Everybody’s Talking About Skills. Almost Nobody Can Prove Them

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Speaker B: Hey, this is William Tincup and you are listening hopefully watching the Use Case podcast we got Todd on from Novoed and we're going to be learning a lot about his uh, his company, what they do, how they do it, how they go about it, et cetera. Uh Todd, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself?

Speaker A: It'd be my pleasure, William. Uh, great, great to be with you and uh, listeners today. Ah, Todd Moran. By title, I am the Chief Learning Strategist, uh, at nov. Um, serve short form, uh, novawed is a talent development platform born out of learning, uh, helping to solve problems, uh around scale and complexity when it comes to upskilling workforces and doing that really in a collaborative sense. So think cohort, uh, and think a whole lot around practice, application feedback. How can we take the best parts of in person learning, digitize that and scale that across global audiences?

Speaker B: So uh, back in the day were you really kind of uh, were you entrenched with the CLO market?

Speaker A: All those folks intently. It's interesting, our origin story, we think of ourselves scale up but we've been around the block for a bit. Origin, uh, 2012 out of Stanford Social Algorithms Lab, the same place that produced Coursera and some uh, good players, um, in the space. We uh, thankfully still have our brilliant and incredibly talented CTO and co founder Farnaz Ranagi, uh at the helm for us, uh, and we came out of that group, uh really trying to take what was the most popular course, uh, experience at Stanford at the time around uh, technical entrepreneurship, uh, and find a way to how could you put that online in a really digitized sense and still bring breakouts and immersive experiences and have mentors, mentees and supporters and all that. Uh, so that was sort of where we were born of almost mooc, like a little bit at the start. Ah. And then our trajectory is moved pretty quickly uh into the core enterprise space where we've spent since our acquisition uh back in 2018, a lot of our effort so serving cross vertical in uh, financial, financial services, some uh, into healthcare, life sciences, um, manufacturing, um, hospitality, uh, think Just sort of large scale enterprise. That's a lot of what we do.

Speaker B: And so you serve both the corporate side of that as well as the, all the employees that are out in the field.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. I think about you know, what was traditionally kind of thought of as knowledge workers in our space, uh, you know, quickly kind of dissolving those lines. And what about all the deskless folks? So it's uh, a huge part especially you know some of the forays we've made into hospitality, uh, those. Think about some of these branches that have firms that have massive footprints, 800,000 employees that are highly distributed, they're not sitting in a computer. And so how do you serve their learning and development needs in an ongoing fashion.

Speaker B: And I would assume that you start with mobile, uh, and probably also shorter content.

Speaker A: It's interesting.

Speaker B: Micro content.

Speaker A: Yeah, so we do certainly do a lot of that. Intriguingly in some ways we were cast uh is uh early days by some of the analysts and folks like Deloitte is a pdp, a programmatic delivery delivery platform. Because we took a lot of in some ways longer form experiences uh, that were you know, maybe purely run through ilt, you know and condense them but also expand them in a more meaningful way that allowed points of interaction when people wanted to get on the platform interact. So uh, we sort of run the full gamut from sort of shorter form experiences that are of an upscaling nature to what if you have a year long program one. We're one of the largest financial uh, services companies out of Manhattan here in nyc uh and create these immersive digital experiences that allow uh, different disparate groups to come together and you know, not just consume content because I think that's a lot of what we're trying to combat in the space is you know consumption uh, does not equal mastery, content does not equal learning. It's a lot of what we go after.

Speaker B: So yeah and in fact it almost works against you. It's noise and it can be distracting. Uh, when you say immersive I just want to make sure the audience understands because sometimes immersive can be experiential, it can be simulations and things like that and sometimes it's just you go deep with people that have knowledge in that space.

Speaker A: So yeah, think about it more the latter way and it's help help the audience. So yeah, we're not getting into the, the AR VR space right now. I will say uh, you know we, we do have an offer referred uh to as Practice Plus. We're about to launch A new dot com which will be exciting in a couple weeks. Uh, folks will get to, get to see that on the, on the website. Uh, but our style of immersive is thinking about how do you take sort of, of what maybe legacy works or classroom experiences, have peer based networks allow coaches, supporters, learning facilitators be part of this experience. Uh, and do things like practice and application, discussion and feedback and do that a, uh, really meaningful way and obviously team dynamic. It's a lot of you talked about it, you see it on our website and people learn better together. We believe that. And so that's a part of what we say. Immersive is opposed to strapping on a headset and off you go with some uh, jazzed up content.

