Learning Uncut

Lalaine Gedal, the Associate Director of Leader Development in the US for Takeda shares Takeda's intentional approach to supporting their people to adopt a hybrid working model from their consultation on what hybrid working should look like to developing a toolkit to support people to adopt this change and engaging Cindy Huggett to run virtual sessions on leading in a hybrid environment. Cindy, a...

In this episode of Learning Uncut, I speak with Catriona Malcolm (or Cat as she is also known). She is the Enterprise Design Practice Lead at Westpac Group. With a workforce of around 40,000 people across seven business entities whose core service is banking, Cat's role was created four years ago specifically to address the complexity of designing skills development solutions across these seven en...

Welcome to our first episode for 2023. To kick off our podcasting year, Anthea Piening, the Capability and Change business leader for the sales team at Lion Australia shares a story about changes to onboarding at Lion Australia. She discusses how onboarding has been redesigned from a two-day event to a blended 12-week program. She discusses the key drivers and how the shift also reflects a move in...

It's been a huge year for Learning Uncut – both the podcast and the business! The podcast celebrated its 100th episode in May and there have been almost 50,000 downloads in the past 12 months alone. In the final episode for 2022 Michelle is joined by Ravina Bhatia, Director and CLO of Learning Tribe. Together they have been supporting Learning Uncut's clients to develop and implement organisationa...

Listening is a critical skill to increase the impact of Learning and Development professionals. Our guest, Shaheen, shares her personal journey with deep listening and how that has increased her effectiveness in her work. We weave this theme in with the story of Project Oxygen Mask, a mental health campaign conceived after noticing her own mental state and listening to others in the organisation t...

Siva Kulasingam, the Digital Learning Manager at Coles, believes that "data is a beautiful thing." He joins me with Andrew Bloye from ClearXP to discuss how his team is working with xAPI data after implementing a Learning Experience Platform (or LXP) and Learning Record Store (or LRS) several years ago. We discuss how both guests think about the learning technology stack and the case to invest in...

Following the pandemic, the nature of work and the expectations people have of the workplace and employers have shifted significantly.  In this episode of Learning Uncut, I am joined by Hannah Conkey, the Head of Learning and Organisational Development at the Royal Automotive Club of Victoria – RACV for short. Hannah shares how the RACV have reviewed their Employee Value Proposition, updated leade...

Kate Fraser from the Australian Association of Social Workers joins me to discuss a blended learning program for clinical supervisors developed in partnership with Family Safety Victoria. She is joined by Dr Kuva Jacobs from RedPoint Consulting who worked on the design and development of the program. Some interesting design considerations shaped this program, including a high need for psychologica...

Pene Barton, VP People and Remote at Noissue joins me for this episode of Learning Uncut, where we discuss the near-universal challenge of keeping people connected, learning and performing while working remotely. We look at how Noissue has tackled this challenge as they scaled a global workforce. Pene discusses relevant approaches and tips including the development of employee journey maps and int...

The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is Australia's multicultural public broadcasting service across a range of media. Brett Archer, their Capability Development leader, discusses how they have taken a strengths-based approach to leadership development. He has extended this to identify and leverage organisational strengths for learning purposes. If you can make it to Sydney 8-9 November 2022 joi...

Katrina Moss from Shopify updates on the embedding of growth mindset in practices across the organisation, including as a key foundation for learning. One exciting new development in the work of L&D at Shopify is to support the effectiveness of work teams. The organisation is now digital by design, with teams spending very little time physically together. They are being very deliberate in ensuring...

This special edition of Learning Uncut is a sequel to season two of the Learning Uncut Emergent series – Taking Bold Action. In this season the Emerging Stronger Team, Michelle Ockers, Laura Overton and Shannon Tipton explored the strengths that L&D require to take bold action. We incorporated insights from this series into our public 2022 Emerging Stronger masterclass. Emerging Stronger is now an...

