Learner Engagement is back in focus. With the majority of the global corporate workforce still #workingfromhome, several recent surveys indicate that #learnerengagement will be one of the top points to address for corporate L&D team. While we all agree that Motivation and Practice are the two pillars of Learning Engagement, Learning at the Time of Need and Feedback are two factors that we can ill afford to ignore. Learning engagement also depends largely on the organizational culture, and the transition of L&D from an order taker to playing an active role by being a consultant/advisor is crucial for today's learning endeavors to be successful. Also, the active contribution of line managers and other similar stakeholders in the creation and curation of learning content is also essential. It is with the aim to discuss and emphasize these factors that we present you with the top 20 quotes from the insightful conversations that Amit Garg - CEO of Upside Learning Solutions, who moderated the podcasts had with learning experts and features: Dhiren Doshi Kirk Donaghey Keith Keating Guy W Wallace Phil Reddall Jennifer Tsang, PCC Toby Harris Stefaan van Hooydonk 范汇东 Vince Han Julie Dirksen

1. PODCAST
Top Quotes From L&D Go Beyond Podcast
Episodes 1-10

2. PODCAST
Featuring :
Julie Dirksen
Dhiren Doshi
Learning Partner
E2E Global Supply Chain
at Colgate-Palmolive
Kirk Donaghey
Standards and
Frameworks Manager
Optus
Keith Keating Guy W Wallace Phil Reddall
Global Learning Strategist
GP Strategies
Performance Analyst &
Instructional Architect,
President,
EPPIC, Inc.
Head of Learning &
Capability Systems
Thames Water
Jennifer Tsang
Chief of Staff
Cisco
Toby Harris
Director of Product
Marketing
Filtered
Stefaan Van Hooydonk Vince Han
Founder
Global Curiosity Institute
CEO/Founder
Mobile Coach
Learning Strategy Consultant
& Acclaimed Author

3. I want to share with you something that we're doing right now with one of our programs, which really is about
taking what you've learned, applying it in the real business environment at the commercial front end,
consumer-facing, and so we're doing a very simple tracking of every participant who goes through the
program is being asked to put on a shared Google sheet globally, put in the link to the action plan that they
have created, and three months later and six months later, come back and tell us the results that they've
achieved and the dollar improvement if any that has taken place, it's just a very simple solution to an extremely
complex problem.
PODCAST
Dhiren Doshi
Learning Partner
E2E Global Supply Chain at Colgate-Palmolive

4. Kirk Donaghey
Standards and Frameworks Manager
Optus
If a learning experience was high effort and low value, then that's the expectation you place on that experience
the next time you go there – high effort, low value. Will I bother going back and doing that again? Probably not.
So you need to make sure that your experience is high value, low effort and that will keep people coming back
to whatever it is that you're offering, whether it's a new product or it's a learning piece.
PODCAST

5. The technology tools are tangible. It is easier to digest than to talk about learning sciences, behavioral sciences,
learning engagement, culture, strategy, those are all the hard things. The learning technology tool is the easier
piece, but if you don't have those others, if you don't have a thorough understanding of those, if you don't have
a learning culture, if you don't have a strategy in place, if you don't have change management culture or
change management strategy for these technology tools, they're not going to be successful.
PODCAST
Keith Keating
Global Learning Strategist
GP Strategies

6. Neil Rackham used to ask my clients at Motorola about their experience with playing golf or tennis and how
coaches led them to use better grips. Well, that's the job of training. A coach will get you to use the proper grips
so that your performance will eventually be great, better. But when you first use a new grip, you don't have ball
control. So the first thing everybody does is revert. So we need coaches and instructors to keep people in the
practice and feedback sessions to use the right grip. And when they go out to the job then we need the
managers to say ‘Hey Guy, use the proper grip, you reverted back to your old grip!’ or the equivalent of that, and
so that's the kinds of things that we need to help. Our learners master the new grips, so to speak, and so they
can go back to the job and perform. Coaching is required to support practice.
PODCAST
Guy W Wallace
Performance Analyst & Instructional Architect, President
EPPIC, Inc.