Speaker B: Uh, this is years, 100 years ago I did this bit with a conference board where it was experiential learning. So we went to NASA, uh, and learned about the Apollo mission through the lens of hr and then we did the same thing at Gettysburg. So we went to Gettysburg, walk the uh, field and thought of the entire Gettysburg. I uh, think it was four days of Gettysburg, the battle. And we thought of it through the lens of HR and it was fascinating because you're learning history, which is cool, but at the same time you're learning about communications, recruiting, you know, all of the things that you, you know that HR is learning, training, development, all these things, it's all in there. And uh, and you know for anybody that's not into experiential learning, it is a, it's a, it's a fun way to learn. It's different, it's different because you're, you're learning without thinking. You're learning like years later I can remember back to the general's names, uh, on the union side. And I would have never thought about that.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, and we, we don't try to tout a ton but there's, you know, there's a ton of learning science that goes into the platform and we pride ourselves on that and we think about the nature of iterative application and space learning. Like these are very meaningful constructs for andragogy and pedag and they're woven into every part of the platform. A lot of that board of our founder and CTO again. And so it's not just hey, let's jazz up an experience of a vilt and bake it in with an assessment. But think about these practice opportunities, uh, that you can do and how allowing video based uh, practice scenarios of a time nature with video based peer Feedback that is in context and in line with a content asset becomes uh, unbelievably powerful. Uh, so.

Speaker B: So I'm sure you get asked this question a jillion times a week. How the measurement of did they get it? Yeah, so we went to this. You and I went through the same course and I didn't get it. You know I went through the same, you know you got it. I clearly didn't get it. Like how. What's best for an organization? I know you get again asked this question what's. How do you know if the, if the employees. If it clicked for them.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a brilliant question. We get it a ton and I think it's in many ways it's almost become more important when we talk about being personalized with point of entry around learning interventions and performance interventions is where is that person on the scale? Are they a 20 year veteran in that construct in those themes and can we sort of progress them out and do a little bit more of an adaptive approach for the type of program or experience that we want to give them? So I think it happens in a couple of ways. One, and we do this both inside the platform is also part of our kind of experience design in terms of building out on novoed. But it's yeah, let's thinking about uh, you know, formalized assessments have a place. They've had a place for decades and they're meaningful but they can't be the only mechanism by which you're measuring did you get it right? Uh, in one of the most powerful ways we've found is in the part and parcel of the learning experience. If you can bake in these practice experiences and whether that's hey, I'm co penning and uh, sort of a presentation component and uploading that as part of a team dynamic. Maybe I'm getting on camera and having to sort of um, state uh, set of positions and perspective and explain my knowledge and uh, then couple that practice event with a series of feedback mechanisms. Those feedback could be peer based, more of a light treatment in nature of yeah, let me assess did they get it? Because I'm in the same experience. Maybe it's more formalized and we have a concept of kind of coaches, uh, think of the learning supporters almost, you know, mentees. They can be in the experience with a formal rubric that they're assessing those work products. Ah, that's a great way to really sort of check did they get it? Well beyond just completion rate, I took

Speaker B: a test at the end of it.

Speaker A: Um, uh, so Those, those two ways I think have been really powerful for us. The practice elements that. Not to geek out on the learning science piece, but you know, they're really become, you know, Kirkpatrick Level 3. Not six months after the intervention or the programmatic experience, they're baked into the learning itself. And oh, by the way, you're getting multiple peers, managers, mentors, assessing as part of that experience.

Speaker B: I like that you said kind of highly personalized because, uh, I think sometimes, um, we don't factor in, or we don't factor in as much learning styles and learning differences and learning behaviors. Uh, you know, like some people, there's a time in which they want to learn and then that, that moment of attention or whatever that that is, it's gone. And then we, then we get admitted into learning and it's like there's a resistance that's to that. It's like the resistance isn't there. It's just that's, that's not the right moment for them. So how do we, I mean, when you guide clients through this, how do you guide them through understanding that, you know, this isn't as easy as it used to be, probably as horrible as it used to be, where we get everybody in a room and we lecture them from the bully pulpit, uh, and some of them are asleep and some of them get it and go on and do great things, etc. So what's the, the highly personalized part? What's the guidance that you kind of give to clients these days?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting because I think in many ways we've done a disservice in the broader vendor space of, um. Can I say bastardize on the show? Maybe that's 100%.

Speaker B: 100%.

