Skills Agenda and Just Another Tuesday (HAPPY HOUR)

10:36PM Jan 25, 2024

Speakers:

Shannon Tipton

Myra

Brent

JD Dillon

Josh (Producer)

Mike Taylor

Keywords:

l&d

learning

ai

people

tools

industry

skills

linkedin

training

systems

list

organization

share

talking

jds

myra

gpt

connect

work

good

Hi there, everyone. I'm Shannon Tipton owner of learning rebels and I am here alongside branch linker where today on lnd happy hour, we're going to be gathering our favorite beverages and talking about what we should have done in 2023. Versus what we're gonna do in 2024. alongside other topics that have both of us going

Yes, with a nice warm hug cozy up next to whatever you need, grab a hot tea, grab a hot coffee, grab anything you need to drink and join us for the next little while.

Yeah, for the next learning while learning Wow, wow.

Now before we get into the comparison of what we should have done in 2023, versus what we could be doing in 2024, we do have some guest clips from JD Dylan Myro. Roll Dan and Mike Taylor. But first, I want to talk about what I have noticed happening on LinkedIn throughout the year of 2023. Which is all of this crazy talk about the skills agenda.

But what is the skills agenda? Can we clarify that for me, because I'm gonna have a hard time talking about it until we know what the skills agenda is?

I think that's a good point. Because the skills agenda what what is the skills agenda, everybody's talking about it in a completely different way, and has completely different meanings? My my whole thing about the skills agenda is why are we even talking about skills as an agenda within workplace learning? Because to me done, it should have always been about the skills agenda? Isn't that what we do? Isn't that what we're supposed to do is improve skills and improve or change behavior? Isn't that what inherently we're supposed to be doing?

I always assumed so but apparently, it's a new agenda. Yeah.

Why is this new? Why are people treating this as a new thing? I mean, what the what the hell were we teaching before? If it wasn't skills? What were we doing? Yeah,

well, okay. So in all seriousness, in truly, in all seriousness, is it because there is this major concern, like we all knew this was coming, but Hello, the outside world of l&d, all of a sudden realized that Oh, shock, the world is changing. Technology is changing rapidly. And nobody seems to know how to use or how to do the things that they do utilizing the new things that keep coming along. And so all of a sudden, somebody somewhere said, Holy buckets, people are lacking skills. And so now we're going to start sending money and putting money aside to to impact the skills deficit, and that is our skills agenda. Am I close? Maybe?

I think so. You know, I like the way that you said that with a skills deficit, because I really think that's what it's all about. Because when I when I ask, what have we been doing in the past, and that's sort of tongue in cheek, because we know what we've been doing in the past, we've been doing knowledge based learning. And we've been doing compliance based learning. That's where a lot of the focus has been. As a matter of fact, I was at a conference where they put up a report that said, what is important for senior leadership? What was important to senior leadership was things like emotional intelligence, being able to collaborate being able to share across the organization, versus what was important to HR slash l&d. The top thing there was compliance. So there was a huge disconnect between those two things. And subsequently, I think when we moved from that position into where we are at now now all of a sudden, l&d is going oh, I guess I guess we should move out of the compliance world, and teaching people or helping people learn how to do the thing, turn the widget, or whatever it is that they need to do. Yeah,

I think that highlights a very hot, hot topic. On the flip side as well, the difference between what we think we do and what businesses need us to be doing or what they want us to be doing or what they think they're paying us to do the output is, there has always been a disconnect between those two things in my mind. And I think that's why a lot of these conversations come up on LinkedIn and people seem to get so confused and it often gets sparked by those who maybe haven't really worked in the corporate space so long. It's something I've been trying to push for a while to is just this reality of Listen, it's in the the job you're doing may not be the job you think you're doing. And maybe you may end up feeling like you're in a completely different industry than the rest of us are. You're having conversations about one industry, but your job is actually in another one.

Well, right. I mean, that's, that's all true. But I'm still confused as to why we are having this continuous conversation about the importance of skills. Why? Why is that happening?

