MANY COMPANIES CHOOSE technology before really understanding how it can address the business problems they are trying to solve. For example, someone thought it would be a great idea to take a classroom lecture and put it online. But, think about the worst professor you ever had in high school or college, and imagine putting his lectures on YouTube. Although you have the technology to distribute a terrible lecture to millions of people, not many people will find this useful, inspiring, or engaging. If it wasn’t good in the first place, adding technology is not going to make it any better. In another case, an elementary school teacher bought every student in her class an iPad thinking that technology would improve learning. But she didn’t really have a plan for how they would use the iPads. Companies, too, often buy technology before they know how they’re going to use it. It may sound obvious, but it is far more beneficial to assess the problem first and then choose the right technology to address it.
As learning scientist Bror Saxberg says, “Technology does nothing for learning. What technology does is take either a good learning solution or a bad learning solution and make it more affordable, more reliable, more available, more data rich, and more personalized.”1 In other words, technology is useless if you don’t start with a solid foundation and strategy for what you want to do with learning.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss some of the most common business challenges companies are facing today and how technology can help solve those issues. We will also explore some of the most innovative education technologies in the market, including those that enable you to explore and create career goals, help people find their purpose at work, and help individuals and companies understand what skills people have and need. We’ll look at technology for practicing skills, learning in teams, and solving real-world business problems. In summary, we’ll dive into the following technologies to show you how they can enhance your strategy. Do you want to help your employees:
• Explore or create career goals? (Fuel50)
• Understand/find their purpose at work? (Imperative)
• Understand the skills people have and the skills they need? (Degreed)
• Practice and get feedback about their skills? (Practice)
• Work in teams to solve business problems? (Intrepid)
We can make sense of it all if we start with “Why?” Why do you need the technology? What problem are you trying to solve?
Building Bicycles of the Mind
Technology is forcing people to fundamentally rethink the way they do their jobs. The reality is that we can no longer separate learning from work. Nigel Paine, learning thought leader and author of The Learning Challenge, talks about efficiency and productivity in the workforce. He believes lapses in employee productivity are caused by lack of investment in our own learning. Paine says, “Learning, for sure, increases human productivity. It not only motivates people, but it gives them new ways of doing things. And new ways of doing things are generally more efficient ways of doing things.”2
To reinforce his point, Paine recalls the famous story that Steve Jobs told in the early days of Apple when he likened computers to bicycles for our minds. Jobs said that on their own, humans are not the most efficient creatures, but when you give humans a bicycle, they become the most efficient species on the planet: “That is what a computer is to me—it’s the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”3
Paine fully believes in the power of Jobs’ theory. “This notion of computers and technology as a bicycle for our minds is very important because it means that it’s not about content. It’s about process, and about the ‘apps’ world where things plug into each other, to solve tasks and solve problems.”4
So over time, when better technology is developed, we get rid of the old and adopt the new, and in doing so we can increase the effectiveness, productivity, and the process of work and people.
But just because technology is better doesn’t mean it’s the right choice. Choosing the best learning technology for your organization means figuring out the type of help your employees need to advance their careers through learning. Once you have that information, you can then find the technology that can make the solution more affordable, more available, and more personalized.
Explore or Create Career Goals
Anne Fulton grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, and studied organization psychology as well as guidance counseling. She’s had a lifelong passion to help people make great career decisions, to guide them on their career journeys, and to help people think more intently about where they want their professional careers to go.
Her own career journey led her to become a vocational guidance counselor and then an organizational psychologist, where she built predictive career and recruitment tests. She then went on to start several tech companies—all focusing on professional development and careers. In 2011, Fulton and her co-founder, Jo Mills, created career pathing software solution Fuel50 with the mission of creating a meaningful workplace for people around the globe. The idea of fueling passion helped inform part of their company name.
Fulton describes Fuel50 as “Match.com meets LinkedIn.”5 In other words, it matches people with career paths and internal opportunities and then connects them to others within the company who can help them succeed. The concept behind Fuel50 is timely—research shows that 46 percent of employees want more visible career pathways within their organizations.6 This is because they want to know if there’s a path for growth, development, and career progression at their current company. So, if you want employees to grow their careers inside your company, you need to connect them to opportunities available internally. Unfortunately, it’s often easier just to look externally at new opportunities through LinkedIn.
Fuel50 helps employees find the answers to questions such as:
• What am I best suited to here in this business?
• What role could I aspire to?
• How can I get from where I am today to where I want to be?
• How can I grow my career here in this business?
