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Jeremy Plant

April 2009 - The Public Manager

High-Speed Rail: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

Real-world examples of how sales enablement professionals can meet colleagues at their current point of need.

Meeting Your Sellers Where They Are

At the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, employees not only need core knowledge of the finance and banking industry as well as compliance requirements and procedures; they must have expertise in general leadership skills, such as communication, and emerging and technical areas, such as data analysis. Employees likewise must stay up to date on the technology and tools they use every day.According to Jeremy Manjorin, the organization’s chief learning officer, that broad spectrum of skills demands a “holistic approach to employee development that takes into consideration not just the technical [skills] but the values and behaviors we want at the New York Fed.”Given that experience levels among workers can range from people with doctorates to those in their first year of work, Manjorin notes, that variance can complicate the development and rollout of learning initiatives.“We really have to make sure that we are focused on the learning needs of the total employee population, whether they’ve been here for one year or 30 years, and in whatever group they work in. It’s a challenge,” he admits.Mission-driven learningThe Federal Reserve, commonly called the Fed, is an independent governmental entity created by Congress in 1913 to serve as the central bank of the US. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is one of 12 regional banks that work within that system to foster economic and financial stability and vitality throughout the country.“We’re a mission-driven organization. Our goal is to make the US economy strong and create a stable financial system for all segments of society,” says Manjorin.Although the New York Fed serves a geographically small area compared with the other Federal Reserve banks, it is the largest in terms of assets and volume of activity. Chief among the functions for its approximately 3,000 employees is the implementation of monetary policy, one of the Fed’s three central missions. The other two missions are international operations and supervision and regulation.Carrying out those missions requires its workforce to have a wide array of skills and competencies.Mapping skillsLike in many organizations, while the various roles at the New York Fed seem significantly different on the surface, they typically have common skills. To get a better handle on the shared and distinctive skills of each job, the New York Fed embarked on an organization-wide skills-mapping journey.“We have taken on a skills-based approach to talent development at the bank. This means you have a holistic understanding of your workforce—really understanding the roles, then mapping those roles to specific skills,” Manjorin explains.The New York Fed started the initiative by conducting an analysis of all roles throughout the entire workforce, isolating the skills, knowledge, and competencies required for each. The first pass at mapping skills was automated, using market data and job descriptions and then marrying that information to the New York Fed’s internal profiles to create extensive skills taxonomies.“There’s technology that helps facilitate skills analysis, but it also requires a lot of input from subject matter experts,” Manjorin states. “This was a bankwide effort. It’s not just an HR effort. It’s not just the talent development department or the organizational effectiveness department. We needed subject matter expertise at all levels.”After the initial intake, the teams worked with subject matter experts to validate the information gathered and align similar skills and competencies to each role as well as help define requirements for demonstrating proficiency. For example, when defining competencies around project management, specific skills may be the same, but the proficiency level for an entry-level project manager will of course be different from that of an experienced project manager.“SMEs would go in and review all the roles within their function, evaluate the skills we identified, and calibrate the assigned proficiency levels,” Manjorin shares.The teams worked with SMEs to conduct several levels of validation. The result is a complete skill ontology and architecture with mechanisms in place to update the architecture as additional roles and skills emerge.“The skills ontology is not set stone,” Manjorin explains. “As new roles develop, it grows and evolves too.”Linking skills to development“The driving force behind skills mapping was so that our people could get a better understanding of their skills and career development planning, and the organization could get better at enabling the development of our talent,” he adds.
Manjorin notes that a skills-based approach helped his team cultivate a heightened awareness of the organization’s learning needs and opportunities, in addition to its existing training and development resources. By having individual skills and competencies identified for each role, the team was able to connect them to workshops, online learning programs, training programs provided through content partners such as LinkedIn Learning, and microlearning assets.In addition, the talent development team used the gathered information to create a variety of learning paths that guide employees to deeper skill proficiency. Fortunately, many assets and programs work for multiple roles. More importantly, the learning function was able to spot gaps among its learning deliverables and determine where it needed to build, refresh, or buy new learning solutions.“Skills mapping helped us gain insight into the most coveted or sought-after skills as well as where the organization had opportunities to provide the right learning,” Manjorin states. “For the learning function, it’s a way to see those opportunities at a glance. It was transformative from a strategy and planning perspective.”During the past 18 months, the talent development team has built a robust catalog of offerings and paths that enable employees to self-serve development. “What we really want to do is change the model from ‘We’re going to push learning to people’ to where managers and employees say, ‘This is what I want to develop’ and simply access it,” explains Manjorin.“And if individual employees or managers do not see what they need, we encourage them to let us know. They can tell us what type of skills they want and why they need to develop them. That type of feedback is baked into the infrastructure of the catalog.”What’s more, when employees are looking to develop a skill or competency, the catalog enables them to search assets such as formal workshops and e-learning programs that are part of a learning path. But there’s another learning component outside of the formal aspect of a learning catalog.The organization has released a marketplace of on-the-job learning experiences that fall outside of a classroom-based approach. In fact, the New York Fed has formalized such experiential development opportunities into what it calls gigs.“These gigs are longer-term opportunities where employees go to a different department, function, or group to work for a specified number of hours a week over the course of a few months,” Manjorin states. “They focus on performing tasks that offer identifiable skill development and experiential learning opportunities.”While those short-term, project-based assignments always existed, he asserts that there is now a “more intentional effort toward tying gigs to specific skills and a focus on an employee’s skill development.”Any department can launch a gig. For example, let’s say a team has a major project on the horizon. The manager can create a gig that the entire workforce can view. The gig profile must pinpoint specific skill development opportunities the employee will gain from the experience, making it a far more valuable endeavor.“We changed it from simple ‘Department X needs a pair of hands’ to ‘this is a development opportunity,’” Manjorin explains. “That narrative shift and the ability to see how the work benefits the employee’s development right in the gig’s description invigorates our people around talent development.”Opportunities to develop select skills needs to be distributed broadly throughout the organization. Just as anyone can launch a gig, any employee can apply for one. Manjorin describes how having workers participate in gigs in other departments creates a competency boost for their original team as well.“Maybe a team needs a certain skill or more likely a higher proficiency level of that skill. Or perhaps an employee is really interested in learning a skill or raising their proficiency so they can move their career to the next level. Training will only get them so far without experiential learning and on-the-job experience.”He adds: “Gigs are not only about filling a resource need. It’s actually about ‘How can we build skills organization-wide and nurture networks? How can we cross-pollinate the workforce?’ Learning from people who have the skills is really what gets people to advance in their careers.”What’s next?“Our people are seeking a stronger understanding of their own career potential and development. They’re looking for career mobility,” says Manjorin. “They want awareness and insight of not only their current role and skills but skills for future roles. They want a better understanding of career planning.”
He imparts that people leaders at the New York Fed are also starting to look for more development and mobility opportunities for their people.“Aligning skills through roles helps bolster the idea of mobility because we can look at different skills and see how some skills are usable across different roles. That opens up more opportunities within the bank,” Manjorin explains.“This holistic approach to skills and development makes it easier for our employees at the New York Fed to identify their own career path and start planning their own development journey.”The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.

