Learning no longer fits neatly into one platform or one format. Employees need training that adapts as fast as their jobs do. That’s why more and more companies are moving toward ecosystems: networks of tools, people, and practices that keep learning flexible and continuous.
In our latest webinar, Geert de Jong and Ashling Moran from Easygenerator sat down with Mark Lamswood from Cornerstone to talk about what ecosystems mean in practice. The conversation covered why they matter now, how they help learning stick, what this shift means for L&D, and how to build them the right way.
🎥 Watch the session: Missed it live? Watch the full recording here.
Why ecosystems matter now
Geert opened with an important point: AI is already changing how we create and deliver training. It speeds up course creation, helps with skill mapping, and makes recommendations in real time. That creates huge opportunities for L&D, but also new challenges.
Mark highlighted another pressure: the pace of change. Skills shift quickly, teams are distributed, and employees face a flood of learning options. Traditional training models can’t keep up with this mix.
That’s where ecosystems come in. Instead of relying on one tool, they bring together authoring platforms, LMSs, and other systems so that learning can flow naturally between them. It’s about connecting the dots, not replacing everything with one big solution.
Both speakers agreed that ecosystems match today’s expectations. Employees want growth, collaboration, and flexibility. Organizations need learning that feels less like a separate event and more like part of daily work.
Moving beyond completions
For years, completion rates were the primary measure of success. But as Mark noted, knowing who finished a course doesn’t tell you who learned something valuable. Ecosystems give L&D a chance to dig deeper.
They support learning in the flow of work, making resources available exactly when someone needs them. They encourage employees to share, turning peers into teachers. And they create space for practice and feedback, which helps knowledge stick.
Geert added that ecosystems give L&D a lot more data to work with. Instead of a single completion number, they can see how people interact with content, where they get stuck, and what they apply afterward. That insight helps improve training and show real impact.
But he also flagged a challenge: these benefits must reach everyone. It’s easy for ecosystems to focus on office workers and knowledge roles. The next step is making sure frontline and blue-collar employees are included, too.
What this means for L&D
Geert described ecosystems as a chance for L&D to rethink governance. Instead of creating every course, L&D can give internal experts the right tools and make sure their knowledge is shared in context, with feedback loops built in.
Mark agreed, adding that the role of L&D is shifting from controller to facilitator. It’s less about holding all the strings and more about creating the conditions where learning happens at scale.
That shift also changes how L&D teams spend their time. Instead of managing every detail, they focus on curating resources, coaching peer learning, and strengthening a culture where people feel comfortable sharing their knowledge.
The result is more sustainable. Employees learn from each other. L&D guides and supports without becoming a bottleneck. And learning becomes something that spreads naturally across the organization.
Building an ecosystem the right way
Mark shared the building blocks of a strong ecosystem: people, culture, content, and technology. Each matters, but the balance is what makes the difference. Without the right culture or real business impact, the tools alone don’t add up.
He also warned about common mistakes. Some companies treat ecosystems as a tech project and expect platforms to fix everything. Others measure success only by completions or try to control every step of learning. These approaches slow adoption and hurt engagement.
Geert added a practical angle. At Easygenerator, the focus is on company-tailored content creation that connects with larger systems like Cornerstone. But he stressed that tools are only part of the story. Adoption, collaboration, and integration matter just as much.
Both agreed that building an ecosystem isn’t a one-time launch. It requires ongoing support, regular updates, and leadership buy-in. When done right, it connects learning to business needs and keeps it relevant over time.
The bottom line
Ecosystems are more than a trend. They are becoming the default way to make learning flexible, scalable, and tied to real outcomes.
For L&D teams, that means two significant shifts. First, using AI and connected tools to speed up training and make it more personal. Second, building a culture where people see learning as part of their job, not an extra task.
That combination makes learning more effective and more visible. Employees get what they need when they need it. Managers see real impact. And organizations keep pace with constant change.
In the end, ecosystems move learning closer to the work, closer to the people doing it, and closer to the goals of the company.
👏 Huge thanks to Mark Lamswood from Cornerstone for joining Geert and Ashling in the conversation.
🔗 Learn more about Cornerstone: https://www.cornerstoneondemand.com/
Webinar transcript
Ashling: Welcome to today’s webinar on future-proofing your learning strategy. I’m joined today by Geert and Mark. My name’s Ashling. But perhaps to kick things off, we can briefly introduce ourselves, and our role in the learning space.
Ashling: Mark, if you’d like to start, take it from there.
Mark: Thanks for inviting me, first of all, Easygenerator team. Mark Lamswood, Regional Director of Content for Cornerstone Internationally. What does that mean? I’m an L&D practitioner. I joined Cornerstone 10 years ago. I’ve often been working in HR and L&D roles, if you like your side of the fence. And I now look after the content products for all of our international customers, so those based in Europe and APJ. Thanks for allowing me to come in and support you today, team.
Ashling: We love having you. Okay. And Geert, over to you.
Geert: Hi, everyone. I’m Geert de Jong, speaking to you from Easygenerator’s Dubai office, where I am the Enterprise Success Manager, primarily also for EU and European clients. It’s also good to see some familiar names in here already who had decided to join this webinar, so very happy with the turnout as well to see so many people interested in talking about ecosystems. Like Mark, I also have an L&D background, so I used to manage a small instructional design team. Before that, I used to work as an L&D consultant. So also involved in LMS implementations, authoring tool implementations, and the like. So pretty much all my professional career, I’ve been involved in ed tech in one way or another. But here, representing Easygenerator, where, yet, like I said, being an Enterprise Customer Success Manager.