Surveys with CEOs and things like that I've got, I've got nothing to point anybody to on it. But I think there is enough data or enough conversation happening out there are enough people stating that that's what leaders are seeing or identifying the skills gap, right, the skills deficit that they, they what they need their people to be doing across the board, not just their training teams, but just across all things. Basically, people aren't producing the way that executive leadership needs their people to be producing. And then the excuse, or the commentary behind it is they don't have the skills, they aren't enough people or or it's reflected in the data of, they can't find people to do the work they need to get done from a hiring perspective and from recruiters where I'm being asked to go out and hire somebody that can code. But I can't find anybody, right? There's nobody out there qualified, or I need someone that's, you know, familiar with back end, server engineering, and there just aren't enough qualified candidates. And there's just no, there's, there's far too many things that need to be done. And far too few people with the skills to do them. I think that's where this comes from. It

could be PwC, published its 20th annual CEO survey. We've got CEOs everywhere, who are saying that one of the greatest risks facing their business is the availability of key skills within the organization. And to me, that speaks to a blazing failure of l&d and HR to connect to what your CEO wants. So if your CEO needs in his saying here, their biggest risk in their organization are not enough people to do all the skills required to take business forward. And somewhere, l&d got lost in that conversation. I don't know how I don't know why. But now all of a sudden, everybody is talking about it. This should not be a discussion. This should be a Yeah, so it's Tuesday.

Well, let me be the bright light on this whole thing. Right, let's turn it around. Let's find happy about it. Let's go, Aha, this is an opportunity for l&d and us as professionals, when no matter how it happened, we finally got the executive leadership to say, oh, geez, what these people do? Yeah. what people actually do for us is important. Maybe, perhaps we should have funded them better, or perhaps, geez, we're so sorry, for the last 50 years that we've been looking down upon your your poor training souls, here, let us raise you to the, to the height of executive leadership, and maybe they bring in a clo and they've never had a chief learning officer before. All right, if and I agree that important, right. Like it's this, we should see this as a as an opportunity that has been long time coming.

Right. And I do agree with that. And I do think that it's a bright perspective. So maybe you have a brighter aura than I do. No,

but you're absolutely right. It is like just another Tuesday in our world, right? It's okay. You know,

the way the conversation to me should be Yeah, but yes, atds latest annual report said that businesses are investing more in l&d than they have in the past. Yeah. So to me, bright, shiny light. Hopefully, we make good use of those funds. And we don't take those funds and say, oh, you know what we need we need better Ladder Safety draining. Hopefully, that's not what we do with those additional funds. So that being said, is I think it's a great time to lead into the wrap up of 2023 and where we stand in comparison, and to that, I would go to JD Dylan and we have a little bit of a clip from JD telling us not what happened in 2023. But wait he anticipates, could or should happen in 2024. So I'd like to take a moment to listen to that and let the audience listen to that. And then we can share our thoughts. Come back. Come on back. Stay with us. Here's JD Dylan.

Hello, l&d friends. It's JD from learn geek and Axonify. And I'm here to talk about l&d and 2024 in three minutes or less. And right now you're seeing lots of content articles and webinars and white papers, telling you what you need to care about as an l&d Professional next year. And I know this, because you're listening to one of those podcasts right now. But here's the thing. I'm not here to tell you how to do your job. After all, I don't know your life or the problems that you're being asked to solve within your organization. And I'm also not here to tell you that other people are wrong when they attempt to predict the not so distant future of our profession. Although I do find it odd, how often the most important things for next year relate directly to the products and services that people doing the predicting happen to sell. Anyway, there is one thing that I can be certain of after 20 years of doing this whole lnd thing. And it's that next year, l&d will face a mix of predictable and unpredictable challenges. And we'll do it with less time, less budget and less resource than we would have liked. But this isn't a 2024 thing. It's a workplace learning thing. It's a balancing act, we will always face as we try to make a positive impact on the people and organizations we support. In a world of economic uncertainty, technological innovation, and unrelenting change. That means we're going to have to make decisions about where we spend our limited time and resources. We can't chase every trend or attempt to solve every problem. That's why I believe l&d professionals in every industry, every segment, every line of business, need to focus on two things. Next year. Two words actually should be at the very top of our priority list. And those two words are not artificial, or intelligence. The first word is systems. The only way we can provide equitable support to our entire workforce is to move beyond our traditional programmatic approach to learning and development, one that relies on l&d to be the provider of workplace knowledge and skill. Instead, we have to adopt a systems approach that scales our capability, curates insights from across the organization leverages data to personalize those experiences, and connects the people who know with the people who need and yes, AI is gonna play a huge role in fostering an always on system of learning within our organizations. The second word is managers, frontline managers are the most important people in workplace learning because they have an oversized impact on the everyday working experience for the people we support. Unfortunately, half of these managers are burned out right now. And 82% have been promoted with very little to no training. And they've seen their workloads increase by over 50% since 2020. So if we want to make learning and development, a continuous embedded part of the work experience for everyone, we need managers to support this transformation. But first, we need to give them permission to lead by making sure they have the tools, the skills and the support needed to do their jobs effectively every day. So that's what I hope to see in l&d in 2024, a shift from programs to systems and a renewed focus on enabling frontline managers that goes well beyond our traditional approach to leadership development. So that's enough for me. So let's connect on LinkedIn. And you can always find me online at learn geek.co Thank you for everything you do have a great holiday, and I'll see you out there in 2024.