• How can I find a mentor, coach, or learning experience (stretch assignment, projects, and part-time assignments known as “gigs”) to help me grow my career?
• In essence, what would I do if I could do anything?
Fuel50 is also valuable to managers and leaders because it gives people a reality check by equipping them with a “career match score.” As Fulton says, “We believe anyone can do anything if they want to, but we will give them a current potential match score to their target role and the road map in terms of competencies, skills, qualifications, and experiences they will need to get to where they want to go.”
One of the main goals of Fuel50 is to build a continuous growth culture and mindset within the business. This is particularly valuable for millennials. Let’s take new hire Rashid as an example. Rashid joined your company six months ago, straight from school, as a business analyst with an MBA. He wants to understand what is required to become the CFO. When he goes through Fuel50, he is told that he has the potential to become CFO, but right now his match is 18 percent. Then he is provided with a road map to follow with some stepping-stones along the way. This kind of visibility is something employees hunger for, along with an understanding of how they can live their values, purpose, and passion at work. These components are all important parts of the Fuel50 experience.
The product has since morphed into a career path tool. It’s designed to help people achieve their full potential and leverage their talents through career insight identifiers known as “FuelFactors,” which cover values, talents, work/style fit, and career agility. Career factors are matched to job opportunities within the company, and employees are supported in finding gigs, stretch assignments, and mentors to assist their career growth.
MasterCard is a good example of a company that has activated career pathing across the globe for their people using Fuel50. MasterCard initially introduced Fuel50 as a career development initiative to help their “Managers Matter” coaching program. It’s become popular within the company; Fuel50 is now being used by 12,000 employees globally. Elizabeth Barrieros, director at MasterCard, says:
In the future, we hope to continue to build enhancements into the platform that will allow our employees to build mentoring relationships, get feedback on their talents from others in the organization, and continue to build their network. Additionally, we are looking into integrating Fuel50 with Degreed so that our employees can directly access learning resources that are related to the talents they want to further develop.7
Bringing Purpose to Work
Aaron Hurst started his first business when he was 16 years old and has been an entrepreneur ever since. When Hurst was in college at the University of Michigan, he developed an influential program in partnership with the university that took students to correctional facilities to teach creative writing to inmates. Hurst believed that experiential learning was so much more valuable than learning from books. Having a learning disability himself, he never learned very well from books; he learned by doing. From his experience of visiting inmates, he discovered insights on a multitude of topics, from creative writing to sociology, from psychology to criminal justice, and from group dynamics to empathy. This led Hurst to realize the value of experiential learning as a powerful way to absorb information and to show how life really works.
In 1995, Hurst moved into the nonprofit world, working on inner-city education in Chicago. While he loved what nonprofits were doing, he quickly realized that they had given up on having a big impact because they bought into the poverty mentality of nonprofits, meaning they could only take their ventures so far because of their financial limitations. So, Hurst decided to focus on what companies did to scale, especially for-profit startups, and try to apply that to the nonprofit world.
He began that journey by moving to Silicon Valley in 1997 and landed a job at a real-estate startup as a product manager educating consumers so that they could take control and ownership of the home-buying process. He then went to another startup, iSyndicate (later acquired by content analytics company YellowBrix), which syndicated and distributed content, and was a precursor to blogging. What he learned by working at two tech startups was that the issue at nonprofits was partly about money, but more importantly, it was about not having access to the same talent. To really scale a company, Hurst believed in hiring ahead of its needs; nonprofits were always hiring way behind their needs. Typically, those startups didn’t have resources in marketing, technology, HR, or other functions. They were always just surviving.
Hurst knew that people were drawn to philanthropy and volunteering, but realized that there wasn’t a good way to connect talent in areas that were needed most in nonprofits. He also saw that companies weren’t taking advantage of the experiential parts of learning. So, in 2001, he decided to connect the two by starting a company called the Taproot Foundation.8 Taproot’s mission is to lead, mobilize, and engage professionals in pro bono service that drives social change. Taproot connects the skills of all types of professionals to help nonprofits with the talent they need ahead of the curve. In 12 years, Hurst scaled the pro-bono social movement into a $15 billion-dollar marketplace.
For Hurst, one of the most rewarding things about Taproot was the number of people who told him that doing pro bono work was the most fulfilling part of their career. This feedback also made him think about the flip side of that statement—that people were fundamentally dissatisfied with their careers and tended to supplement their jobs with volunteer work to find meaning and purpose.