Ashling: Nice. Thanks, Geert. Hopefully, we can pull on some of that experience as well today. I should also introduce myself. My name is Ashling, and I have the pleasure of moderating today’s conversation. I am a Customer Value Manager here at Easygenerator. I started myself as a trainer before moving over to the world of Customer Success about three years ago. And with that we can jump right in.
Ashling: I see time is ticking by and there’s already some topics in the chat. Today we’re going to be speaking about learning ecosystems, if I can pronounce correctly. And we’re going beyond the traditional software suite. So when we speak about an ecosystem, we’re speaking about connecting tools, people and data, to create personalized in-flow learning. That’s combining both traditional formal training, with informal knowledge sharing as well. And of course, real work. The results of this can be dynamic. It involves continuous learning environments and then it’s going to drive individual growth on the one hand, but then also organizational success. So now that hopefully we’re all on the same page, we can perhaps dive right in, with the question, and I think it’s at the top of most of our minds.
Ashling: And that’s why are we speaking about ecosystems today? And why is now the right time? And perhaps Geert, you’d like to kick us off.
Geert: For sure. So I think this is the right topic at the right time. Primarily because of, of course, the emergence of AI. That’s a big one that has really kick-started certain developments within the Learning and Development world. We used to talk about technology-enhanced learning and teaching, but nowadays it’s also more about AI-enhanced platforms, course creation. And this has accelerated a number of things for us as a course creation company. We first witnessed this around two years ago when OpenAI allowed different programs to connect with it. And of course, being an e-learning tool, which is all about the conveying of information from trainer to learner, we saw that AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to e-learning. So it can help with that tricky part of how to write a good text for the right audience, formulating questions. And since then it has evolved immensely. So I think we also see that on the LMS platform and learning environment providers where AI is now having a real impact.
Geert: Pretty much most of us have probably encountered when a course assignment was one hell of a job. It used to be even more complex because of provisioning systems that sometimes had thousands of different job descriptions in their roles and titles. So assigning the right training just to the right person at the right time, was something that was very labor-intensive and slow. And we actually see AI now moving into that aspect. The heavy lifting of presenting the right information not just based on role, but based on immediate need, based on personal interest and development. So that’s, I think one of the developments that we also see that really helps with the heavy lifting, helps speed things along. Now why is it good that we’re talking about this today? Well, this speed has also accelerated and presented a lot of innovations in the learning ecosystem.
Geert: Five years ago if we had the same webinar, I couldn’t predict that five years from now we would see big changes in the L&D landscape in learn tech. But I can make a bold prediction that in five years time, people who go into L&D who are involved in digital learning technologies, they might not even make a distinction between LMS, LXP, talent management software anymore. They might not even know what SCORM is anymore. We are dealing with quite an old standard for learning where you present learning according to a certain format so that LMS systems can read it. Well, I think five years from now we’ll definitely see a completely changing landscape. And just the numbers that are in the meeting today, I think already prove in themselves that it is a hot topic today and important to discuss it in this setting with people from the L&D side of things. Learn Tech. So different people present in the webinar as well.
Ashling: Certainly. And then, yeah, I suppose. Mark, do you see much the same or is there any trends or shifts that you see impacting why we’re here today discussing ecosystems?
Mark: Yeah, I think the first thing I’ll pick up on is what Geert’s saying, which is we’ve always been in this landscape and profession where things are constantly changing. Where we are today is not where we were five years ago and perhaps we still can’t quantify where we’re going. So why is it important that we’re here? Is because we’re talking about this concept of a learning ecosystem. This idea around organizations trying to stay agile, competitive, future-ready — look at some of things like the World Economic Forum on how agile we need to be and how we need to remain competitive. We also need to think about today’s pace of change. So the idea is that we have an abundance of learning options. So building an ecosystem to support that isn’t just timely, it’s going to be essential.
Mark: And I think more than anything now’s a really good time because we’re also seeing shifts in the workplace, shifts in the technology that we’re using and probably in and around some key areas like we talk about rapid change and skills gaps. How do we manage that in the world of AI with digital transformation and automation? Probably a couple of other key points is workplace flexibility. We still quite often have people that have very well-distributed teams. Some have started that return to office, some are still working from home or remotely. So the learning ecosystem — the concept is let’s just make it easy for us to connect with each other. Let’s look at the knowledge and the tools that we have and particularly around technological advances. So where are we from an LMS AI perspective? How are we going to bring those things together? And I think that’s what we’ll go into here today to start to perhaps demystify or just give our points of view on where we think this is going.
Ashling: 100%. And something interesting that I picked up from both of you is change, and things are changing with speed. And you both mentioned AI and skills are changing faster than ever. I see in the chat as well, for example, Joe has been tasked with overhauling an L&D ecosystem. So it is a topic top of mind. If anyone else has thoughts or questions you can of course add them to the chat. But what I would be curious to know is how do ecosystems actually help organizations keep the pace with these fast-moving shifts?
Ashling: Shall I pick that one up first?
Mark: Yeah, of course Mark, you can go ahead.