7. It's kind of a given in our world that anything we do should do one of these two things or both - efficiency and
effectiveness, or at least not damage the other. If you do something faster, but you make it less effective, you
probably shouldn't have bothered. But if you do it faster and keep it as effective as it was, that's an
improvement.
PODCAST
Phil Reddall
Head of Learning & Capability Systems
Thames Water

8. Yeah, especially at a big company it's a matter of really partnering with those line managers to have a deep
understanding of not only what is their role, they're going to be really pivotal and also helping you kind of get
kind of the adoption and influence the team to kind of come on board. I do feel like there is a large part of L&D
that needs to be that consulting piece so that you understand the business, you understand how to manage
those stakeholders, how to tell that story, how to paint that picture, so that people do see the value and then
you can start bringing people into your that sphere to be able to help influence the people that are really key.
PODCAST
Jennifer Tsang
Chief of Staff
Cisco

9. Think about your own life or your own business, your own company, your own organization, the content we
make defines us as people. If you're not going to make any content, you have no identity, at least no identity
that can be externalized and written down and shared with someone. Of course, you need to make stuff. The
question is what should you make? And I think this is where curation comes in. Could you envision the possibility
where a curation exercise identifies, that 80% of your capability needs are covered by existing, actually free
providers or maybe low cost content providers and then you have a 20% gap which is likely to be the stuff that
is pretty unique to our industry, perhaps maybe even to our organization.
PODCAST
Toby Harris
Director of Product Marketing
Filtered

10. The more the leader learns, the more the team would learn. And the less the leader learn, and learning is a
broad term, it's not about just going to courses, by reading books, it's reading abstracts, listening to do anything
that might be available, any information. so it's so important for a leader to have a growth mindset, to have a
curiosity mindset, her or himself.
PODCAST
Stefaan Van Hooydonk
Founder
Global Curiosity Institute

11. One of the biggest challenges that L&D folks have is how do I reach and engage the learner audience? They're
not reading email, we struggle getting them to our learning management system or whatever learning portal
we've created, they're busy, maybe they don't even appreciate the importance of learning, so that's big major
challenge. And a chatbot on a mobile device is a really frictionless user experience. So you can have a chatbot
talk with people on WhatsApp or Teams, where they already are. Then that opens up a whole world of
possibilities for an instructional designer to say, ‘Now that I have that connection with that learner, can I
program a chatbot to help that person learn and progress?
PODCAST
Vince Han
Founder & CEO
Mobile Coach

12. People's interest level and therefore their motivation and ability to pay attention to learning content is entirely
contingent on whether there's something they can do with it right away. If I give you the challenge and then I
give you the information on how to solve that challenge, it's far easier task for me to pay attention to that
information on how to solve that challenge instead of waiting until people have a need and giving them the
resource then we're saying, ‘Here's a need, it’s fictional, but it's still a need and now you need to solve this need.
PODCAST
Julie Dirksen
Learning Strategy Consultant
& Acclaimed Author

13. I think how you drive engagement and learning really has a lot of the two main components, or three
maybe - one is the right tools and the methodology, two is the right content, but most important is senior
leader and people manager engagement.
PODCAST
Dhiren Doshi
Learning Partner
E2E Global Supply Chain at Colgate-Palmolive

14. Kirk Donaghey
Standards and Frameworks Manager
Optus
I see learning engagement as in-the-moment, like in that particular session or when learners are in that piece
of learning, how engaged are they with that with that piece? Whereas learning experience I feel is a little bit
more holistic and it's looking at perhaps the end-to-end experience around how they may access that learning,
or where they may access that learning and how do you improve that experience or align it to other
experiences that they expect.
PODCAST

15. I find motivation and inspiration are two of the biggest gaps that we often have among our learners, especially
when we are prescribing the learning to them without them having a deeper understanding of the why behind
it - Why as a learner am I taking this, when I complete this how it is going to make me a better employee, a
better person. So without that motivation, and inspiration, we're we are really shackled with our ability to create
learning engagement.
PODCAST
Keith Keating
Global Learning Strategist
GP Strategies

16. We're not looking beyond the activities of learning to the results of learning and we need to start focusing on
the terminal results and then assess whether or not the learning that we're doing it is good enough because
we're having that impact on the results of the business.
PODCAST
Guy W Wallace
Performance Analyst & Instructional Architect, President
EPPIC, Inc.

