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

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[00:00:35] Und wir werden lernen ein paar über seine Unternehmen, was sie tun, wie sie tun, wie sie tun, wie sie tun, wie sie tun, etc. Todd, würde Sie uns ein favorit und introduce yourself? It would be my pleasure, William. Great to be mit Ihnen und den listeners heute. Todd Moran, by title, ich bin der Chief Learning Strategie an NovoEd. Und in short form, NovoEd ist ein Talent Development Platform, born aus dem Erfolgen,

[00:01:00] helping to solve problems around scale and complexity when it comes to upskilling workforces and doing that really in a collaborative sense. So think cohort 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? So back in the day, were you really kind of, were you entrenched with the CLO market? Yeah. All of those folks? Intently. It's interesting.

[00:01:30] Our origin story, you know, we think of ourselves scale up, but we've been around the block for a bit. You know, origin 2012 out of Stanford Social Algorithms Lab, the same place that produced Coursera and some of the players in the space. We thankfully still have our brilliant and incredibly talented CTO and co-founder, Farnaz Ranagi, at the helm for us. And, you know, we came out of that group really trying to take what was the most popular course experience

[00:01:58] at Stanford at the time around technical entrepreneurship 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 and mentees and supporters and all that. So that was sort of where we were born of, almost MOOC-like, a little bit at the start. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then our trajectory has moved pretty quickly into the core enterprise space where we've spent,

[00:02:23] since our acquisition back in 2018, a lot of our efforts of serving cross-vertical in financial services, some into healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, hospitality. I think just sort of large-scale enterprise. That's a lot of what we do. And so you serve both the corporate side of that as well as all the employees that are out in the field. Exactly, exactly. I think about, you know, what was traditionally kind of thought of as knowledge workers in our space. Right.

[00:02:53] You know, quickly kind of dissolving those lines and what about all the deskless folks? So it's a huge part, especially, you know, some of the forays we've made into hospitality. You know, those, you know, think about some of these branches that have, you know, 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? So I would assume that you start with mobile and probably also shorter content. It's interesting.

[00:03:22] So yeah, so we do certainly do a lot of that. Intriguingly, in some ways, we were cast as early days by some of the analysts and folks like Deloitte as a PDP, a programmatic delivery platform, because we took a lot of, in some ways, longer form experiences 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 and interact.

[00:03:50] So 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? We're one of the largest financial services companies out of Manhattan here in NYC and create these immersive digital experiences that allow 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 does not equal mastery. Content does not equal learning.

[00:04:20] It's a lot of what we go after. Yeah. And in fact, it almost works against you. It's noise and it can be distracting. 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. Yeah, think about it more the latter way. It's helped the audience. So, yeah, we're not getting into the AR, VR space right now.

[00:04:49] I will say, you know, we do have an offer referred to as Practice Plus. We're about to launch a new .com, which will be exciting in a couple weeks. Folks will get to see that on the website. But our style of immersive is thinking about how do you take sort of those elements of what maybe legacy works or classroom experiences, have peer-based networks, allow coaches, supporters, learning facilitators to be part of this experience and do things like practice and application discussion and feedback.

[00:05:19] Oh, I love that. A really meaningful way. And obviously, team dynamic. It's a lot of – you talked about it. You see it on our website. People learn better together. We believe that. And so that's a part of what we say immersive as opposed to strapping on a headset and off you go with some jazzed up content. I did – this is years – 100 years ago. I did this bit with a conference board where it was experiential learning. So we went to NASA and learned about the Apollo mission through the lens of HR.

[00:05:49] And then we did the same thing at Gettysburg. So we went to Gettysburg, walked the field, and thought of the entire Gettysburg – I think it was four days of Gettysburg, the battle, and we thought of it through the lens of HR. Interesting.

[00:06:06] And it was fascinating because you're learning history, which is cool, but at the same time, you're learning about communications, recruiting, all of the things that you know that HR is – learning, training, development, all these things. It's all in there. And for anybody that's not into experiential learning, it's a fun way to learn. It's different. Yeah. It's different because you're learning without thinking you're learning.

[00:06:35] Like years later, I can remember back to the general's names on the union side, and I would have never thought about that before. Yeah. We don't try to tout a ton, but 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 interactive application and space learning. These are very meaningful constructs for andragogy and pedagogy, and they're woven into every part of the platform. A lot of that board of our founder and CTO again.