Mark: So I think my perception is learning ecosystems, to the point that you raised, they’re going to help organizations keep pace. We’ve got faster skill cycles. AI is also creating agile learner-centered environments. So it’s about then connecting people, technology and that idea of real-world applications. So it’s turning training into this continuous adaptive process. How do we think we all do it? It’s peer-to-peer learning. So peer learning, knowledge sharing, connecting people to mentors, experts, peers — cross-pollination would be a good word there. How do we transfer skills? It is, of course, we will all be using some form of AI-powered intelligence to deliver personalization, to look at surfacing emerging skills and content as the technologies are going to change. And then we’ll start looking at things like data-driven insights. Why are they important to our learning ecosystem? And some of the buzzwords, I guess, like integration into workflow. So it’s around bringing all of those things together. I see the questions coming through. I guess our job is to try and help you understand how do we really achieve this and how do we get from there.
Ashling: Geert, I’m sure you’ve got something to say here too.
Geert: Yes. I’d like to present a rather concrete example from one of my past functions where I worked at a large hospital, where we were tasked with also creating a new learning environment, similar to Joe, for a rapidly-changing workforce that requires new skills, especially in the medical sector. You also see a lot of technological advancements, but also there’s a huge personnel shortage when it comes especially in northern Europe when it comes to hiring nurses. So nurses especially, they have to do more than just their core functionality. They used to have proper training for one department, say an oncology nurse, or you would be a transplant nurse. But now, nurses have to be more flexible. They have to deal with more complex patients in multiple departments. So that required a lot of upskilling, and also, a culture change.
Geert: But when we look at the ecosystem, that proved rather challenging for a number of reasons, because there were so many links in the system, where you had talent management for workforce deployment that had to also draw on our data on what are people actually trained at. We were asked as an L&D department to create a large number of trainings fit for each role. So there you see that the ecosystem needs to support rapid change, but also the culture and the people need to be ready for it. And in this case, of course, nurses required a lot of training. They needed an assessment to see how well they’re doing. And also from compliance standpoints, a lot of assessments taking place. And then that data needed to be also looked at by organizational development and HR to see which nurses have which skills at this point in time.
Geert: So it presented a lot of opportunities as well, because we gained better insight into what sort of workforce we had. You could map out personal development journeys. And that was just for one category — for the nurses. So an ecosystem in place that supported that. So of course we had to learn as we went along. But it’s crucial that you don’t have any weak links in the system, because if the training isn’t correct, the nurses aren’t going to go back and revisit the training. If the data isn’t in there that HR needs, they’re not going to come to you and say, how are we doing training wise and how have we upskilled our workforce? So all of these different stakeholders that you have — with career development, organizational development — they’re also all part of that ecosystem that you have to involve when it comes to fast changes in the workforce and when it comes to upskilling.
Geert: So I think it’s a unified challenge that we’re all in. And thankfully, we’re a lot further now than we were a few years back when a lot of this was still manual, keeping Excel lists. Whereas now it’s more complete in terms of the learning tools available, the type of assessments you can do, the more intelligent assignment — which is very important — based on personal interest because it can change all the time, not just based on role. So I think some of these developments that we’re seeing… Ashling, to come back to your question as well: yes, skills. A skills-based economy where it’s not just about roles, but also about your professional journey in your company and the skills that you need to do your job and to do the job of the future. I think that’s where the ecosystem is a crucial part.
Ashling: I love that. I love “jobs of the future” and thanks for sharing an example, Geert. It’s always nicer to bring things into the real world. Theoretical is great, but having those examples really bring things to life. I picked up on a few things you just said there. You’re speaking about learners, in this case nurses, who won’t want to take learning if it’s not applicable. We’re trying to cover or fill skills gaps. And I’m curious: when we’re speaking about ecosystems, how can we ensure that learning really sticks or works, and go beyond just completion rates.
Ashling: Is that for me or for Mark?
Geert: Yeah, I think Geert. Yeah, you can pick it up, and then we can also get Mark’s take on this.
Geert: Sure, sure, yes. So I’ll keep this one brief. But indeed, yeah, it’s not just technology, it’s also about people. So connecting people, processes and technology, but also connecting them to business goals, of course, is quite crucial. So what I used to do is go to the different departments a lot, say what sort of skills gaps do you have there? How can we best serve you? So to be intentional about what sort of tools we present them with instead of saying, well, we have this for you and everyone has to follow the same utilization of the tools. So to allow for a certain flexibility, I think, is crucial. Also, yeah, of course you have to secure the budget again and prove your own ROI. So to get the stakeholders involved, to look at different departmental needs and still keep flexibility of tools. Because how often do we speak with customers who say, oh by the way, we also have that department but they’re using their own LMS, or they’re using their own tool for authoring. So to be able to present a tool that is flexible, that meets different worker needs — I think that’s very crucial.
Mark: Yeah, and I think I’d probably just add to that then. What that does is it brings together a really good example of where we can go into something that’s quite industry-specific. And there’s always the need for us to use models like a learning ecosystem to be able to really deep dive and support particular areas that are particularly regulated or complicated or managing needs of an industry. If I go then and sort of bring it up a level, we also need to make sure that this is something that’s relatively universal, because there are universal aspects to this that are also important. It’s around skills gaps appearing everywhere, and that’s mainly, I guess, because of the automation of the process that we have, and we’re also seeing lots of changing demands. So it’s a move towards that sort of continuous adaptive learning and it’s cross-functional. It needs to be universal, but it equally needs to be able to deep dive.
