Chief Learning Officer’s “Learning Insights” series is dedicated to showcasing the thoughts and career journeys of chief learning officers and learning executives—the tireless trailblazers who are transforming the landscape of corporate learning and workforce development. In this Q&A series, we garner strategic insights, innovative approaches and challenges overcome from visionary leaders worldwide.
CLO: What initially drew you to a career in learning and development, and how have your experiences evolved over the years?
A passion for corporate learning and the significant impact it can have on both organizational capabilities as well as employees’ professional and personal lives.
Over the years, my experiences have become more analytically and scientifically oriented. To create and support cutting-edge talent communities, I now also lean more into technological support solutions, peer-to-peer learning and micro-learning for learning in the flow of work.
CLO: What key initiatives have you implemented as a learning leader to drive employee development and foster a learning culture?
Fostering a learning culture requires creating executive buy-in and alignment to secure resources (time and money) and then ensuring that learning content is highly relevant to both the organization and learners’ needs, and delivered in accessible and engaging ways.
A key initiative I started in my organization three years ago was our twice-annual Days of Learning. A full-company stop-work event that combines “Learning from the Inside” with dozens of highly varied sessions led by members of our internal talent community with “Learning from the Outside,” which brings not only great keynote speakers but also a “choose your own learning adventure” of content to choose from into a day in which the whole organization celebrates learning and its power to keep us at the cutting edge of what we do.
CLO: What is the most impactful learning program you’ve introduced in your organization, and how has it contributed to employee growth and business success?
Most recently the learning programs centered around the integration of AI capabilities into everyday workflows. In particular, the piloting, training and analysis of the implementation of developer co-pilots has led to up to 40 percent productivity gains in targeted software and machine learning engineer populations by helping them to focus their time and efforts on areas in which their human intelligence adds the most business value. In just one year this has had a multi-million USD impact on my organization with a current ROI of approximately 900 percent.
CLO: What is a common misconception people might have about the L&D function, and how do you address it?
That it’s “nice to have,” but essentially an additional cost center. I address this by prioritizing and aligning learning content with evolving business objectives, making learning easily accessible and ensuring that all Kirkpatrick levels of evaluation (especially ROI) are focal.
CLO: What excites you the most about the future of workplace learning, and how are you preparing your organization to adapt to the changing landscape?
The integration of human and artificial intelligence to amplify organizational capabilities.
My company is a market leader in applied AI providing a SaaS solution for major banks and financial institutions globally so keeping our talent community aware and active in making use of the rapidly evolving technological capabilities internally, as well as externally is key.
CLO: What essential qualities or skills make a successful L&D leader, and how do you cultivate these traits in yourself and among your team?
The mental model is that we are primarily business leaders who use the powerful tools in the people/talent/learning portfolio to help create and sustain marketplace success for our organization. This means cultivating an addiction to data that supports better decision-making and always connecting our work as simply and directly as possible to measurable organizational success criteria.
CLO: What game-changing advice would you offer if you could go back in time and mentor your younger self?
A Stephen Covey classic: “Always start with the end in mind.” What business/organizational impact do you want to create and how will that be measured (preferably in dollar terms)?
CLO: What do you feel is currently the single biggest challenge facing L&D professionals and the industry as a whole?
Responding effectively to the rapid changes occurring in the world of work with the combinations of human and machine intelligence that are already possible. Being realistic whilst allaying fears regarding what the future of work may look like – whilst not yet knowing ourselves!
CLO: We’re always looking to showcase innovative tools and technologies. Can you share one work or learning tech product or platform that has significantly improved your work processes and why you find it valuable?
One of our internal products is our own LLM which we built and specifically trained and finetuned for the financial markets industry to be able to help provide reliable input regarding the complex terminology and concepts prevalent within the industry globally.
That product (Pathfinder) is used to help onboard new employees in our clients and provide them with easy access to better understand communication and data flowing around them. As we are a company primarily of data scientists and technologists who generally lack a depth of understanding of financial concepts and terms, it has been great to use this as a learning tech tool for our employees to better understand our clients’ industry.
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