Hurst spent the past few decades exploring the relationship between purpose and work, so in 2013 he decided to embark on a new journey, co-founding the technology company Imperative. The goal of this company is to imagine a world where the majority of the workforce is purpose-oriented9 because of the huge benefits to employees, companies, and society.
To create awareness around purpose at work, Hurst published The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World.10 In his book, he details his extensive research on how people perceive work. What Hurst discovered is that people are wired to see work from two different viewpoints. The first is through purpose orientation, meaning that some people view work as a way to achieve personal fulfillment as well as a method of serving others. In the second orientation, people view work as a way to achieve status, advancement, and income.
Hurst’s philosophy is that the economy is changing, and he also emphasizes that when we apply rigor to purpose, it becomes an economic driver. Imperative built the first ever assessment around purpose so that people could learn about themselves, and then expanded it so that people could build their careers around their purpose drivers. So instead of dreaming to be a great engineer or a great salesperson, you can think about how to become outstanding at your purpose. The thing is that no matter what job or role you have, your purpose makes you feel incredible and fulfilled—it’s the one thing that is sustainable.
Hurst sees an urgent need in companies to create a more purposeful work culture. “Companies across industries are hungry to evolve beyond engagement and are inspired to embrace fulfillment as the framework for their talent strategies.”11 Imperative is working with Fortune 100 companies to help employees think about skills development, career development, and leadership development through the lens of purpose. It helps people look at the competencies they should be building regardless of the job they have. This is going to become even more important for future generations. In Imperative’s study, Purpose in Higher Education,12 Generation Z is the most purpose-oriented group to enter the workforce yet; 47 percent are purpose-oriented (compared to 28 percent in the workforce now), and nearly a third of students say they would rather major in a purpose than a subject.
To determine purpose-orientation at the company level, employees take an assessment that determines their purpose drivers and answer questions about how fulfilled they are in their work. The information they share provides a good measure of their relationships, their impact, and their sense of growth. Participants are also asked to set a 90-day career goal; this could something like being a better leader or manager, or if the participant is new to the company, the goal could be based on their first 90 days on the job. Depending on the assessment results, employees are given their purpose drivers and a dashboard that sets out their short-term goals, the actions they need to take every week, and their personalized results measuring relationships, impact, and growth. Building on that technology platform, Imperative has started to partner with external coaches certified in the Imperative methodology to help guide people on how they can realize their purpose at work.
Why Should CEOs and Companies Care about Purpose?
Some companies balk at thinking about purpose and meaning at work, but there’s good reason for leaders to care. According to the 201513 Workforce Purpose Index sponsored by New York University, workers with a purpose-orientation are the most valuable and highest potential segment of the workforce, regardless of industry or role. On every measure, purpose-oriented workers have better outcomes than their peers:
• 20 percent longer expected tenure
• 50 percent more likely to be in leadership positions
• 47 percent more likely to be promoters of their employers
• 64 percent higher levels of fulfillment in their work
Understand the Skills Employees Have and the Skills They Need
David has had a lofty purpose for a few decades now—a goal that challenges the way we think about learning and education. He’s been on a mission to “jailbreak the degree” and change the way the world learns and give everyone credit for all the learning they do throughout their professional careers and indeed their lifetime. In 2012, David put that goal into motion and co-founded the education technology company Degreed.
Growing up, David was a good student, investing a lot of time and energy in studying to make sure he kept his 4.0 GPA, and took as many college prep classes as he could handle. He was yearbook editor and on the student council, played soccer, held an after-school job, was an Eagle Scout, and played the saxophone. In short, David did all the things he was “supposed to do” to be that quintessential college applicant. But the truth was, as good a student as David was, his approach to education and learning was simply a means to an end. He believed in the narrative told to him and his fellow classmates—that doing well in school would lead to being accepted into the best university, which would in turn lead to the best jobs after graduation and set them up for the best career—“best” always meaning the safest and most prestigious choice.
However, after taking the ACT when he was 17 years old, he had an epiphany. He realized that despite the years of time and effort he had invested in his education, how he scored on this one test would determine nearly half of his future—it was half of the equation for what university he would get into, which in turn seemed half of the equation for what job opportunities would be available. To him, the system seemed crazy.
Although David didn’t know it at the time, college marketing dollars are dictated by SAT scores, ACT scores, and your zip code—that’s how universities target potential students. It’s not because you were good at math or were in band; it was because you scored high on the ACT.