[00:07:05] 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 that you can do and how allowing video-based practice scenarios of a timed nature with video-based peer feedback that is in context and in line with a content asset becomes unbelievably powerful. So I'm sure you get asked this question a jillion times a week.

[00:07:34] How did 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. How do you know if the employees, if it clicked for them? Yeah. The brilliant question. We get it a ton. And I think it's, in many ways, it's almost become more important.

[00:08:03] 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 and 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? And so I think it happens in a couple of ways. You know, 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.

[00:08:29] But it's, yeah, let's think about, 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. And 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,

[00:08:50] I'm co-penning 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 state a set of positions and perspective and explain my knowledge, and 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.

[00:09:13] Maybe it's more formalized, and we have a concept of kind of coaches, I 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. That's a great way to really sort of check did they get it, well beyond just completion rates. Right, yeah, I took a test at the end of it. Yeah, I'm good.

[00:09:34] So 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 really become, you know, Kirkpatrick level three, 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.

[00:09:56] I like that you said kind of highly personalized, because I think sometimes we don't factor in or we don't factor in as much learning styles and learning differences and learning behaviors. You know, like some people, there's a time in which they want to learn, and then that moment of attention or whatever that is, it's gone. And 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.

[00:10:25] It's just 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, and some of them are asleep and some of them get it and go on and do great things, et cetera. So what's the highly personalized part? What's the guidance that you kind of give to clients these days?

[00:10:54] Yeah, it's a shame, because I think in many ways we've done a disservice in the broader vendor space of, can I say bastardize on this show? Maybe that's just wrong. 100%. All right, we'll 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 just talked about. What's my sort of learning preference style?

[00:11:21] What's my nature of, as an adult learner, I'm a full-time employee. How am I going to also make time for this effort? So a couple of ways we guide clients in this fashion. One is you have to be flexible with a modality delivery. Sometimes 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're lucky enough to have the opportunity to do a forced return to office dynamic, maybe you're not lucky if you're an employee.

[00:11:49] 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. 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 of those programs is a huge part about addressing disparate needs, especially when it comes to geographies.

[00:12:18] And then technically, from a product standpoint, one of the things we put a huge emphasis on, and I'm sure we'll get into some talk about AI. It would be a disservice if we didn't mention it. 100%. Is thinking about languages. That's a huge challenge when you think about the global audiences that we're serving. 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.

[00:12:46] Because that's what really drives home, you know, 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 sort of 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. You know what's funny is about 20 years ago, there was a lot of discussion.

[00:13:13] It was e-learning back then, but it was more of a learning for learning's sake. You know, we want our education. Now you went through the competency kind of model wave, and now you're in a skills wave. I'm fascinated by skills-based everything because I've kind of seen some of this before, so it seems eerily familiar. How do y'all – what are your clients asking you?

[00:13:38] Like right now, because they're hearing it from everybody, of course, and it's needed. Like legit, things are changing. So I think we are at a confluence of like, okay, AI, Gen AI. Yeah. 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's the feedback? 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.

[00:14:08] Yeah. I think a couple things that really stand out for us is there's some of the sort of mature learning organizations, but candidly 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.

[00:14:34] You know, they retooled their entire approach to digital upskilling of their entire workforce. And the way they approached that, and we helped be kind of the driving force behind re-envisioning their corporate university in a pure digital sense, was, hey, let's create a mix of offerings in these academies, whether it's supply chain or commercial academy or leadership academy or sort of digital,

[00:14:58] that allow, hey, selective, let's place people who we know need these skills into these items. Right. 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. 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,

[00:15:24] 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. And 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.

[00:15:54] You've made a suggested playlist to 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 in many ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But 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.

[00:16:21] So that's good for everyone involved. That's good for the employee that's going through that to know, yes, I've actually acquired that. You know what I'm saying? Like that's not just an employer trying to measure the return on that type. They're actually, it's in everyone's best interest that you actually do know the skills that you say you know. Yes, exactly.

[00:16:44] And so I think that's why we put such a heavy emphasis on, 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 obtained the skills in the other end or, you know, definitive clarity. There's evidence, proof, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's funny because I think that, I've talked about this a couple of times. I want to get your take on it, is the half-life of skills.

