Nigel Cassidy: What's wrong with how we do workplace learning if costly skills training is soon forgotten? Why can't more learning be on tap at the point where people need it? I'm Nigel Cassidy and this is the CIPD podcast. Well, so there I was trying to hang a heavy bathroom cabinet on a rather thin plasterboard wall, and the DIY place was full of rather complicated-looking metal cavity wall fixings, but I mean which one to choose and how do you put them up? The answer? Well, you've got it, I found and watched a YouTube video. Simples! Training at the point of need. So, this month we're asking why learning professionals don't take note and design content and tools to be instantly available to staff when they need them. Now I know what you're thinking, learning and development should go a bit deeper than showing how to complete job tasks. Yet is your content always accessible where it's needed? Does it bug you that you're somehow losing control of what people are learning? Well, with us the Leader of Learning, Knowledge and Performance Support for the health and life insurance provider, Vitality. He's also responsible for various operational functions across the business, which maybe gives him a different take from his HR and L&D background. It's the Director of Strategic Enablement at Vitality, Seb Tindall, welcome.
Seb Tindall: Thanks, Nigel. Good to be here.
NC: And with Seb, a digital learning and performance consultant who's had what she herself calls a rather squiggly career in retail, media, logistics, education and more. She's certainly built a big-name client list, focusing as she does on L&D, welcome Theresa Rose, founder at ConsultHer.
Theresa Rose: Thank you, Nigel. Delighted to be here.
NC: And Theresa, I was intrigued to see that, away from work, you're learning how to lift heavy weights in the gym, and you do a lot of salsa dancing. I just have to ask you; do you consciously apply learning principles to those hobbies?
TR: I sure do, yes. So, I'm thinking about progression for lifting. It's starting with the basics of the correct forms and techniques, watching lots of videos and using apps and things like that to help me. I'm also a Vitality customer, so earning my points for Vitality helps as well, yeah.
ST: Great to hear.
NC: Yes, I'm. I feel bound to say other insurers are available, but Seb looks pretty pleased about that. And I mean, do you kind of, seeing we're talking about learning at the point of need, do you find with steps in salsa, so you have to, sort of, mug up at the last minute or do you just sort of do it all long term?
TR: Oh, now this is an interesting thing because everything's being talked about, skills-based organisations, isn't it? And there isn't much discussion around constant skills, so there are skills that you need to be using all of the time and without that particular fundamental skill you can't do the task or the job. So, with salsa dancing, the basic steps are the constant skill. You can't do the dance without the basic steps.
NC: OK. And over to Seb, I know that as far as I know, you're not the owner of that cute dachshund on the Vitality TV ads, but you were telling me you do have an energetic 5-year-old. So again, do you, do all your learning and development principles work well with him?
ST: I don't know if anything works well with trying to raise a 5-year-old. I think the, it's a perpetually humbling experience, and I think the things that have really helped me learn about the profession of people development have been things outside of it. And I think watching, you know, a human learn the world, learn the tasks it needs to survive, you can kind of get lulled into a sense of trying to get them to avoid errors and trying to get them to stop, you know, doing things wrong etc. And that is a vital part of learning, is the ability to do something, fail, apply that back again and perpetually improve in, kind of, in day-to-day life. And I found it just a moment to really reflect on, you know, I know we're dealing with adults in the workplace, but some of the principles apply. You're never going to stop that person learning. You can't control it, and nor should you. All you can do is try and guide them in the best way possible in order to get the outcome required for them. And it's, you know, it's a timely and perpetual reminder in the household around that, really.
NC: OK. So that's Seb and Theresa. So, we're talking in particular, Theresa, about learning at the point of need. I mean we get these phrases, don't we? We've had "learning on the job." There was "learning in the flow of work", "performance support." I mean is learning at the point of need, do you see that as something distinct, it's a "thing", a step further?
TR: Yes, and it makes me reflect on when I joined the profession because, as you said, I've had a squiggly career and learning and development, the people space is something I came into around 14/15 years ago. And when I first started going to conferences, there was discussion around "just in case" or "just in time" learning. And the "just in time" learning, was that learning at the point of need and I've been in the profession over that time, it doesn't really feel like we've achieved that. It's still around, and there's still so much "just in case" learning. Even if we look at what's happened in digital learning over that time, going from interactive PowerPoints to e-learning to what I call now "death by pathway". So, it's gone from "death by click next" to "death by all of this content put into learning pathways". It's still just in, "just in time", "just in case" learning, sorry rather than "just in time" learning.
NC: So, Seb, we haven't, if we haven't got very far according to Theresa, I mean that suggests that the whole profession, you know, needs to redesign its essential content and make it accessible.