It wasn't three minutes or less. I'm just gonna say

hey, he tried he gave it a good

tried, he tried. But I want to thank JD JD Dylan, thank you for your thoughts and supplying those thoughts to us here. And he's not wrong. He's not wrong at all. What we have done in the past is that we have focused on the road, and not necessarily how we're going to get down the road, if that makes any sense. We've got this path, right, we've got this l&d path, and we know where we want to go with it. But we don't really think about how we're going to make that happen, what systems we need in order to make that happen. So we don't think about how do how do the business goals connect to the learning goals? How do we connect our maybe our learning management system with our HR is systems? How do we make sure that We've activated managers to communicate the importance of what we're doing. You know, we haven't thought about all of those cogs that need to work with each other, in order for us to reach the successes that we're hoping to reach,

it's a tough way to go. I think a lot of that. I mean, being somebody that's been around for a few decades in this industry and watched it, I think we were all enamored with the massive amount of technology change. And we were always just chasing the technology. And I kind of equate that to the road part of what you're talking about, right? We're very concerned about going from, you know, dirt roads, to asphalt roads, to rubberized roads to now high tech roads that generate energy, you know, are we we just spent so much time going from computer based training, to web based training, to e learning to mobile learning to now hybrid learning and all of the learnings that all the tech and now all the tech is here, there is no more and you know, maybe AI, whatever, it's all just getting better, there really is no more new mediums that we can do differently. So now, we're trying to figure out how right what are the systems you need to put into place? And how do we get our industry trained up to utilize all of this tech? And how do we walk across these roads to get to that final destination that we need to get to? You know, and I think that's where our struggle is, at this point as an industry as a whole. And where we lacked credibility for so long, I think. So yeah. That's where those systems don't need to come into play where, you know, what are all the systems that we need? How much budget money do we need, like, it's the business acumen. Now that's going to separate the people who succeed in our industry from the people who don't if you're, if you're in an l&d organization, or a training organization, or whatever, and you don't know how all of the things that you do actually connect to the business and connect to the bottom line, you're going to struggle, that's something that has to be and if you're not into tech, and you're not sure how you're going to do all this digital stuff, that's going to be an issue too. So level yourself up,

level up, baby, the rides gonna get bumpy. But you're right, is it is it's kicking the can. That's what we have done in the past. You know, we've experimented with these different, like you said, learnings, and we've tried to claim them as the answer, because remember, e learning was going to be the answer, you know, to all of our learning problems. No, it

was computer based training back in the day that

was oh, I remember that. I used to have that. Did you used to get that binder of CDs. So you had a subscription and you would get the CD every month not unlike Netflix for learning, I guess as you got that CD, and I used to have this big binder. And we used to have a subscription where you got five CDs and you gave those CDs like they were a precious commodity. They were checked out or whatever. Oh, yeah. You know, because they were Frick, they were 1000 bucks. I mean, they were really expensive. And you would hand those CDs out and hope you got them back. But anyway, I digress. But for those people who are interested in systems, you know, JDS book lnd ecosystems? Yep. That's not probably not the right title. Well, let's see, he wrote the book about learning ecosystems. And that's a book that everybody should pick up. And he also mentioned, it's not going to be about artificial intelligence. I agree with that as well. I think it's handy. It can certainly help us do our jobs quicker, better, faster. But it's all about the wisdom behind it.