David says, “I believe that high-stakes testing, like the ACT or the SAT, doesn’t have anything to do with who you are or what your potential is. In fact, it’s strongly correlated simply with your socioeconomic status at the time of taking the test. The education system incentivizes people to master test taking, not how to learn.” David realized that while he had become a great student, he was actually a really terrible learner. He had no passion for learning or sense of curiosity, and he placed little value in what he was taught. He had been programmed to soak up information and spit it back out on tests. David decided that more than being a great student, what he really aspired to was to be a great learner. That goal cemented his passion for lifelong learning.
Despite his reservations about how high-stakes testing operated, David stayed on the conveyor belt and took the tests and did well. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in economics, and, like many others, his degree became the currency by which his value was determined in the job market.
Coming out of university, he was offered a job by a management consulting firm in Dallas, but despite learning a lot, enhancing his skills, and working with great people, he felt something was missing. During this time, he realized that he needed to dedicate his energy and his career to his passion for education, even if it meant giving up the prestige and financial security of management consulting.
David recalls, “I started to think about the ways our formal education is not representative of who we are or what we can do. More importantly, I realized that it should be our skills, irrespective or how or where we develop them, that should be what determines our opportunities, and I wanted to be part of the solution.”
He started looking for people and companies doing interesting things in learning and education but didn’t find much. Then he heard about a little tech start-up back in Utah called Zinch, which boasted the tagline “Students are more than a test score,” and became intrigued. Zinch was akin to a LinkedIn for high school students where they created profiles that were accessible as part of the college admissions process. That way, the students were being evaluated on more than just their test scores.
David emailed the team at Zinch and they responded once or twice, but things weren’t progressing fast enough for David. So he bought a plane ticket and flew out, unannounced, to their office. He knocked on their door and said, “Hey, I’m that guy you’ve been emailing with, can I take you to lunch?” By the time lunch was over, David had a job offer, which he accepted on the spot.
In retrospect, David admits the leap from prestige to purpose was hard. As a management consultant he had been well paid, was on a promising career track, and had excellent benefits. Joining Zinch meant a 60 percent pay cut, and a move into his parents’ basement just weeks after the birth of his first baby.
In 2012, following three years of working for Zinch, David had cemented his vision on how to transform the educational system, and he was finally ready to start his own company. He started Degreed from San Francisco and, with a small team, developed the initial product: a platform to provide people and companies to track ALL lifelong learning and a profile that individuals could own that enabled them to track their learning throughout their entire career.
David realized that learning is a journey where we travel between universities, employers, and providers of education. You learn on YouTube, and perhaps on TED; listen to a podcast on your commute, then take training at work; maybe later you fly to a conference where you will read a book on the plane. You journey between many destinations and providers of education, and while the market has seen a lot of consumer-facing innovations in providing new ways to learn, no one had set out to support the learner on that journey as they travel between providers of education. Degreed set out to be the first platform that would support you with a continuous model of lifelong learning that helped you discover the best pathways of learning and get credit for everything you learned.
Now, years later, Degreed is one of the leading education technology companies in the world helping many of the Fortune 100 companies and beyond solve some of their most pressing business problems by identifying the skills of their employees and continuously helping employees upskill themselves.
At its core, Degreed is about helping people learn so they can build skills for both their personal and professional goals. Working in today’s expertise economy you need to keep learning to stay relevant. By educating yourself on everything published on a specific topic, you can become one of the world’s most knowledgeable experts on that topic. All it takes is an interest in learning and your disciplined commitment.
One quote, from Laszlo Bock, former Google head of HR, has always stayed with David: “When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings.”14 David met one such exceptional person in the early days of Degreed who really had an impact on him. She was an accomplished woman in her mid-fifties but when he asked her to tell him about her education, she answered, “Oh, I’m not educated. I didn’t go to university.”
It really struck David that this woman still felt she was uneducated because she hadn’t obtained a traditional degree. Practically speaking, what does a degree in economics 15 years ago tell you about what you know and can really do today? Degreed strives to reframe this lens by ensuring people are credited with all types of learning whether they have a degree or not.
Of course, David knew that unless our learning could be answered for, there really was no way for it to unlock opportunities. While people learn from a variety of sources throughout their lives, traditionally there hasn’t been a way to track what was being learned or to take that learning with them when they changed jobs. Thanks to David’s vision, anyone can now go to the Degreed website and set up a learning profile for free to start tracking their learning and continue to build the skills needed for their career goals. Through data and analytics, leaders and managers can also track their team and organizational learning goals and assess progress on building employees’ skills to address the company’s needs.