ST: I'm never a fan of bashing the profession. You know, I think that the future exists. It's not, it's just not evenly distributed across the profession at the moment. I think if we, if you forget the definitions, you know the methodology. I think the irony about performance support, it is, it's methodology agnostic. If you think about the opportunity and you go, you know, you're a business you're trying to grow, you're trying to serve your customers in the most agile way possible in a challenging job market. Imagine the power of being able to bring someone into an organisation, sit them down in a chair and be able to seamlessly conduct that from the moment they enter the business, no training required. It protects the customer in terms of the interaction, all the processes are ergonomic enough to be able to figure them out and do it for them. Well, that's when you know you've arrived as a learning development function, and I think some people struggle with that notion because they want to see formal interaction with that individual. Well, it's as much about the ecosystem helping them to perform as it is about the inputs of any single support function in an organisation.
NC: Well, in a way, you're not only challenging whether we need to have all this learning prepared at the point of need, but actually whether you should send people off on expensive training courses. What you're saying is that the work processes are the things that need revisiting.
ST: Yeah, I think you should redefine your influence as a function. And a lot of times, you know, and I've fallen into this trap myself. I sit here and you, again, you learn from a lot of mistakes in your previous career, but you might advertise, "Isn't this amazing? We've trained people for 60 hours a year. Isn't that wonderful!" By the same token, if I trained your people for six months a year and they didn't do any work, I'm the best learning development function in the world. Training hours and hours spent away from your job are not a good thing. In fact, they're a cost. It's actually going to cost you. So, you've got to be really sure that you're trying to find the optimum level between performance, going out there, being exposed to the role, learning by doing, and then reserving any time away from the role for it being absolutely necessary. I think that's the key distinction for me.
NC: OK, well, Theresa, just indulge us a moment, let us assume that you do have people that need more access to the stuff that you've got somewhere sitting in the organisation. How do you try and get it out there? I mean, what sort of format might it need to be? Do you need new tools? What's the process of making it available?
TR: I think, linking back to what Seb has said, it is about that ecosystem and learning and development can't do it all. So, it's where you work collaboratively across your organisation with your subject matter experts, but also understanding that people are going to be at different levels. So, there is a danger that subject matter experts are the expert, and then they don't understand and relate to what the novice does. And this is also about observation as well and going and spending time with your people in the organisation that are at different points in their experience with your organisation and looking at workflows, particularly around performance support. And that's where it started, really, it was about workflow analysis. That was where this performance support originated from. And I think you pointed out that that I've written about this, and going back into the research, and it goes back to the 50s, 60s and 70s. It's not anything that's new, as with most things, but it's that we've got more tools in our toolkit to enable that to happen in a more efficient and effective way now.
NC: So, Seb, how does it work in your own organisation, Vitality? I mean, clearly people need to give the correct answers, there's a lot of compliance, people can't go off and do their own thing. So, how do you keep people on track and empower them at the point of need?
ST: There's a number of steps that we've, you know, we've created a bit of a custom process, but you know, I'm conscious of time, so probably draw back to some of the principles with it and I think, to Theresa's point. You can't do it all, but your first warning sign, if you're going to deploy a new process is, if it requires a lot of training to run a process, it's probably not a very good process. That's your first warning. So, if you're going to get together as an organisation and say "that's going to be an issue. It's an inefficient process. The human brain is fallible. We could train them a lot; they'll forget a lot. There's going to be a lot of issues in there." So, we've got a process by which we'll go around, and we will assess the intuition of a process with the end users and say, "OK, well, try and do it, try and do it cold with no instruction. What happens, where do you get stuck? Where are the issues?" That's the intelligent point, number one intelligence point number one, sorry. Number two is, you start to work with all your operational stakeholders to understand what are the things that we just can't get wrong here? You know, there are some critical things that if we get them wrong, you just cannot recover from that and they become the real focal points of what you're going to do in terms of your resources. So, we have to get those things embedded in, ideally the processes mean that, you know, you don't have to worry about that because it's automated, but if it's not, you know that's number two. And suddenly, you're starting to bring together the stuff that's a really high mental load. The stuff that we can't get wrong, and that is going to inform that process, and it's great to have that. The final point, which is one that's quite often forgotten, is that perpetual feedback mechanism. You know, you leave any learning intervention, whatever happens, you are at best an enthusiastic amateur, at best. So, if I set you loose in an organisation, what happens to ensure that you actually continue to retain and maintain competence? And I think the question we ask, as a collective is, if someone goes out there right now cold and they get it wrong, what happens? Because it's far more important that that mechanism is right than any input into people's knowledge upfront, because it's got to perpetuate and continue long after the training is forgotten. And I think those threads kind of come together in our process to try and identify and understand criticality, ergonomics and, kind of, perpetual improvement.