It's an excellent segue of taking us into our reflecting on are connecting the 23 to 24. And looking at what came before so at the beginning of 2023. What were those trends that we were all saying we're going to be? Well, somebody said, said an article, but it's pretty it's pretty closely. You know, this one's from Adobe that you sent the link to me on and that we were going to talk about was, what was everybody thinking about at the beginning of last year, and I think we could spend hours on each one of these topics, I'm pretty sure. But the very first thing that they ask us to ponder is the importance of digital first learning strategy of a digital first learning strategy. And I just kind of laughed when I read that one. Right, me

too. Again, it's Tuesday. Yeah, yes. Not a Tuesday in 2004, either. Yes. Right.

Yeah, exactly. It really is this something that needs to be a trend. And okay, so yes, we it's easy for us because we're in we're knee deep in this stuff. When we talk about all the time, and we live it, but I always have to go step back. And remember that 85 90% of our industry, that are people that don't live and breathe this stuff every day. And for them, maybe this is the first time they've looked at their job as holy crap, I need to be more digital in all of the things that I do. So

you're right. There are a lot of organizations out there that just haven't grasped. Not that they don't know, I'm gonna take that back. It's not that they haven't grasped it. They know the importance of it, but they're not willing to one invest in what it takes. Or or that they are, well, this too shall pass I'll stick with my classroom, or what have you, you know, and that's not necessarily coming from l&d. It's coming from the people who control the budget. Right? Well,

right. So the the change is hard. Yeah, right. It's making that change. Like, you can sit there and be one of those folks and say, Oh, wow, I heard about this fascinating thing called mobile learning or micro learning. But now they are going to have to go back to their office, they're going to have to build a case for it, they're going to have to convince somebody, they're going to have to wait for a round of budgetary elements to buy a new tool that's actually going to do it. If they can't figure out how to do it using the existing tools they have that then becomes sort of is it really worth my time and energy? It really, you know, everybody's happy with my course right now, you know, do we really need you know, are we really going to get any benefit from it and, you know, then then all of the confidence issues creep in, and there's all the corporate politics to push all that kind of stuff. And that's the main reason why a lot of what should be old news is not the because there's so much more to business acumen than just knowing and understanding the ecosystem around you being the type of person that's able to push and get things done, get things purchased, get things budgeted is an exceptionally unique skill set that does not often land in the l&d department.

No, and it's not on this list either. So lists like these. So the this article from Adobe, the top 10 learning and development trends for 2023. For those of you who look, we'll be sure to put it in the show notes for you. Just to quickly run down the list. Number One On The List is digital first learning strategy, developing soft skills, the importance of virtual reality and training. I don't know about that one. But okay. Leveraging AI and automation for personalized learning, the rise the rise of micro learning, I've been in micro learning since 2018. Why is this the rise? That aside, emphasis on equity inclusion in training programs. Strategies for successful blended learning approaches, the importance of purposeful collaboration for effective team building, investing in data collection and Analytics to measure ROI and training effectiveness and preparing the workforce to handle future challenges and understanding the impact of positive psychology on l&d initiatives. That's a list is that

the skills gap right there at the end? Take us back to an original conversation but preparing the workforce. Don't we do that already? today?

I think that's gonna be my new. That's gonna be my new catchphrase, isn't it Tuesday? Hey, that's the title of the show. That's the title of this the new talent show in it Tuesday. Another another Tuesday in l&d Another Tuesday and l&d lists like these are great. Let me start there lists like these are great. It's for the wrong audience. Yeah, all of the l&d people who take pride in what they do, who are of curious nature, those who participate in their communities, etc. This is just another Tuesday. This list needs to go to senior leadership within organizations. That's where this list needs to go. Because a lot of them still, as you just said, you know, they're concentrating on their classrooms or they're not giving resources or budget, etc, etc. Yet, they want things to change. Things don't change without investment. Yeah. So the list like these, the audience should not be lnd. The audience for this list is senior leadership.

Yeah, this is the kind of thing that though as a training professional folks out there should be sending to their managers should be sharing with their internal organizations and saying, Listen, this is the industry that we're in this is what our department is and this is this is what the greater industry is doing and what they are seeing in the coming years and what not. You hit on the What about AI going through here? Should we hear from Myra, we might need to hear from my right. Yeah,

so we have my role, Dan, who I consider to be one of the few people in l&d who really understands how AI can can help us and do the things we need to do. Certainly there are others, but my arrows at the top of my list, and if you aren't following Myra, you need to and especially if you're on Tik Tok, you need to follow Myra on tick tock so that's my arrow, roll down R O L da n. And we're going to hear a little bit from her as to what her thoughts are for 2024 when it comes to AI.

