Workforce Development

The Business of Learning, Episode 56: Learning Across the Employee Lifecycle – How Training Can Improve the Employee Experience

30 min read

Employee engagement and retention remain two top challenges for business across industries. Learning and development (L&D) leaders can help by delivering training across the employee lifecycle, ensuring that employees receive the development opportunities they’re looking for — no matter where they are in their career journeys.

In this episode of The Business of Learning, we spoke with Dana Baker, Degreed engagement manager at Cisco, and Andy Schuster, CPTM, senior training manager at Growmark, to learn more about delivering training across the employee lifecycle.

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To learn how to support learners across their career journeys, download the complimentary job aid below, courtesy of Training Industry’s Agile for HR and L&D Certificate program.

The transcript for this episode follows:

Speaker 1:

Welcome to The Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from Training Industry.

Sarah Gallo:

Hi, welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, senior editor at Training Industry. Here with my co-host Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, editor in chief.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Yes. Welcome. Before we begin, here’s a brief message from Training Industry’s Agile for HR and L&D Certificate program, the sponsor for today’s episode.

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As a learning leader, your tasked with delivering training programs that drive business results. But with business goals constantly shifting alongside market trends and disruptions, this can be a challenge for even the most experienced training leaders. Training Industry’s Agile for HR and L&D Certificate program can help by giving you the skills and tools you need to deliver flexible and impactful programs so that when it comes time to pivot, both you and your training programs are ready. For a sneak peek inside the program visit the show notes for this episode for a complimentary job aid or to learn more about this course and other Training Industry Courses, download the complete training industry course catalog also linked in the show notes. Are you ready to embrace the Agile revolution?

Sarah Gallo:

Training and development plays an important role in both engaging and retaining employees. After all, it makes sense that without opportunities to learn and grow, employees may begin to feel stagnant in their roles and seek those opportunities elsewhere. And with recent Gallup research finding that low engagement costs the global economy approximately $7.8 trillion each year, businesses would be smart to double down on employee engagement sooner rather than later. Learning leaders can help by delivering training across the employee lifecycle, which can ensure that employees receive the development opportunities they’re looking for no matter where they are in their career journeys. To learn more about delivering learning across the employee lifecycle, we’re speaking with Dana Baker, Degreed engagement manager at Cisco, and Andy Schuster, CPTM, senior training manager at Growmark. Andy and Dana, welcome to the podcast.

Andy Schuster:

Thank you. Looking forward to it.

Dana Baker:

I’m excited to be here.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Yes, welcome. We’re so excited to have you both here today for this conversation. To get things started, why don’t you both share how you define the employee life cycle? What are those different stages employees go through throughout their tenure at an organization?

Andy Schuster:

I think every organization probably defines it a little bit differently, but at its core it’s recruiting, onboarding, really development, professional development in their role, retaining the employees, employee engagement, and then off boarding or providing exit interviews. And really depending on, I would say again, the culture of the organization and how they view the employee lifecycle, you may add or subtract a couple of those components.

Dana Baker:

Yeah, I agree. I just the thing I would maybe focus on a little bit more is during the actual stage of an employee at a company, at least at Cisco, we kind of look at people into three different categories, as individual contributors, managers, leaders, and then leaders of leaders. That’s kind of our kind of three categories to look at people. And then obviously within those there’re different little focus areas like emerging talent or those that are brand new to the company or those that have transitioned from maybe a completely different industry into your organization. So that’s kind of just to second that or add onto it, that’s kind of a little bit deeper into how we look at employees actually while they’re at our company.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Great. Thank you both for clarifying. Why is it important that learning and development is delivered across all of these stages throughout the employee’s lifecycle?

Dana Baker:

Learning is never not needed. Learning is something that is an always on type of activity. No matter what stage you’re at, no matter where you are coming from to where you’re at currently, learning is always going to be a constant. And I kind of think of going to a university or going to a higher education as a way to learn how to learn, rather than to try to specifically learn a skill. Yes, that is the goal of most universities and higher education, but I truly think that you learn how to learn correctly so that when you move on in your life into your career, you have those skills in how to learn and retain knowledge quickly and be able to turn it around and produce results from it. So that’s kind of how I think of learning [across the employee lifecycle].

