Upskilling and the Future with Darren Nerland

In this episode of the iDeas Podcast, I chat with Darren Nerland, senior leadership development manager, speaker and co-founder of Learnapalooza.

In this video, I ask Darren about his take on the current focus on skills in the learning and development industry, as well as what he thinks the future looks like. On the note of the future, we also discuss how exactly we, as instructional designers and learning professionals, should go about planning for the future needs of our organisation.

This episode will be a great listen for anyone working in instructional design, performance support or a learning and development leadership role.

You can connect with Darren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrennerland/

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Transcript

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This is the Ideas podcast, the show where learning and development professionals discuss ideas over a nice cup of tea warning other beverages may be consumed. In this episode, I chat with Darren Noland, senior leadership development manager, keynote speaker and co-founder of Learn A Palooza. We discuss upskilling and what the future of workplace LNG might look like. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ideas podcast. With me today is Darren and we're going to be talking about skills. Don't walk away. This is not an advert for some edtech company. Don't panic. This is a this is a proper conversation about skills. We're not going to try and sell you anything. Don't worry. And actually, I think it's it's going to be a really interesting conversation because I've kind of seen you speak in a lot of places. Obviously organised, co-founded learner palooza. So I've seen lot, but we've never stopped and had a conversation. So I'm very much looking forward to this. So first of all, thank you so much for making the time. And second of all, of course, we pretend to be like an indie instructional design podcast, but the real reason people tune in is to find out what people are drinking. So what have we got there? I actually have it's instant, but I have Vietnamese coffee, which I really like. It's instant, but my wife, who's Vietnamese, makes Vietnamese coffee for me sometimes. And it's just so, so great. It's very rich and very powerful coffee. But so sometimes is it when I'm in a rush, it's instant. So, yeah, isopropyl. It. If it tastes good and carries caffeine, then it's a winner. Right. There you go. There you go. Yeah. See, it's it's the middle of the day here. So I have gone for a very safe kind of Pepsi, Max. Oh, there you go. It's quite dull, but that's. It's fine. I will have my wits about me for the conversation for once. There's usually a kind of tipping point halfway through where I stop being particularly useful otherwise. So. Yeah. Right. So first things first, then. I doubt there's anyone listening that doesn't know who you are. But who? Who are you? What do you do? And why should we listen? Yeah, yeah. Why should you listen? That's an interesting question. We'll get to that one later. So to Tom, I've been in the learning development industry for I hate to say it close to 30 years, which puts me at around 40 years old and I've worked for lots of different companies. So that acts over the years. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Amazon and and I usually my niche is around used to be around my kind of learning ecosystems and how you implement those into organisations. That was a little bit and throughout this whole thing I've done leadership development and all those other things right that you love to do as trainers and as training managers, as directors, that sort of thing. And then kind of landed a few years ago on skills, on how to develop skills within organisations and set up that that structure and, and then start thinking about the skills of the future. So it's one of the things I love to do is talk to organisations about the, you know, what skills they need today, how do we do that kind of alignment within, within the organisation, what are the systems in place? And you're right, I'm not going to give you a, you know, a 32nd commercial on these different systems where they work really well, you know, from a skills perspective. And then and then how do you how do you think about it? You know, ten years out? Because we say it's one of the biggest problems I think we have is we don't we don't think about what happens five years, ten years now in these in these areas of of of jobs. And it's across the boards. It's not just on these it's the companies themselves. Yeah, that's quite interesting. So first of all, let's say you got into skills years ago. It's not, in fact, 2022 Discovery. You kind of turn over a rock this year and go, it's a skill like this. This do this. This sounds amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So, but one thing I have kind of come across in trying to have this conversation is that people you kind of think, oh, skills are simple enough, but actually defining in in in the land world what it what falls into that skills area of work is a little bit trickier than certainly I first thought it was when I started having the conversation. Yeah, maybe I'm just thick, but maybe others get confused as well. So when you're talking about skills, how do you define what falls into that category? Yeah, I meant and I'm going to answer your question and take a step back on why I think we are confused for this. And the reason being is, is we've done a few things. One is we set up competencies in organisations that are pretty broad and there's