Hi, I'm Myra Rodin. I'm a technologist specializing in artificial intelligence. She had asked me for my top five AI tools of 2023. Here's my list. The first one is notion. notion is a notetaking app that has integrated AI. It is a paid service, but well worth it because it's cost effective. It allows you to take notes, organize your notes, you can create knowledge bases in it, you can create collaborative workspaces that you can share with your team and more. My second app would have to be notebook LM by Google, I gained access to notebook LM in beta. And it is now as of December 13, available to everyone. Notebook LM allows you to upload data sources, and then query those data sources. You can create a knowledge base with it, you can create blog posts from it, you can create other content. And you can also take notes in notebook LM, the cool thing about it is that it's available in research mode right now, which means it's available for free use. My third application is Fathom AI. And this is a zoom plugin. What it does is it joins your Zoom meeting, and it records the audio of your Zoom meeting and then transcribes it and creates action items that you can then share with the attendees have your resume so you don't have to worry about taking note you can really focus on your meeting. My fourth app is blocks. This was shared with me by the blocks team on LinkedIn. And once I started using it, I got kind of addicted to it. What it does is it allows you to record anything that has audio in it. So it can be a meeting, it can be a phone call, it could be a movie, it could be an audio book, it could be anything. And what it does is it will then summarize the recording and then provide you with a transcript, full transcript, and a summary version along with action items that you can then share similar to fathom but it works with any type of audio. And then my fifth is going to be a suite of tools. So large language models. So some of my favorite are barred by Google Cloud by anthropic and chat GPT. By open AI, which everyone is familiar with, they all do the same things, yet, they have different capabilities and different price points. Right now you can use Google Bard at no cost. Both Claude and open aI have free versions and paid versions. And the underlying large language models on which they're based are evolving, which is pretty cool to see. Open AI has an API that you can use to create other tools. Bard also has a way to connect data sources to it so you can further manipulate it. So that's it. Those are my top five tools. I hope that you find these useful. Go ahead and explore and I would love to hear your commentary on LinkedIn Be sure to tag me

always good stuff from

Mayra always good stuff from myRA. And I think what she's talking about here, I love the variety of tools that she's sharing because it fits right into JDS statement about the same thing. That's why we're doing this together Brett. Because it fits right into systems. Right? So here are the different AI tools that you can use to complete the what's the word I'm looking for if to complete that circle, right, the circle of AI life

ecosystem. Yeah, the whole thing. Yeah, for those people that are listening, you may have heard of Chet GPT you may have a couple other ones. But getting connected with folks like Myra and learning about all of the other ones. There are literally hundreds of new tools out there that all focus on utilizing AI to make one particular part of your digital life easier. And I think if anybody gets it just the tiniest little thing that they will do differently in 2024 It's to investigate all of the different ones don't just stay hung up on Chet GPT and all of the become a great As you know, prompt writer and chat, GPT, and all the things you can do with chat GPT, and like everything is always chat GPT or open AI, but there are so many new tools, probably, most of the tools that you're probably all using right now are implementing some sort of AI, if they haven't already, on a very basic level, it will just get better and better and better with every passing upgrade of the software that you use. So there will always be this, this AI being built into the work that you do, but take advantage of it and play with it, but expand your horizons beyond Chet GPT, please, if I could implore folks to do one thing, you know, there's, there's way more out there, there are a lot, it doesn't hurt for you to learn it. If you'd like to geek out on that stuff. That's great. It just makes you a more valuable employee to learn anything new, especially that, but I wouldn't tell people to stress out about it.

No, not right now. I think having the awareness all you need right now beneficial, you know, so the awareness of AI ethics,

you know, and play with it a little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