Practice Skills
Six years ago, Emily Foote15 got a call from her former Drexel law professor, Karl Okamoto, who told her he had received a small six-month research grant to start an education company. To be eligible for this small business innovation research grant, the company would need to meet two goals: it had to have social impact and it had to create jobs. At the time, Foote was practicing law as a special education attorney, but Okamoto felt her experience in classroom teaching made her an ideal business partner.
Foote has always had a passion for education. Before practicing law, she spent two years as an elementary classroom teacher for underserved students in Atlanta through a program called Teach for America. Teach for America recruits exceptional college graduates from top universities around the country to spend two years teaching in the most disadvantaged schools before they embark on their lifelong career journey. After Teach for America, Foote spent an additional three years teaching high school and middle school at a KIPP charter school (tuition-free public school) before heading to law school. Both Teach for America and the KIPP charter schools programs were challenging the norms of a traditional education, which gave Foote excellent experience for the EdTech company she would join.
Part of her desire to make a difference through education was personal. While Foote always did well in high school, she never felt smart. Somehow, she always felt that she was fooling everyone and that she was just a very good mimic. In her opinion, traditional school is set up as a one-to-many scenario where a teacher or professor pushes content and hands out assignments. Although she felt she was a good student because she gave her professors what they asked for, she still wasn’t sure that she absorbed all the content or learned what was most important. Even after getting good grades, she didn’t feel smart or confident—that is, until she went to law school and took a class from one professor, Okamoto, who had a completely different approach to teaching and learning.
Okamoto was passionate about legal education, and he felt there was a disconnect between how law was being taught in law school and how much knowledge students were able to retain and apply in the real world after they graduated. Traditionally, law professors focused more on theory and not so much on practice. Through his own research, Okamoto discovered that law students took an average of eight years of practicing law before they became good, competent lawyers.
His research also showed that people who became competent lawyers benefited from being mentored, watching how peers and more experienced lawyers practiced law, practicing themselves, and getting feedback. In sum, lawyers needed practice, feedback, and reflection to excel in their profession, which, he thought, could be applied to other disciplines as well.
Okamoto decided to replicate in his law classes how he thought people really learned. It had a huge impact on his students. The model Okamoto developed involved chunking topics into four-week intervals. Classes were small—only 12 students. Week one focused on learning by doing; week two was about learning from peers; week three involved learning from experts in the field; and in week four there was an opportunity to reflect on what had been learned. The key to Okamoto’s approach was not to begin teaching the students how to actually do something but to let the students figure that out for themselves.
For example, one four-week interval might involve learning about asset purchase sales agreements. But instead of giving a lecture on the topic, Okamoto would pair students up and give them one week to prepare an asset sale purchase agreement. Students then had to go away and figure out for themselves how to create one. The following week, each pair would present their completed assignment while the rest of the class scored them based on a rubric. This way, the presenting students were provided with feedback from their peers immediately after the presentation, through an open discussion of what they did well and what could have been better. Then the next pair would present until everyone demonstrated the skill, gave feedback, and received feedback.
In week three, the students would go on a field trip and visit a law firm to present their asset sales purchase agreements to two practicing attorneys and get feedback from those experts. To conclude the day, the two expert law partners would then demonstrate the skill to the students to show how it’s done in the field. Week four was about reflection; each student had a journal and would write about what they learned, what they would do differently, and what they would keep doing. To finish week four, Okamoto would lead a retrospective discussion to synthesize all that had been learned during the four weeks. Then they would move on to the next topic. (Note that Okamoto’s teaching closely follows the principles of the Learning Loop—knowledge, practice, feedback, and reflection—as discussed in chapter 1.)
After taking classes from Okamoto, Foote left law school feeling incredibly confident because she had had the opportunity to demonstrate true competence. So, when Okamoto told her that they could build a technology product that would mirror how he teaches, she felt excited. She realized the impact they could have on so many people and didn’t hesitate to join her professor in the venture.
The company they founded, Practice, an EdTech company that provides peer-to-peer video coaching and assessment, would replicate through technology the process of how Okamoto taught in his classroom at Drexel University. Initially they wanted to leverage the power of video technology to help educators teach more effectively in the classroom, but they soon realized the potential in helping companies scale corporate learning through technology in a way that helps people learn and build skills in a practical, collaborative, powerful way by practicing.
When Emily and her team first talked to employees at large companies to understand how they liked to learn, most of them told her that they learned best through role-play, receiving feedback, being mentored, and interacting with their peers. But, as Foote discovered, most of the employees weren’t learning this way at work. Managers didn’t seem to have time to give the specific, actionable feedback their employees needed to hear. Because of all this, Emily felt even more confident that their product, Practice, would be a great solution for corporate learning.