[00:17:14] Mm-hmm. So, like, what is the lifetime of a, you know, what's that natal lifetime of, of a skill? And it all depends, I know. Yeah. With those skills. But, but we, we don't talk enough about skill decay. Like, I'll give you a, for example, so you can play off of it. A hundred years ago, I ran an ad agency. I had a ton of employees, all that stuff. It was a B2B ad agency. It was a cool ad agency. I exited successfully.

[00:17:41] 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. Mm-hmm. So, those skills that I once had cherished, et cetera, they've, they've diminished. They've decayed. They're not there anymore. And the market has also changed.

[00:18:11] 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 timeframe. Yeah.

[00:18:38] I'll give you a perfect example because this is so, they won't use the phrase, which I'm going to use. Right, right. 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? Right. And part of this is changing a legacy mindset. I can say this because I spent 20 years on the customer side running large-scale L&D and digital business transformation. Fair enough. It was, hey, let's do the intervention. Great job. We're through it. Let's go get the next population. What about those other 10,000 people that we ever, you never come back to? Yeah, they're good. Yeah, they're fine. No.

[00:19:10] 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. Exactly.

[00:19:26] So we're, you know, one of the pieces we're seeing in that a lot is getting people out of this mindset of fixed 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. But it can.

[00:19:55] We have one of the world's largest airlines 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 Chicago O'Hare that we have to sort of incorporate with these, you know, these new 747s, for example.

[00:20:24] 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 it. Oh, I love that. 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. Right. It's a continuous. And they realize that. Now, there are different subjects. There's different constructs. Right, right, right.

[00:20:52] But you're touching those same populations in a 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 me. Oh, 100%. And you want to keep me here. 100%. It adds more value for the company. You also need to be safety and compliance and all these other very important things.

[00:21:13] It's like if 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 still agree.

[00:21:43] So that training that you're doing on your phone, you watch the video, you do the bid, 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. Yeah. Without question. And I think the signal, we're seeing this a lot. The pivot I mentioned at new.com coming from us, we came into the space as a learning solution. NodeWed and learning platform were one of the same. We had one company, one product, one platform.

[00:22:10] We're now expanding out and recognizing, hey, it's more about the whole person, kind of the way you're going. It's about the talent. And so 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 in July with an offer around Mentor Plus. And we see that is really important.

[00:22:32] 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. Right, right, right. And a set of playlists. I was going to ask you about that because you've mentioned learning and performance or interventions and performance several times. Yeah. And people think of those as siloed.

[00:22:57] They think of mentoring and coaching and 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, 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.

[00:23:27] It's good for the individual. It's good for the employee, too. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, I don't know where you're seeing this, William, and some of your 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 draw on a Venn diagram, there's just greater overlap.

[00:23:48] It's not to say that, hey, the idea of talent acquisition is not a distinct effort or comp planning and succession planning are distinct elements, but those should be woven into the entirety of a talent experience. Like that's, you know, employee experience, talent experience, talent development, that's what we should be getting after holistically.

[00:24:05] 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 going to be more interested in that job. Right. Right. Comp and talent acquisition, they've got to be closer together because they've got to get, they've got to get the offer ready. Correct.

[00:24:30] 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. And I think, 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.

[00:24:57] Like I'm here, part of my commit to joining you, not just a paycheck, as you, if I ask, is you develop me. So, so that like ever compete for talent and, 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?

[00:25:27] How are you going to keep it, develop it, progress it, uh, and grow on that side. 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 of the things are being automated or augmented. Okay. That's, that's fine. That's just life. Um, skills are changing.

[00:25:56] 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.

[00:26:09] Now that 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?

[00:26:31] Yeah, that's a, it's a fascinating one because 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 then we're all taking care of everything. Everything will be fine. It'll be long cost. Yeah. ChatGPT and AI and J-AI. And it's like, whoops, like just kind of blowing it up.

[00:26:54] So I think, I think two things that, you know, that we're helping to guide and 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. Right. Not to create flying cars tomorrow, but to meet sort of the immediacy of need. So, you know, in order to do that, a couple of things have to happen. You have to be able to sort of scale meaningfully. It has to have a component of human intervention.