Andy Schuster:

Yeah. That’s a good example. And I would echo that and add, in today’s society, the learning should be constant. We’re dealing with the future of work, the workforce of the future, all of these different components. We’re a small- to medium-sized organization and recruiting talent and developing talent is critical. And so we want to make sure that we have the necessary components in place to not only deliver that training but ensure that the right training is available to them. And there’s a lot of talk today about the employee value proposition, if you will, or what is it that we as organizations really need to be doing for the employees and a big piece of that as career development, employee engagement, really making sure there’re opportunities from the beginning to the end of that employee lifecycle. And training plays a huge role in that in all different endeavors, in all different ways. Dana had mentioned the employee, the leadership development training, professional development training in the various stages people are in, and it’s just making sure that we touch base in are maintaining the integrity of our programs as we allow people to move through those, that becomes so important. So we work hard to stay front and center in terms of our employees minds and what we can do from the training perspective.

Dana Baker:

I also think that learning is a little bit …. it depends on how you kind of frame it up at your organization is how it’s viewed. I would say for us at Cisco, we frame up learning in the form of a reward most of the time when we’re looking at our employees. And so if you do learning as a form of a reward, then it’s more likely that people are going to buy into that particular piece of content that you’re trying to get them to go through. But also it’s something that they find as a way to help with employee retention is, okay, if this organization’s buying into me and they’re developing me, then I want to give my best back to the company. So that’s another kind of way to frame up learning at different stages is different forms of rewards. You go up in one’s career, so reward level might look a little greater than maybe somebody who is brand new in their career. But also that might just be as satisfactory as needed. When you’re early in your career, if you get some sort of extra training or get to go to a conference that’s really great, that sounds awesome. You’re new in your career, you don’t know much, you’re just trying to absorb and be a sponge and taking everything. Whereas if you’re later in your career, your reward is going to be more of a personalized coach, somebody to really get at the things that you are struggling with and how to help you kind of combat some of those challenges that you’re facing. So it looks different at different stages and I think it’s appropriate that it looks different at different stages as well.

Andy Schuster:

That’s a really interesting take and when I hear Dana talking about that, that’s very much a culture piece. And so I’ll share with you where our culture is as it relates to training. So Dana talked about it being a reward. We would see it culturally as a necessity as something that I have to do to go take the next step. And we’re a 95 plus year company and very operational, so the organization itself sees training as something that’s necessary to take the next step and not have it necessarily as a reward. And Dana mentioned coaches and one of the things we’re really trying to implement inside the organization is how can our leaders be better coaches. We’ve just begun to bring in outside vendors and outside coaches for our executives and we’ve had some just fascinating results. So a little bit of what our job is inside the employee life cycle is sharing the story of what learning is and what it can be. And that’s not what it is today, but that’s a culture component and the idea of learning as a reward is a pretty cool concept. I like that.

Sarah Gallo:

Yeah, I like that concept as well because as our listeners probably know, learning really is a reward. It’s giving that employee the skills they need to advance their careers versus some sort of check-the-box thing or remedial intervention. I think it’s also important to note here that there’re distinct differences that come with each of those stages employees go through throughout the employee’s life cycle. So whether it’s onboarding or leadership, all of the stages kind of require new skills and competencies. So with that in mind, how can training really help employees transition from one stage to the next and really set them up for success in that new stage of their career?

