? So just surveys afterwards. I think also you can build into your engagement surveys around, depending on how often you maybe have these go out at your company, but we in particular have questions around learning and development in our engagement surveys. Are we moving the needle on those as well from our employees' perspective around they're getting what they need to feel like they're engaged in that they are learning and growing? And you can always look at some of the bigger company metrics. But again, I think incorporate where you can, get feedback where you can, and continue to kind of track where you can as well.

act where you can as well. I do think that there is a degree of skepticism around certain kinds of surveys at this point. I hear the term happy sheets a lot when we're talking about, you know, how valuable this use of your time was. And I think there's a degree of bias that we have to make sure that we're not falling into, which is people don't want to say that they didn't enjoy something at work because it's maybe it could get them in trouble, put them out of favor with that team or something like that. And at the end of the day, usually these things are collected relatively soon after the training and not quite after, you know, like skills have been applied and that sort of thing. So when it comes to actual application and utilization of the things that we're learning, are there any ways that you can recommend that we actually kind of observe longer

term after learning has taken place, like like retention but also application of those skills and how we can demonstrate that to stakeholders and that sort of thing i mean you can think about behavioral changes and where we're measuring some of that in our potentially values like so for example at once we have built into our values continuous learning is one of our values and so we've also incorporated it into our mbos of have people taken a certain amount of training or things as well to develop themselves this year i think that there's other metrics that you can clearly like high level look at around retention but i do think a lot of it is still coming back to like are you seeing a behavioral change in individuals based off of the skill you're trying to incorporate the learning objective you are looking to achieve

when you set off this at the beginning like we should not be creating training and programs that don't have an objective in the end if you you leave this, this is what you should have learned and can apply in the future, right? And so again, I think that's where really these post-assessments come into play for people to track over time in L&D. Are you seeing any specific change in employee relations cases coming to the forefront, right? Or anything from a compliance perspective around harassment discrimination. And sometimes you see peaks on that step as well, because once people learn and go through it, they feel more comfortable reporting some things. But over time, I think you can see some of those types of metrics as well from certain types of training.

So ultimately what you're saying is that, I mean, obviously the number one thing you just said is that having clear objectives for a learning so that you can really assess that. But also, you know, the idea of like a pre-survey or something like that, you should always go in with some sort of clear vision as to what the concrete change is going to be. we're looking at AI right now. We're looking at really complicated technological advances, you know, new kinds of software that are supposed to make things like hyper-efficient and really sort of change the world of work as it is. That's sort of the theory behind some of these new tools and the technologies. Nothing specific in mind. What are your thoughts on learning things like that? Is it best for us to create some sort of infrastructure for learning new tech concepts and new tech tools in a broad way to inspire creativity to like find solutions that fit the company best? Does it make sense not to put clear end goals on certain kinds of education if it's sort of

on the cutting edge and it's what might help us next? But is it still worth investing the time, even if it's a looser, less clear set of goals that you have from that learning? I think I'm not clear exactly the question you're asking, Tyler. Are you talking about like the impact of AI and whether we should have parameters in governance around AI or something else? What I'm trying to get at right now is that people are starting to theorize that AI is going to impact every facet of work and that we don't really know like exactly what's going to happen in terms of which jobs will be removed and which jobs will be augmented very seriously. But at the same time, every job is probably going to change because we're going to

start using AI, some sort of AI tools in our work. And organizations probably have some sort of duty to teach their folks about what could come theoretically, even though we haven't really identified exactly what that change is going to be, there are going to be big changes. So it's harder to put like a clear metric of success on that thing. But at the same time, it feels irresponsible to not prepare your organization for big time changes. And so I'm just curious as to what you think, like if we can't put a clear sort of outcome on this, what should we be looking to achieve? Inspiring people within the organization

to come up with their own new ways of work, new best practices, even from an R&D perspective, you know, inspire people to think, how could we apply this technology to our products and services, that sort of thing. It's like a less clear outcome, I guess, but is that education still worth it, even though there isn't clear objectives that you can really nail down? Here's something I'll say around skills, because I think it's important to come

back to the types of skills that are still relevant in most organizations, given the rise of AI. I recently was looking at the 2023 skills report by LinkedIn. And they were saying that the most sought after skills from some data that they collected back in late 2022 is still management, communication, customer service, leadership, and sales. Those are skills that are still required in organizations and that we still need to be doubling down on regardless of what might be coming from an AI perspective. I think we recognize roles may evolve and people need to understand the empath or awareness around AI. And I think a lot of people today are doing a lot of research to even just on their own around AI. It's very hot out there and it's very much talked