Speaker A: All right, I'm gonna say it. Sort of bastardizing this idea of personalization and we've simply equated it with content and we say, hey, you should have a system that looks like Netflix. And it's just a series of content assets that map to skills. You want to get better at that core. And all the while we've neglected the things you've just talked about. What's my sort of learning preference? Style? What's my nature of as an adult learner? I'm, I'm sort of full time employee. How am I going to also make time for this effort? So a couple of ways we got clients in this fashion. One is you have to be flexible with a modality delivery. Sometimes, you know, self paced is absolutely the way to go because you allow that opportunity for A time and a place that makes sense. Others maybe need to look more like a blended experience. If you, if you're lucky enough to have the opportunity to do a, uh, forced return to office dynamic, maybe you're not lucky if you're an employee, but if that's part of your work world and you can do in person, fantastic. But couple that with a pre and a post and some longer form of continuing that. Learning kind of in a programmatic way is a big approach. Um, and so watching sort of the mix of those, whether it's blended or self paced or sort of purely virtual, I think giving and baking the flexibility into the design uh, of those programs is a huge part about addressing disparate needs, especially when it comes to geographies. And then technically from a product standpoint of the things we put a huge emphasis on, you know, I'm sure we'll get into some talk about AI. It'd be a disservice if we didn't mention it. Uh, is thinking about, you know, languages, you know, that's a huge challenge when you think about the global audiences that we're serving. Uh, make that really easy to sort of deploy programmatic experiences, learning interventions in language of choice, but also allow the interactivity, the social dynamic and the elements of those to be in language of choice. Because that's what, what really drives home kind of the did they get it? Piece that you alluded to before. So a couple ways we try to kind of help shape and guide clients about modality, about flexibility of program design, and about being thoughtful of who's the audience you're trying to touch. And of course we need a platform that can do all those things. We think we've done a pretty stellar job about putting all those together.

Speaker B: You know what's funny is about, uh, 20 years ago, there was a lot of discussion it was e learning back then, but, but it was more of a learning for learning sake. You know, we want it, we want our edge. Now you went through the competency kind of model, uh, wave, and now you're in a skills wave. Um, I'm fascinated by skills based everything because I've kind of seen some of this before, so it seems eerily familiar. Um, how do y', all, what are your clients asking you like right now? Because they're hearing it from everybody, of course, and it's, and it's needed like legit. Things are changing. So, uh, I think we are at a confluence of like, okay, AI Gen, AI. Uh, yeah, uh, these things are changing how we do work you probably do need to upskill. Yeah, fair enough. So what's the guidance there and what do you, what's the feedback? What's, what are you getting from them? The practitioners, like this is what we need. Yeah. And they might need that or they might not need that, but yeah, I

Speaker A: think a couple of things that really stand out for us is, you know, there's some of the sort of mature learning organizations which candidly that's a, that's a pretty good fit for us. You know, folks that have gone through and said, hey, listen, I've been toiling with my LMS for 30 plus years. It's not meeting the needs. I've tried a bunch of different point solutions. You know, how can you help progress us? So I think of folks that have taken angles. We've got one of the largest building materials manufacturers in the world. They operate in 50 countries, 40,000 employees. You know, they retooled their entire approach to digital, uh, upskilling of their entire workforce and the way they approach that. And we help be kind of a driving force behind re envisioning their corporate university in a pure digital sense. Uh, was, hey, let's create a mix of offerings in these academies, whether it's supply chain or commercial academy or leadership academy or uh, um, sort of digital that allow, hey, selective, let's place people who we know need these skills into these items. But let's also allow flexibility for just enough, you know, just in time, just for me. Because that's a lot of what we were hearing on the skilling side. Uh, and so we created this idea of these sort of open academies where it's an open enrollment construct. So yes, there's still a peer based component to it. They can come in at a time and a place that makes sense for them and the goals they have or with their manager. Uh, and they can have that sort of rich immersive experience, but they can do it over a period of time which becomes really valuable. So yes, they want the skills, but they want to have some choice and directionality in what those are. And then they want to have choice and directionality in modality of delivery and time, you know, in intervention or in experience. And so that's a lot of where we're guiding the second one. I don't know, William, if you're hearing a lot of this from other clients is, hey, great, you've got your taxonomy, you've defined some content experiences, you've mapped those out, you've made a suggested playlist of people. The problem is, and I think we're all missing this. At least a lot of our big clientele have said we've done that. It's great.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But we don't, we don't know if the proof is there. Have they truly progressed that skill? It's not the self reported or the light assessment from a 180. We need to know, you know, evidence like we want work product evidence of did they move that skill in the right direction. So that's, and that's good for, that's