Banking on Holistic Development

December 2022 - TD Magazine

Reduce the friction that is preventing learners from engaging with your learning.Businesses spend billions of dollars trying to understand consumer behavior, resulting in marketing strategies that aim to get consumers to buy their products. However, in those companies, many L&D functions are not leveraging the same insights and strategies to reach their learners. Treat your learning solutions like products, and minimize the friction between the solutions and learners. One way to do so is using BJ Fogg's behavior model to evaluate your learning initiatives.Identify the frictionThe Fogg behavior model looks at three conditions that must be present for someone to engage in a behavior: motivation, ability, and a prompt. When one of them is absent or diminished, so is the likelihood that the desired behavior will occur.For example, let's say you have a missed call on your cell phone. Why didn't you answer the phone? Maybe you heard it ring, looked down and saw who was calling, and decided you didn't want to talk to that person right now. You heard the ring—that was the prompt. Nothing was keeping your from answering the call (that is to say, you had the ability). You just didn't want to—you didn't have the motivation to engage in the behavior.Now let's say the phone rings, and you're expecting the call and want to take it. But you can't find your phone, or it's in another room and you can't get there in time. Again, you heard the ring (the prompt), and this time you wanted to take the call (motivation), but you weren't able to get to the phone in time (ability).Finally, let's say you're expecting the call, and your phone is right next to you. However, the ringer is set to silent. The phone rings, you want to answer and are able to do so, but you never hear the ring—you received no prompt to answer it.That's how Fogg's behavior model works. The presence or absence of any of the variables can contribute directly to the likelihood that you'll engage in a given behavior.What if we look at learner behavior through that lens? You've created a great learning initiative and spent a lot of time and money on the learning ecosystem. However, you don't seem to be getting the traction you're hoping for. Here are some questions to consider:Are learners aware of the learning solution? Are there prompts that alert learners to its availability?Are learners motivated? Do they want to engage in learning?Are they able to engage with the learning solution?Is there anything preventing them or making it more difficult for them to access it?If you have opportunities in any of those areas, then you have friction between learners and the learning solution. Friction, in this context, is the absence of prompts or is anything that impedes motivation or ability when it comes to a learning initiative.PromptsIf learners don't know about your learning initiative, it may as well not exist. These days, people are inundated with prompts—pop-ups on smartphones, ads on social media, digital billboards, and the like. How can we ensure that learners are prompted to our initiatives? The traditional methods are static and push prompts.A static prompt is one that is in a fixed physical location, such as a poster in a breakroom. It works fine when your audience tends to be isolated in one particular location. But if someone is not in that exact location, they won't see it.A push prompt is much more targeted. It entails identifying your audience members and sending a prompt to them, such as an email reminder that a course is available. However, you often can't customize that prompt by audience member—everyone gets the same message. And you can't time the prompt so that it reaches an individual right when they need it most. Thus, there are some limitations to what we have traditionally used as prompts in our learning ecosystems.This is an area we should pay close attention to because it has the potential to change rapidly. Imagine if we could activate a prompt for a specific learner at a specific time and in a specific location with a learning solution that is designed precisely for the activity that they are engaging in in that moment? It would be similar to finding an exclusive offer from Starbucks popping up on your phone whenever you're within 50 yards of a store.MotivationMotivation should be the easiest variable in this equation. If your initiative meets a learning need, learners should be inherently motivated to engage with it. However, that isn't always the case. In my experience, there are two major reasons. The first is that the solution does not meet a learning need (which is a subject for another article). The second, and more egregious, reason is that learning solutions get bogged down with demotivators that dilute learners' eagerness.Given the massive increase in video use for learning, there are some lessons to be learned from how people engage with YouTube and how we think about the videos and other learning initiatives we create.I often use the example of having a hole in my drywall and turning to YouTube to see how to fix it. Not surprisingly, there are numerous options from which to choose. We've all become accustomed to using filters to narrow down internet search results, although we often do our own visual filtering first. For example, I can take a quick look at a results list on YouTube for drywall repair and immediately rule out, or at least deprioritize, some of the videos. The first thing I'll look at is time. I expect that this should be a relatively simple task, so I'm not looking for a long video. The shorter the better.Likewise, learners have