nothing wrong with competencies. In fact I've helped develop many competency maps in organisations. You know, there's lots of different organisations, big organisations that are using these different and most of them know about the top two or three competency kind of companies that you know that, that they use. The challenge though is within those competencies are actually skills. And so so we say things like, hey, we'd love to have we'd love that business acumen. So business acumen is, you know, is a competency that some companies use. But what's in business acumen? Well, how do we know that you have good business acumen? Well, you start drilling down into those skills. And so we would say things like, well, they have to they have to understand data analytics. They have to understand, you know, some of the little data science pieces. They have to understand maybe that the organisations tool like Tableau or something like that. Now see you start drilling down into those skills are actionable. So when I, when someone says, hey, I need to build these skills, I say, well, what's the action behind it is skills are skills can be measured. And that's the other thing. So that they're actionable and they can be measured similar to objectives, right. Is when I think about skills. And the easy part for most people is what we used to call a study of hard skills or tech skills. Right. I need someone that's proficient in Python now. Proficient Python is is again a broad topic. So if I if I asked them as well, what part of Python do you want them to be proficient and say, well, I just need I just need that beginning kind of, you know, one on one. So, okay, great. I can write learning objectives. I can test on that and I can I can tell you, you know, from a knowledge perspective, whether or not that skill is is working, then I can go into a system and I can also measure that and say, did they finish something, you know, within a certain amount of time? Does it work within my system? So then I can start to start to understand, you know, do they really understand this and can they apply it where we tend to get into hard skills are technical skills are actually, in my mind, easier to kind of articulate into information when you get into what we used to call soft skills and why I say we used to call them because I just there's lots of people in industry right now that were pushing back against soft skills. There's nothing soft about them. And it's it's really hard to articulate them sometimes and to measure. And so I call them either human skills or super skilled or yes. Who are professional skills. But so human skills are professional skills. They mean the same thing is what we used to call soft skills. So if you said, hey, Darren, you know, we need a we need a session on feedback. So how do managers get feedback to our employees? Well, again, it's a deep subject, but at least you give me something to work with, right? So collaboration, maybe sitting up here as far as that competency. But as you start to drill down, there's probably ten different skills within that. Obviously, one of those might be feedback. And so when I start talking about feedback, so I want to make it actionable. So what do we talk about? So we're talking about the, you know, the verbal and written on those. That's feedback to someone. And how do I do it? How do I make sure that I give good feedback to Tom so that Tom is taking our feedback and say, Oh, let me think about that. Too often feedback is like, Tom, you did a bad job in that meeting. Well, that wasn't even specific, right? I just said you did a bad job now. So again, we have to get specific about, you know, how that feedback is done and that sort of thing. So there's an opportunity to say, okay, let's look at feedback as a skill. We can still test knowledge. I actually think that in the human skill side, it is less about the knowledge. It's it's more about the measurement, right? Or the measurement gets harder and I get it, I get it. And that's why a lot of organisations are struggling with this. The measurement side really is about so we do things like peer review, so peer review just give you feedback and be specific about it, what kind you know. So we ask pointed questions. Now that's that again that raises another problem is what I'm doing is you have all these skills we need to build because now all of a sudden people Skype the lightbulbs which are not like, oh my gosh, I've got, you know, I've got, you know, 20 skills that one role might need, you know, just human skills. So that's where I think there are applications out there today that help with this. And so those are things like those are things like, you know, where you get into psychometrics, where they ask general questions. But those questions, when you answer them about that specific topic and then you put that into a system that has an that has a has a machine learning in there, it starts comparing your answers to other people's answers around this topic. And, and in one of the places I used to work for, we were getting a 87 to 90% accuracy rate on this and that to me is pretty darn good. So if I get if I can take something like feedback and say, Hey, Tom, answer these 20 questions, and I'm actually doing that between guys in ten questions and then you answer them. And I've got, you know, 20,000 people worldwide answering that same question. I get a pretty good idea of where you sit within this within the level of of this particular scale. So I can say, oh, Tom, you rated a three on a scale of eight and so we need to work on that, right? If I was your manager. So that was a long there's a long answer to what? Our