about in a lot of outlets. And so really getting ahead of, you know, what are the benefits of AI maybe in the specific company or realm that you're working in or that your company's in? And again, I think this has to tie back to some of the strategy around, well, what skills are we going to need? This to me ties back to still the skills talk. What skills do we still need as an organization with AI coming into play in potential areas of our organization? And where do we need to fill the gaps? And I think some of those skills that I just mentioned are still extremely relevant in things that we need to continue to keep an eye on, as we don't know where AI is going to go in some case. I personally can't predict kind of where some of this is going. So I still

think it's helpful for people to understand that there are definitely skills that are required with this evolution happening. And here's how we need to continue to double down on some of those as well. Yeah, I see that for sure. I want to pivot a little bit. I took a look at some of your LinkedIn posts. It's good content. In one of them, you mentioned that you think that we need to start employees on DEI education pretty much right away in the first few weeks and kind of ingrain that in what they're doing in their early trainings. I mean, do you think that DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is something that gets in there a lot? Do we need to incorporate that sort of throughout the branches of our companies?

Is it more than just sort of training? Is it more like an ethos that we need to follow, not just as an educational goal, but as like guiding principles? Yeah, I do like to talk about DEI on LinkedIn or elsewhere. But for me, what was really important from a litmus perspective when we were standing up this organization is to incorporate DEI into the values of our company for me again and we very much have incorporated into onboarding training you will get a in your first day at litmos you will hear from me about the importance of dei at litmos and take a couple of courses around cultural

intelligence around how to be an ally so I do think there is a starting place of setting the tone for employees who are coming in or into the organization but it's more than that right like DEI is very broad and vast and there's a lot of touch points that you should be having throughout you can't just again none of this is a one and done and so how are we looking at rewarding and recognizing aligned to our values? How are we looking at building out robust manager training that talks about microaggressions or unconscious bias or how to lead a culturally diverse team? How are we building it into our internal employee communications channels?

Are there days of awareness globally that are important for us to recognize, to talk about as an organization and to highlight support? What are our policies and practices? Are we looking at for getting feedback also on employee engagement surveys? And we do have questions in ours specifically around diverse perspectives being valued, around bringing your authentic self to work, and really asking up front and center, like, how do you feel about these topics at your company as well? And so there's definitely a thread, I believe, that goes through in various separate touch

points of the life cycle of an employee. Yeah. What about before the employee actually joins? How about recruitment and making sure that you get a diverse and representative workforce? I think that's a really critical part of this is making sure that we all understand that people from all backgrounds that are qualified and skilled in the roles that we want are out there. It's just a matter of finding them and giving them the right opportunities from all over instead of from the sort of the typical more common routes, you know, the college degree job type route. What do you think about that? Are you doing anything explicitly or do you have any

sort of just theories as to how that should be handled from a recruitment perspective? I think we think about the hiring process as a point of time, right? So I think we can think about like one, your candidate pool, the hiring process and the interview process and all of that. So I think as far as the hiring process, interview process, we should be looking at ways that we're standardizing the interview process. What sort of questions are we using for all people for certain roles, right? It's sometimes very easy for one person to come and ask some questions and another person to come in and ask different questions, right? And so are we using any sort of assessments

to test those skills and capabilities for certain roles? How are we, again, coming back to like this manager training or interview training to think about unconscious bias, to be aware of unconscious bias? So how are we doing some of that training with our managers and our interview panels? But how are we extending some of that training with our managers and our interview panels? But how are we extending our reach? Right. I think we all, at least in the corporate world around my experiences in tech the general career channels, but are you seeking out specific posting sites that have a broader reach that represent diverse individuals? Are you investing in those? How are you looking at partnerships with universities?

What does that look like if you're looking at recruiting early career talent or internships, that sort of thing? And are you looking at building or creating relationships with other types of organizations that really truly represent diverse individuals? And so are you sponsoring different conferences outside of what maybe you typically would sponsor? Are you hitting different job fairs than what you may be typically attending? And reassessing and re-evaluating to really support and be involved in those that represent underrepresented groups. I think the other thing, and we've talked a lot about skills, is thinking about skills-based hiring. And I read some stuff recently around this as well from a LinkedIn report as well, that 75% of recruiting professionals expect that their company is going to start prioritizing skills first hiring in the next 18 months. And so how do we continue to look at skills