Andy Schuster:

I think one of the biggest components and biggest wins that we’ve had here at Growmark is the introduction of a competency model. So I’ve mentioned we’re a little bit older organization, and when we rolled out the competency model, we had some initial competencies and then what our team did is we began to break those down really based kind of on the employee lifecycle and also the stages of development from a young professional to a young leader all the way up to executives. And that’s become our roadmap in terms of how we want to develop our employees. So that becomes a really nice, frankly marketing piece and piece of the puzzle for individuals to see what the purpose of learning is and how they can apply that across that employee lifecycle and inside of their work today. And so we make sure that every time we do training, we’re always lifting up our competency model, we’re talking about the purpose of it, we’re talking about the why. We’re showing them where they exist in the competency model and focusing on both strengths and weaknesses as we kind of move through that. But earlier Dana had talked about training is foundational and necessary every stage of the way, and I would agree with that. One of the challenges I see and I hear from my peers is onboarding and really maintaining the training and the learning as you’re bringing on these new employees. And I think that’s something as organizations move forward, they really want to get correct out of the gate in terms of being able to onboard employees in the right way so that they stick around and become really valued employees down the road.

Dana Baker:

Yeah, I would say the only other addition I would have to that is just kind of some examples of what some teams have done that I’ve seen for each of these kind of different stages, at least at Cisco. My team at one point we had what was called a “source code.” [We asked ourselves], “So, what are our views on our particular industry that we are the subject matter experts for? Okay, here is all of the information about what our team is, who we are, how we think, what our viewpoint is on certain big key topic, go crazy.” And we have that sourced in Degreed as a plan. And so people can go through in Degreed and take a look at all of the different content that makes up who we are as a team. And sometimes that’s the hardest part to figure out when you’re brand new to a different team is who’s who, who does what, how does everyone play together and how do they play together nicely and what does that look like and what’s their point of view on certain topics. Really helps bring somebody up to speed a lot quicker than maybe if they just had a bunch of one-on-ones and try to gain that knowledge firsthand experience. So that’s just one quick example that has helped kind of bring anybody up to speed no matter what stage they’re at in their career. But I’d say most of the time it’s not that universal. Most of the time it is more specific to whatever stage that person is at in their career or whatever stage they’re at in that company. As the pandemic has hit, there has been so many people that have really reassessed where they want to be in their lives … not only just [in] their careers but [in]their lives. And a lot of people have taken a look at what is it that I want to do and maybe have changed careers completely. I think now that [coronavirus] pandemic is a few years in, we do have folks that said, “Hey, at the beginning, I’m going to change my career. I’m going to go back to school, I’m going to get a different degree, or I’m going to get these certifications so that I can change to a completely different role.” And we have had more folks apply to Cisco that have more unconventional backgrounds applying and we are definitely taking a look at those applicants just as seriously as everybody else that has maybe applied for those roles, understanding that people are coming to work from different stages in their life as well. They might have completely changed roles and careers and they might not be necessarily your typical early in career demographic or emerging talent demographic, but they still might need the same resources that somebody else would at that stage. So, how can we meet the needs of people during each stage? The other big kind of key thing I see when it comes to learning at different stages is learning is actually pretty disruptive or it can be disruptive, especially if it’s something that is like you are being lifted and shifted into a course or a training program or you’re going to a conference and how do you fit that into your regular duties and responsibilities? I find that it can be challenging for folks to know when to fit that in. So it’s also a really big key component that our leaders are supportive of folks throughout their different stages of their career and encouraging them to continuously improve themselves by building their skills. I think if we don’t have leaders that are on board with that continuous improvement because it does take away from their regular day job duties to learn, but it’s an investment in the future. And so the more we can get our leaders on board with that idea, that concept that learning is a valuable asset to help somebody stay relevant in the future of the company, can really kind of frame the view of learning in a completely different way from an employee perspective and from a team perspective as well.

Sarah Gallo:

Certainly. I know our editorial team here at Training Industry has definitely seen that as a trend, where that manager support is just so critical. Employees are busier than ever and they really need that time and space to learn or else it’s just another thing on their already overflowing plate, so to speak. So [manager support is] super important to keep in mind. I also want to touch on another fact here. We mentioned onboarding being one of those stages where new hires really need this training to get them up to speed. Are there any other sort of stages in the employee lifecycle where training is especially important and maybe stages in which training may be lacking or overlooked?