NC: Theresa, how does that all chime with you and the work you do?
TR: Really very much. And I think what Seb's talking around there is things like critical incident techniques, is identifying those real crunch points and selecting what it is that people need to have knowledge where they retain it. Which is where you would need the training and/or the learning and development and things that people do on an ad hoc basis, which is where you might have the performance support or job aids so people can pick those up if it's something that doesn't occur that often and you don't need them to have that knowledge to use all the time.
NC: OK, Seb, we're talking here a lot about the kind of run of work, the crucial stuff that needs to be done. But if we go back to my bathroom cabinet, I mean, it was still on the wall when I last looked this morning. But I mean, solving my DIY problem with a YouTube video doesn't make me a builder and I just wonder whether we're in danger of confusing or prioritising immediate task support with the kind of longer-term learning which organisations ought to be offering? You know, developing people's skills and capabilities, their future problem-solving, their decision-making. Are we losing sight of that because of budget cuts and everything else?
ST: There's a couple of points that have occurred when Theresa was talking it's good to pull out because they help to answer this question. I think number one, we just touched on, is frequency. You know, the amount of times that you might get approached as a learning development department to say, "Every year there's this process and it happens once a year and people get it wrong, so we need to train them." You know, it's absolutely pointless to do that because by the time you train them, they'll have forgotten, and it runs around again. And the first sign of insanity is having to do the same thing again. So, there's a frequency piece in here to say, when you come to us, if a process is infrequent, that's all the more reason to rely on performance support and use that methodology because a fallible memory will fail you in between those instances. I think the second one is around performing your role here. Now, it's really difficult to connect with someone about future career, future skill needs if they're struggling to do their job on a day-to-day basis, that will not be their primary concern. So, I think what we're looking at at performance support here is, ensuring that the environment is absolutely supportive of you being able to do what you need to do, to buy you the bandwidth to do that, and there's almost an assumption that if you become, you know, really effective, if your efficacy is absolutely right when you're interacting with somebody, that you don't do anything else. Well, no, well, that preserves capacity to talk about skills that can be transformative for your organisation, to talk about scarcity, to start growing them in advance of when you need them. But you can't do that if you've got a customer on the end of the phone who's shouting at you because can't do what you need to do.
NC: So, you've got to do it all?
ST: I'll take your word for that one, Nigel, but I wouldn't recommend doing it with the bathroom cabinet, you know.
NC: OK, I want to talk about AI, Theresa. I mean, it's here. It excites some and terrifies others. I mean, perhaps we can talk about the part it might play in delivering your learning in a moment. But one aspect of it which seems to worry people is the loss of control. They've got learners asking for what they need, I wonder if there's a sort of, rather misplaced thought in the mind of some L&D people that they're, they should be controlling what people are learning, and they're losing that control.
TR: It's a difficult one, isn't it? Because you want to stand out as a profession and showing support in your organisation and enabling people to do their jobs, but you cannot put your arms around and touch everything. And I experienced that when I was working in an organisation where we had significant cuts, both from an operational point of view in learning and development and also from a behavioural point of view. So, because we had those quite separate and I think that's also sometimes dangerous because we don't then sense-make for people in our organisations. And everything's very separate, the learning's separate and it doesn't, it's not joined up together to give them a holistic experience. So, what I found myself doing was collaborating with people in the organisation and equipping them to equip themselves because there was no way that we could do it on our own. But then with more, with things that were far more highly strategic, that were much bigger pieces of work, we had a process in place that made sure that we had both the resource, and it was a business imperative. It was going to deliver on key strategic objectives to say "yes" to that work. And detailed resource planning. That was how we really improved our learning operations and saved a significant amount of money, time and enabled people in the organisation, which is ultimately what it's all about. It's about people and performance.
ST: When we talked about AI, it's a tool. I think the dynamic thereafter is trying to control people's learning, you know, long before AI was around, people learn perpetually in an organisation. You better hope they do, because if they don’t, we are, you know, every organisation is in a lot of trouble. You cannot be absolutely everywhere, looking at people all the time and controlling it. And nor should you want to. I think that the real nuance and skill of a learning development professional is to identify the areas either where they're most needed or where they can catalyse performance the most. But if you're there to control learning development, then I think there's a real inflection point for every professional to say, "you don't want to" because it's a key. It's a key support for your department and it's a key thing for an organisation to do.
NC: So, while we're on AI, Seb, do you think that enables you to make more learning available at the point of need through using AI?