Ashling: That makes sense. And I think that brings us to an interesting place. I know that we’re talking about the importance of flow of work and then also peer learning. And I can see some interesting things happening also in the chat that feed into the conversation as well. So for example Joe was talking about having genuine experiences. And yeah, it seems that culture really here is the foundation. If people don’t buy into learning in the first place, no amount of technology is going to make that learning work. So I guess, Mark, what do ecosystems do to make learning continuous, or how can we make this learning continuous and visible?
Mark: So I guess actually here what we’re talking about, and seeing some of the comments, is how do we keep it visible? One is I think we have to think about how we get buy-in from everybody. I’m sure we’ll go into that sort of changing role of L&D and what we need to be doing differently or how we need to change our approach. I think there’s a couple of things. One is it’s being connected with the business. So we need to make sure that at the highest level we are regularly meeting, we’re breaking down some barriers and some silos. We’re all talking a common theme and a common language so that we’re not just an isolated unit of people trying to work in an organization and instruct some change and deliver content against skills gaps. We’re staying super aligned to what the business wants to achieve.
Mark: And one of the biggest things I think I learned from being a practitioner moving into Cornerstone, as an example, is I had the opportunity to reflect back. So when I’m talking to some customers, I can often see them trying to instigate a huge amount of change but perhaps needing to connect some dots around the wider business, which is very often where I go — strategic processes are first because that gives us some common alignment. That’s where I’d probably start this conversation.
Ashling: That makes sense. And then would this help, I guess, with preventing people becoming overwhelmed? Is that the idea behind that suggestion?
Mark: Yeah, I think what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to take people on a journey. So with any learning ecosystem, we’re bringing in any change. The other thing we do is if we have the alignment at the top and we all build this common framework of what we want to achieve, we know all the details, right? We know that a learning ecosystem is much easier for people to use when they get it right. What we’ve got to do is you get the common alignment at the top. So all departments are singing from the same hymn sheet. We’re all aligned in what we want to achieve, and then we can get into why we use a learning ecosystem to deliver the right training in the right time and in the right place. And what we want to do here is always remember that we’ve got users at the end of this that need to engage with what we’re delivering. So I think the two start to go hand in hand. If you’ve got common alignment across all business areas we can then start going into looking at building what this is going to be and how can we get people excited to come into this learning ecosystem?
Ashling: That makes sense. And then yeah I think that brings us nicely to a next topic. But I am reading the chat and I see that Joe has a question here. And what I would say is that culture really is the foundation. If people don’t buy into e-learning in the first place, no amount of technology will make it work. So what ecosystems do is make learning continuous, they make learning visible. It’s not just about onboarding, or one-off training here and there, but it’s part of that everyday flow of work. And I think this brings us nicely to another topic. So following on from what Mark said here about common alignment and making sure that we’re all singing off the same hymn sheet, I am curious Geert, from your experience, about how L&D can embrace peer-to-peer learning without becoming bottlenecks.
Geert: Indeed. I just wanted to comment as well on Joyce who had the question: how do we make people see that training is an investment in themselves? Well I think foremost we have all these new possibilities, new technologies, but in the end people only have more or less the same amount of time that they can actually spend on training next to their jobs. So what used to be crucial is that of course you bring learning from the top. So you also have a manager that knows the importance of training. So like Mark said, it begins from the top. But also an obstacle was usually the training was seen as an isolated activity, so you do it next to your job. So part of an ecosystem, of course, is also having different modalities to reach the learner. So that is one important one so that it doesn’t interrupt the workflow too much. And that’s where you come to this trend that Jane Hart speaks about in modern workplace learning of how to bring learning to the workplace.
Geert: And we do see quite a lot of developments there as well which causes different shifts. When we look at e-learning, our core business, we now see that our clients are preferring shorter courses instead of long courses, which will always have their place. But shorter courses are of course easier to consume, easier to go back to. We now have integrations also with Cornerstone — an important one — where it’s so easy to offer up training, to update it. People always get the latest sort of training and it’s easier to go from one system into the other systems. So integrations is a big one. And there we also see more and more being possible with connectors, and things like Teams and Slack also opening up to businesses like ours to connect with.
Mark: Oh sorry. I was going to say you’re spot on. You can continue.
Geert: Yeah, and that is indeed the more informal peer-to-peer learning that always took place. So people were always engaging in some sort of training even though they were saying they weren’t, because they’re always learning on the job, they’re hearing things from colleagues, they get shoulder-to-shoulder trainings. People overload you with PowerPoints or PDFs that you have to go through a certain protocol. So we’re also now seeing, also this is a result of more and more opportunities for everyone to engage in training, so it’s becoming more and more democratic where, for instance, we see a lot of companies now investing in SME-created e-learning, where the everyday business expert also wants to contribute not just by a PowerPoint or PDF, but in the way of e-learning. And that of course brings a lot of this informal learning. And that’s the third trend: the more informal learning surfacing and being part of this ecosystem. So we’re now seeing what is happening in Slack, there’s greater visibility as well on social learning and peer learning. So we have more data, we have more shorter courses available, and all of this together through the integrations kind of matches that vision of having actual job support. So more training in the flow of work.