Dana Baker:

I would say the messy middle, kind of the “Michelin Man” kind of middle area is probably where training is lacking the most, in most organizations just because if there isn’t a big critical transition period of oh, I’m becoming a leader, there was a big drastic shift in my role as a responsibilities, versus okay, I’m just kind of moving up to the next level of the same position. It’s a lot more drastic of a switch if you do either move to a completely new team or you change to becoming a people leader. Those are more critical stages in one’s career that’s easily defined. I think the less easily defined areas are those that are more of that kind of messy middle. So either within the leadership realm, the middle management, and also kind of the middle stage of those individual contributors that are not necessarily wanting to advance to become a leader. They are perfectly content being an individual contributor and that’s kind of where they’re happy. Those are the folks that I would say the training is not as well defined historically. I think that’s where folks really need to take their training into their own hands. A lot of times as folks advance in their careers, they do specialize into a very specific niche area. And if they do that, a lot of times the training that they require is also going to be that same capacity. It’s going to be very specific, very niche. And so a lot of times if the employee is not advocating for themselves and seeking out the latest and greatest, it can be even challenging for their leader to know what to recommend for them. So I think that that’s definitely a stage where it can be challenging to know what to line up for that individual. And that’s where I like to [bring in mentoring], especially if somebody’s more senior in their kind of individual contributor track. [Mentoring is effective because] a great way to learn is also to teach. So we definitely have a pretty big teaching culture and a mentorship culture. We don’t have necessarily a super formal program around mentorship or teaching, but it’s definitely a part of our culture that when you are at that stage, you give back and the best way that you can kind of advance and grow your skills is to give back in the form of teaching. So that’s where we do have a lot of mentorship type of programs or our employee resource organizations that we also have, they’ll kind of tap into those more senior folks to come in and do talks and speeches and things like that to give those that are not quite at their skill level an opportunity to find out how to get to that higher, more advanced level of understanding.

Andy Schuster:

Yeah, it’s a good question. I would echo to some degree what Dana was speaking about. When I first got to Growmark, we had a big gap in what we call it today, our experience leaders. And that’s the group of individuals that have gone from managing teams to now they are really managing departments or divisions. So a little bit different perspective in a lot of different ways on where you were comfortable leading that team and you were working on team building and ensuring that things were moving properly with that team. Now you’re responsible for strategy, execution, budget, so there’s some pretty different responsibilities there. And what I have found is the further up the ladder you go, the ability to be able to let go of the day to day and focus on the strategy and execution and the vision becomes a difficult task to overcome. In other words, they want to step back into and still be part of the dday-to-daywhen what they’re really be asked to do is set and cast the vision. And we’ve been talking a little bit about time and learning being disruptive. This is also the group that I have found will notoriously say, I don’t have time for whatever the learning opportunity would be, whether it’s a conference, whether it’s an opportunity to work with an executive coach, whatever the case may be, they see that as something that’s taking them out of the battle, the daily battle if you will. And it’s just to them they’re not sure what the value is. However, when you get them offsite, and we’re typically in a cohort situation with that group, you get them off site, the learning becomes incredibly powerful as a part of that cohort.

Andy Schuster:

I can share this, we’ve recently just created a mastermind group for a group of senior executives that are in a very similar life cycle stage in terms of being leaders of companies and organizations. And it’s been overwhelmingly received in terms of this group wanting to get together and learn from each other. And because they’re similar in terms of their tenure and their experience and their roles, it really becomes a very powerful piece for them. The other thing I would say for folks in this role that I have had some really good success in is as you become really CEO, executive staff into that role, bringing on an individual executive coach for those leaders is incredibly powerful. Most of them would’ve had an assessment, a 360 done along the way, but if they haven’t having an outside vendor do a 360 [degree assessment]. And it’s the perspective I think simply of somebody from the outside that’s an executive coach that’s really pouring into the folks has been very powerful from our end. So it’s a unique nuance where our training department’s fully capable of serving obviously the executive team, but to some extent they really appreciate when I go out and I grab an executive coach or provide some opportunities outside the building that they can really pour into. So that’s been a good win for us in that regard.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Those are such good points and areas that other learning leaders can take into consideration that can sometimes get overlooked. I’d be interested to hear a little bit more kind of your own experience and what’s going on at your organization. How does your organization use social and informal learning to help kind of support that continuous learning that needs to happen?