“What Practice does is mimic these great, in-person small trainings that typically require a ton of time, money, and people, and allows companies to do it in a much more scalable way without degrading the efficacy simply because it’s online for scalability purposes.”16
Practice provides authoring tools (usually used by learning and development professionals) to build exercises that include the four learning steps and then delivers it to an intact working group. This means that the four components that make in-person training so effective are emulated in Practice:
1. A means to practice the skill
2. A way to build social capital and to get and give feedback from peers
3. A way to self-reflect
4. A way to get direct feedback from an “expert”
For example, pizza restaurant chain Dominos uses Practice for management training. They have an excellent ongoing management program where a few times a year, they fly people into headquarters to help them move up the leadership track. Some of the topics Dominos has focused on include how to manage a profit and loss statement (P&L), how to effectively give a direct report feedback, or how to set an agenda for a meeting. Since flying people into headquarters can be costly, not only from a travel expense perspective, but by taking people out of their day-to-day jobs, they’ve replaced one of the in-person, live trainings with Practice. As a result, Dominos saves on costs while retaining the effectiveness of the learning.
One of the largest global telecommunications and media companies is another example of a company using Practice, but they have adopted it for their customer support new hires. In the first instance, a group of new hires is given a set of exercises to complete, such as how to properly greet a customer, or how to handle a customer who is complaining about their bill. Firstly, new hires are shown a video of a customer upset about their bill. Then the new hire creates a video of how they think they should respond to the upset client. They then upload that video and in return get a set of assessment questions asking them to rate themselves on how they think they did in the interaction. If they don’t like how they scored, they can re-record their video until they are satisfied with their own self-assessment. In other words, they can keep practicing until they get it right. On average, people resubmitted their videos six times before they were satisfied with their work.
During the second stage, the new hires engage in a crowd-sourced peer-review process. People are randomly assigned peers to review and they use the same assessment they used to rate themselves. According to the surveys conducted by Emily’s team, people love getting and giving the peer feedback. They enjoy receiving feedback because they feel they learn more from their peers than their managers; their peers are the ones actually doing the job. They also enjoy giving feedback, some even providing it to more than the required three peers. Those surveyed said that providing feedback to others made them feel good because they felt that they were truly helping others.
But probably the most impactful part of the product, and what most inspired Emily to create Practice, is the chance for self-reflection. This is where the real learning happens. So in stage three, new hires get a “model” example of how they might have responded to an upset customer, or how they might have handled the difficult conversation. Both this example and the hire’s own recorded video response are shown. Looking at the two in parallel initiates self-reflection. “What did I learn? What am I going to start doing? What am I going to stop doing?”
Self-reflection turns a traditional, passive model of education into something that insists you think about what you’ve learned. Instead of pretending that you “get it” or mimicking what you think someone wants without truly understanding, self-reflection helps people to absorb the information and gives them the confidence to master a new skill.
Work in Teams to Solve Business Problems
Sam Herring is a serial entrepreneur in Seattle and a self-confessed liberal arts junkie. He studied history at Yale, and got his graduate degree at Harvard where he studied ethics, religious studies and public policy. Herring’s studies are relevant in business today. Core skills taught in the liberal arts like critical thinking, problem solving, and communications are in high demand today in every industry. “Hard skills” like math and science remain important too.17
In 1999 during the early days of online learning, Herring was employee number one at a learning technology research company called Lguide. They helped other companies make smart buying decisions about what was effective in asynchronous e-learning. The company eventually branched out into consulting and expanded their services to provide selective training outsourcing to large global corporations. In helping start Lguide, Herring learned about the training industry, what buyers were looking for, and the types of problems companies were trying to solve, such as cost reduction, speed, or talent engagement.
Around 2012, Herring sensed that the industry was changing and that people were starting to have different expectations around learning:
“I think the watershed moment from a technology perspective was around 2007 when the iPhone was launched, and YouTube was purchased by Google. A few years later, these technologies started showing up in the enterprise and employees were saying, ‘Wow, I have these amazing experiences with my devices as a consumer, why am I putting up with this crap at work?’ ”
So, Herring and his team saw an opportunity to do something different. They started testing a lot of new ideas, and he admits not all of them worked. It was an evolution; they started with some core ideas and then worked with some early customers whose input proved to be very influential in shaping their future product. They were also inspired by the MOOC concept being used in higher education, but they reimagined it in the context of work. Herring thought, “What if you could solve business problems with collaborative learning at scale versus just disseminating academic content?”
