Brandon Carson (author) - L&Ds Playbook for the Digital Age

By Bob Mosher

Standing still is not an option, and we can only imagine the disruptions ahead.

DENIS POMBRIANT

We all recognize the central importance of technology and how it affects our businesses and our workforces. You could say this is an age of technological marvelone that continues to bring a rapid revolution in the way we work, forever changing our expectations of that work and what it means. Out of this, the corporate learning industry finds itself on center stage, now a lead actor in this new movie with a serious role to play. There are heightened challenges, newfound responsibilities, and massive opportunities for L&D to enable the workforce to navigate this critical time and create real, measurable business value.

Critical challenges include:

Understanding that the technology issues we face are broad and require L&D professionals to have, and maintain, a certain level of expertise.

Understanding that technology alone does not guarantee the application of skills and increased performance of those whom L&D servesapplying new and innovative instructional design methodologies to a learning technology does.

Navigating and integrating the legacy, and often outdated, technologies that L&D has accumulated over the years is daunting and overdue.

New responsibilities include:

Addressing the complexity the digital age brings to the workforce.

Researching and applying new instructional design methodologies to todays workflow and every changing learning technology ecosystem.

Considering adding new, or modifying existing, roles to an L&D team such as data scientist, performance consultant, and AI engineer, among other multidisciplinary competencies.

Helping organizations redefine what the new workflow is, and will continue to evolve to, over the next several years.

Adopting a performance-first mindset rather than one that defaults to training as the first, and often only, option.

We have so many opportunities in front of us as well:

Rethinking long-distance collaboration.

Increasing employee satisfaction by delivering more consumer-grade learning experiences.

Moving into the workflow to deliver embedded moment-of-need deliverables, thus reducing the training footprint and cost and adding more direct value to the business.

Rethinking antiquated learning design methodologies and replacing them with approaches that meet todays ever-changing business landscape.

Leading the way in technology adoption and accelerating its impact on performance and return on investment.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic became a game changer for everything. Most L&D operations find themselves permanently altering how they design and deliver learning solutions to their audiences. Ive been in this industry for 37 years, and Ive never seen demands placed on a learner like were seeing today. In the past several months Ive heard less talk around creating instructor-led classes and e-learning, and more demand for how L&D can rise up and support a learner, and an organization, that finds itself navigating a volatile workflow environment like never before.

The conversation is more about supporting and enabling performance at an ever-changing moment, not upskilling someone so they can perform down the road. There is no down the road anymore. The need is now! Its no longer whats nice to knowits all about what you need to do. Waterfall design approaches are being exposed as more outdated than ever, and a three- to six-month turnaround time on a training deliverable is unacceptable and impractical in a time when the rules can change on an hourly basis. That scenario isnt what L&D has traditionally planned for nor was built to deliver on. L&D needs a newer, agile, and pragmatic strategy that rewrites the rules and realigns the L&D team in a more appropriate and applicable way.

In this book, Brandon Carson builds on his perspective that the digital age is forever altering how business gets done, thereby changing the role corporate learning plays in delivering business value. He states that our primary challenge is not about the technology trends we see day-to-day, but more about the people on L&D teams and their capabilities, the decisions they make, the methodologies they use, and the strategies they formulate to continue to navigate this often blurry and never-before-seen acceleration. He calls for us to create a new playbook for L&D and walks us through how to assemble one that focuses on how we truly bring an applicable solution and measurable return to the workforce and the businesses we support. Ive seen one of his playbooks, and I guarantee youll find value by digging into his approach.