17. We can make it easier for people to find the learning that's relevant for them, but I still think there needs to be
an element of responsibility to make sure that people are thinking or what I want to achieve, what do I need to
do in my role, what are my objectives, where do I want to go in the future —and from all of that, a great
development plan. I think we still need to keep some responsibility in the human, the learner, for working their
way through that with support. And of course therefore motivation matters—motivation to learn, and therefore if
you haven't worked out why you're learning, we're going to struggle.
PODCAST
Phil Reddall
Head of Learning & Capability Systems
Thames Water

18. I am a big proponent of being trained in how to affectively facilitate and manage conversations, how to apply
these coaching principles. You learn to identify assumptions and remove as many of those as possible. Also
design thinking I think is extremely powerful. That for me was probably one of the biggest game changers for
me as far as like how I approach problems and how I approach these programs that I had been building for
many years, is how do I take that methodology and that approach to how I design the learning experience. So
I'm a big advocate of those two. I mean there's tons of different processes and certifications, but I am a huge
believer in getting to the right problems or solving the problems for our customers, whoever those are through
asking more questions. I just think if you can develop that skill set as an L&D professional, you will be far and
away doing all the great things that L&D professionals do and you'll be helping and serving your customers in
the best way possible.
PODCAST
Jennifer Tsang
Chief of Staff
Cisco

19. L&D isn't really about cutting costs, it's about maximizing the return on your spend because all of us believe in
this industry, but we should be investing more in learning and skill development, not less, and finally, for world is
really waking up to that, I think that is what's happening, which is great. So I think curation goes beyond just
centrally filtering, administering content and removing the stuff that's not relevant. Curation is everywhere in
society. It's an ongoing process and not all companies, but many companies can trace some aspect of their
own success to curation.
PODCAST
Toby Harris
Director of Product Marketing
Filtered

20. Some people are just natural learners, they read all the time, they're part of the right networks, but also very
important they have this sense of humility; they’re okay to be a constant novice. There's about 10, maybe 15% of
such people in any given organization and I came to call them A players. They are typically also experts at
something, but are always exploring more. And then you have the B players, people that want to learn but they
miss something. Either they're stressed or they have a family situation, or they’ve lost this some muscle on the
way or society kicked it out of them somehow. And then you have C players, people that don't want to and can’t
be changed, but that's also a minority in most organizations. So my challenge always was how do I turn such B
players into A players? And I quickly ended up in a notion of mindset.
PODCAST
Stefaan Van Hooydonk
Founder
Global Curiosity Institute

21. The big exciting opportunity, as well as the biggest challenge for L&D people is in the instructional design
of a chatbot. The idea of creating a conversational learning experience is quite different from typical eLearning
instructional design. Where we've had to live in a box of that time-bound where ‘Hey you're going to have this
three-hour workshop so you got to make sure the instructor is going to have some really great tools and
experiences for just those three hours, but for chatbots you can have experiences that last a year. And that, is
really exciting, opens up a lot of possibility to be creative, but it also it is also very new, so I think for this
audience to start thinking about and imagining what those user experiences can be, can be really fun day
dreaming or brainstorming.
PODCAST
Vince Han
Founder & CEO
Mobile Coach

22. There’s a common accepted structure of memory - the information processing model which looks at sensory
memory, short–term, or working memory, and then long-term memory, and the truth is you take in a ton of stuff
into each of those and then almost immediately forget most of it and that not a bad thing. We are living in this
age of information overwhelm. You don't want to remember every single thing you've encountered. You want
some of that stuff to fade, so I think working with the patterns of memory, which is some stuff is disposable and
it should be disposable as part of the planning, not a flaw. Feedback is the hardest and most difficult thing to
scale in a digital environment. And yet it's one of the most powerful tools that we have for learning.
PODCAST
Julie Dirksen
Learning Strategy Consultant
& Acclaimed Author

23. PODCAST
L&D Go Beyond Podcast Series