Because you're not, you're not going to break it, you're not going to break it, you know, so go ahead and give it a shot. So with that, I agree. So I see. So this is a list from you know, what we should be doing, or what we should have been doing in 2023. And this is where, you know, these sorts of lists converge, right? Because I'm not seeing any difference. This list could have been written today. For 2024, and it was still be accurate. So it's a regurgitation of what l&d should or should not be thinking about. I'd like to see how many you could find that have, like compare it to one that was written like four days ago. Now they all say the same thing. I mean, I brought one up, and there was one that was that JD actually wrote for hr.com. And I'll put it in the show notes as well. He said he ran 30 articles, predicting the trends for 2023 fed them into chat GPT probably under the Data Analysis API of it. And what we were supposed to focus on for 12 months, he came up with a list of 24 things. So there are 24 themes that l&d was supposed to focus on in 2023. And I would bet that your average l&d person was probably only able to focus on to that list. Absolutely. What he's saying today rolled over 2023 rolls over to 2024. Sounds like

most of the good l&d People have evergreen thoughts that don't apply to the, you know, only the next four months from now. I think they

are totally evergreen thoughts. And I think that's great. Because really, the ones that keep bubbling up to the top are clearly the ones that are the priority things that we should be working on. So the VR, the one that they mentioned about VR, I still don't think the industry is ready for VR. I think the baby step that the industry needs to take in 2024 is a more highly concentrated view of augmented reality, not virtual reality.

Well, yeah, I'll push back on you a little bit there. And I just think all of the businesses and the industries that can really gain value from virtual reality have done so medical,

yeah, that's a yes. It's just it's one

of those things where it's it virtual reality has a fantastic use case as a training vehicle for a lot of different things free, but everybody just has to understand that it's expensive. You just build even if you find a company that says we make it, you know, 10% cheaper than the what it used to be five years ago, that's still a lot more than what it costs you to throw together a PowerPoint and now hold a class on the shop floor teaching somebody how to do something, right. I mean, it's still more expensive than what an alternative might be. So you have to ask yourself, what is the value? Is the risk of somebody screwing up so bad that it's worth spending the money to build a very expensive simulator? Pilots? Yeah, the hit right. Yeah, the other piece is, is gaining access to a real world situation. So difficult and so much more expensive, right? That building it in a virtual space is a lot cheaper, and allows people to practice a bunch of different scenarios over and over again, right. That's another good way to do it.

Are you saying we don't need virtual Ladder Safety training? We

do not need virtual ladder training safety. We do not. But yeah, I get your point. I totally get your point. And this is why I say augmented reality can be your friend. That's the that's the baby step because you can do so much with augmented reality for 10% of what you might pay for a virtual reality experience, but it has its place It's about understanding what you want to use it for. And is it worth it? Right? Are you really going to make a difference? And that's where you really need to think about these things, you know, but I, but that's true for any of the tools, any of the technology, any of the tools, is it? Do you need it? Is it going to help your people be smarter, better faster than they were yesterday? Yep. To me, that's the litmus test,

maybe one of our follow up shows needs to be on talking about that, having that business acumen to make that happen? And how do you sell it? And how do you build the business case for those new technologies and whatnot?

I agree, I think so I see that coming in the future. So people pay attention. Now, the last thing, and I'll go back to JD, it's a great thing that we lead off with him is the systems part. So the systems part, which are all the different components to make the thing work? Now part of making the thing work is getting the resources to help you make the thing work. And I have always been a proponent of resources over courses, you know, so if we can give people information to help them do the thing better than do that, rather than to you know, bring them together in an elearning course, or a classroom training? If that is the use case that is going to work for you. So how do we curate that stuff? How do we find it? How do we make it work for us? And for that? We have some thoughts from Mike Taylor, the king of curation,

where they're learning rebels? Are you feeling overwhelmed by the content de luz? Are you drowning in a sea of newsletters? Well, you're in luck, I've got some tools for you that can help you become a content curation ninja. The first thing every good curator has to have is a way to take control of all the information that's coming at you. The best way that I found to do this is with an RSS reader, which you'll sometimes hear called an aggregator. Imagine this. Instead of chasing emails and hopping around between websites, you've got a single stream of knowledge that is flowing to you. That's the power of an RSS reader. Like my personal favorite Feedly. It's like a news aggregator on steroids. That lets you control the flow of information from all your favorite sources. So say goodbye to inbox overload, and hello to information enlightenment. But you can't just consume that you've also got to capture those gems right. Feedly has a boards feature for saving the best things in your feeds for later. Other good options include your favorite note taking tools like OneNote, Evernote, or any of the many other options that are out there. If you're like me, and you like things visual, walling app and x tiles, both offer a stunning way to organize and present your curated treasures. Imagine a beautiful wall of knowledge just waiting to be explored. And finally, here's the secret sauce, sharing your creative content with the world. But nobody has time for constant posting, right? That's where buffer comes in. It's your social media scheduling superhero. That's your content scheduled across platforms and watch your audience engage. Will you sit back and enjoy a nice warm, delicious latte. So there you have it. With these tools in your arsenal, you'll be a curating content, like a pro, saving time maximizing learning, and conquering content chaos with ease.