Geert: Although I have to say we’re not there yet, because really good job support which doesn’t require you to go into your LMS or to engage in a learning activity as isolated — we’re still quite removed from that ideal vision, the holy grail if you will. But certainly we’re making steps towards that.
Ashling: 100%. The three different trends are certainly appearing, and I think growing from strength to strength, and probably aren’t just trends and are here to stay. In the chat as well, I saw some nice insight from Tiffany as we are talking about different modalities and meeting learners — Tiffany sharing about drilling down on the skills that you want to teach, and I think that you’re spot on. People engage with learning when they see what’s in it for them. And I think it’s really nice to also bring learners to the experts. An ecosystem helps make that personal value really clear because it connects learning to career growth and to day-to-day performance. So it’s not that one-off event, as you mentioned, Geert. So, yeah, to kind of bring us back on — what role does L&D play in this? I’d be interested to get your take, Mark, on how L&D can embrace peer-to-peer learning without becoming bottlenecks.
Mark: That’s a big question. I think from my side, first and foremost, we have to embrace the change. I think often L&D were at the forefront of this and at the moment with the onset of AI, I think very often we’re concerned as to what part we have to play here. So from my side, I think it’s around us moving from perhaps being that traditional facilitator to an enabler. What I see is L&D having a really crucial role in helping embrace the idea of a learning ecosystem. It’s around engaging those stakeholders, trying to keep people aligned, and it’s showing the value that we add in delivering a learning ecosystem. But we have to also be clear that some of the roles that we’ve had in the past, perhaps as facilitators of learning or one-off events — I think from my side we’ve now got to move into the enabler of this. We’ve got to be able to show people the value of that learning journey.
Mark: We need to embrace the change. We need to make sure that we’re very alive to the different sorts of learning that are available. Many of our organisations today are perhaps moving away from that classroom-facilitated learning to now the enabling of the learning journey that’s building people’s powers and filling skills gaps. So I think the biggest piece is we’ve got to embrace the change first. I think we need to lead the way and we need to become the enablers of this. And seeing the comments that we’ve got, it’s not always going to be an easy job, but we embrace the change, and I think we then move from facilitator to enabler.
Ashling: Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting trend and it certainly is maybe a slightly different experience of L&D. Geert, as you work with so many organizations rolling out this type of learning, I’m curious how you see this process working of L&D being the enablers.
Geert: That’s a great encompassing question. So it touches on many different points. But I think at the heart of it is control. So L&D used to have control over content. You create something as L&D, you look at what sort of audiences do you have, and then you require a certain completion on those learnings, and that’s it. And instead of control over content — which in certain areas is still very valid: company-wide trainings, strategically important trainings, there you still want to have that control — but I think it’s now also more in the speaking in terms of control over processes that surround learning. So indeed you can think about governance, enablement for the author. Especially now that AI can do so much more. It can actually help you turn that knowledge into a learning experience for colleagues.
Geert: So to really think about what does it mean for someone’s professional identity to allow certain teams to become their own centers of excellence, to create trainings within the team for their colleagues, and to kind of guide that, enable that, draw best practice from it. Because you usually start small and then you’re looking to build upon a certain best practice with the other teams and departments. And of course that’s where we also come in with the enablement that we offer. So it is a mindset change but I think it’s a crucial one, especially now that we see L&D teams fulfilling also more of a talent management or organizational development function. Like I said, it’s moving much more towards the level of skills than it used to be before. You’re now part of a bigger ecosystem where you also have more data available about how employees are doing, how departments compare — it might become even part of someone’s yearly evaluation, what sort of trainings they’ve done.
Geert: So to be mindful of your own role as L&D as connecting to these other fields — it used to be independent, but we’re also now seeing more and more roles like Learning and Development plus Talent Management Officer, or Director of Learning, Careers and Organizational Development. So it’s partly because the ecosystem is changing into more complete landscapes of following the whole learner journey — from onboarding, as someone said in the chat, until they leave. So facilitating that is one of the causes. So it’s organizational, it’s technological perhaps, it also has to do with learner demands and people switching jobs more than they used to. Perhaps it’s a combination of all these factors, but it’s a very real change. And like Mark said, it requires opening up to the change. It requires finding trusted partners that can actually help you with the change, that have done it before. And about becoming your own center of excellence in the sense that you have that best practice available to you. What works for your organization, because what works for you might not work for another organization. Also build up that internal expertise to capture that. So I think those are some of the crucial elements when we speak about this.
Ashling: I’d love to maybe pick on that thread, especially where you brought it back to what Mark was saying about building out ecosystems. I see Shu Wen’s question in the chat as well, asking about what indicators we can look at to determine whether we’ve successfully built an effective ecosystem that supports employee learning. And I’d love if you could elaborate on that, Mark.
Mark: Yeah, so I guess that’s almost — it feels like it’s an entire webinar all in of itself. But to try and get to the point, I would probably go here: I think we’re using learning ecosystems to move away from just looking at completion rates. So one of the biggest things we’ve had, and one of the challenges we’ve had before — and it can and does sometimes still have its place — is what we’re trying to do here is we’re driving a cultural shift. We’re driving engagement. We’re using multimodality learning to get people interested in learning again. So I think in the first instance it’s got to be — go back to what we said before — being really clear on the strategy of what you want to achieve, but then also understanding that we need to go now deeper than just looking at completion rates in themselves. They have their place, but they’re not always going to be the place where we want to land. So we now need to think about what else do we want to be able to return here. Like, how do we prove the development of skills?