an expectation of how simple or complex a task is and at least some sense of how long it should take to learn. If they see that a video is 30 minutes long, and their perception of the task doesn't line up with that amount of time, you may lose them right away.I start playing a six-minute video from the list. After a lengthy introduction, a bio of the host, and several examples that don't apply to what I'm looking for, the host eventually starts the process of explaining how to execute the repair. It took over one minute to get there. That is an informal measurement I call "time to learning"—or how long it takes before I get to the actual learning. Time to learning is especially important when considering whether our goal is knowledge retention or knowledge acquisition. In other words, are learners in this for the long haul, or do they just need a quick one-off fix that they will rarely if ever need again?When looking at learning from a knowledge retention standpoint, time to learning is slightly less important. We know we're going to get deep, and participants learning about the instructor's credibility can be helpful to set the tone. But if we seek knowledge acquisition, or disposable knowledge, time to learning matters a lot—especially if there are several options from which to choose.For example, imagine I need to generate a report for my manager, who is out sick. I've never done the task before, and it's highly unlikely that I'll ever have to do it again. After some digging, I find a few videos that will help me figure out what to do. However, the videos don't cover only the report I need to generate; they cover all the reports in the entire program and explain where the data from those reports comes from and why they're important to the business.Are those bad things for me to know? Of course not. But they're not relevant to what I need to do right now. Getting what I need is like searching for that how-to needle in a haystack of video instruction. I may resort to other options, such as trial and error (risky) or asking a colleague (now two of us are wasting time trying to figure this out).Going back to the drywall video: I stuck with it for more than a minute only to see how long it would take for the purposes of this example. If I had a real need, I doubt I would have held out for more than 10–15 seconds.We can and should apply the same lessons to our video content libraries and consider where we are adding friction that we should remove. In most cases, those are demotivators that don't reflect the quality of our instructional design yet may deter learners from ever finding that out.AbilityAnother go-to source for information in people's nonwork lives is Google. Here's what happens if I search for "how to repair drywall"—let's count the clicks: I open the browser to Google and type the search term, then click Search. One click. What I see first are a few links to associated terms like "water damage" and "peeling" that enable me to refine my search. Below that is a frame from a video already queued to a specific timecode that is likely to address my need. Below that are links to a few more videos, all with descriptions and timecodes of key moments in the videos. Next up is the "People also ask" section, which displays several ways that others have posed their question that may be more in alignment with my need. And finally, I get a list of results that I would normally expect to see on Google. All from one click.Now think about your learners and, more importantly, your learning ecosystem. Most likely your version of Google is some sort of learning management system or learning experience platform. How many clicks does it take learners to get there? Once someone arrives at your version of Google, how many of the features described above does it have? How easy is it for learners to find what they need?Many of us are presumably still in a situation where learners must go through six, eight, or even 10-plus clicks to find what they need. Number of clicks and speed to solution are ways we can assess learners' ability to engage in the desired behavior.Nobody wants to click through a never-ending menu. Individuals have been conditioned that they shouldn't have to, and they are far more likely to give up somewhere along the way than they are to reach the end.Other ability barriers include bandwidth and hardware. Sometimes our instructional design comes with ability barriers. If you have motivated learners who know about your initiatives, make it as easy as possible for them to access and engage with learning.Enhance learning's impactThis article has numerous questions you can ask about any given learning solution. It's going to be difficult to get satisfactory answers to all of them. But what you can do is identify an area that you believe may be causing friction for your learners and is something that you can influence.In other words, we all want better bandwidth, but you probably have an extremely limited ability to influence that yourself. You may have a better chance implementing some prompts for learners that can move the needle. Or you may be able to reduce the number of clicks required to access content with some adjustments to your internal websites or portals. Start small by looking for areas to reduce friction with existing learning solutions, and then incorporate the ideas into the design phase of future ones.If you treat your learning program like a product and view your learning ecosystem as a mechanism for reaching your audience and providing that product, it may change your perspective.

Are You Driving Learners Away!

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