Innovation
Innovation
4 fast-moving trends on the 2023 LearnGeek Innovation Cycle.
Are you ready to ride the wave of innovation?
HAHAHAHA! I’m sorry. I just started doing one-take narrations of my ECOSYSTEM posts and even I can’t keep a straight face while reading that out loud. So thanks for obliging my humor.
Thought leadership moves a lot faster than workplace reality. With so much noise in the marketplace, it can be hard to figure out if you’re keeping up with the latest trends or falling behind your peers.
The LearnGeek Innovation Cycle helps L&D pros benchmark their practices against the overall progress of the profession. Every year, I place the 22 most-discussed concepts of the moment along a maturity curve inspired by the well-known Gartner Hype Cycle.
L&D innovation often happens within siloes. We experiment within our own organization without a view into what is/not working elsewhere. We discuss one concept without considering how it does/not impact another. We get distracted by hype from marketing messages and white papers and conference sessions. The Innovation Cycle breaks through the noise with a one-page snapshot of how things are evolving in real life.
Here’s the newly-updated version for January 2023.
I break down all 22 topics and their placements on the cycle at LearnGeek.co/innovation, but there are four concepts that really stood out as I put together this year’s cycle.
Skills | Reality is Coming
This has been THE TOPIC in HR and L&D for a few years, and it’s not slowing down. There’s an entire tech category dedicated to tracking skills. Most HCM and LMS platforms have introduced skills features. Some organizations are years into their skills implementations while others are still figuring out exactly what this concept means to them. It all makes sense on paper, but adopting skills as the foundation of your talent strategy is a challenging, high-stakes transformation. As budgets tighten, we’ll begin to see how far organizations are willing to take their investments in skills when it comes to reimagining their workforce management practices.
Artificial Intelligence | The Hype Accelerates
This is less a jump in technology and more a leap in awareness. AI has been embedded within learning tech for years - automated translations, content recommendations, NLP search, content generation. Even PowerPoint uses AI to caption presentations and suggest design improvements. Now, thanks to the popularity of ChatGPT, people are getting a clearer picture of the short-term potential for AI at work, including within L&D. AI is also an important part of the skills conversation because its data capabilities are essential for identifying and closing capability gaps at an enterprise scale. AI will likely over-promise and under-deliver this year. The tech will continue to advance, and organizations will find small-but-meaningful ways to leverage it to solve important problems.
Integrated EX | A New Paradigm Emerges
I’m dubbing 2023 “The Year of EX.” It’s time for organizations to figure out what they want to be when it comes to the employee experiences. Are they going to lean into remote work? Are they restarting their office cultures? How will economic uncertainty inform EX investments, including learning and development? For decades, learning has lived within the HR silo. Now, thanks to the emergence of EX platforms like Microsoft Teams, L&D is inching closer to the workflow alongside other critical EX components like communication, recognition, wellness and engagement. I added this concept to the cycle for this year because it’s time to pose an important question: is learning a product that stands on its own or a feature of the modern workplace that must be integrated within everyday work processes and systems? Given the title of this newsletter, you know where I stand.
Capability Academies | The Corporate University Gets Reimagined
What do you do when you can’t find people with the skills you need to grow your business? You build those skills yourself! That’s where capability academies, the second new entrant on this year’s cycle, come in. Organizations with massive talent needs are done waiting for schools and competitors to solve their critical talent problems. They’re shifting their centralized L&D resources away from legacy programs and towards tactical skill building. There’s a new category of tech emerging to support this in-depth development. Companies are partnering with education providers to shape their own certification programs. Some of the biggest thought leaders in the industry are advocating for this approach. This year, we’ll start to see where this concept fits within a modern learning ecosystem.
What do you think about the 2023 LearnGeek Innovation Cycle?
How do your current practices compare to my placement of concepts along the cycle?
Which concepts would you like me to explore in more depth?
Let me know in the comments.
One thing this week: AI for birthday cards!
I sign LOTS of digital cards - birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, children, pets. I’m on a small hybrid team. I can only imagine what’s happening in large, distributed organizations nowadays. Instead of spending time trying to come up with clever messages or defaulting to the same generic stuff everyone else says, I hired AI to do the work.
Feed ChatGPT prompts with non-identifiable information related to the card recipient. Voila!
It saves time. It tests your AI skills. It’s a conversation starter with teammates. It’s a new, fun way to approach a workplace tradition - as long as you do a good job showing your appreciation with unique AI prompts.
PS - Include a “written by AI” disclaimer with your card message so people figure out what you’re doing. :-)
Coming up: ITK is back!
Tune in for the Season 2 premiere of In The Know this Wednesday (01/18) at 1130am ET. Jenifer Calcamuggi, Director of Learning and Talent Development at Shake Shack, will join me on LinkedIn Live to discuss the importance of resilience, wellbeing and learning in today’s workplace. Get the details and sign up on LinkedIn. Subscribe to get show updates and binge watch the entire ITK catalog at axonify.com/itk.
Next week, I’ll tell you the story about the time I got into a shouting match with my boss about the color blue.
Be well. JD
Great article, JD. It's so relevant to the work we're driving in today's L&D realm. I'd love to hear more about Capability Academies. It's such an interesting concept and the perfect platform to really drive learning in the flow of work. One of the challenges I have personally experienced when working on academies, is that many work cultures are still not made ready for building a true learning ecosystem. Curating self-guided content, tracking participation and engagement is the easy part, but bringing the business along to change how they work in order to effectively weave in learning experiences is, in my opinion, one of the biggest challenges.