Personalized Adaptive Workplace Learning and Assessment, with Luis Garcia

Speaker A: M welcome to the HCI family of podcasts where your source for personal, professional and organizational growth and development. We share our own original research, explore industry trends and interview executives and thought leaders from across the globe. Join us for practitioner oriented content around all things leadership, hr, talent management, organizational development and change management. Maximize your personal and organizational potential with the HCI family of podcasts. Luis Garcia, welcome to the conversation today.

Speaker B: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Speaker A: John, it is a real pleasure to be with you. You're joining us from Orlando, Florida. I'm south of Salt Lake City in Utah and today we're going to be talking about training and development, learning and development, that area and not just about like sitting in a class and like listening and learning or maybe watching a video and, and lear something. It's not just about like absorbing through osmosis and hoping that something sticks. Right? It's, it's about uh, actually taking something and applying it and actually like assessing whether or not the, the training works.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And so that's really what we're going to try to unpack today and explore together and how we can do that effectively or more effectively within our organizations as we get started. I wanted to share Luis's bio with everybody. Luis Garcia is a seasoned international executive with over 25 years of experience in technology, digital media and he specializes in driving new ventures and products to rapid growth by building effective teams that harness innovation, technology and creativity to solve complex problems. He is the president of peat, an Orlando based tech startup that offers a suite of cost effective and customizable solutions that enable organizations to deliver personalized workforce learning at scale. The PEAT team is dedicated to harnessing the power of AI to help organizations of all sizes optimize their training initiatives spanning from onboarding to regulatory compliance, product knowledge, technical skills and more without hiring additional training resources. I love it. So Pete is all about what we're going to be talking about today. Uh, before we dive on in, is there anything else you want to share with your, with the audience by way of your background, personal context or about your company? Uh, and then we'll get started.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So as you read, I've been in digital education for over 20 years and there's just two problems that I have constantly experienced as I manage organizations and grow organizations, not only, uh, because they're wearing education, but will happen in any setting. And it is, number one, it's really hard to create learning content that is effective. Uh, but number two, and it's the hardest one and it happens at all levels of Education and learning. It is really hard to evaluate learning, to really uh, know whether a person learns. So we have been living with these two problems for a very long time and we use them as the foundation to create peat. Now PETE stands for Personalized Education, Training and Enrichment. And it's really the power of AI which has given us the opportunity to create something like this. Um, because uh, we can, for the first time are able to solve both of those problems and solve both of those problems at a price that can be brought into a smaller organization. See large companies, uh, usually uh, solve the training, uh, problems by creating L and D departments, learning and development or training departments. And they have the learning experts in there and the learning managers and so on. So it is expensive to do that. Like my content department at university, to deliver content to you know, thousands of students around the world cost me a million dollars a year to run. So that is the cost of it. But if you're a smaller company, let's say 100 employees, 50 to 500 employees, you don't have that kind of money for that. But you do have the training problem. Uh, so you use other method, you use uh, shadowing or you use a, you know, you create a PowerPoint or use you know, even ChatGPT nowadays to create courses. But that only solves half of the problem. You can only deploy the content. You don't know if they actually learn. So what we wanted to build is a tool that could solve both of those problems at a price that we could bring them to a small and medium sized organization which in the past had never been able to afford.