on our job descriptions? To your point, there's a lot that's always been out there about formal education, but are we looking at certifications? Are we looking at, again, assessing a certain skill set that anyone can go through? You may always have certain roles that require a specific degree or a specific certification, but opening up the aperture for more of a skills-based profile. One of the things we do at Litmos as well is encourage people to apply for our roles. Like we say it out there on the John description to apply regardless of whether you think you meet every single checkbox, right? And so just ways around

there where you can continue to help those who may feel that there's barriers in place to continue to assess and see if it makes sense for them to get access to and apply for your roles that you have available. What about, you mentioned allyship earlier, being a good ally. How do you encourage allyship systematically in the workforce? So I've been at organizations where there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in anything DEI related. And of course there probably is. If you're talking to people and you're learning from them at a very personal level, I'm sure that some people are going to feel as if their identity is not being perceived or received correctly, or that they're masking and behaving a certain way because they don't feel welcomed as they are. And I've also been at organizations where I walked in and there's ERGs right away, there's employee resource groups,

and there's groups that reflect diverse populations and there are things that they're doing actively. So how do you encourage that from the start? It's not, you know, obviously day one, giving them a training. I think that's step number one. But from there, you know, it doesn't stop from there, as you said. So what are the key things that you can institute that make that easiest to be just a good ally? Yeah. And I think it also kind of depends on the environment that you're in. Are you a remote first environment? Are you a global company? Are you in person altogether? And so honestly, your strategies will likely change. But you really touched on one that is very near and dear to my heart is these employee resource groups.

How do we use people who have common interests just interest groups in general the ability to connect and come together and to learn together is support and this doesn't have to be managed by a certain team at a company in general these are managed by the employees for the employees you provide a framework and let them take it from there right and so i am constantly amazed by how much can the culture of an organization and in the engagement of an organization is driven by the people who care about the culture of the organization right and want to be called it and raise their hand and you say who's interested in helping me with this and you will know right away like how people feel about it and have the interest to kind of drive it forward.

And I think it's offering that space up, offering those channels up to help everyone. Maybe you executive sponsor certain things as well with the buy-in of an executive. But I do think a lot can be driven by the employees that can provide kind of those outlets for them to connect in whatever way that may look like for your company. Yeah. So we're running up on time here. I want to ask you one more question circling back to technology. Very simply put, are most organizations using technology to support learning correctly in your vision right now? What is the correct way to use technology as something that facilitates, enables, supports, and maximizes learning? I think those are very key words, Tyler. Do your best. I know this is a big, broad question, but even from a litmus point of view.

Some of those words are fabulous when you think about it, right? Because the technology should not be a hindrance for one. You should have accurate data. You should have the ability to report. You should be able to leverage and know your technology. I think that's the thing that's important. Some people don't know the capability of their own technology that maybe they purchased. There's really a lot more to certain features and functions. I think it's important to know the technology to extend your reach and to, again, meet people where they are. If you're using your tech the right way, if you are boosting them where they are getting reminders consistently, if you integrated it with other tools, so they're getting reminders

from other tools like Salesforce or others that they're already working in, technology can be extremely helpful and is to having one key metrics, to building engagement, to driving gamification, these aging systems, this awareness, these leaderboards, right? These content libraries, the ability to create content. There is so much in tech out there to, like you mentioned, enable people to interest people to help them see the value in investing in L&D. But ultimately, the learning should be inspired from the individual's own desires and what they want to learn, how they want to develop, and what interests them most, right? It should sort of come from the individual who's doing the learning. Is that safe to say? I would say, again, coming back to the business

objectives, we do still need as an organization to have certain learning objectives that are tied to business outcomes, right? I think when we tie to professional development, there is a lot of ways that can go for an individual, depending again on where they started, where they're coming in, their personalized learning journey, their interests, the other things that they can get connected into. But again, I think it comes back to we do have to have those metrics behind. Why have we invested in L&D? Are we investing in the right sort of programs for our business and for our people? Do we have the right skills that we need to be successful in the future? And do we have that

right environment and ecosystem for people to thrive here, to learn and to grow and to thrive? So for me, it kind of comes back to that broader picture of, yes, people want autonomy to be able to, as an adult learner, drive your needs. There's also business objectives of why we build certain programs and resources and content that helps drive the business forward, aligned with the individual's needs as well. Cool. Well, before I let you go, Kylie, can you just let our listeners know where they can learn more about you and also about Litmos? Sure. Well, you can always connect with me on LinkedIn or learn more about me on LinkedIn

and check out Litmos as well on our website at litmos.com. Cool. All right. Well, thank you so much again for joining. And for everybody at home, thank you so much for joining. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action,

a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. Cheers.