So, they put a question out there to some of their customers: Would they be interested in a learning platform that would help solve business problems? A platform that was highly scalable, highly engaging and collaborative, and involved group-driven learning experiences?
Herring says, “That sort of technology really didn’t exist anywhere at that time. You had self-paced e-learning, webinar technology, and then higher education LMS technologies like Blackboard, but nothing that was really addressing the needs of corporate learning.”
The question elicited a great response; people wanted to know what this sort of learning experience might look like. Within a year they had about a dozen customers who wanted to work with them, and that gave Herring and the team of 30 enough confidence to focus entirely on the collaborative learning technology. Eventually, in 2015, they sold the services side of the business to Xerox and launched Intrepid Learning as an independent technology business. In late 2017, following 750 percent growth and winning 40 industry awards in just three years, Intrepid was acquired by higher education leader VitalSource Technologies to lead VitalSource’s corporate and professional learning technology business.
Intrepid was focused intently on enabling learner practice and real-world application of new skills on the job. “Too often learning and work are seen as two different worlds: it’s a fatal flaw of event-based instructor-led training. While learners can get really engaged in a classroom experience, they often cannot directly apply new skills to actual work challenges in this environment, and they’re certainly not doing much to reinforce these skills on the job.” So Herring continued to focus on direct application of skills on the job and solving real work challenges, and wrapping learner collaboration around that. Intrepid does this by facilitating discussion forums, getting employees to engage in real work with their teams and reflect on what they are learning together, and helping individuals and teams learn over time.
The part about learning over time is important. Instead of trying to absorb a big data dump in an eight-hour classroom training session, our brains need time to process information. Learning over time gives us the opportunity to practice as well as to get reinforcements to our learning along the way.
Intrepid is a mission-driven company whose employees are most proud of enabling their customers and their partners to create transformative learning experiences for learners. The work they do goes beyond creating business impact; it impacts people’s lives. Herring says, “Learning new skills really matters to people’s ability to advance their careers. Whether mastering technical skills or core skills like communications and leadership, we have seen so many examples of people learning and applying a new skill that has helped them do their job better and move ahead at work. And at the same time, companies choose us to help them solve their stickiest, thorniest business and learning engagement challenges. At the end of the day, we are making a difference for people at work and the companies they work for, and that feels really good for all of us at Intrepid.”
One of Intrepid’s biggest success stories is its collaboration with Microsoft beginning in 201418 to create a new training approach for global sales teams. Microsoft had made the decision to evolve into a mobile-first cloud-first company—meaning a shift in focus from hardware and software to “cloud” products, such as servers, storage databases, business applications, more. But the transformation would have a significant impact on Microsoft’s global sales teams. Rather than selling to IT managers, the global teams would be selling to business decision-makers typically operating in finance, accounting, and marketing departments, which required a very different sales approach.
The challenge facing Microsoft was clear: How could they train their global salesforce to adjust their sales technique to accommodate their new customer base?
Microsoft sales readiness leaders quickly realized the scope of the challenge. They knew it was a sea-change for the sales team, and as such it would require a new approach of significant magnitude. In response, Microsoft partnered with Intrepid to develop a “cloud mini-MBA” program with multiple business schools such as INSEAD, London Business School, Wharton and Kellogg to design collaborative, cohort-driven courses on Intrepid’s technology platform. The programs included pre-recorded video lectures from professors, quizzes to test for understanding, online discussion forums, relevant case studies, and “mission” assignments (where participants created account plans for real customers).
Teams from all over the world were encouraged to communicate with each other, swap notes, and review each other’s work. They were also able to track progress and compare that progress with their peers, an activity intended to spur friendly competition. At the end of each course, those who achieved the threshold percent pass rate and a passing grade on the real-world assignment received certificates from the relevant business school and a digital badge to use on their LinkedIn profile.
It’s a great story because the outcomes were so valuable to Microsoft. Early on, when they measured the impact of the program, they showed it supported over $50 million in new revenue from just a couple hundred of the thousands of learners. And because team members created customer plans while taking the courses, field sales leadership was thrilled because account planning was a major priority for the team. In addition, the sales team loved the program. Individual engagement and satisfaction scores set new records for sales training programs at Microsoft. Not only did the outcomes show business impact and employee satisfaction, but also the program inspired some heartfelt testimonials from the sales reps, one of whom proudly announced, “I took this course, and because I took this course, I signed this deal with a bank for $25 million!”19 Another employee was so impressed with the program that he spent twice the time recommended to follow it, just because he felt it was so beneficial to his career success and customer planning efforts.20 With such great results, it is not surprising that Microsoft is continuing to use a custom MOOC training approach to teach a broad range of selling and core skills, and give teams from all over the world the chance to build relationships, share difficulties and insights, and communicate in a way that would never have been possible before.