Andy Schuster:

That’s a really good question and I wish I could crack the code on it in particular. I can tell you what we’ve done here in the last five years. So we really didn’t have an LMS. In fact, my admin team lead used to call our LMS a “Yugo.” And we’ve upgraded to SuccessFactors, so now we have the Cadillac. And within SuccessFactors, we pulled in Skillsoft as a content provider as well as some other outside vendors. And so for us it was being able to have, and really teaching our organization that you have the ability to learn, self learn, you have mobile learning, you have microlearning, but we basically had to step back and I think Dana said it earlier, we had to teach our employees how to learn on their own. They were so used to in-person training and big cohorts and it was almost an event production versus a learning opportunity. So we spent quite a bit of time really talking about what is learning and we still do in all of our classes. So providing licenses, working with teams one on one to show them all the different ways that they can learn on their own and through the different options that we have through the LMS and through Skillsoft. And then informal learning, we spend quite a bit of time in our leadership programs. They’re usually three months to a year long. And we really drive learning opportunities within the cohort of those folks are responsible for bringing forth and sharing with the rest of the team, different ways that they’re learning, different experiences that they’re being provided and some of the biggest wins and losses they’ve had into those experience in terms of leadership development, learning opportunities. So we’re very diligent about, for lack of a better term, really forcing the conversation into a learning conversation. Because as I said earlier, culturally we’re just very operationally driven. And so it’s been fun to see that process kind of pull its way forward and we’ll continue to focus in that area as well.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

As we’ve already discussed, creating that learning culture that continuous learning that needs to happen in an organization is extremely difficult because it’s a long-term process and so it can be difficult to get started. And so kind of with that in mind, Do you have any tips for our listeners who want to begin creating a culture of continuous learning in their organization? How can they get started? What’s that first step look like?

Dana Baker:

I would say make it hard to ignore. So try to incorporate learning into as much as you possibly can and make it as natural as possible for folks to find materials in a learning style format. So for example, you have a big event that you have, we’ll have all your supplemental materials in some form of learning. So for us it’s a degree pathway most likely or a plan that collects several of them. Make it easy for folks to incorporate into their daily work life. And the more you can do that, the more or less lift that they have to do, the more likely they will do it. The other thing is trying to make it attractive to them or have some sort of incentive behind why learning is important. So is it overboard? Is it to get on a leaderboard? Is it to prove that they have the abilities to move on to their next role? What is it about that learning that you can make integrated into what somebody already has to do or a way to show them as a form of a reward? I think that really does help kind of solidify the why somebody would take time out of their day to do some sort of learning. The other thing around that is to make it easy to do that, which is not always easy to do, which is kind of funny to say. But how can you make it less of a lift for folks to put their content into a place that can be easily consumed from a learning perspective? That’s easier said than done. You can obviously do that with a lot of governance. You can do that with help. You can do that with having a good relationship from a learning perspective with your business and all of the kind of sub-business areas that want to share their learning in a way that makes sense to folks, can have that good dialogue and that connection already set up. A good trusted relationship so that when things do need to be put into a format for consumption, it can be done quickly, easily, et cetera. And there’s enough knowledge and expertise in each of the business areas to do that. And the other thing I would say is give excuses or reasons or events that folks can kind of all rally around and it’s some sort of social kind of pressure to go towards some sort of event. So for us, we have four events a year, one per quarter, that focus on learning in some capacity. So we have it focused on teams for our next event, and the one we just had was focused on leadership at all stages. And then we all focus on teams, we focus on individuals, we focus on leaders. But these quarterly events that we have, we have so that folks have something to rally around. There’re actual events that people go to and attend, but it’s also we’re creating discussion guides and materials for teams to have discussions within their team to make the learning kind of stick for them and what are they going to change, what are they going to take away from that event? I think it’s not only presenting folks with the materials to learn, but also having a way for them to retain that knowledge and make changes from what they have learned into their actual organizations, their work lives. And I think that’s the part that really is the transformational aspect of what learning can do for a company is you have to find ways to help folks understand how they can translate what they’re learning into actual work that they’re doing day to day. Otherwise, nothing’s going to stick in a way that’s actually going to make changes across your company. We definitely look at learning as a way to transform our organization and we have done that several times throughout our company’s life cycle. And I know for sure that has to happen when a company has been around for several years. So how can we find more ways to make that less of a lift for folks is what our goal is always trying to do.