Geert: Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. Jump in on what Mark is saying because, as L&D, we’re also now becoming semi-BI experts — business intelligence. A lot of HR managers are now asking us for dashboards, for reports that we have to deliver. So then indeed, completion is not the only metric that counts anymore. Data follows the learner around much more. It’s more easy to see how someone learned, their whole learning process, how they engage with certain trainings. You now even have AI coaches that can actually assess and feed through data, LRS systems that can capture this data as well. So now that we have access to more and more data, where it’s not just about completion, about checking the box, it’s also what do you do with all of the data that is available to you. So that’s another point of course where the L&D function now faces opportunities and challenges.
Geert: What do you do with this data? But also just to put a slight warning on this: now that we have more data available, because we see it often being focused on very knowledge-intensive roles — of course, a lot of companies also have a large blue-collar workforce, and how to also respect their professional journeys. The way they learn, the way they interact, to also be able to capture that and not just focus on the knowledge-intensive roles, which allow you to see much more how people are learning, how people are developing in certain skills. I think that’s one of the challenges as well for us as learning platform providers. How do we also reach that population and not lose them in all of these advances that we now have with more data, with AI, et cetera.
Mark: I’m just going to quickly add in. Sorry, Ashling, a little bit more, because it actually becomes so rich and deep. We’ve got to look at how do we use these learning ecosystems, because we’ve got to think about the integration into the flow of work. We’ve got to look at peer learning and social reinforcement. This is actually a really broad topic. That’s why we know that this concept of learning ecosystems — it’s not going away, and it’s not going away for a very long time, until perhaps the next reinvention of what that learning ecosystem will be. There’s lots of things to do. It’s also around knowledge sharing. But I think peer accountability — when you’re using a really great tool like Easygenerator, of course I have to do the plug there, that’s why we partner with you — this is actually around making the individuals responsible and almost embracing that ecosystem, producing great materials that we can all access. Sorry, I know we’ll be stuck for time so we’ll move on.
Ashling: No worries. But you’ve actually followed up what I was going to ask next, because it is interesting. There’s definitely a lot of opportunities. I like to think that with tech advancements, yeah, it’s a world of opportunity rather than something that’s scary. I heard you were mentioning different aspects of an ecosystem there — things like LRS, for example, we have LMS, we have authoring tools, but we’ve also acknowledged that ecosystems can look different and we might have different types of either knowledge-intensive roles or more blue-collar roles as well. So to ensure we’re moving towards building an effective ecosystem, I’m curious Geert, if you have some examples of pillars that you would see in a successful ecosystem.
Geert: Again, it very much, of course, depends on the sort of industry you’re in, the sort of company you’re in. I saw someone comment that you have very compliance-heavy sectors where training needs to be controlled more. Although of course there also the question becomes, how are people doing it at this moment in time, the training, and can you still benefit from having experts contribute to that, because they might already be teaching their colleagues more informally, which also becomes prone to errors. But indeed when it comes to core pillars, I think you have to be intentional about what you’re creating. So does it match the way your workers work and learn, first and foremost? What sort of support do you have internally? Of course, sometimes the relationship between the L&D team and the IT teams can be a bit strained, so you might recognize this as well. So what sort of support is there available when it comes to creating different connectors and integrations?
Geert: How much do you indeed rely on the vendor to help you with all of those things and already have an ecosystem in place? Here I want to return the favor to Mark, where you have kind of a complete ecosystem with one vendor, so you have that one-stop shop where you can go to instead of having to plug in many different tools, and you don’t know which tool people have to use for what, and people themselves might not know it. So yeah, it’s really about being intentional about how you create your ecosystem. And there’s many different ways of doing it. There’s many constraints as well as to how far you can go, how deep you can go with certain tools. Being multimodal, of course, is a very important one.
Geert: And indeed, we have 20 minutes left. But before I wrap up my bit, I very much wanted to mention an example of a client that I spoke with this morning actually, that are already quite far in creating this multimodal training environment. Skills-based, aligned with business goals. And that was an Australian client of ours that recently actually won an L&D prize for the best L&D team in Australia. And this was because of the way they — yeah, I was very impressed with that. So I said, well, let me mention this in the webinar that I’m about to attend. And this is how they did it.
Geert: So like many companies they have this five-year vision, where in 2030 they need to reach these aims, and it’s connected to these company pillars. And one of those company pillars, of course, was AI. So the training team brainstormed how can we aid the AI literacy within our organization, to equip everyone, no matter what role you do, to have a basic knowledge of AI and also to have AI that you can apply in your day-to-day work. So what they did was they took the multimodal approach. They developed e-learning, they also designed a skills taxonomy around AI. So they had four different domains if you will: a foundational domain, an advanced domain, a more strategic domain, a more technical domain. And they spread that out across different functions in the company. And then each of those domains also had different skill levels that you could go through. So you could attend a webinar, you could join a chat group — so more social learning, peer-to-peer learning. Of course, you could do a lot of e-learnings, you could attend a vendor seminar, a Microsoft seminar. And all these things combined led to different intersections where you could actually see, okay, we’re progressing in terms of educating people about AI.