skills. No, no. I think it's really interesting. I think it's and I agree. I think listening to that, I think that's exactly why we do get confused. Yeah. And I think when I was, I was discussing this with someone else the other day when I think back to when I started in the industry much more recently, I must have it. But it wasn't part of the discussion. No. Yeah, I chose I you know, rather than kind of, you know, a lot of people fell into the role. I looked in really good funds. I went off and I did a lot of courses and I often say it was my biggest regret is that's how I got started. Because you're right, I learnt competency framework and that that's the, you know, that is the most important thing. You don't need to get into any more detail than that because beyond that it's just abstraction. And it's interesting that now maybe we're realising that that isn't abstraction, it's the stuff that's actually important and the ah competency framework maybe was the problem or, or stopping at the competency framework maybe was the problem, thinking it was the kind of zenith of our, of our potential. Yeah, yeah. That, but so I think there's a lot of discussion around the at the moment. I'd be interested to see where you stand on this, where we I think focussing on skills is great, but it almost seems to be held as a you focus on that, don't worry about knowledge. Knowledge isn't important anymore, which I think is an interesting way of looking at it. And the kind of regular argument is, hey, you can look anything up in 30 seconds now. So what's the point in having knowledge? All you need is the skill to find the information. And I've been trying to kind of figure out where I where I stand on this. So what your thoughts? Yeah, I so this is where I tend to go a little old school. So most of most my most my job in my life has always been kind of looking future wise. It's always I've always been fascinated with like what's happening tomorrow or ten years from now. And part of it is because my own, my own. So I used to have imposter syndrome, right? I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm not good at this because I fell into if I fell into learning development and I was really good at trading technology and like, oh my gosh, you should be a trader. So I fell into it. And so I always kind of had this imposter syndrome, like, I'm going to do more and I do more. Let's next. Right. The thing about knowledge, though, is we in the future, we will there will always be roles that need deep knowledge, you know, and we're talking about things like data science and but even agriculture, right? So, you know, if you think about where agriculture is going and how much of a change in that industry is happening, most people don't outside of that, don't look at it. But I visited South Africa recently for a conference and I was doing some research and I was just surprised that I'm like, wow, there's just a lot going on that there, that there doing in researching agriculture, researching kind of the kinds of soil that they want to do, vertical farming. That's what thinks is always going to be roles that are that need that deep, deep knowledge going back to data science that you need to understand how these things work together, right? If you don't, you can't just look that up on YouTube. I can't. I can't go. Why has this data dataset over here in this dataset over here as a to dig into that or have to dig deep on those things. I also think that, you know, if you're going to be a manager or a supervisor director or whatever, I still I felt like the idea of, hey, let's get let's raise people up through the ranks. Let's get them that knowledge and training and skills that they need and keep that flow going. Now, that being said, there are a number of jobs in the future that won't need is as deep of knowledge. And I think more people are also going to become polymaths. So we're going to have to be somewhat experts in a few different things. Right. But still requires still requires some of the some of the knowledge. So I think it's a misnomer or is a mistake. I was going to say it's a mistake to say, oh, you can look it up on this. You can do something there. Probably. Yes, you probably like if I wanted to go if I wanted to go cook fries at McDonald's or KFC, I'd go look that up on YouTube. Now, there's two things that are wrong with that. One is safety, right? I can look it up on YouTube, but. But no one's probably watching me to see if I done it safely, too. Is that's a job that's going to be automated in the future. So why would I you know, why would I even take my time doing that? And there's no deep knowledge there. So if you think about some the jobs are going to be automated. Don't worry about those. Maybe that's fine to look up on YouTube. There are some things like in retail where I just need to know something quickly about that. This or a customer always or I should say always sometimes leads to other questions. I always think that there's knowledge behind those things. So I don't think I don't think it's going away. I think we still need to trained. I think we need to help people learn. And I think we still need in a lot of cases, we need to assess it. Yeah, no, I think it's interesting. Is it my sort of first training stuff I ever did was of retail and sales, and it always stuck with me. It's like, it's exactly that. Someone's always got a question and if you're the salesperson, ask to go, Oh, well, I'll have to go and look that up. You've just that question of credibility. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Yeah. You know, obviously there is a a skill in saying, I don't know, let me find out for you. But if you say it six or seven times in one conversation, it starts to paint a picture, right? It does. That's it. Yeah. Think it's I suppose like many things it's that maybe that initial dash to go, it's all in on the new thing and then maybe that gradual realisation that actually, you know, new wants has always been I think the, the kind of key thing. Yeah. And in learning design. Yeah. Yeah I think so. No one approach, no one ideology if you will, I don't think has yet gone this is it, this is perfect and in all scenarios. Right. Right. I think the question may be in the future, I don't know. I just thought of this. So I got I haven't tested it and maybe I'll just a response is if I'm a learning professional, right, let's say 5 to 10 years from now and someone says, hey, we just need to make a training on this to put up on our corporate video site. And if I say, oh, let me go ask my subject matter expert to help me with that, you know, you know, because I don't know enough and think there's maybe not whatever. Right. It does. It is. Doesn't it say, well, if you have to ask someone about this because there's potential nuances or whatever, does that mean, that is probably not just something they could just, you know, watch a video and be done with or there's other questions that go that branch out from there. So, you know, but but again, it's like if it is that way, then like, you know, make the machine, just make its own video. I know, but. Well, yeah. That's that's that's the scary side of the future. But I do think it's a great place. Yeah. Now I should say a couple of years. I think it must've been 2018, 2019. I went to a conference session by Donald Clarke and it basically said, 20 years time none of you will have a job. Said, Oh, you'll be writing your content rate and your videos and publishing on the other matters for you. You'll need to find something else to do that's like, oh well, positive, upbeat. Start to the day. Yeah, I hope it wasn't the keynote though. It was actually like, Oh, that's quite good. Right? Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully turned it around. The reopening is like. You know, actually phenomenal session because he just pointed out how, you know, we're kind of obliviously walking towards this world where we're kind of going, Oh, he's a million miles away. And he's like, It will feel that way until the day it happens. And then it will seem like it took this massive jump. But I mean, just in this last thought, this last week, and then there's a news article, that guy won the fine art competition in the States somewhere using an AI generated image. Right? Right. Well, is that art? Is that somebody create a picture? Yeah. Yeah. You used oils, you use acrylics. He used. Now, is is there that much of a difference, you know. Yeah. Clearly the judges didn't think so except that his was better because he won first place. And if and we were like, art is a world I will never take over if I can be a great artist, why couldn't it be a great learning designer? Yeah, it's quite an interesting question. I don't know the answer. I know very little about it. I just think it's very interesting. So so if I can comment on that. So, you know, if you take a if you walk backwards from that finished painting and what the idea that person still had you input had to get input. Yes, do that do that to that technology. And so in the future still there's going to have to be, excuse me, inputs. And so there's still there's still in the future still teams that manage these things. There's still people that understand the algorithms. Right. And yes, machines are going to get much better at learning where we are still. And I agree with you, it's like we're right around the corner from some of these things. Like, you know, everybody everybody complains to questions every a little bit older generations complain about you walk into a store and there's in your at the checkout yourself. I have to scan my own things to check out. And the thing is that's not going to change. So you either embrace it or you fight it. I embrace it. I'm like, there are other jobs created because this one has gone away. The company now focuses somewhere else on like R&D or hopefully upskill ing people within the organisation. And and by the way, that's where that's where we need to go next is upskilling because it's the skill definitions. Fine, but we're missing out on skills of the future and we're missing out on upskilling people within organisations. But if you think about it, it's not too far that most stores will have. I mean most stores have some except for the small kind of corner stores have some kind of automated checkout, even if it's one or two in the future, you know, ten years from now it will all be automated. So if we don't embrace that, you're just going to still sit there and complain. But you're still going to be scanning your own groceries or watch the pandemic help this to you. It's going to be delivery or kerbside pickup, and that kerbside pickup isn't going to be a person. Bring it out. It's going to be a little it can be a little a little cart that's got a that's got a computer on it and tells you the directions is I need to take this to kerbside number one and it pulls up to your car and then you can I'll just put your groceries in. So those things are happening. And you're right. It's right around the corner. Not not very far. That's the sort of thing that sneaks up. But I'd love to touch on the upskilling thing there. I think, again, it's a prime example of it gets talked about every now and then, but generally it's a very kind of insular. We're