How we’re using Bots to change how we do Learning and Development

Re-think and innovate how we execute Learning and Development!

That was the brief from a client. A client who had these challenges…..

• Getting our people into a training room isn’t working as well as it used to. Feedback from our people and the business is that too much time is being spent in a training room.
• We’re encouraging our people to spend more time out of the office and in our customer’s space, where it really counts, and we still must develop them.
• We’ve got factory people. Taking them off the floor for any time stretches our operational effectiveness.
• Our people don’t all have access to laptops and desktops (what are desktops?)
• The economy is not what it used to be. We need to find more economical ways to deliver more innovative and better quality learning to our people

As 2017 rolled on, we were given similar briefs from another 2 clients. In delivering on these projects, we set some goals of our own….

• We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We didn’t want to build yet another platform for people to install, learn or download.
• We didn’t want to do that because when you do that people resist. People reject. People don’t engage. Who wants another app (we have so many) to get something done? We wanted to use platforms that were already well adopted, where people didn’t need to learn how to navigate or what to do.
• To keep costs down we were determined to find platforms that were free and were highly efficient with data (this is South Africa and data is not yet abundant or cheap).
• We were only going to do mobile. If it wasn’t mobile, we weren’t going near it.

We went with two different platforms. One Web based and the other Bot based.

I’m not writing this to illustrate how successful we’ve been (we’ve had some fabulous successes). We had to learn a lot during 2017. And what we’ve learned we’re really proud of. We’ve gone a distance others still have to go. Moving people’s paradigms around how they consume Learning and Development isn’t an easy task when it’s been done in one particular way since the beginning of time. You need to work harder than you think to invite engagement that relies on on a mindset of self-learning.

We’re grateful to the many ‘critics’ we invited to give us feedback. They were brutal at times, but with each correction we kept building a better experience for our audience.

During 2017 we had a glimpse of the L&D future. There’s plenty to be excited about. There’s plenty of change ahead. And don’t be surprised to find a Bot creeping closer and closer to the centre of your Learning and Development programme in the next year or two.