I love Mike he's he's so wonderful. So think about using a tool like Feedly to gather all of the industry knowledge if you work in a bank. So you can gather all of the industry knowledge about banking regulations, laws that are coming out, etc, etc. So you can gather all of that stuff out and then use a tool to further disseminate that, to share it, you know, with others within your organization, how valuable would that be? I think that's all part of the systems, right?

It's part of your own personal learning. When I when I think about content curation, there's two pieces of that from a professional perspective. One it is around keeping ourselves educated and understanding the technology well enough to be able to guess please stay up to date with everything that's going on, because it's hard to just jump into LinkedIn or whatever and scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, and you can kill you know, five hours find, you know, find a dozen or two dozen people that you know, post frequently get an RSS feed reader and just get their posts or figure out a way to just aggregate those feeds that you want. The other piece is you know if there's a way to be able to aggregate content inside your company if you work in a large organization, a lot of companies have big enterprise social media. platform's of one form or another that do have RSS feeds built into it. And you can find certain departments, certain divisions, certain heads of divisions, certain presidents, VPS, whatever. And every once in a while they post things right, you can get all of that stuff. So if you can feed all of the things that are most important to you, as a training professional within your organization, that's another way that you can become very, very valuable inside your organization, when you start to learn quickly, where the needs are. And if you can spot a training need, before they even know they have a problem, you can start solving problems ahead of the curve,

or even identified the business need, quote, unquote, business need. Yeah, I put that in. Because here's something I used to say all the time is that everybody's got that hidden bullet point in their job description. And that hidden bullet point in their job description is to make the boss look good. Yep. So if you had an aggregator like Feedly, that collected articles, videos, etc, that were important to the boss, or important to senior leadership, and you fed those pieces of information to them, you become more valuable, right? So you're kind of killing two birds with one stone there, you're making them look good, adding value to their position, and you're making yourself look good and adding value to your position. So it's a win win for everybody to really enhance your curation skills,

it goes back to that sense of your new job, your your corporate job, if you're new to the corporate world is making your boss look good understanding and knowing what it is that they are held accountable to, right, that boss hired you, and has you there to help them achieve the goals that are on his or her list, not yours. So if you just because you're an instructional designer, and you got a PhD or an Emmy D or you just got your certificate, and you're a genius at all the processes of instructional design, yeah, those are going to help you. But if what your boss really needs is something else, I'd encourage you to focus on that.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's where we can put a bow on this. So when it comes to 2024, I think some of the key things that we can continue to focus on are the ones that we've just discussed, JDS, advice about learning ecosystems, mires advice about weaving technology, artificial intelligence, etc, to help you with those ecosystems. And Mike's advice, to help you curate resources for the people around you to help them be smarter, better, faster than they were yesterday. And if you concentrated on those three areas, it will naturally take care of some of these other big fat lists that you see out there. That's a you got to do these 23 things in order to be a great, l&d professional, but just focus on those three, and I think we can do that concur. 100%. But we would be remiss if we didn't mention on this episode, the recent passing of Ray menace, yes.

What a tragedy, a lot of love and hugs to the people out there, who are, you know, his family members and friends and close colleagues that knew him really, really well, heartbreaking, such

a shock to hear that. And training Magazine did publish a tribute to him. I'll just, I'll just take this from a personal level. As far as Ray is concerned, on my phone, I have, you know, the Notes app. And within my notes app, I have different notes labeled with different people. And Ray was one of those notes, because whenever I talked to him, he always gave me a good idea. You know, he always gave me a good idea for, you know, a blog post or something that I should be doing. He you know, he encouraged me to continue on the micro learning path. He also kept wanting me to go in a direction of like, triptans. What do you call it triptans tools? He was like, he knew how much I like to experiment with different tools. He was like you should do a segment on your website or whatever that's called tips and tools and you should do that. And I'm like, I that's okay. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I couldn't wrap my mind around actually making that happen. But he kept you know, he kept wanting to see me do that. And it was just so like him, you know, to encourage people to take a path that he thought was best for them.

Maybe instead of tips and tools it's Shannon suggestion suggests

Oh, Oh, yeah, there we go. Let's do both you both. You both in honor.