Speaker B: good for uh, everyone involved. That's good for the employee that's going through that to know yes, I've actually acquired that. You know, I'm saying like that's not just an employer trying to measure the return on that type of. They're actually, it's, it's in everyone's best interest that you actually do know the skills that you say you know.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly. And so I think that's why we put such a heavy emphasis on um, you know, some of those, you know, guiding clients into baking practice elements in. Because then you don't have to get it in a self reported fashion. I really think I obtain the skills on the other end or.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You, you know, with definitive clarity. There's evidence, proof.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, it's funny because I think that uh. I've talked about this a couple times. I want to get your take on it is the half life of skills. So like what is the lifetime of us? What's that lifetime of a skill? It all depends. I know, yeah.

Speaker A: With that skill.

Speaker B: But we don't talk enough about skill decay. Like I'll give you a for example. So you play off of it. 100 years ago I ran an ad agency, had a ton of employees, all that stuff. It was a B2B ad agency. It was a cool ad agency. I exited successfully. And uh, I haven't run an ad agency in 25 years or no 15 years now on my resume it would probably still have some of those things. Right. But I don't have any of those skills. I mean I have very few of those skills because everything has changed. So those skills that I once had cherished, etcetera, They've, they've diminished, they've decayed, they're not there anymore. And the market has also changed. And so I'm not up to date and all of those types of things. So how does that conversation happen with clients about okay, when we, when we do this right, we're going to upskill and that's going to last a period whatever that may be. But also if we don't use that skill, it's now going to also decline in some, some time frame.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll give you a perfect example because this is so they won't use the phrase which I love, I'm going to use I love this skill decay. But they're saying the same things, which is what if we don't return to this with our employee base is in part of this is changing a legacy mindset. I can say this because I spen 20 years on the customer side running large scale L and D and digital business transformation. It was, hey, let's do the intervention. Great job. We're through it. Let's go get the next population. What, what about those other 10,000 people that we never come back?

Speaker B: No. And onboarding new employees we just hired or acquired to, you know, a company that has 5,000 employees? Yeah, we'll figure that out. Like, it's like they need the same. They actually need it more than everyone else because they've been learning and using these skills for the last year.

Speaker A: Exactly. Uh, so we're, you know, one of the, so the, one of the pieces we're seeing in that a lot is, is getting people out of this mindset of fixed, um, point in time, single intervention. And think about it as this sort of less episodic and more continuous. And now does it have to look like a digital academy where you're doing nine different academies and 40 offerings and open enrollment? No, not everyone has to look like that. That's a very mature learning organization and talent organization. Uh, but, but it can. We have one of the world's largest, uh, uh, airlines, uh, that you know, has a group called acs Airport Customer Service. So think above wing, below wing, ramp agents, customer service agents, 50,000 people. How do you get at that group in a way that doesn't cannibalize their need for operational efficiency, but you constantly have to be skilling them. What are the new de icing procedures that are happening, you know, at uh, Chicago o' Hare that we have to sort of incorporate with these, you know, these new 747s example. So you know, they run a quarterly construct where they revisit the same populations every quarter, allow this opportunity to do effectively what is 90 minutes of experience. Microform. But they spread it out. They spread it out over a quarter and then they repeat, repeat it. And so this quarterly learning experience becomes a point of revisitation for that group where it's continuous skilling. It's not a moment in Time, it's a continuous. And they realize that now they're different subjects, there's different constructs, but we're touching those same populations in repetitive fashion. And guess what the response is from the employee base. Like, you do care about me. You do. You are trying to upskill more and you want to keep uh. Which is fascinating.

Speaker B: Well, it's like you want me to be better at my job. Not just because it adds more value for the company. You also may be safety and compliance and all these other very important things. It's like uh, if, if I'm, if you're, you're investing, that's actually I think something that's missed from employees of the amount of money that is spent on learning and training and development and all of those things. It's like there is a massive amount of money to make employees better, not just for the business, but to actually make them. It's actually when you're competent and confident in your job, you feel better about your job generally speaking, right? No, I can train. So that training that you're doing on your phone, you watch the video, you do the bit, it's like, yeah, I didn't even think anything about it. But that's actually. There was millions of dollars that went into that experience.