Company Culture and Technology
New learning technologies require companies to change their mindset about their own learning and how they think about learning and work. Many companies are accustomed to command-and-control cultures, but in fact clarifying your company’s fundamental philosophies is the key to success. For example, if a company buys technology that provides access to free learning content, but then blocks employees from accessing YouTube while they are at work, then the technology is at odds with the philosophy of the company. Similarly, if managers decide to track every piece of online content consumed by their employees and monitor how they complete their assignments, then that approach, too, flies in the face of giving employees ownership of their careers and learning journeys.
Companies need to adapt more to what their employees want and need. In addition, no technology is going to be a silver bullet. You can’t just buy technology and expect that people will automatically convert. There will be work involved to make new technology successful—implementation, change management, executive buy-in, communication, and marketing all play a part in ongoing success.
Learning Technology Ecosystems
After figuring out why you want to do something with learning technology, chances are that you will want to do more than just one thing—you might want to help your employees discover their career goals or find their purpose. You might want to help them share their knowledge with peers; help them assess, learn, and build skills; and give them opportunities to practice their skills. Then you might discover that you can’t find one company or one technology that does all these things—and maybe that’s a good thing. At the onset, it may be more challenging to choose more than one technology. In the long run, though, companies should be thinking about creating a learning “ecosystem,” which is a system that seamlessly integrates best-of-breed technologies for the problems that they want to solve.
There are other advantages of adopting a learning ecosystem philosophy. For example, if you are using a video content platform today and you’ve integrated it into your learning ecosystem, then later you find there is another video platform that suits your needs better, you can easily swap it out. You are not tied to every component of your ecosystem—it’s ever evolving as technology continues to evolve too.
Many disruptive technologies in the market are changing the game when it comes to helping employees imagine their career goals, create and disseminate content, discover and consume information, and track skills and learning. There is something else unique about the number of forward-thinking, disruptive learning technologies emerging in the market: in most cases, the learning solutions are being created by people who are driven to make a difference in the world, whose mission is to scale technology to help people learn in unique and exciting ways.
Many of the education technology company founders such as those profiled in this chapter didn’t create a technology solution just for the sake of making money. They created the solution because they were passionate about solving a particular business problem and saw a huge need that they could fill—and they wanted to have an impact in changing the way the world learns.
How to Create Your Learning Technology Ecosystem
For too long, businesses have stuck with the status quo, even when it’s not working. But, there’s also a balance. While you don’t want to switch technologies constantly, you don’t want to buy technology for problems you are not trying to solve, either. Here are some ways you can succeed with the right technology.
1. Figure out your learning and talent strategy first. It seems like common sense, but work out what you want to do, what your strategy is, and what business problems you are trying to solve before buying technology to support that strategy.
2. Do your research. There is plenty of great information out there about what technologies are available to solve your particular problems, so keep up to date on what’s new. Some great resources for this include Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.
3. Invest in adaptability more than efficiency. Let go of the fantasy of one integrated system that does everything, all in a simple, seamless application. It feels familiar, it sounds safe, and it would be efficient. But locking all your processes, content, and users into one monolithic system won’t help you adapt when requirements and priorities evolve, or when new, better options emerge. And they will.
4. Focus on value, not price. Look beyond the sticker price. According to Fosway Group’s research, licensing fees account for only 35 percent of the total cost of “owning” company-wide software. Most of the expense actually comes after you sign, when you implement, operate, and innovate. So dig deeper. Consider productivity gains, think about new possibilities, and factor in the time and work it will take to drive adoption and utilization.
5. Select a partner, not software. Push past the sales rep. No matter how slick the user interface looks, or how easy the integrations sound, software won’t transform your operations or make change stick. People will. Innovation takes vision, creativity, and grit, but it also requires solving problems. So get to know the product as well as the engineering and client service people you’ll be working with. Your success depends on their flexibility, experience, and skills, too.
When General Mills’ former talent development leader Susie McNamara evaluates new technologies for learning, she scrutinizes more than the technology itself. “I not only look at what the technology does and the experience that it’s creating,” she says, “but I also think about the entire package. What do I get when I buy this? Do I get a team of curators? Do I get a marketing team? Those answers have made my decisions for me in a lot of cases. I’m not just buying a technology or a product. I’m buying an entire team of people. I see them as an extension of my team.”21