Andy Schuster:

It’s an interesting perspective when you’re sitting in the training learning space and you’re working with an organization that’s very much as I’ve been mentioning before, operational. And so when I first got to the organization, one of the things that we did was probably a little bit of a nuance from the previous manager was I wanted to make sure that the team was incredibly clear about who we were, what we do, and how we serve our customers. So if you think of sort the foundations of the CPTM [program], we are the strategic partner to the divisions, to the departments. For us to be able to do that, we have to be able to go in, have a conversation, do needs assessments, talk to them about their strategic plans. And so we spent the first two years talking about the role of training and learning inside the organization and how it supports your goals. And bit by bit through some wins with various divisions and departments and building a team that was highly focused on consulting, coaching, facilitating, and training, those were the four traits really that I looked for with our trainers. And then having continuous conversations with leaders and divisions about how we can support their initiatives. Now we’re getting ready to launch a pretty big initiative with succession planning inside the organization and I have great hopes for that in terms of not only employee development but also leadership coaching, individual development plans, some larger employee programs, professional development programs and other cohort type programs. But I would say for somebody that’s trying to share the message of what the learning department can do and the role of continuous learning, if your company doesn’t know what you do, be very, very clear on your own department’s mission, vision, goals and your strategy to reach them. And then show unbelievable value in being really, really good at how you work with those divisions and it will have a tremendous impact positive, both in terms of reputation, but also in terms of really becoming the thought leader or the knowledge expert in that training facilitation space. And you all of a sudden get pulled into meetings and have opportunities that probably traditionally weren’t there for some other learning organizations. So be a marketer and be super clear on your mission and your vision. That’s very, very powerful.

Sarah Gallo:

Definitely. The role of the learning leader is essentially a strategic partner to the business. So that kind of brings me to my next question, which is another common challenge that learning leaders face is getting buy-in for these sorts of initiatives. Do you have any tips for listeners who are struggling to gain buy-in for ongoing learning and development?

Andy Schuster:

This one is kind of near and dear to my heart, and I’m not a big workplace politics person, but I will say this, you have to find sponsors at a level higher than you and even in the executive ranks that are going to really empower you or going to get behind your initiatives, are really going to begin to spread the word, if you will, to their peers and to their divisions and their teams about the work that you do. And so it’s kind of going back to the original statement, being very clear on who you are as a division, as a consultant, as a facilitator, sharing that message, finding your sponsor. And then again, I’ll use the phrase kind of being a marketer, but then making sure that at every opportunity you are sharing success of some of the programs that you’re doing. I spend every single meeting, I’ve been doing this at Growmark now for seven years, every single meeting with executives, I share some success story, whether it’s a stat, it’s a quote, it’s a survey data. I share the wins that we’re having and the impact that it’s having on the organization and it’s my role as the head of training to be able to share that message consistently. But it’s really, really important to have that data and it’s also really, really important to find that sponsor.

Dana Baker:

That’s a great point. I would say just to add on to that or second that is that to make sure that the work that you’re doing isn’t just in your own silo of learning. It’s very easy to say, “Okay, we’re HR, we’re going to do only HR stuff, we only talk to HR people and we’re going to roll it out and it’s going to be beautiful.” That never happens, if you just do what you want because you want to do it. You have to work with a business to make sure you’re meeting their needs. And I like to think of my team as an enabler and it’s in a good way of course, that we help enable you to get what your business needs to do to transform into a learning format so that you can make that happen. So, how can we take your business goals, your business objectives, and translate that into learning where folks are coming to us and saying, “Hey, you guys have the expertise in curation, you have the [expertise needed to deliver learning in house] but we have the subject matter experts, so how can we kind of partner with you to make sure that we get the training developed in a way that is most applicable to that audience, but also is going to meet the business objectives of that organization?” They’re going to push a lot harder for something that they built or it was their idea. And, if it’s something that is going to help truly transform their organization, they’re going to push for it a lot more than we ever would or whatever need to. I don’t see my role as one to market in the business for training. I see that as the role in the business to do that work. So it’s really the buy-in for them to get help in a way that has a better user experience. I think anybody’s capable of putting together some sort of loosely put together training to train somebody on something. But is it going to be good? Is it going to be a great user experience? That’s the part where my extended team comes in. We have a design team that’s also a part of our learning space. And so how do we help you design something that will actually meet your learners where they need to be met, but also is engaging and helps get the material across in a way that folks do retain it? And that’s where I think the true kind of distinguishing between just anybody who’s trying to teach something and a true kind of learning and development organization is the ability to have that consultation to take what they want as far as the goals and objectives into actual training that can deliver those objectives and goals. And that’s the part where you definitely have to have the skills and expertise to do that. Not everybody has that ability to translate training in that way. And so that’s why we have our central learning teams at Cisco and our learning teams within the business, and we partner together on efforts that are large and transformational like this, so that it’s all about the users and the user experience and we don’t create something that is going to end up with a bunch of support cases or something like that. I mean, we really need to focus on making the learning something that is desirable for folks, otherwise they will not want to go through it and take the time out of their day jobs to go through. The training

Sarah Gallo:

Definitely, it has to be actionable and something that learners want to engage with. While we’re talking about the business value of continuous learning, I’m interested to hear also on that more broader level of how learning across the employee lifecycle can really help organizations stay competitive in today’s market, which we kind of mentioned is evolving faster than ever before. What does that look like?

Dana Baker:

Folks don’t want to go to a place that’s going to be stagnant. They don’t want to go to a place that the technology is outdated. They don’t want to move to a company that isn’t trying to have self-improvement and continuous growth in the future. And the easiest way to incite growth in an organization is to challenge someone’s current status quo with the way that they’re working what they’re doing. And so you can do that and several different ways by trying to challenge technology to try to challenge innovation type practices to try to change the way somebody even thinks about the way that they work, like the move to Agile that was popular several years ago, for example. So I think it’s making sure that folks outside of the company know that your company values learning. And when you are retaining the talent that people are staying at your organization because they can get that continuous improvement that they maybe had to fight for at another organization or wasn’t as easily accessible in the hands of the learner. I’ve been at organizations where it’s harder to get your hands on learning. And then there’re organizations like Cisco where the world is your oyster. You can learn kind of anything you want. And when it comes to cost, that’s kind of where the distinguishing factor comes in as the amount of type learning that you can get. So the role is your oyster in the sense of, okay, you need to learn about leadership. Well, there’re free offerings for leadership, there’s cost offerings for leadership. There’re different stages of training for that one particular skill that somebody may want to go into. And so trying to make sure folks know that they have all of those options available to them is half the battle. Some of the times, is just making sure people know where and how to get the content that they want to get so that they can advance their career and stay at the company longer.

Andy Schuster:

This is a question that has fascinated me and kind of keeps me up at night as I think about how do we help the organization stay competitive? So we’re in an uber competitive environment and the future of work and the workforce of the future are utterly fascinating in terms of the pace of change and what’s going to be necessary. And so as you think about training and employee life cycle, for me it’s one of those things that for our organization to stay competitive, I have to be able to bring in not only the right training delivered in the right way in different modalities, but I also have to introduce different ideas and concepts and certifications. And I’ve got to look at the talent inside the organization. I have to consider if there’s, in terms of a talent review process, is an up skilling need a need that we have in the organization as we look at succession, are there folks that maybe have different competency skills and traits that could be used in other places. So the learning across employee lifecycle is so critical to keeping the organization competitive. It’s really what keeps us on our toes. And it’s just been a really neat paradigm to watch shift, especially since the pandemic as learning has really done, in my opinion, a nice job keeping up to pace with how fast things are changing in the competitive landscape. And I think we’ve done a really good job with that. And I would argue that the pandemic, if the organizations were prepared for that or were able to pivot quickly, the pandemic really allowed us to show some of the strengths that we have in the learning department and how learning can be just more than in person learning and all the different modalities and options that individuals have. But staying competitive in the future of work in the workforce of the future, we just have to make sure we have the right content and that’s consumable when the employees want it.