Speaker A: Yeah, without question. And I think the signal. We're seeing this a lot and the pivot I mentioned that new.com coming from us. Well, you know we're, you know we came into the space as a learning solution node and learning platform were one of the same and we had one company, one product, one platform. You know, we're now expanding out and recognizing, hey, it's really, it's more about the whole person kind of the way you're going. It's about the talent. And so you know, we're casting ourselves as this talent development platform. Yes, we have the best of breed collaborative, experiential kind of cohort based platform called Learn Plus. But we're coming quick, uh, in July with an offer around Mentoring Mentor Plus. And we see that is, is really important the one to one the human elements and being able to kind of create that as part of a continuous workforce development is something that every large enterprise is going to need. It's not just an LMS system and a set of playlists.

Speaker B: I was going to ask you about that because you've mentioned learning and performance or interventions and performance several times. Uh, and people think of those as siloed. They think of uh, mentoring and coaching, 360 degree and feedback and all of this Stuff they think, normally they think of it as separate as learning and the way that you've kind of combined or conjoined those things to then say, yeah, we could do a chicken and egg thing. However, uh, it's really important to bring them together, bring them closer together so that people learn the things that they need to learn so that they can perform. And again, that's good for the company, it's good for the individual. Ah, it's good for the employee too. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I think it's, you know, I don't know where you're seeing this, William, and some of your other, Other clientele, you know, but this idea that I think some of the most mature organizations, the world of talent and learning are ever becoming closer and closer together and that if you're drawn a Venn diagram, there's just greater overlap. It's not to say that, hey, the idea of talent acquisition is not a distinct effort or comp. Planning and succession planning or distinct elements, but those should be woven into the entirety of a talent experience. Like, that's employee experience, talent experience, talent development. That, that's what we should be getting after.

Speaker B: Uh, holistically, I could argue that they all should be. I mean, they're all interconnected, but they should be closely interconnected because, like, what happens in TA is if I know that you care so much about me that you've got this different training mechanisms to make me better, I'm, um, going to be more interested in that job. Right. Comp. And talent, uh, acquisition, they've got to be closer together because they've got to get. They've got to get the offer correct. You know, like all these things that we've had, as you said, distant or farther apart, they're all coming together. And that's to the benefit of the corporation or the employer and to the benefit of the employee.

Speaker A: And I.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: And I think, I don't know, the other piece that strikes us a lot we're seeing amongst our clientele is what's the expectation from the workforce? What are we, six generations now, simultaneously executing the workforce, especially sort of younger generations, like, there's an expectation that you develop me. Like I'm here, part of my commit to joining you, not just a paycheck as you, I ask as you develop me so that like, ever compete for talent, and not just compete, but retain it. Retain it in a way that allows it to perform for your organization. So that's why a lot of what we're trying to do is we see, like, learning shouldn't Be off to the side. Mentoring shouldn't be off to the side. These things should be coming and they should be talking about a broader, you're saying, ever interconnected world. That is, what does your workforce need to look like now into the future? How are you going to keep it, develop it, progress it and grow on that side? So.

Speaker B: Well, uh, you know, no one's got, uh, 15 years of gen AI experience. There might be some people at NASA that actually do have that experience, but most, most people don't. Right. So you're coming in. And now we'll get back to the AI part. You're coming in where jobs are changing, some things are being automated or augmented. Okay, that's, that's fine. That's just life. Um, skills are changing and uh, and again, that investment in people's skills, good for, good for everyone involved, you're meeting them where they are. What consultants used to say the rubber meets the road. Right? So you're meeting them where they are. You're making them better. Now the, the question is, is how does the company, the employer, keep up with what, you know, the gap between what they have now and what they'll need, you know, not flying cars, but maybe six, nine, 12 months out. How do they keep track of that gap?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's uh, a, it's a fascinating one because I, I think all the energy and effort that folks put in, you know, over the last, you know, maybe five to seven years, some, some folks a little longer, where let's get the taxonomy right, let's just nail the taxonomy and, and then we're all taking

Speaker B: care of, everything will be fine.

Speaker A: ChatGPT and AI and Genai and it's like, whoops, like just kind of blowing it up. So I think, I think two things that, you know, that we're helping to guide and that sort of stand out for this is we as vendors, you know, need to be wildly responsible about our use of AI in terms of how that gets deployed. It can absolutely be sort of meaningful to help address those gaps in a workforce about folks need to create flying cars tomorrow, but to meet sort of the immediacy of need. So in order to do that, a couple things have to happen. You have to be able to sort of scale meaningfully. It has to have a component of human intervention. And we took a, took a long time, candidly, when I think we were late to the game with sort of deploying some of our AI, uh, capability in the platform in support of skilling workforces in our corporations because we wanted to Be really thoughtful. Like, let's be the adult in the room when it comes to deploying AI. Not just.

