As the “new style of learning” lead at Hewlett PackardEnterprise (HPE), Glyn Townsend is responsible for building new, innovativelearning offerings for HPE’s software education business.
Figure 1: Glyn Townsend, new style of learning lead, HewlettPackard Enterprise
We recently connected with Glyn to hear about how HPE isadopting new methods of learning and how that will shape the software industry.
Doreen Lorenzo: Howdoes the role of visual instruction and communication play in what you do, interms of the new style of learning and teaching employees?
Glyn Townsend: Thereare different learner styles in our organization. Quite a few of them are usedto learning visually rather than very formal, instructor-based training. Visuallearning and the ability to take cues from people, and also digest complexmessages, is much easier through visual learning than through traditionalmeans.
DL: Whatare some of the learning and development trends that you’re following closelythat interest you? What do you see coming up?
GT: Accessto broader and bigger markets. My industry has predominantly focused oncustomer training and external training on our product technologies, thoughtleadership, and trends. It’s how we access a broader market and how we canreally engage with those new users, but also, internally, how we can delivermore complex messages more clearly. How do we get access to people andprovide them the training and the knowledge around the products and the thingsthat we have to offer? That’s really exciting, in terms of what the new styleof learning offers, such as video-based learning in its more structured sense.
DL: Nowthat you’re seeing more and more companies producing video content, would youever consider producing your own video content?
GT: Verymuch so. The more traditional world that we kind of got ourselves stuck into,in terms of how we create content and what people want, has now moved toself-paced, being able to fast-forward and replay the same message over andover again. For example, I’ve tried for years, in doing plumbing in my ownhouse, to solder a joint. I’ve never worked it out right. I’ve been told how todo it. I’ve read documents on how to do it. So I watched a YouTube video.Literally, I watched this YouTube video and I rewound it and I played itprobably four or five times. I had one practice go. I rewound it, I played it,and I nailed it. I nailed this solder joint. I’ve never been able to solder aplumbing pipe in my life, and I did it through YouTube.
That, for me, was the real turning point—that you can getacross very complex subjects to people and they can play it at their own time,they can rewind it if they haven’t quite followed something, you can get acrossa truly technical subject to any audience through the medium of YouTube. That’skind of where I see things going. I think that the new generation of learnersthat are coming through aren’t expecting us to re-create a classroom experiencethrough online training, which is what we’ve spent the last 10 years trying tore-create. I think that people are accepting of a guy in his living roomshowing you how he’s fixed something as a way forward.
DL:Could people learn from their peers through video? How much does that play intoyour organization?
GT:That’s the absolute center of where I see things going. I work in the softwaredevelopment industry. The big, crippling factor to any organization adoptingsoftware is: How do they get their end users to adopt this new technologyquickly? It’s becoming more and more normal that your products, and theinterface your users are using, [are] changing very, very frequently. You can’tdo that in the way that we’ve been creating training today. Up until today,that period between where you’ve finished developing your product and you’vetrained your users and you’ve released it is months. In the new world, you’vealready done another six or seven releases by then.
Much the same way as everything else in softwaredevelopment is shifting left, from unit testing shifting left to system testingshifting left to everything in the ecosystem into this iterative approach, ourtraining and development have to shift left as well. I think the onlyeconomical way or practical way you can do that is through video-basedlearning. The way that people are more comfortable with video in this sort ofYouTube generation is really going to make that the most significant inflectionpoint in our industry in terms of software development release.
DL:Do you think that learning and development (L&D) could, then, fuel theinnovation process in your organization?
GT: Learning and development, as an organization, couldreally help fuel innovation in companies by enabling rapid informationtransfer, by enabling people to collaborate in a way that they haven’tcollaborated before. The quicker the L&D world can realize that they’re notthere just to do compliance training and ethical conduct training, but they’rethere to help people work together to understand how they can be more efficient,how they can adopt technologies, and how they can work together to overcomebusiness challenges, [the quicker] they can provide a platform that does boththings by sharing that information and the training and the other aspects. That’swhere L&D can really become a part of the business.