Speaker A: Yeah, well that's really cool. You and you, you highlight you know, a bunch of major problems in the learning and development space. Um, that's been, you know, really hard to grapple with for decades. Um, and really for decades the bread and butter of learning and development and training and development has been classroom based learning. Like you sit down, you have an instructor, they have a learning manual. People uh, may have like a packet, uh, maybe they do a little pre work, they show up, they learn, maybe they have an assignment, they have some sort of takeaway, maybe there's some sort of an assessment or an exam or something, maybe there's some sort of follow up. If it's a decent pro training uh, program, there'll be some sort of follow up, you know, a week later, 30 days out, whatever. Um, and that's if it's a good training. You know, a lot of trainings don't even have that. Right. Uh, and, and, but it's just not effective. It's just not very effective. And, and most of it, you know, learning science tells us, and educational theory and educational research, uh, tells us that most of that is forgotten. I mean almost immediately, most of it, if it's not applied directly, um, you know, it goes in one ear, out the other and it's just not personalized. So, so that personalization piece has always been a, ah, ah a. The assessment piece has always been a real challenge. The direct application piece has always been a real challenge. What's really cool about modern technology is it allows us an opportunity to address all of those challenges. Right?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: So let's talk through that and tell us maybe a little bit more about how you do that with pede.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you. You're describing exactly correct. Uh, and it doesn't matter the setting, corporate training is one of them. But you're describing happened in the classroom for traditional education everywhere too. And uh, the best way that we have for evaluating learning was through tests. And tests at best are poor and at evaluating learning. The best way to evaluate learning would probably be uh, uh, interviewing individuals about what they learn and have them practice with you in front of you to see whether or not they grasp uh, the knowledge and be able to fill up the gaps as they go along. But that's not scalable. It's not even scalable in a normal classroom and uh, uh, format. That's why tests were invented. So how can I have a conversation with an expert at scale without the expert? So that's what AI allows us to do now because when we create courses and we uh, ingest all this knowledge, we're able to create this skills, uh engine in which uh, a person can be evaluated. Now the first problem we wanted to solve is like how do I can have a conversation with the expert and the expert can evaluate my knowledge based on the learning outcomes that we, that the system define. Because by the way, most people don't know that the point of a course is to deliver learning outcomes. And uh, so our, our system is rooted on learning outcomes. But because our system is not created for learning experts, uh, we do the work, the algorithm does the work of creating the learning outcomes transparently for the user, but it uses that as a foundation to do evaluation. So we first wrote an engine. So to have this conversation, uh, to be able to evaluate that learning outcome. And um, that worked really well. But what we realized is like all we're doing is playing a role. So now the AI could be the expert that is asking you questions Evaluating your learning. But we could flip the role also and say, well, uh, the AI can be the customer and you can be the expert. And that's another way to prove that you learn right. And uh, if we do that then really the AI can be any role. So we started experimenting with it. Uh, it could be a customer calling to your support line, being very upset, and now you have to de escalate that. Or it could be a cold call that you're trying to convince somebody to buy your product and you could be practicing that or it could be a number of scenarios. So while in that building was a skills assessment engine that allows you to practice or allows you to, and allows you to evaluate the learning. And all our courses include that by default. Okay. Now you can do that in text, you can do that in spoken, you can even do it with a video. We have the ability for you to have a live conversation with a video avatar to make it as real as possible. So I work in sales, uh, a long time. You have to do a lot of role playing with people to train them to take that first call. And uh, so that takes time from the supervisor or whoever is doing that part here they have a safe environment to practice all these conversations and be ready for that first call.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love it. We've come so far. So the fact that you can do it with uh, uh, an interactive video avatar in real time, get real time feedback, that simulated environment, that role play environment, um, I'm a university professor, so in a classroom environment that was always like actual application classroom based activities, role plays, um, you know, case applied case studies where students are like doing real projects with real organizations. Like those were always the bread and butter. Like that's the real stuff, right? If you could do that with your students, that's where they gain the real skills. That's where you can assess real competency. But it's hard because it's hard to scale. Uh, and it's, it's, you know, and so, so what you'd end up doing is you would like pair off students so they're like role play playing with each other. Um, or you know, there's a variety of ways you try to do it, but that's limited because now you instead having an expert with the student, you have a student with a student. Right? And there's only so much, you know, a novice can teach a novice. And you know, there's always, um, you know, one of the best ways to learn is through teaching. And so you know, having, having a student working with A student is still valuable. Um, but, but having that expert, you know, on the other side via ah, the, the simulated role play with the, the AI video avatar, that is really, really cool. And that's something that we didn't have before like that. That's a new emerging that we have with these technologies now. It takes a lot of computing power, it takes a lot of tokens, it takes a lot of those sorts of things. Um, but it's getting better and better, it's getting cheaper and cheaper, um, uh, to be able to do that and to be able to do it at scale. Uh, so it's becoming more and more accessible for organizations, not just big corporations, but even small businesses.

Speaker B: Yes, yes, we are able to deliver a very um, affordable uh, price um, so that small companies can have it. Now what is also interesting that we found in this work is that 80, 80% of the workforce doesn't have a desk. It's frontline deskless workers. Yet only 1% of the software investment goes to software for them. So they are the first people that are representing your brand yet the least trained people out there. And uh, so because we're starting getting these customers for frontline distributed workforces that uh, needed to hire a lot of people, deploy them really quickly, like think concert, right? You know, band is in town, uh, you see all these people around protecting, helping people. They get really no training to do that. And uh, those were our first customers. They wanted to be able to train those folks. They are not trained on how to de, escalate a difficult customer in uh, life. So now they can practice that. Uh, so we started getting more and more uh, those kind of customers. And today a lot of our customers are frontline, uh, distributor workforces that before were getting no training whatsoever. And now they're not only getting good instructionally sound content, they also have the ability to practice and, and get their position certified before they are out in the field.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, well either no training or, or really generic, you know, not personalized training. Right. Um, uh, so that's what I've seen in small business is you know there's so many free resources out there. There's MOOCs, there's, you know, there's YouTube, there's, there, there's not a, there's not uh, you know, a limitation around content. There's so much content out there. Um, and so you uh, know, and a lot of uh, scrappy small business owners, CEO, solopreneurs, whatever, like you know, they can go out and find content. The problem is, is it Personalized to your business, to your, to your strategy? Is it personalized to your team? Is it personalized to the individual learning needs of your people, uh, and where they're at, to your products and your services? Right. And that's, that's the sticking point because you know, there may be, if you're lucky, with those generic resources that you find on YouTube or you know, on whatever, um, you know, you may find 50%, 60%, maybe even 80% alignment with what you're trying to accomplish and what that resource provides. But there's still probably a pretty big gap. Um, and it's static. Right. It's because it's a resource that someone else created. There's no interactivity with it.