upskilling this person in our business to this new role is quite reactive. Yeah, I think you're right. The but that skills of the future thing is, I think it's always a very difficult conversation because how how do how do we go about defining the skills of the future? And I certainly it's an area I don't dive into very often because it's not an area that I'm very good in, to be honest. So when you're sort of thinking about it, what are your thoughts about what they are and how do you figure out what you think they're going to be? Yeah. So number one, I do this all the time, by the way. I say something, I go, wait a minute, let me take a step back for a second. So I give the second set. The foundation, so to speak. Right. Is, is we also don't do a very good at looking at our skills across our organisation today, what we have, what we need today. And so what I mean by that is the job descriptions that I see today don't have very many skills. You know, they have a lot of responsibility. You'll be responsible for dot, dot, dot. And we really just want to know and that's fine. Those are those are great. I wouldn't get rid of those. What I would do is at the bottom, I'd say, here's the 20 skills that are core to this job. And now I could go out and if we were all doing this in organisations and we were measuring skills and stuff like that, imagine being able to take your skills profile with you, right? Which you really can't do today, even though like, hey, LinkedIn has got these skill ratings, those are not right. By the way, most like I look at mine and I don't remember ever doing this. Oh Tom Thompson I had this skill and Joe said I had the skills that are like, Hey, you're good at this. I'm like, No, I'm not. They're a good judge of that. Right. And by the way, by the way, Linda doesn't care whether or not you know, you for a day or I've known you for ten years, this is like, Oh, they're great at data science. Mike No, I'm not. I can understand, but I'm not, you know, I don't go down that path. Yeah. So anyway, so, so we need to get better at today. What are we doing today and how do we, how do we, how do we develop those skills and how do we upskill people there and then and in the future wise? It's very similar, though. I think once you get to the skills on how to how to develop those skills. But first, when you're thinking about developing skills of the future and what your organisation needs, there's two things to me. One is, as I said, there's those human skills and it's and this is where research has helped us out a ton. Right? There's a lot of people out there doing research on this. So P.W, see the World Economic Forum Institute for the Future every month? I'm okay. I'm combing through their white papers. I'm looking at the website and stuff like that and they go, Oh, some fascinating stuff out there. But oh wait, if you look at the top ten skills for actually now, I think it's 2030, which is only eight years out World Economic Forum in the top like seven were human skills, creativity, innovation, you know, collaboration. Right. Those are things like, well that's we talk about that today is like we need more of that in organisation agility, stuff like that. So if we're helping people today, it's going to help us for the future. We just don't do enough of it today. And second thing is, is so again looking at the research tonnes of help their industries every industry has got at least I mean these three or four kind of like you've got Gartner and Policy and all these things for looking at these the future of these industries. Right, whether it's retail or agriculture or something like that, you just got to do a little bit of research on it. And then the other part so that's that's the second part is research. But then also how do people within your organisation that that have some of that kind of future skills, the creativity, the innovation, bring them all together even if they don't know about, you know, well, I don't know what they do over there, bring them all together. And I've done this before in organisations where we all just start talking about the future and you've got a half a day or even a day days even better where you said I going to break people out the teams and you do it like a hackathon. You're like, let's take our company and let's or our department. So if you're in a big Cummins cigar department, what's going to look like in ten years? Let's bring in some of our partners and customers. Let's do this. It's amazing what you can come up with because they will tap into that research. They have ideas. They're like, Well, my job is doing this. And then all of a sudden you're like going, Oh, if your job is being automated, so you now focus on this. That means that this is going to change too. So you'll start talking about robotics, you start talking about, you know, better, you know better data quality and stuff like that. But it's all about, you know, it's all about and then you start wrapping that around things like maybe we need maybe we need more data scientists, maybe we need people, more people in marketing that you can help sell these things, you know, so there's lots of things that you that you can do to kind of move people out of that comfort zone, a lot of people to the comfort zones. Like, here's what I do today. I know what happens tomorrow into that kind of more imaginative, innovative space. And if you if you look at like the Institute for the Forum, they always do. It's kind of a ten year report. What do they think that the next ten years going to look like in different, different spaces? They've done this for education. They've done it for agriculture. They've