Yeah, he was, he was such a genuine guy too. I think the thing that I remember the most is just how warm and authentic and real he was, every single time I met him. That is smile. And just in to your point you meant you said the word encouraging. And I'll say that was the other thing that he always followed what I was doing, and would always reach out to me and say, I love it. I love what you're doing. Brent, and I'm learning from you. I'm and it's fantastic. always positive, always spinning everything on the upside. And you just, just always, every time you walked away from a conversation with Ray, you always felt better about the work you were doing. You were doing.

Yeah. Regardless. And that's where, you know, regardless of whether or not you thought your work or not, he always thought it was great. You know, and then he just had that vibe, you know, he had that aura about him, where I think what I'm looking for is he had a unique gravity, you know, so that that gravity pool, you know, to bring people to him, without being judgmental, or without patronizing you, or being condescended to, it was a truly genuine curiosity, and a truly genuine level of let me help you. Like you said, he also just wanted to know what I was doing. And, you know, how was that working? And he was learning from that. And it was, it was great. He'll be missed, for sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Without a doubt. I mean, it's just a hole in the industry. And you know, what's so sad is that every time we lose somebody in the industry, it's always one of my favorite No, you know, that brings such positivity to the industry, you know, not that I would wish ill will on anybody in the industry at all. We don't need them to start job is. No, don't we definitely don't

the worst people live the longest. Look at Dick Cheney. He's on his fourth.

Yeah, it's just it's hard, you know, to, especially as we all seem, you know, we're not none of us are younger, and none of us are get. We're not getting out of this alive. Nobody does. And so it's just a real reality check forever. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, it does put life in danger. It really does. Especially when you get hit with unexpected news. Let's put it that way. You know, when you when you put your life into perspective, after, you know, hearing about something like losing Ray, you really start to not really care about the bad, right? It could be perceive in your life.

And it was so close to losing Bob, right, losing Bob pike. And however, Bob had been sick for a while, you know, so I think we all had our chance to go up to Bob, I know I did, to go up to Bob in in sort of a not so obvious way, say goodbye. But

well, we had him at the last TL DC event, we had Baba, Trish made sure since we held it in Arizona. And he was from here, Trish brought him to the event. And I felt I was just, I was in awe of his presence, just the fact that he would want to come down and be a part of our event. And, you know, I think I think half of the people that were there didn't have any idea that they were being graced with his presence and who was in the industry. I mean, many, many did, and many talks to him. But I think some people are just so new in the industry. They just I don't think they I don't think they had any

Well, now that shame on us if people are walking around not knowing who Bob Pike is right? Or was right. I know. Right. And Bob is another one. I have shared many meals with Bob. And he was just I had another was another note section for Bob, you know, because he was always full of wonderful, great ideas. You know, just give man five minutes and you'll come up with 100 ideas for the things that you should be doing. And they would all be good. It's like, Well, damn, I've been doing this for 10 years. How come you took you five minutes to share something with me that I shouldn't be doing that I really shouldn't be doing? How does that happen? You know, as losing industry icons. Like Bob pike. Like Ray Jimenez hurts the industry.

Yeah, for sure. It's nice that they're good. There's a legacy left behind and it's our I know, it's our responsibility to remember to keep this alive, memories alive and to to share with folks that a None None know this stuff that we're telling you is new there were these great guys in gals in our industry that came away before us. The people today are standing on the shoulders of the giants, as they say without question and nothing is new under the sun. Oh, that's

true. That's very true. But I think that you wrap that up nicely. You know, I think we all have an obligation to continue to move the legacy forward, indeed. So, on that note, learning rebels, everybody you can find learning rebels learning rebels.com, you can find all of our events there where you can find our Learn something news, our coffee chats, our workshops, etc. You can find more information about Brent and what he's up to. Where do you want to send people Brent?

Yeah, just you know, you can always hit me up on LinkedIn. I think I think for now, all of the updated information will be LinkedIn for sure. Hit me up there, because things will be changing. I think I could send you to the Learn train dot community to join me there but it may not be called that for much longer. So I'll hold off and just say go to my LinkedIn. I'm easy to find there.

Oh, if you're on LinkedIn, I didn't know we were in the presence of experts

did you put fall for this? If it's one thing I like to be called it's the old is the guru. The guru. Oh, yeah.

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