Speaker B: Exactly right. So at best you're consuming good content. Yeah. And, but you don't know if they learn it. You don't know that I'm able to apply it. So. Absolutely, again, what I call a contact artifact is at uh, best half of the learning equation. And uh, so we have really focused on the evaluation.

Speaker A: Yeah. And talk about that. So one of the things that I love about the new capabilities of the current technology is not only does it provide real time access to role, uh, plays and application, um, simulated environments, um, you know, personalized learning. But behind all of that then is assessment capability. Right. So talk more about that and what you can do with, with your tools and like why that's so important.

Speaker B: Well, the first thing is, is that you don't have to be a learning expert to uh, use our tool. You don't need to know words like assessment or evaluation of learning or learning outcomes. We're doing all that heavy lifting behind the scenes, uh, to make sure that you can deliver training programs that are effective. So that's first, it's rooted in instructionally sound rules that you don't need to know anything about because our customers are business leaders. Um, the second part is having an engine that will allow you to role play at any level, even if it's asking you questions to see what your knowledge is or you being the one that answer questions or having very specific operational knowledge that need to be practiced before you are deployed or to take you to the next level. The other part is that we have found that ah, in learning and you will notice this interactive activities and those are really hard in digital education to deploy at scale. If you want to do a simple drag and drop or something, how to teach my piece of software or a complicated form, the best you can do is record a video and then again hope that they Consume it and understand how to use your software. So one of the most sophisticated things that we do is we have an app maker. So you can take, let's say it's a piece of software, you can take screenshots of the software, fit it to, to our app maker, and the application itself will create an app in which you walk through all of the points of the UI and tells you exactly what to use and why you're using it and then evaluate your learning over that. So it's not only conversational, it could also be systems driven. So we really focus on all those areas that are important for the small business, for the people to know so they can do the job better.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I mean that's so powerful because that's one of the biggest gaps that's pretty much always been there, um, with learning and development in the space is how do you assess impact? Um, I mean frankly that's, that's one of the biggest gaps in a lot of business areas is like how do you really truly assess impact of whatever initiative, whatever project, whatever thing you're trying to accomplish. Um, what's the ROI of it? What's the actual learning objective outcome? Um, are you actually moving the needle? But, but it's like the assessment like gets embedded into like the actual uh, product itself and how, you know, you can actually measure the actual like learning taxonomy and the actual skills and the competencies that you're having. This, the, the learners, you know, um, develop as they're going through, you know, whatever role player, whatever simulation or whatever you know, thing that they need to learn, develop, whatever. Um, and that's, it's, it's incredibly powerful because then you actually have, you can create a baseline, you can actually um, then see movement and you can see, you measure delta over time and you can translate that into roi, which is for any small business owner of course that's going to be super powerful, um, for you to be able to continue to make the case on any L and D spend. If you're in a bigger, medium sized to large business, it's going to be critical as you're making the case up, uh, through the C suite to get dollars towards your L and D budget. Um, and, and there's a reason why, you know, in any kind of economic hard times, why training L and D budgets are often tend to be some of the first things that get cut. It's because they usually don't have, you know, a whole lot of um, strong data to show how their budget is producing outcomes. Um, there's kind of the assumption that what they're doing matters and, like, what they're doing helps, you know, improve, um, how the business is run and, you know, how, you know, the employees do their work and how salespeople sell and whatever, blah, blah, blah. But there's often no real evidence of it, um, because measuring the outcomes is challenging, and a lot of organizations just don't do it or they don't do it well. Uh, and so having something that's embedded into what you do, you know, is a really powerful feature. Well, Luis, I note the time. I need to let you go here in a minute. But before we wrap things up for today, I just wanted to give you a chance to share with the audience how they can connect with you, find out more about your work, your team, and then give us a final word for today.

Speaker B: Well, thank you so much for having me. Uh, if what you heard today resonates with you, and, uh, please go visit our website. We have the best, easiest website to remember is pete.com. pete.com. You go right there and you can read about what we do and you can sign, uh, up for our newsletter or you can ask for information and we'll call you right back and see what are your challenges and see if you're a good fit for.

Speaker A: For.

Speaker B: For Pete. Thank you so very much.

Speaker A: Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. I encourage the audience to reach out to get connected. Find out more about what Luis and his team can do for you. Check out the really cool tools and, and resources that he has to offer. And, uh, as always, I hope everyone can stay healthy and safe. They can find meaning and purpose at work each and every day. And I hope you all have a great week.

Speaker B: Thank you, John.