Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

When it comes to skills, it can feel like they’re changing so fast it’s impossible to develop them before they’re extinct. However, one timeless skill not only remains at the top of nearly every priority list but spans across every role and function. What skill am I talking about? Communication. However, in order to improve a diverse and complicated skill like communication, you have to start by b...

The landscape of #learning and #hrtech continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, and it can sometimes feel impossible to stay current. In the first Learning Tech Talks of 2021 Matthew Daniel , Jeff Lowndes , and I decided to collectively share our predictions and insights into what we’re seeing in the market as well as the growing maturity of organizations around the globe. We discuss everything fr...

Whether it’s curating content from a variety of sources, improving the learning experience through personalization, developing employee skills, or predicting and measuring the impact of the work we do there’s no shortage of opportunity for technology to enhance the way we work together. Historically we’ve patiently, and sometimes impatiently, waited for the LMS to improve its capability stack to m...

Keeping all the assets, resources, and programs organized while analyzing needs, delivering and forecasting what will be needed in the future is a piece of cake, right? And, it’s not as if the events of 2020, distributed workers, and global organizations make things any more difficult. There’s a lot more complexity in managing a successful learning function than people often realize. After all, wh...

Preparing for your first job or transitioning into a new field is overwhelming. Developing the skills you’ll need, understanding the terminology, and being able to tell a compelling story during an interview is a lot for any individual to take on, especially at the pace roles are changing. This overwhelming task has only been made more challenging by the events of 2020. Fortunately, technology is...

Everyone is talking about modifying and developing the skills of the workforce, but so many are struggling to figure out what to do about it. One of the most significant challenges is that each individual is different and brings with them their own unique skills, experiences, and opportunities for growth. While formal training can play a role, research shows us that coaching can dramatically impro...

Developing talent is about more than designing and delivering learning content and experiences. It’s about connecting employee development to their workplace performance and enabling their ongoing career development. And there’s no denying mapping the skills of an individual, measuring those skills, identifying the interaction between employees, and connecting all those dots in order to develop yo...

It’s easy to underestimate the amount of learning content that is created and maintained within an organization. However, when you even begin scratching the surface, you’ll quickly realize the negative impact a lack of visibility into that content can have to your bottom line. And, while streamlining your internal content operations may not have the same dramatic allure as a new learner experience...

We all know travel costs and operational downtime have been significant barriers to the critical support and engagement required by business leaders and employees, and that didn’t just start with COVID19. And, while the desired outcome of functional training is to improve operational efficiency, legacy methods often require a significant loss in that efficiency in order to achieve that outcome. Th...

While the dynamics of working in distributed and virtual teams weren’t new to 2020, the gaps and challenges some teams were already experiencing reached a new high as the entire workforce transitioned almost overnight, vaporizing work as we once knew it. As a result, the demand to develop more than just the individual reached an all-time high as teams struggled to connect and engage with each othe...

Creating video content should be a piece of cake right? After all, everyone has a webcam or cellphone that can be used to record themselves from anywhere. Not quite. If you’ve ever led a user-generated content initiative, you’re familiar with how hard it can be to get people to produce a video with any degree of production quality. Even if they can make the thing, the logistics alone may have you...

Talking about creating a culture of continuous learning, unlocking the potential of your existing talent, and providing employees with an extraordinary experience while improving productivity and reducing costs is one thing. Delivering on it is another. As a result, organizations frequently make the costly mistake of first looking for talent externally because they are unaware of what they can do...

With 63 episodes over 12 months paired with an entire career dedicated to learning, learning technology, and digital transformation, I should have all the answers, right? Spoiler alert. I don’t and won’t pretend I do. However, I have managed to acquire some pearls of wisdom here and there while forming a candid perspective on where things are and where they’re going. On this special 1-year anniver...

Knowledge, content, and expertise don’t distribute itself to the right places. Unfortunately, it’s distributed across the organization, often in silos or buried where people are unable to find it, but technology is helping. Today’s tech is capable of aggregating, curating, and recommending it right where you need it while automating rudimentary tasks to enable the highest degree of performance. In...

The kind of solutions we can create to help employees see, touch and experience is changing dramatically. We’re no longer limited to text, images, and video that’s to augmented and mixed reality. Even better, augmented and mixed reality isn’t just for large organizations with big budgets and teams of technical designers. This technology allows us to take passive content and bring it to life by con...

Regardless of what you call them, competencies are fundamental elements that guide your talent strategy and provide the framework required for managing employee skills. However, managing skills and competencies well takes more than a fancy chart that looks nice on a PowerPoint slide. It requires comprehensive tech capability that allows organizations to create and assess the frameworks while asses...

Knowledge is only as powerful as the individual’s ability to demonstrate or articulate it. Fortunately, video is a great way for individuals to practice synthesizing their knowledge by practicing how they would apply it, getting feedback, and modifying their delivery. However, the logistics behind a solid video workflow is often more complicated than many L&D organizations or learning tech too...

An LXP is nothing more than a fancy front end for an LMS, right? Not quite! Seamless user experience and central interface for employee learning are important features when considering a learning experience platform, but you can’t just stop there. For one, an LXP needs to also consider the social connection between employees whether it’s helping shape what content is relevant to a learner or enabl...

Making the jump from in-person to virtual events is about a lot more than copying and pasting your content into a new environment. To do it well, we need to think beyond delivering content to delivering experiences. It requires rethinking the content, architecting an experience, and measuring whether the resources invested in the design and time spent by the participants actually delivered the des...

Neglecting or poorly managing the front-end analysis of the L&D supply chain has consequences for everyone involved. It’s here where decisions are made to fill gaps or solve problems that don’t exist. This leaves everyone working on things that don’t really matter. Add to that, inefficiencies and poor management in this area have dire downstream consequences. It doesn’t get any easier when you...

Technology being aware of your environment and augmenting the it with digital information, guidance, and support. Experts guiding you through new and challenging tasks from anywhere in the world in real-time. It may sound like something from a science fiction film, but it’s actually a powerful capability being used by organizations around the world to dramatically improve performance by enabling t...

The way people communicate or fail to communicate may be one of the biggest inhibitors to the success of your organization. But, what can you do about it? One of the most impactful ways shape and develop human skills is through coaching. It develops the confidence and skills required for an individual to effectively to share their ideas and develop their own teams. One of the biggest challenges wi...

When many people hear the word elearning, it doesn’t invoke a positive response. It's often associated with poorly designed content that forces people through a painful user experience. While there are reasons why people don’t typically see it in a positive light, it doesn't mean the tool and delivery mechanism is completely ineffective. In this episode I’m talking with Alexander Salas from eLearn...

When you hear Artificial Intelligence, what’s the first application that comes to mind? Perhaps robots or a mischievous computer program comes to mind. How about workforce development or employee experience? The reality is, AI isn’t just for IT or business functions. It’s something every talent and HR leader should be intimately familiar with as a powerful tool for transforming our work and our wo...

One of the top challenges employees face when it comes to continuous learning is the limited time they have. This is often because corporate learning is viewed as a separate activity from their daily work. Add to that, the technology we’ve historically relied on to support continous learning has further reinforced this belief. The reality is, when people are forced to go outside of where they are...