done it for car manufacturing. I think it was automation in technology. And and the thing is, it's like they're not they're not 100% right. And they never say they are. So if I look back at the reports, there's like but it's still pretty cool. It's like 70% accurate within like, you know, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't this widget doesn't do this, but it does. It smell is still the widget that they set. Right? So I just think that we just we don't we don't have the discipline to take the time because to focus on that burning fire that's today of like, oh, no. And by the way, so my day job is Amazon, right? I work at Amazon as a as a senior leadership programme manager and we're talking about how we don't have enough data scientists and how we don't have enough people to help us with machine learning. Now, fortunately, Amazon has done something different rather than complain about it or try to steal people from other places. By the way, that's getting even harder because companies that I talk to at conferences like the big companies like LinkedIn or or HSBC or those sort of people, you know, that they're all struggling. So what they're doing is they're starting to upskill people to like, we need to push people up into these into these areas. And there are people that don't always specialise in data science. They may be a data analyst over here, but let's move them into that into those places. So so hopefully in the next couple of years they're up there. And then as we need more of them, I'm pushing people out my pipeline right internally, not externally. So we get some extra in. But I think I think in the future we're going to have probably more of our pipeline filled or we should be able to fill more of our pipeline of jobs internally if we're planning, you know, five, ten years out accurate more since accurately better. There's no reason why we couldn't have 70%. And these large companies have 70% of our pipeline on these key roles up here right. Just filled with you know within the organisation. Yeah. Think it's interesting that the conversation very rarely goes to that kind of almost talent management place, but I suppose actually realistically that's kind of where it should not necessarily start but certainly focus on because knowing the future of skills I guess is irrelevant if you don't have a future workforce. I right. One's got to go to supply. The other kind of thing. Yeah, it's interesting to hear about sort of moving away from so much external. So we're certainly seeing, I would say probably an increase broadly over the last ten years of external higher rather than internal upskill. Yeah. So it's is interesting to hear about going the other way because I think you are right. I think we've had such a long period of that one. It I mean it puts you salaries up, which isn't necessarily a bad thing unless of course, you're the one paying the salaries. Right? Right. Which I guess is where we get into that. Realistically, if it becomes that difficult to poach people when you're paying them six times their actual value just to get them in upskilling, suddenly that's a lot, a lot more. Attractive, but also a problem with equity within the company. You're paying some six times this and these and the rest of the people are here as an equity problem there, you know, so you would need to do this or you need to or you need to kind of do this in meeting. Now. Yeah, I think it's that that's an area where I think upskilling is going to be interesting in the future because we've got I think we've got a couple of interest in maybe a decade ahead of us where we're going to have some really oddly mixed skill groups coming into the workforce. I was chatting someone the other day who's dealing with an extremely young kind of just starting their first jobs now, he said none of them used keyboards and a nice touch screen. So yeah, he said. So when we put them on our mainframe based services system, they looked at it and went, Sorry, what? Yeah. You have to navigate using the arrow keys and you feel this is just letters, this is it as it. Wow, that's that's an interesting thing. We think, oh, everyone's always getting better with technology. So it will only the technology that's, you know, their, their thing. Right. But also, I think we're certainly I'm seeing an increase in needs for basic skills that historically maybe internal teams have not been responsible for. I'm seeing a much higher request level for I've got loads of new employees I want to take on, but their English isn't great. We need to we need to do we need to do language skills. And it's kind of always been education, space and maybe as we see, you know, current situation specific people coming here as refugees, they're going to need jobs. Those jobs will often require them to develop language skills and teams are going to have to get on board of that. And that's going to be a whole new kind of training. I don't think a lot of us have ever had to do. I know. I certainly haven't until this last year. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting place to be right in your absolutely right that we have to check again. This is a change in the way we think. Right. So one of things you mentioned was, you know, this is talent, talent management. And and that's why I think so. Yes. And the interesting thing is LG typically in most companies typically lives in h.R. But here's how Andy over here is recruiting. Here's talent. Now, is it managing his own? How often do we talk to each other? And the funny thing is, I've always wanted to have that conversation and I think they have to. But we haven't figured out somehow why we don't talk to each other. It's never like, Oh, you're going to do our. So this is how recruiting does it? In the words of asset information, it's like, no, no, no, let's all work together. So I think we need it. So that's number one. I think we need to figure this thing out together and in a different way than we have in the past. Number two is is. Yeah, I think yeah, I think those those kinds of skills. I think there's an opportunity also here to outsource. You know, what I mean by that is if you think about because there's a big, big population that doesn't go to college, right? The trade schools, there's a lot of trade schools out there. In fact, I think we need more trade schools and we do more that we don't need more colleges, we need more trade schools. And the reason be is for what you just said, which is, hey, there are some basic skills that we may need in the workforce. Why don't we all share some of that so we can get people still up and maybe create our own pipeline, right. Of people coming out of these trade schools into the kinds of things that we need them to do. And some that may be like, hey, let's, let's do let's, let's bring in people at, you know, English as a second language, but then also teach them some skills that will apply to five or six different companies and again, create a pipeline for them. So I think it's thinking differently about how we onboard them. And again, maybe it's not us, maybe it's there's some other way of doing that, you know, but but you're right, I think that those are the kinds of things that we should be looking at. But that's and that's the challenge is lots of different things that happening in just 10 to 15 years. And it is some organisations are like are like just like where do I start, right? Where do I start? And and that's a challenge. I've had some, those strategic conversations in my own organisation and then we come, we come to once you start talking about it, once you start actually bringing people together and talk about you start setting prioritisation and you start doing some of those things. But you have to have the conversation first. You have to have yet to bring the people together to have the conversation. You know, I wasn't just talking to myself in in a silo. Absolutely. I think something you can say about the separation of us from other sections of the h.r. World. Yeah, i think part of that is certainly my experience is I've been referring a lot recently to like the Ellen, the ego, the kind of we're different, we are whatever we might be at. Yeah. But also that kind of feeling that that's the best way to put it. We spend a lot of time internalising also. So what is instructional design and you know, what are the you all these kinds of conversations which are really interesting I love to get into those discussions aren't very helpful outside of ourselves. Probably not. You know, what matters to the organisation is probably the impact we have less than how we define ourselves. In fact, it is always about impact, always. I mean, by the way, that's my that's a term I use when I want to talk about this, I talk about impact. So what is the impact you want to make your organisation. So this is Ellen do you there's a couple example is Ellen D responsible for retention it's impact so so yeah, I think we are partially responsible for any kind of retention. And so but we, we rarely look at retention numbers, but we should. We should because because we are we know that, that we know they hold the old saying of like, well, people don't need jobs and we manage this. Okay, great. So why don't we train better managers? Why don't we have better leaders? Well, if you want better leaders, you need to go on hire them. But then they don't know much about your organisation or you can help them and help them in different ways. If you have good leaders within yourselves of your retention problems, or maybe you got good leaders, but we're not focussing enough on, you know, level one, level two employees. And so there's some learning that goes there. I just think that yeah, I think we but by the way, this happens in other departments as well, right. But we've got to focus on. Yes, we have always done that. I don't care whether you call them objectives or outcomes. I've seen this argument, you know, over the years. It kind of ebbs and flows now, like it's outcomes. It's outcomes. I'm like, yeah, you're both right objectives and I don't care. What I care about is what's, what's at the end, what's that impact already? You know, if you're onboarding someone when what's the time to proficiency, right? I don't care that they actually pass the knowledge as well. That's not what I care. But if you're doing a really good job as as a as a learning team, then I have no then I don't have to look at those numbers very carefully because I've seen lots of people get, you know, like their their training ratings are four out of five and they get 90% pass rate. So my great thumbs up, keep doing that. But now so you're doing that really well. The next thing I want is time to proficiency. How quickly can I get that person up to speed? Right. And so there's other things after that, right? So we call it the long trail, right? So the long trail of learning is like, what are we doing after training? And it's not just all boards everywhere, across boards. Like I would rather you tell me that you developed a one hour class and it took you 40 hours, but you took 80 hours to to help people along that pathway afterwards, that learning journey afterwards, and that they're getting more proficient at that skill. I want that part this little part show up. That's