Speaker B: I'd rather you be slower. Yeah, I'd rather you be slower, but be ethical and be, uh, audited and all of those things to where it's like, you know what? Yeah, we got there a little late. So what you got there? The right way. And, uh, Liverpool, the football club, they

Speaker A: have my favorite squad, the Reds. I like it.

Speaker B: What? Yeah, so they have a saying, you know, this bit, win, comma, the right way. And so I think about that every time I think about how people deploy software, it's like it isn't a game of getting there the fast, fastest. That's a win.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Okay. W. You get three points. Yeah, fair. Uh, I get that. However, I think when comma, the right way is actually more appropriate for software.

Speaker A: I love it. Yeah. How you get there matters and I think you know that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: End result, if, you know, if these large, large, you know, enterprises are trying, you know, are putting extensive amount of trust in you as a partner, a vendor partner, then you, you need to meet them. That. So, um, yeah, like I said, like when we deployed our Novo AI, you know, that permeates all parts of the platform. You know, we had a couple themes that we really want to push on, which is, you know, deliver those global learning experiences at scale, make scale the thing that it can really solve for. Right from day one, create high impact programs. That was a huge part, like a lot of what Novoid is. It's not just a rote scorm package and you put it with an assessment and off you go. It's. It's the idea of let the AI power the nature of what is high impact. We talked about it earlier, right? How do you know? I got it. What really moves a collective workforce, uh, and then keep really pressing on, um, scaling what we think are the two big unique features of our platform around feedback in a major way and peer learning. So that's where we sort of invested and took some time. So we came with then big launch with AI translation, quiz generation, captions and transcripts, key summaries, takeaways, practice insights, discussion prompts, uh, discussion insights. It was like a whole plate and slew of things that permeate the platform. But it was done with that idea of like the human element in mind and the human needs to have a hand and a touch on that. And we don't train our models on client data. We, you know, we sort of combat against the nature of hallucination and all that. Uh, it's important I think the responsible approach to AI in that sense.

Speaker B: I love that. And congratulations. Not easy to do and expensive. Yes to boot by the way. I guess I should have said that. But doing it the right way also is a, comes uh, with a heavier price tag. Um, so agility, what are you hearing from your clients and guidance that you're giving because you've been in the game for a little while.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: At a certain age we don't talk about years, so we won't say years but you've been in the game for a while and we at one point we would plan in years, you know, uh, two, three, five year plans, you know, and you'd have these, these plans and it's around change management and all this type stuff. It's uh, I look at that and think, okay, we, we gotta be thinking in minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and like years. Ah, uh, I don't know if we can think that far because I don't, I don't know if we're gonna have the, I don't know if we're going to be given the opportunity to think like that.

Speaker A: Yeah. To the luxury. To think of that.

Speaker B: Yeah, the luxury. Yeah, that's great. That's exactly right. I don't think we have the luxury. Got to think in years. But that's a very hard concept for a leader that's been doing learning, training, development, etc for so long to think of because they know 50,000 employees, they know how long it takes uh, at the same. So it's like the balancing of okay, we've got to be agile. At the same time we've got 50,000 employees. So how do we balance those things out?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think one of the, one of the, one of the best approaches we've seen some of our clientele take and this is hard for L and D and I can say this because I wasn't is talking about myself. Yeah, you've got to release some control. Uh, you've got to be willing to let go of that. And now you know, pushing some of that down into lines of business, into functional leads where you're allowing to do some of that creation and content. Now there needs to be guardrails, there needs to be standards, there needs to be a brand new design guideline. Not everybody as an instructional designer or learning m experience designer, but if you can equip them is a big theme of our platform. We think of it as is, you know, delighting the content creation. Uh, you Know, kind of, you know, creator platform style is it doesn't have to be in the hands of the select few within L and D and talent. What if we were to empower others to do that and make those tools incredibly easy for them to kind of create these experiences? Who knows the content better than anybody, who knows the job better than anybody? The people that are doing it day in, day out doesn't mean you can't be a, ah, sort of uh, in the hr, BP liaison sense in an L and D setting and you don't have to give away everything. Um, but you know, how do you stay agile? Well you listen to the business, you empower the business to execute where it needs to and you give them tools that allow them to do it. And so that's a big part of what we're seeing there too which is taught that's scary, right? That sort of release of control.