Geert: Of course there was an evaluation of how well people understood AI, what they thought of the trainings, and there you could see them even developing AI chatbots that you can interact with. So there you saw that the multimodal approach connected to overall business goals and aims, to that five-year program, to one of those pillars — that is having an impact already for them, to the extent where they won this great award. So well done to them. But I think that’s what we’re more and more seeing: L&D in the business, contributing to business goals by the interventions that they’re doing, being very much multimodal. Dividing things up by skill, not just by role. And that’s what they’re now trying to do for more of those organizational pillars. It’s not a short-term project. So they have a year one goal, year two goal, year three goal, year four goal. But their aim is to reach 100% of their workforce so their workforce is AI-ready. So I think this is one of the examples that I’m very excited about myself — about the approach that they have taken, about the real impact it is having across different departments.
Geert: So personally, I’d like to end on that before we go into the Q&A. But before we jump into the Q&A…
Ashling: Really exciting. I hope that they’re celebrating that achievement because it’s a perfect example of what we can do with an ecosystem. And we’re speaking here about bringing different modalities together and different types of training. So I am curious Mark, from your experience, as Geert said with a one-stop shop like Cornerstone, is there any pitfalls that those attending the webinar today can avoid when they embark on this ecosystem journey?
Mark: Yeah, I think probably two messages for me. One, let’s always remember that sort of human, cultural aspect. This learning ecosystem needs to work for everybody. And we also completely accept that many of you will have, you know, a slightly-detailed agenda which makes you look different to everybody else. At the heart of it are people, and at the heart of it are people that need to learn, they need to develop skills. So I would always say, however strategic we might need to be, let’s always think user experience and let’s think about the human and cultural aspects that align with your business. Let’s always keep the people at the front of what we’re trying to do with the learning ecosystem.
Mark: The only piece that I would say to go with that is it’s very easy in our day jobs when we’re trying to move fast in all sorts of different ways, we also need to remember that this isn’t just a tech project. Very often what I see is we can get so drawn up into the project plan that talks about how we’re going to deliver our learning ecosystem that it can take us off track. It could take us away from our original strategic goals. It might take us away from being human-centered and cultural in what we’re doing. So don’t just fall into the trap — and we’ve probably all done it at times — that when you’ve got a very big project that you’re running, you don’t just treat it like a standard tech project. Getting this right is actually so much more.
Ashling: 100%. And I think, yeah, that brings us nicely to the Q&A. But it certainly is. It’s more than just a tech project. It’s more than just a trend. You have to align on your goals. You have to look at what you’re trying to achieve as an organization, but then also make sure that you’re embracing this shift culturally as well. With that being said, I know we have about 10 minutes left, so I’d love to get to some of the questions because the chat is quite busy. So yeah, we can hopefully hop into that.
Ashling: I see from Oves, he’s asking about how you see… I can’t quite… Oh, the Zeigarnik effect and learning and acceptance in your teams as a trainer and manager. So yeah, Mark, if you could share your insight on that.
Mark: I think I can pick up on that one. So this is really good. This is great because — playing some flattery to the audience — we get it. You all know your stuff here and we all have a particular lens to look at. So here we go into something that starts to get really quite deep. But the overview is — and I can never pronounce it correctly either, so I’m glad I’m not the only one — but the Zeigarnik effect is saying there’s this idea that we have a tendency to go back and we will go and complete things that we’ve left unfinished, rather than going in and completing things in totality. How do people attract, how do people manage learning programs against that?
Mark: I’ve got one example for you. The work that we do to produce content in-house ourselves — Cornerstone purchased a content organization called Grovo. Many years ago we actually started to move our in-house production to something that had more of a TV box set feel. Now that works on the Zeigarnik effect, because what we were doing — and you could do this of course in-house using your Easygenerator tool — is you’re producing this episodic cliffhanger that actually makes you want to go and complete the next piece of learning. We actually won some awards for some content that we produced in an episode-based format. And that was the idea: you’re trying to reach different people’s styles, but you’re also trying to make it feel like you’re unfinished. That didn’t answer my question. I need to go into the next piece of training. So it’s very broad. It probably doesn’t go into the Zeigarnik effect in enough detail, but it’s an indication of how as developers we might sometimes try and take some of those principles to create a sense of urgency to go in and complete the next piece of learning.
Ashling: That makes sense. Geert, do you have anything to add before we jump to the next question?
Geert: I think it was a good answer to what could also be a webinar in and of itself. I see Virginia asking something interesting as well, regarding soft skills. So she says that bringing soft skills and courses to meetings work for an area. But what about strategic processes and strategies for technical, practical and job-specific skills that are necessary for success at work? I heard you touched on this a little bit around skills training so I’d love to get your thoughts in this.
Geert: Yes, skills training is such a fascinating topic as well because you do have indeed generic skills, which are mostly soft skills like communication, leadership development, and then you have the more specialist skills which often have a practical component as well. And again, a lot of those skills are being taught and trained not in a virtual setting but in a day-to-day job setting. So we asked the question ourselves as well as a software company: how do we contribute to what a classroom trainer is doing now, and how can we put that into a virtual environment with a good learning experience for the learner?
