Three Technologies that are Reshaping the L&D Landscape

Technology is transforming nearly every learning and development function, from content creation to coaching to upskilling. Dani Johnson’s keynote, “Navigating the Future: Harnessing Learning Technologies in the 2024 Workplace,” at DevLearn 2024, revealed more details on some of the tech that is changing learning and performance management as we know it. 

New advances in measuring & verifying skills
AI has helped make significant strides in skills assessment. Here are three ways that L&D is very close to being able to quantify at scale people’s abilities: 

1. Skills used to be assessed with a quiz or by having someone watch someone else to ensure they could do a task. But new data from all elements of work technology, not just learning tech, can now be used to help L&D professionals assess and understand the workforce’s skills. For example, data streams can be brought in from the Microsoft suite and frontline technology, like the technology drivers use when driving the truck, to help L&D understand people’s skills and make decisions based on it. 
2. Technology is moving to include skill verification. Not only has tech started verifying that employees have a skill, but also to what extent they have that skill. This information opens many doors for L&D to improve training, hiring, and upskilling. 
3. Data isn’t just staying inside the learning and development department anymore. Tech vendors are providing dashboards to help employees understand what skills they have, what skills they need, and where their skills are compared to their peers so they can take more ownership in their learning. 
    

The rise of “relationship tech”
Did you know learning technology can help build or enhance relationships between people in the workplace? Here are some examples of how it’s being used:

1. Skills-based peer teaching tech matches employees based on the skills they have that others need to learn. For example, if someone needs to create a macro in Excel, they can find somebody in the organization who knows how to make it and can teach their peers how to do it. 
2. Tech-enabled human coaching helps human coaches prepare questions and summarize information for coaching sessions. It can also help with coach matching to ensure that employees are aligned with the right coach.
3. Bots for self-reflection provide users with hints to stop and think about their actions before moving forward. For example, before a boss sends an email to their employee at 11:30 p.m., the bot would ask if the boss really wants to send the email, given the late hour. 
4. Adaptive practice allows humans to rehearse tough conversations and get realistic responses. This can be a critical tool for managers, especially new managers, who need to give feedback to their employees.  
    

The next wave of content creation
Many L&D professionals already use technology to make outlines, generate ideas, translate content, add subtitles, and create courses. However, technology is also being used for content creation in these new and creative ways:

1. Creating personalized learning was a very time-intensive, manual process. But now AI can help tag content and put together learning paths in innovative ways that we haven’t seen before. Some software can even create personalized courses to help answer specific employee questions. 
2. Current tech can also create systems training that sits on top of the system itself and regenerates the video every time the system changes. This allows the L&D professional to avoid recreating the course whenever the system changes because the course automatically updates.