Sebastian Tindall from Vitality is a return guest. In episode 66 he spoke about their resource-led learning strategy. He returns to discuss how this strategy has evolved since late 2020, including the introduction of digital adoption platforms and expanded use of metrics to enable and demonstrate business impact. If you are serious about taking a business first mindset and impacting organisational...

Kelly Hopkins joins us from Kathmandu to discuss how his small L&D team has taken big strides to support learning for their workforce of 1,800 people, many of whom are frontline staff in retail outlets. The most important element of their learning strategy is coaching, which they've enabled not only with technology but also with smart analog resources that are easy and effective to use in their re...

In Episode 103 we spoke with Zoe Freeman about the Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency organisational learning strategy, titled 'Becoming a Learning Organisation.' She mentioned that she had worked closely with Claudia Faletolu, Kaitohutohu Mātua, Āheitanga Māori (Māori Strategy Advisor) in the Centre for Learning and Development at Waka Kotahi. Claudia joins us to discuss how Te Ao Māori (Mā...

Becoming A Learning Organisation is the title of the Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency's learning strategy. Their learning strategy is their roadmap to becoming a high-performing learning organisation. Zoe Freeman, the Strategic Advisor in the Centre for Learning and Development, discusses how the strategy was created. Key aspects of their approach include deep engagement across the organis...

In the spirit of reconciliation Learning Uncut acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present. Reconciliation is an important issue and piece of unfinished business in Australia. It is about strengthening relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples a...

Helen Sedcole, the Chief People and Culture officer at Z Energy, discuss how they are approaching leadership and leadership development for a different future. There is no pushing people through standard modules and declaring that they are 'done.' Rather leadership development is seen as continuous process that it is part of everyone's work to take responsibility for and engage within the context...

Today's episode marks the milestone of Learning Uncut's 100th episode. Nigel Paine joins us to mark this special milestone. He has a short conversation with our regular host, Michelle Ockers, about how she finds stories and guests, and puts the podcast together. The first episode came out on the 12th of June 2018. Four years later, we've had 118 guests who have willingly talked about their work in...

Lil Ryan from Anglicare SA and James Stack from Obvious Choice discuss the use of a mobile learning app by frontline workers in the aged care sector. This story is an excellent example for those who are interested in using evidence informed approaches from learning science to improve the effectiveness of learning solutions in their organisation. The app used spaced repetition and retrieval practic...

In the wake of the shift to remote working during the pandemic the need to connect and collaborate effectively was amplified. We continue to explore what this looks like in evolving hybrid working models. At the same time there has been a resurgence of interest in social and collaborative learning. In the 2022 Global Sentiment Survey recently published by Donald H Taylor we saw a global rise in su...

In this episode of Learning Uncut I speak with Peta Pocock about how leadership development has changed at the Australian Bureau of Statistics since the start of the pandemic. The shift to remote work gave their L&D team to the opportunity to innovate. This is an archetypal story of learning innovation during covid times. Host: Michelle Ockers Transcript and related resources:   https://learningun...

Emma Evans, the Oceania Women's Football Manager and Annie Kennedy from Capability Group discuss the Oceania Women's Football Development capacity building program. While this development program preceded the Oceania Women's Football Strategy, it's one of a series of initiatives that is giving women more opportunities in the game and is using football as a tool for social change across eleven Paci...

Jane Calleja discusses how Weber develops the product knowledge and confidence of independent retailers to sell their range of barbecues. When covid limitations and travel restrictions made face-to-face workshops impossible they had to come up with a new approach to provide the critical elements of a product and flavour experience. In a period of skyrocketing demand in the homemaker segment in 202...

Boldness is the willingness, confidence and courage to take risks. The recent Learning Uncut Emergent series explored core strengths that L&D needs to take bold action. In today's solo Elevate episode Michelle Ockers discusses why it's important for L&D to take bold action right now. While gaining credibility and respect are strong internal motivators for many, there is a far greater calling for L...