ST: I think I would probably change the question to an extent, Nigel, in that, having learning available at the point of need isn't the useful thing per se, and I think, just to use a provocative example, you know, imagine I'm speaking to a customer. I'm using it as an example because it's usually quite time-pressured, and they asked me about a complicated process. I'm not going to go and log on to a 20-minute module and watch that and get back to them while they're on hold. You know, I think if we move away from that piece and say, "does AI look like a viable tool for advancing our profession?" My gut tells me “Yes", but I'm yet to see it done really, really well. I think there's a couple of options where we've explored and we're utilising it. Trial and error of course, but I think that's the same for everybody. But I think when you do asynchronous events, everyone's learning at the same time. You know, you do lose a critical ability sometimes for people to question and add conversation, post that event. And what we've seen is you have the ability to not only scrape the questions that are coming through to shape the resources in real time, which is really useful, but you could also start to inform the LLM, the Large Language Model, about here's how we want that to be answered in the future. So, you're, you're almost increasing the accuracy of the responses on one side. But you're also trying to use something that people worry is going to remove a connection, a human connection, to almost enable it. So, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a grey area, but I do see it as a viable tool.
NC: It's interesting, Theresa, I mean Seb has sort of, systematically demolished the premise of our discussion is that perhaps sometimes you might need to put learning at the point of need. I wonder, with your wider work with other organisations, can you see places and situations where it might be helpful? Because I just want to pin you both down a little bit more about how you get all the stuff that's available to people when they need it, even if we have to accept, from what Seb says, that it might not be while you're on a sales call.
TR: Yeah, I realise I didn't answer the AI bit from your question as well and it's probably good because, listening to what Seb was saying, it's made me think around well, we have to train the training even. Because it's that accuracy of information still and Seb's point as well around losing that human connection is really key. And I feel like that's happened a lot, particularly during COVID and probably carried on, where we've gone far too much down the digital route and the view of self-directed learning which hasn't again really, really paid. It hasn't really paid back the profession and the investment in it because people do need that human connection. There's probably too much of people learning on their own and not together and collaboratively and, for me, learning in the flow of work would be more about those conversations and working on business problems in a collaborative way rather than. "Here's some information because you might need it here, mightn't you?" That, for me, is where facilitation of learning in the workplace is the sweet spot, and that might involve AI as well, as a partner in that rather than as an alternative to.
ST: You know well, well, well what? I think it's important to try and be provocative in these discussions because I think, sometimes we're all violently agreeing, right? You know, we're all talking about the same sort of challenges. I think what I've witnessed, particularly post-COVID is, you know, a lot of hybrid environments existing. You can't ask that person next to you, so that a lot of those informal in the moment connections of kind of diffusing information from experienced individuals are lost.
NC: And in a way that was learning at the point of need, wasn't it, when that happened?
ST: Correct, correct. And a very effective one, you know, some organisations you wouldn't have a learning development department, you'd go and sit next to someone experienced and away you go. And I think that, what you lose then is an ability to support people who were isolated early on in their career and that is a struggle. And that's something that the profession has to respond to, which, you know, certainly that's where there's expansion. I think the second one is, if you're an organisation that wants to automate a lot of high-frequency work, which we all do. You know customers want, have a heightened expectation of being able to deal with things when they want to deal with them. They don't want to have to call your contact centre and you're trying to make it as easy for them as possible to be able to do that. You end up losing some of the low complexity work into your organisation and what you're left with is quite judgement-based, difficult work. So, it's a very potent cocktail because you can't ask the person next to you and the stuff that's coming in is more and more complex, you know, sitting in that grey area. So, as professionals that's the real challenge is. Because I can't bring you in and start on the easy stuff because it doesn't exist any more. You need to be up to speed as quickly as possible because we want to have the agility to help our customers at the time they need it and they've never been more demanding and you need to do it whilst you're on your own, probably at home. And that is not an easy equation to solve.
NC: And all this, Theresa, raises the question of; if your resources are limited, how you're going to deploy them to try and make this accessibility possible? I mean, I've got resources or courses written down here, but I'm not sure that's the answer.
TR: I know somebody that probably would say it is. It's again, it's like saying, well, not well not one solution is going to solve all of your problems, but it's also understanding well, what is the problem? Because often the presenting problem isn't the problem that you need to solve. It's doing that research and delving underneath to find out what it is and that either/or courses or resources. Because you know, I'll go to courses, and I'll use resources and they help me in different ways for different things. So, it's not about throwing out the baby with the bath water. It's choosing. It's choosing, as I said earlier, the right, we've got so many tools in our toolbox now, as learning and development professionals that are learning tools and tools beyond, far beyond learning and development. But it's thinking creatively how you can use them and it's making people's working lives and your customers, as Seb's pointed out, it's your customers ultimately, making their lives as easy as possible. And it's going back again to those, where are those critical incidents? Well, what data in your business have you got to say that these are failure points or are you creating more failure demand?