Speaker B: Oh, it's terrifying. Terrifying. Let's call that what it is. Terrifying. Terrifying. And again there's to be going to be some people that, that, that adopt that mentality quickly. Uh, again it's the adoption curve, right? So there's going to be people that take that and go, yep, that's it, go. And then there's going to be people that fight it and, and don't want to leave M Control. They don't want to, you know, they've got experience and that's what they know. And you know, so there's a lot of stuff there. Let me ask you, um, some buyer related types of things. If people are buying, I mean you're dealing with people that probably already have something. Uh, if it's not another lms, they've got uh, an in house uh, system or something like that. What are the questions that they should be asking of you? Yeah, what if you could script it?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: What would you like to hear them ask?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think you know, one of the biggest ones that needs to happen right up front is you know, how well will you play with my tech stack? And how will you play with my tech stack? I don't think people ask this enough. They say, hey I saw an, your, your website, you have an integration page. So I think we're good. But they don't really ask. You know that sort of the nature of like tell me is that, is that when you say you've got an integration, what exactly does that do? Is that a light level connector or you're literally doing sort of, you know, you know, passing data back and forth. Are you exposing APIs? So I think you know well and

Speaker B: at the place and at the size of market that you play. They might be an Oracle shop, they might be a workday shop, they might be a uh, an SAP shop, they might be whatever shop. Again, I love that. How do you play in the sandbox? Yeah, because is if this is going to be something that I've got to fight with performance, total rewards and like I don't need even. It could be the best software ever.

Speaker A: What? It doesn't matter. At the end of the day my total cost of ownership just skyrocketed and

Speaker B: I didn't and my team is going to get frustrated, they'll leave, uh, then I've got all kinds of other problems and it ultimately won't unlock the real value that you have have if it doesn't play well on the sandbox. I love that.

Speaker A: What else? The second one is, uh, you say enterprise great. Tell me how you're Enterprise great. And I came, I've come after the provider side. It was, it's in scale ups and some pure startups and you know, sure, everybody loves to play at the top end of enterprise because it's very attractive. Uh, but the reality is it's hard, it's hard to get to enterprise grade, uh, in terms of security and privacy, control and sockets and all of these pieces. So that's. The other one is encouraging people to really dig deep on. Tell me the scale that you operate at, tell me the other people that look like me and smell like me and walk like me and how are you solving for them? And so I think those kind of go hand in hand. The nature of how well do you play in sort of my environment, uh, but also talk to me about your enterprise grade readiness and that includes global footprint. Uh, you talk about getting into the EU and support for different really complex things like work council insure meetings. There's a lot of moving parts and

Speaker B: pieces to it that like that like me bit is really important for like you. You talked about the hospitality market, the restaurant market. When they see that you've done work with let's say a McDonald's, a Burger King, a Whataburger, Sonic, they automatically know. The practitioners automatically know. Uh, you get us, I mean we, we do something different but you, you kind of get what we're doing so we don't have to explain our industry to you. You already know what our industry is about and kind of how it works. I think that helps having that industry expertise because you become kind of an industry expert at the same uh, industry Learning expert at the same time of being a software expert.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I think if I put a third one on there, William, if I could, you know that a lot of what we do, we're tech providers, right? Yeah. We're vendors and vendor partners in the market. We provide tech. But it's a solution if it's a, if it's a really good partner and you're gonna have a 10 plus year relationship with them, which hopefully you are when you're making these determinations. Uh, yes, it's gotta fit in your stack. Yes, it has to return value. Yes, it has to serve a global workforce. Yes, it has to be enterprise grade. But also how are you going to help me in times of need? And I don't just mean, look, what's your support network and do you have around the sun? Um, I mean bake it in and we've made a big effort. This is one of the teams that actually sits with me at the company is our strategic consulting services. We're not trying to build this massive book of millions and millions of consulting services. But we know, we, you, uh, know we know a lot because we've seen a lot. And that's important when you pick a vendor is can they help guide you through program design? The nature of a bill, what does it look like to drive engagement? How do you address things around measurement frameworks? Those are really important things.