[00:27:22] And we took a long time, Kenley, when I think we were late to the game with sort of deploying some of our AI 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. I'd rather you be slower. Yeah. I'd rather you be slower, but be ethical and be audited and all of those things to where it's like, you know what? Yeah, we got there a little late. So what?

[00:27:50] You got there the right way. Yeah. And Liverpool, the football club. Oh, you talk about my favorite squad, the Reds. I like it. What? Yeah. So they have a saying, you know this bit, win, comma, the right way. Yes. 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 fastest. That's a win. Yes. Okay. W, you get three points. Yeah. Fair. I get that.

[00:28:18] However, I think win, comma, the right way is actually more appropriate for software vendors. I love it. Yeah. How you get there matters. And I think, you know, that at a result of, you know, these large enterprises are trying, you know, are putting an extensive amount of trust in you as a partner, a vendor partner. Then you need to meet that. So, yeah. Like I said, like when we deployed our Novo AI, you know, that permeates all parts of the platform.

[00:28:44] You know, we had a couple of 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 Novo it is. It's not just a rote scoring package and you put it with an assessment and off you go. 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?

[00:29:12] And then keep really pressing on scaling what we think are the two big unique features of our platform around feedback in a major way in peer learning. So that's where we, you know, sort of invested and took some time. So we came with, you know, then big launch with AI translation, quiz generation, captions and transcripts, key summaries, takeaways, practice insights, discussion prompts, discussion insights. It was like a whole plate and slew of things that permeate the platform.

[00:29:39] 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. It's important, I think, the responsible approach to AI in that sense. I love that. And congratulations. Not easy to do and expensive. Yes. To boot, by the way. I guess I should have said that.

[00:30:07] But doing it the right way also comes with a heavier price tag. That's right. 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. Yeah. 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, two, three, five-year plans. You know, and you'd have these plans.

[00:30:36] And it's around change management and all this type stuff. It's, I look at that and think, okay, we've got to be thinking in minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and, like, years. I don't know if we can think that far because I don't know if we're going to have the, I don't know if we're going to be given the opportunity to think like that anymore. To the luxury to think of that, yeah. The luxury. That's great. That's exactly right. I don't think we have the luxury to think in years.

[00:31:05] But that's a very hard concept for a leader that's been doing learning, training, development, et cetera, for so long to think of. Because they know 50,000 employees. They know how long it takes. It seems 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? Yeah.

[00:31:31] I think one of the best approaches we've seen some of our clientele take, and this is hard for L&D, and I can say this because I wasn't, is you've got to release some control. I'm talking about myself. Yeah, you've got to release some control. You've got to be willing to let go of that. And now pushing some of that down into lines of business, into functional leads where you're allowing them 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 design guideline. Not everybody is an instructional designer or a learning experience designer.

[00:31:59] But if you can equip them, there's a big theme of our platform. We think of it as delighting the content creation kind of creator platform style. It doesn't have to be in the hands of the select few within L&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 who are doing it day in, day out.

[00:32:24] It doesn't mean you can't be sort of in the HRBP and liaison sense in an L&D setting, and you don't have to give away everything. But how do you stay agile? Well, you listen to the business and you empower the business to execute where it needs to, and you give them tools that allow you to do it. And so that's a big part of what we're seeing there too, which is – that's scary, right? That sort of release of control. Oh, it's terrifying. Terrifying. Let's call that what it is. Terrifying. Terrifying. And again, there's going to be some people that adopt that mentality quickly.

[00:32:54] 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 don't want to leave control. They don't want to – they've got experience, and that's what they know. So there's a lot of stuff there. Let me ask you some buyer-related type things. If people are buying – I mean, you're dealing with people that probably already have something.

[00:33:19] If it's not another LMS, they've got an in-house system or something like that. What are the questions that they should be asking of you? Yeah. If you could script it, what would you like to hear them ask? Yeah, I think one of the biggest ones that needs to happen right up front is 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 on your website you have an integration page, so I think we're good.

[00:33:50] But they don't really ask. That's sort of the nature of like, tell me, is that – when you say you've got an integration, what exactly does that do? Is that a light-level connector, or are you literally doing sort of passing data back and forth? Are you exposing APIs? So I think – Well, and 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 an SAP shop. They might be whatever shop. Again, I love that. How do you play in the sandbox? Yeah.