ST: I think I've learned a lot over the years and that's a lot from doing it, probably quite badly at times. I remember thinking, "oh, this is great", you know. But, at this point, when they want to serve a member, a screen pops up and there's, you know, there's four pages of information. There's everything you need, you know, isn't that a great idea? Amazing! And people just kind of, "no, that's terrible. That's the last thing that you want to pop up at that point, because it's confusing and it's just going to alienate the customer." I think we came to the conclusion quite quickly that, and you get this question of "what is a resource? Tell me what it is?" you know, "Be specific!". The reality is, it's whatever helps people do their job. It doesn't matter how ugly it is as long as it helps them do the job, that's the pertinent thing. I think when we talk about resources and courses, it feels like it's a binary choice. Well, it's not and I think the reality is, if you can become really adept at what you do, you've gone from leaving your job to do learning to come back to it, then to try and apply it. People progress as a profession then, and you started to do some application in the training room. Then you started to blend it a little bit and that's great, you know, right at the end of that spectrum, you know, into the future, for me, is pre-emptive error avoidance. Systems that can start to understand what you're doing at the time that you're doing it, you know, and if you deploy AI well, it can listen to the conversation. So, it can start to surface things and say "oh, you forgot to do this" or "you haven't quite done that". And actually, you ensure that there's error avoidance to support that person to get to that that highest level of customer service but also performance in their role. But I kind of, you know, I think we've moved past that resources/courses conversation as a profession. But I think what we need to almost unite on a little bit is what's the future state? And for me, it is trying to get to that pre-emptive point of error avoidance.
NC: OK, so trying to bring this together, Theresa, if we've slightly demolished the premise of having lots of information popping up at the point of need, which Seb has already made clear, is not helpful in his organisation. You must have some thoughts on how you can make a greater body of information that people need available to them when they need it.
TR: Yeah, it's something that we haven't talked about but there probably is a lack of in our profession, is content management. And where and how you're using that content and keeping a catalogue because we know we get learning management systems that get, you might search for an item, and you get thousands or hundreds of the same thing to try and search through. I mean, I've done that, gone into my systems and typed things and thought, "Oh my goodness, we've got all of this." And then you haven't got the proper tagging. That's going to be so critical, is the tagging of your content and your content management, particularly with artificial intelligence. I think that is one thing, you start to look at all of what you have and where you can reuse it and repurpose it and what you need to get rid of and how you manage that content as well and who it serves. Where and where and who and how it serves and as to, to go to Seb's point, if it does the job it doesn't have to be all lights, bells and whistles. If it does the job for what people need, great. And getting their input as well and spending time observing in your organisation and looking at what all the pain points are and using that are most important data.
NC: And in fact, Seb, the AI might actually help you drill down into that information you've already got somewhere?
ST: Yeah, I mean Theresa made a couple of really, really, really good points that would be good to draw out, I think. First and foremost, being ugly, but just about doing the job is my calling card, you know, it's something I've been known for in the industry. It applies to resources too. I think the second point is almost around that knowledge management piece. It's such an important point to make there that the more you're able to curate an architecture that supports performance, the more you have to maintain it, and you almost start to move to a behind the scenes architect as you do this role. And I think that sometimes that's a really challenging thing for people to start to get into. It's a noticeable shift in our profession, where I think it was seen as a quite distinct skill set: knowledge management. But now, you know, to the point around pathways, curation is such a key part of it that it's not just what resource do you use? The ergonomics, is it accessible? It's also kind of how is that continually developed to make sure that it's reaching the optimum state for that person? And that's quite a tough pivot for a lot of people to make just from administering a course and updating that instead.
NC: OK, I think that's a great point to end on. A massive thank you to both of you, I mean, clearly real specialists in the field and I love the way you've, sort of, challenged the premise, but given us lots of new insights on it. That's Theresa Rose of ConsultHer and Sebastian Tindall from Vitality. I'll just mention, there is another CIPD podcast on the stocks which some might find useful as an adjunct to this episode. It's number 181, where we zoomed in on learning transfer, how and why learning does or doesn't stick. And one lesson there was that learning rates vastly improve where people are made accountable for using what they learn, and managers are accountable for making sure they do. That sounds more threatening than I intended, but that's our podcast for now. Until next time from me, Nigel Cassidy and all of us at CIPD until next month, it's goodbye.