Geert: Now that is of course a larger overall goal where we’re going more into simulations. So for instance, Easygenerator already has some great tools for software simulation, for soft skill trainings. But when it comes to the specialist skills and how virtual training can contribute to that, we’re also moving in a direction where we’re focusing more on feeding AI with that more practical knowledge that you need to acquire, using practical examples but also actual more simulatory features in Easygenerator. So it is a topic that’s been an important topic for a long time. How to employ learning software to facilitate the more specialist skills, the more hard skills, rather than just soft skill training. But it is something that we’re working on as a company. I’m sure Mark as well and his colleagues are also looking into how we can support these hard skills, by way of assessments for instance, having AI assess people. So also quite curious, Mark, how you approach that at this time.
Mark: A couple of things I’ll try and address and pick up one of the other questions that came in as well. This idea of the concept of having to blend soft skills and then when we start to go into process and very job-specific elements of training — one of the beauties of a learning ecosystem is it can embrace all types of learning. There’s a piece that I talk about with the World Economic Forum and the onset of AI, that there’s some interesting pieces around soft skills. Soft skills will absolutely have their place, and we know they will. And there’s lots of reasons why we use them on a strategic development front. We actually still need to use some of those courses to be able to develop great strategic leaders and thinkers. Sometimes we might be starting to find that people are beginning to use AI capabilities to speed those processes up. But actually a learning ecosystem can allow you to use all of those.
Mark: It’s not covering it all because it’s quite a big, deep topic. But what I’m saying is learning ecosystems will allow you to do all of those things. Sometimes you might need to be developing a journey for people that have a particular task or a particular job in mind, and you might start to see that some of that will be AI-generated. Of course your tool would enable people to do that in a particular deep-dive topic or an SME space as an example. But it’s how you then blend all of those things together. The other one I was going to pick up — because I was trying to build this in as well — is on that piece around ecosystem, dynamic production, monotasking. That starts to get really interesting. And one of the other ways I think that we can counteract that within learning ecosystems is to start looking at the formats that we might be using. We know, and we’ve known for a long time, microlearning has a really important place to play sometimes.
Mark: What we’re talking about here — this idea of monotasking — is let’s not get distracted with something that we’re doing. And what I’ve seen some of my customers doing is taking a much broader microlearning strategy, because then that avoids distraction. There are techniques that they talk about within that space. Some people will have heard of something called the Pomodoro technique. But in this space, the very quick answer would be: think about the format that you’re delivering the learning. And perhaps you might want to, in certain tasks or certain formats where little distraction is required, then think about bite-sized chunks, think about microlearning and the power that it plays. Microlearning doesn’t just have to be one thing, of course, it can be a number of things that you tag together. But it provides it in a much more digestible format.
Ashling: Indeed. If I can quickly add to that as well. I just saw Oves’ question. So these sort of tasks are also often very protocolized. So you do this, you do that, you get that result, and you have to do this and then you complete the task and you have a concrete result.
Geert: Now what we already can do is for instance to simulate that and say, well, we’ll put those screens, or whatever machine or program you’re using, we’ll take pictures or screens, we’ll put them in a sequence so that actually in Easygenerator you can go in and you can click and then you see the result that you should be getting. You can compare it to your real work environment, and then you go through the process, or you’re still in the actual program or doing the actual task at your workplace or with your machine that you need to configure with certain settings. And that’s kind of a blend between learning, learning on the job, getting actual results, and making sure that at the end of doing it you get the same results. In the e-learning where the instructor created those instructions versus instructions versus what you see on the job. And that is something that yeah, a trainer or coach used to do. They used to say well done, this is how you do it, and they would grade you. So that is more and more of a function analogy that e-learning is taking over. But only to a certain extent, because of course, you still have the combination of having actual assessments outside of training where people just have to check the boxes or an instructor or trainer has to check the boxes.
Geert: So that will always be the case with these highly protocolized actions. But we are seeing e-learning moving more and more into that space.
Ashling: Yeah. And I can say it’s also something that I’ve seen as well from an example that I have. I was working with an organization that had a lot of blue-collar learners. They were operating machinery and they saw that even after the onboarding, people might not be 100% even if they got signed off on by a trainer. So as Mark said, they actually started leveraging microlearnings. So if you’re at your machine and you had a question, you could pull up a really quick piece of learning to actually help with that safety piece as well.
Ashling: We’re nearly at time. We have room for one last question, coming from Virginia. So I’m curious if there are any other tips or tricks, or successful cases for bringing managers in to help them buy into e-learning. And Geert, I’m curious.
Geert: Yeah. Any tips from your end and your experience? It’s all about what matters to them, what is important. When you speak to different department managers, they obviously have their own goals, their own targets for their department in terms of workforce development. So it’s — and I’ll be very brief — it’s all about alignment with the business. So I think we also did a customer roundtable where we talked about aligning your learning strategy with the business strategy and having different ways of doing that. So the person that asked this question, we definitely have some materials as well on how to align learning strategies with business strategies. Because that’s what it all comes down to in the end: getting the business along with what you’re doing, proving value to the business of the learning programs that your people are developing. So yes, definitely, we have some tips for that one, 100%.
Ashling: And I will say we’re coming to the end. So I do want to take a moment to thank you both, Geert and Mark, for joining and for sharing your thoughts. The chat is still going. I’d love to keep this conversation going as well. If you’re interested in some of those materials, you can also find them in our Knowledge Hub. But yeah, a big thank you to you both.
Transcript produced from VEED subtitles. Speaker attribution assigned based on context and role.