[00:34:18] Because if this is going to be something that I've got to fight with performance and total rewards and – like I don't need – it could be the best software ever. But it doesn't matter at the end of the day. My total cost of ownership just skyrocketed, and I didn't know that. And my team is going to get frustrated. They'll leave. Now I've got all kinds of other problems. And it ultimately won't unlock the real value that you have if it doesn't play well in the sandbox. I love that. What else? The second one is you say enterprise-grade.

[00:34:48] Tell me how your enterprise-grade. And I've come after the provider side. I was in some 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. But the reality is it's hard. It's hard to get to enterprise-grade in terms of security and privacy controls and soft cards 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.

[00:35:14] 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. But also talk to me about your enterprise-grade readiness. And that includes global footprints. And you talk about getting into the EU and support for different really complex things like Work Council in Germany. There's a lot of moving parts and pieces to it.

[00:35:37] So that, like me, bit, is really important for – like you talk 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, a Sonic, they automatically know. The practitioners automatically know. You get us. I mean, we do something different, but 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.

[00:36:08] I think that helps, having that industry expertise, because you become kind of an industry expert at the same – an industry learning expert at the same time of being a software expert. 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 really good partner and you're going to have a 10-plus year relationship with them, which hopefully you are when you're making these determinations, yes, it's got to fit in your stack.

[00:36:37] 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 Rammel's on? 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. You know, we're not trying to build this massive book of millions and millions of consulting services. But we know a lot because we've seen a lot.

[00:37:06] 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. I 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 all are sitting on hundreds, if not thousands of clients. You're seeing what's working somewhere else in another place.

[00:37:33] So 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's lighting it up right now. And I think it would actually work really well with your audience, your employees. 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. Yes. Yeah. That idea of that proactive. Yes.

[00:37:58] We know you're on a three-year contract term, but we're going to not just meet with you to address your functional requests for features and go over bunk 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 that do just that. Right? They walk hand in hand with you. 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 can you provide to shape and drive my success? Yeah. Somebody's got to help me because I can't.

[00:38:26] If I'm doing what I'm doing, I can't see it all. I go to enough conferences. I can't attend enough 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 payments and all the other stuff. They care about my success. All right. I'm going to ask you a tough question in the sense of I'm going to actually pick your favorite child.

[00:38:53] 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? Video practice. Tell me about that. So this is part and parcel. So what we talk a lot about, about the importance of show me evidence and proof of what product they really got it. One of the things that we baked into the experience is not just content consumption or assessments or long form private learning or peers.

[00:39:23] But let's create this idea of let me do a timed real time 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 prompt. There may or may not be a timed force dynamic that I have three second countdown and I have to go.

[00:39:50] So 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. That is one of the most powerful mechanisms, I think, in the platform. Because they can give feedback based on that. They can then turn right around and go, OK, all right, objection response stuff.

[00:40:13] OK, listen, there's a universe of no's and it's getting the no's to maybes, maybes, the yeses. So here's what you explained to Jimmy. You got there. And the thing is, is making sure that they tell you what they got. So much of that is a teaching is then saying, I taught.

[00:40:36] But however, what you hear, you know, and asking that question, I think that I think that feedback mechanism 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's the only things I tweet, you know, like everyone needs that. Everyone needs coaching. Yeah, without a plan. But that doesn't need coaching. Everyone needs coaching. They might not ask for it. Yeah. But they need it.

[00:41:05] And one of the things we've done is, you know, we can bake that into a experience, a learning experience. Right. 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 of 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 health care. And I'm a consultant.

[00:41:34] I need to say, geez, did I really get the core themes that are top of mind for that vertical right now? So that power of being able to sort of practice. And again, I get self-determination. I get some autonomy in there. I get to do some mastery of a little Daniel Pink style. And a safe environment. Exactly. Right. Like, listen, your mentors and your peers, the people that are going to give you feedback, they're not trying to hurt you.

[00:41:58] They actually, you know, you can do it in a safe environment and they'll give you feedback in a safe environment so you get better. Man, I could talk to you. We haven't even gotten to Liverpool. Lord, yeah. Dude, you've got 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, the audience. I'm sure they learned a bunch of this, a bunch of stuff during this episode. Absolutely. My pleasure, Warren. Thank you for making the time. Absolutely.

[00:42:28] And thanks to the audience for listening, watching. Until next time.