Sarah Gallo:

Well Andy and Dana, before we wrap up, are there any final takeaways that you’d like to leave our listeners with?

Andy Schuster:

In our organization, a couple things as a learning department, learning leader, a learning employee, that are fundamental. The first is certainly know your business. The second would be know your culture up and down. How do you want to work inside that culture and what does that look like? And then the third one is have absolute clarity on who you are as a learning department, a learning division, and understand the value that you can bring to the different departments and divisions and be really, really clear and consistent in how you communicate not only your skills, but the options and opportunities that you can provide to those divisions as you help them achieve their strategic goals.

Dana Baker:

I would say the last kind of takeaway is make sure that you’re also staying on the latest and greatest as far as learning trends go and ways to engage learners in learning new skills. I mean, skill building is not always just courses and trainings and pathways skill building can happen on the job as well. And recognizing and getting people to know that hey, learning happens all the time. It doesn’t have to happen in a super formal way. There are other ways to keep yourself relevant. How do you build it into your daily practices? Are you being on top of the latest and greatest in your particular area, even from a learning perspective? Are we making sure that we are delivering training in a way that is the latest and greatest, whether it’s technology or approach to learning or the actual tools of delivery for that particular training? Making sure that we as a learning development team is actually doing learning ourselves. That’s always a big challenge. Whenever I talk to people about learning, I try to encourage them to find ways that are natural ways for them to learn. So build it into your routine in the morning or build it into your routine on a weekly or daily basis and find nudges that you can deliver to yourself to remind yourself to do that until it does become a habit for you from a learning perspective. So that’s a big key one for us. The other thing is to make learning social. So try to find a way. I know we talked about social really quickly in earlier part of this podcast episode, but how do you find a way to not necessarily make it social in a social media aspect, which you can do, but more social in the sense of how do you go to a conference, come back and share with your team? How do you go take your master’s degree courses and come back and share what you’ve learned with your team? How do you take maybe something controversial and have a discussion with your team about that particular topic? I think learning can also happen in idea sharing and making sure that the latest and greatest topics are being discussed amongst your team and you take the time to do that amongst your teams. I think that is also just as critical in creating a learning culture as creating the best of the best courses that are out there.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Those are some great takeaways. Well, on that note, I just want to thank you both again for joining us here today. This has been a great conversation. How can our listeners get in touch with you after the episode if they’d like to reach out?

Andy Schuster:

Certainly. Obviously LinkedIn page. I’m under the name Andy Schuster. We have a Twitter feed that we are relatively pretty active on, called @InTheKnowLeader all one word. And certainly folks can reach out [through the] Growmark directory and call right away. I love sharing thoughts and ideas with other professionals, so really appreciate this opportunity and appreciate you having us on this podcast.

Dana Baker:

Yeah, and same with me. My LinkedIn page is probably the best way to stay connected with me from a professional perspective. But I am also definitely willing to have discussions with anybody who’s interested in these topics. I love staying in contact with folks that are also in the learning space to help make sure that idea sharing is also happening across companies, because sometimes we learn the best from each other and can take each other’s ideas and be able to apply it in our own particular organization. So I am also willing to have folks reach out to me on LinkedIn to stay connected.

Sarah Gallo:

To learn more about learning across the employee lifecycle and to view this episode in animation, check out the show notes for today’s episode at trainingindustry.com/trainingindustrypodcast.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

And if you enjoyed this episode, let us know. Leave a review wherever you listen to your podcast. Until next time.

Speaker 1:

If you have feedback about this episode or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us at info@trainingindustry.com or use the contact us page at trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to the Training Industry podcast.

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