awesome. I'm glad that you did bunch of videos and stuff like that, you know, and blah blah blah. But I want this part. That's where that's where the impact happens. In fact, doesn't happen here. It's a start of impact. Impact happens there. No. Absolutely no. So we're always stuck with making those first shows where manager The question is always the same thing. Does it make the boat go faster? If not, stop doing it? It was. That sounds good. Okay, good. Yeah, we're on it. So we're scary enough. We're rapidly coming up on the end of the hour. But as this is as these conversations always do, but I always like to finish up with the same couple of questions. So first thing, looking at the entirety of the world of workplace learning and development right now, what are you really excited that you see in the industry and want to see more of and what maybe are you not so excited about and wish you weren't seeing so much of her? Boy, that's a great question. So maybe we should have sent this to new foreign people. Yeah, people think they've got to the end, and it's like, Oh, it's over. It's like, yeah, now, now my question. At the I've done all my, my brilliance is in the past right now. Yeah. So, so I think what I'm excited about is I am excited obviously because I've been doing this for ten or 12 years of thinking about skills. So I am excited that people are talking about skills. I really am. I think it's a great place to start and to think about and the reason I'm excited about it is also the reason is also the flip side where I don't think we focus enough on and that's the people impact. And so I love the idea of talking about systems and talking about new ways of learning because all those get wrapped in. So by the way, I'm I'm kind of cheating here and saying skills, but I love that I love that technology can help us bridge that gap. I love that we're going to get better people that have these skills in the future. But the challenges on that people side is I don't know that we think about the impact that we have to people. And one of the things that I think is I don't I don't want to I'm tired of looking at numbers for numbers sake and saying, hey, across the board, we've got this. You know, we've, you know, we've got 80%, you know, or attrition. That's that's okay. No, it's not okay. That should be 9%. Right. And why is it that way? And it should be about the people. And too often it's about whatever number it is. And believe me, I know because I have to let this happen is I got to get that time to proficiency. I have to get retention rates up and stuff like that. But if I'm not if I am a learning professional and I don't have things like personas built for my audience or I haven't gone out and met my customer right now I'm not talking about my season, talking about my customer across the board. Anybody on the learning curve, including the managers, directors, I haven't done that in a while. Then we're not going to question whether or not we're really talking about the people. And for me, that's the biggest thing is we need to develop people within our organisation and all the numbers will follow guarantee and you can I'll bet everybody on this podcast listeners is I bet you $10 in ten years if we focus on the people that plus interest $10 in ten years, you come back and said that didn't work, Darren. That was not true. I'll pay you $10 plus interest. But it should be about the people that that that's bottom line. And I just don't hear it enough. I know it's in there. I know it's in there, but we're too focussed or too scared to push back. This is why. This is why I think I never get promoted or I have to go to different jobs is because I keep our knowledge about the people. I, I'm like, I guarantee good. But just, you know, those are my. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But most leaders, when you start in they start talking about it. They they do start to listen. So yeah. First you know, that's that's also I always it just just made me think of an old director. We were once all in a meeting and someone for someone was talking about sort shrinkage of the workforce. They said, oh, we, they gave a percentage number. And she said, Well, let's just stop the meeting. How many people was that exactly? And she's like, okay. And how did we let I think it's about 130. How did we let 130 people down? Yeah, because they haven't got a job anymore. So I said, no, I don't feel good about that. And the meeting was just kind of sat in silence going, Oh, that's a bummer, right? We probably should never happen again, should we? It's right. It was. Really impactful. It's quite, quite interesting. You, I think it's like you, you know, that that number is people. But until you stop and go, oh, that is 130 people, that for some reason we hired and then they aren't here anymore. Yeah. Yeah, very interesting. So just to round everything off, I mean, thank you again for making the time. And if people want to continue the conversation or get in touch or obviously in a decade claim their interest, where can they get hold of you the best? Honestly, the best way is reach out to me on LinkedIn. So Darren Berland on LinkedIn, follow me follow learn a palooza, my little conference here in the Seattle area in the United States. And I love to talk cause I love to hear from people so happy happy to jump on line with you. But thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Ideas podcast. Before you go, please consider leaving a review, a comment and a like on YouTube and of course letting us know in the comments what you're taking away from this conversation. Until next time. Have a great day.