Each year, the achievements of two learning professionals are honored by the Learning Guild with the Guild Master Award. At DevLearn in November, Jeff Batt, Founder of Learning Dojo, became the latest distinguished practitioner to join these ranks. After the ceremony, our team caught up with him to hear his take on the industry’s biggest challenges, what the future holds, and more.
Q: How did you get your start in learning and development?
A: I got a job as a sales coordinator. This is when I was still in college, and a company called Rapid Intake was hiring for someone to call and organize demos, and so I applied for it. Not knowing exactly what eLearning was, I applied for it and started doing that. I didn’t enjoy the sales part, but eventually started doing demos of the software and fell in love with the eLearning industry. I started going to conferences and started speaking at conferences during that time, and I just loved to create content and create different learning interactions.
Q: What are you currently working on?
A: I am building several apps that will help you with your learning and development. I love to vibe code, test out things, use tools that go beyond the normal out-of-the-box tools, and create my own solutions. That’s what I’m working on the most right now.
Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the industry?
A: I think the biggest challenge is AI, and trying to make sense of AI, and trying to see how it actually applies to your job. I think there may be times where we’re jumping the gun on AI and thinking that it can do more than it can but also trusting it a little bit more. I think we need to take a step back and actually train the AI and create custom chatbots that are specific to our organization’s needs, so it has the right content and delivers the right things in the moments that your employees need it as well.
Q: What’s the best advice you received in your career?
A: I think the best advice that I ever received was to focus on what you do best. So, there’s a lot that’s out there that you can do and oftentimes we feel like we’re behind on it. Like for me, focusing on developments was something that I could do best. So just focusing on that and helping share it with other people in my organization or in the industry at events like DevLearn has helped me the most in my career.
Q: Where do you see the industry going in the future?
A: I think development-wise the industry is going to be more chat-based. Think natural language where you describe what you want, even in things like Storyline and Captivate. I think instead of building all of the content ourselves, it’s going to be more of a chatbot type of thing. So, you say, “I want to have a four-tab interaction,” and when you click on that tab, it’s going to show a layer, and so you describe it instead of actually building it yourself. And then you can describe, “Now I want it to have it be animated,” or, “I want this to have some audio that says this,” and more of that kind of natural language, similar to what you’re seeing with Lovable or Cursor or ChatGPT as well.