Speaker B: Uh, 100%. They don't know what they don't know as a practitioner. They don't know what they don't know. And they don't know because you are sitting on hundreds, if not thousands of clients. You're seeing what's working somewhere else in another place. So you can, your consultants can bring that to bear back to them and say, hey, wait a minute, we haven't even talked about this bit. However, it, it's lighting it up right now and I think it would actually work really well with your audience, your employees. Uh, we might want to take a look at it. And again, I'm not selling you anything. I'm just saying here's something that's working. We might want to consider it here.

Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, that idea of that proactive. Yes. You know, you're on a three year contract term, but we're gonna, we're gonna not just meet with you to address your functional request for features and go over bug triage. We're going to come proactively to you and we have a whole customer success management core run by some brilliant folks in our side, uh, that do just that. Right. They walk hand in hand. And I think that's a good question for folks to ask is, yeah, I get the software. I know, I get that. But what else? What else provide to shape and drive my success.

Speaker B: Yeah. Somebody's got to help me because I can't. If I'm doing what I'm doing, I, I can't see it all. I can't. I go to enough conferences, I can't attend enough, uh, webinars. I can't read enough white papers to know it all. So I need a vendor that actually isn't a vendor. It's a partner. It's someone that's actually. They care about me. Not just the, you know, the payments and all the other stuff. They care about my success. All right, I'm gonna ask you a tough question in the sense of I'm gonna actually pick, pick your favorite child. Um, if you're giving a demo, if you're giving a demo and you rarely, I'm sure you rarely do a demo, but what's your favorite thing to show people?

Speaker A: Video practice. So this is, um, part and parcel. So what we talk a lot about, about the importance of, uh, show me evidence and proof of work product that they really got it. Um, one of the things that we bake experience is not just content consumption or assessments or long form pragmatic learning or peers, but let's create this idea of, let me do a timed real time, uh, capture of a video practice of me. Maybe I'm doing Objection. Handling in kind of a sales dynamic. Maybe I'm going over crucial conversations and how I approach a feedback model with a direct report. It's a leadership development experience. But I'm putting myself on camera. There may or may not be problems. There may or may not be a timed force dynamic, uh, that I have three second countdown and I have to go, uh, right. And something about that where you can create high stakes, low stakes, but you're creating a sort of an asset. A submission can go through a workflow. It could be privately submitted to just a sort of a facilitator. Uh, that is one of the most powerful mechanisms, uh, I think in the platform.

Speaker B: Uh, because they could give feedback based on that. They can then turn, turn right around and go, okay, okay. All right. Objection. Response stuff. Okay, listen, there's a universe of nose. And uh, it's, it's getting the nose to maybes. Maybes the essence. So here's what you explained to Jimmy. You got, you got there. Um, and the thing is, is making sure that they Sell you what they got. So much of that is a teaching is then saying I taught. However, what you hear. Career. Yeah. You know, and asking that question, I think that, I think that feedback mechanism, uh, of a mentor or coach or somebody that can actually look at that objectively and go, hey, listen, this is, this is really good. It was the only things I tweak, you know, like everyone needs that, everyone needs coaching. Planet that doesn't need coaching. Everyone needs coaching. They might not ask for it. Yeah, but they need it.

Speaker A: And one of the things we've done is we can bake that into uh, uh, experience, a learning experience. But we also broke it out. So we create a thing called a practice room which is, listen, I took the experience, I took the course, I get it. But back to your point, I need to. The decay of my skills. Maybe I need to come back six months later into the platform and I'm going to just spin up that practice room, I'm going to practice again and I'm going to send this submission to a couple different peers. I'm going to get their feedback to see if I've really honed or I'm coming back off an account from automotive into healthcare and I'm a consultant. I need to say, geez, I, I, that I really get the core themes that are top of mind for that vertical right now. So that power of being able to serve practice. And again, I get self determination, I get some autonomy in there. I get to build some mastery of

Speaker B: a little Daniel and a safe, and a safe environment.

Speaker A: Exactly right.

Speaker B: Like listen, your, your mentors and your peers, the people that are going to give you feedback, they don't, they're not trying to hurt you. They actually, you know, you can do it in a safe environment. They'll give you feedback in a safe environment. So you get better, man. I could talk to you.

Speaker A: We haven't even gotten to Liverpool lore yet.

Speaker B: So dude, you've got, you've got, you've got like, uh, you know, like a job and calls and all kinds of other stuff that you got to get to. But thank you for carving out time for us. Uh, the audience, I'm sure they learned a bunch of this, A uh, bunch of stuff during this episode.

Speaker A: Absolutely. My pleasure. One, thank you for making the time.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And thanks to the audience for listening, watching, watching. Until next time, uh,