From Course Catalogs to Dynamic Enablement: The New L&D Operating Model

Julia: Welcome to L&D in 20, your go-to resource for all things workplace learning, brought to you by Go1. I'm your host, Julia Nieradka, Manager of Customer Success here at Go1. Today on the show, I'm excited to be joined by Jenny Dearborn. Jenny brings deep experience in learning, talent, and workforce transformation, as well as business strategy, and has spent her career helping organizations think differently about how people build the skills and capabilities they need for the future.

Jenny, welcome to the show. 

Jenny: Great to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Julia: Pleasure. In today's deep dive, we're exploring the next operating model for workforce capability. As organizations face faster change, more complex skills needs, and growing pressure to prove business impact, L&D leaders are being asked to do more than ever to deliver programs or manage content.

They're being asked to help build the capability their businesses need to adapt, perform, and grow. That raises an important question: What does a modern L&D operating model need to look like if learning is going to become a true driver of workforce capability? In this conversation, we'll look at what will separate the most effective L&D leaders over the next few years, how people, partners, technology, and data need to connect differently, and what L&D may need to stop doing to lead through change, and also what senior leaders need to do to be building that next.

Jenny, I'd love to start with the leadership shift. For years, L&D has often been measured by activity, how many programs were delivered, how many people attended, how many courses were completed, but the pressure now feels very different. So what will separate the effective L&D leaders from the rest? 

Jenny: Yeah, I think the pressure is the same, and the answer and solution is the same, but the whole context around it has changed.

So I would say the best L&D leaders were always the ones that brought a high level of business acumen and the ability to measure impact over activity And it has become more and more critical that we do that, and less and less tolerated, those who don't do that. So it has always been the case that we, as a global, you know, ecosystem, have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on corporate learning, and leaders have always said that the most critical thing is the skills and capabilities of their humans.

The expectations of leaders are of learning and development leaders are always the same. Be business acumen first. Think about the knowledge, skills, capabilities, competencies of your humans. Be comfortable with change and impermanence, that whatever you teach today will be gone and not needed, and you'll have to teach something else tomorrow, that you're on this constant treadmill, and you're never done.

So it's really, it feels the same. 

Julia: And Jenny, what are the conversations, in your opinion, that L&D leaders should and could be a part of a lot earlier on now than they often are? 

Jenny: I would say it's really understanding from the very beginning what are the business metrics that you want this learning intervention to drive.

You want to improve leadership trust score. That's why you're putting in a leadership development program, or you want to understand that your learning program is a leading indicator, and you should be measuring it, and it's part of probably several leading indicators that drive a lagging indicator, a lagging indicator like you're reducing top talent attrition or reducing, you know, new hire turnover.

You know, if a new hire in the first 12 months attrits, that's something that could have been prevented, right? And there are several activities and programs that you can do along the way. And so that's when it's okay to be measuring activities because there's probably 100 activities that lead to 10 leading indicators that all align to driving one lagging indicator, like top talent attrition, or overall company attrition, or employee engagement, or the employee net promoter score, or something like that.

How do these metrics ladder together? 

Julia: And given that fundamental massive transformation that L&D is going through at the moment, I think it follows to what you've been saying that our underlying operating model must evolve in tandem. It should always be evolving. But in your opinion, what does the next operating model actually look like?

Jenny: You know, the most successful L&D leaders really understand that data model operating structure and can put tools in place, which means that there's fantastic first mover advantage for the ones that do, because so few L&D leaders really are attuned to that level of sophistication. About 5% of learning and development leaders have actually deployed AI-enabled learning technology.

And so for those that do, they can really have a skills intelligence engine and be able to dynamically create, you know, the L&D solutions that are just in time, just enough, just for me, exactly what the person needs at the moment that they need it, without even really knowing that they need it or not even really asking for it.

A system kind of automatically creates it and sends it to you. So that sort of dynamic enablement really is the, you know, the operating model of the future where a lot of companies are still operating with Course catalogs and sort of a learning management system forward, you know, that, that giant course catalog first kind of approach is very antiquated, and the best leaders are looking at it completely differently.

Julia: For somebody here listening today, what are the signs that an L&D team is still operating sort of like a course factory? 

Jenny: I mean, it could be the questions that they ask. So when a client, int- an internal client, an internal stakeholder goes to the L&D team and says, "I would like to have, you know, this solution," if the L&D leader says, "How much money do you have to spend?"

Or, "How many hours do you, are you comfortable pulling your people off the line?" You know, leading with those kind of old-fashioned questions like, "How much time do you have? Do you want this to be ILT or e-learning, or do you want me to put a quiz at the end of that, you know, at the end of that course?"

Or something like that. So those are not the right questions. The right questions are, "What is the business impact metric that you're trying to drive? Do you know, have you identified, client, have you identified who are the learners in your department who are impacting that metric?" So maybe I want to, you know, fix my talent acquisition metrics.

Well, I know who the people are that are impacting those metrics. Those are my recruiters and my hiring managers and anybody that's involved in the interviewing process. Okay. That's easy. You know, you don't ask for everybody out in the business to be taking those learning interventions that are only impacted by, you know, where only a couple people are impacted.

So I would ask, do you know who are, is driving these metrics? Do you know how they're driving it? And, you know, being able to pick apart the variables of those business impact metrics. 

Julia: And I think that brings us to the ecosystem around learning very nicely, Jenny, because capability doesn't sit neatly in one platform or one department anymore, and it depends on the people, managers, business leaders, technology, data, as you mentioned, and also the systems to keep everything actually running day to day.

So how do people, partners in technology and data need to connect differently in this day and age? 

Jenny: From a people perspective, again, it's the same mantra that I've had a, for lots of years, but the context has changed. I always feel like I can't be the leader of a department where the cobbler's kids have no shoes.

You know, I need the people in my learning team to be on, absolutely on the cutting edge. So they need to be more knowledgeable, more skilled, more comfortable with new technology, more comfortable with AI than anybody else, because we are driving that on behalf of the business. So we can never say, "Oh, I, you know, I wish I could get some of that, too."

Right? So I have to, you know, be pushing constantly on the development of my staff so that they know all of the latest technology and all of the latest trends and tools. And so when a client comes to them and says, you know, "I would like to have a project management class, and can you supersize that for me?"

You know, my team can say, "Actually, that's not the right solution. Let me tell you what the, the right approach is." And they're not just following what their client suggests. So, you know, always build the capability of your learning and development team first. I'd say for my partners, I would say that the most important partner that the L&D team has is kind of the innovation team within your company.

Now, that might sit in the CFO's area, it might sit in IT, there might be, like, a chief data officer, there might be a chief innovation officer. But whoever it is in your company that's driving next gen innovation. And in my company, that sits in, in IT, but it can be different places. And you wanna connect with that person and say, "What are the experiments you're running?

What do you wish the employees at this company knew better and differently?" Co-own those metrics with your innovation team. And do you have a policy around or a program around, like, everybody gets a Claude license, or everybody gets a Copilot license. You know, there should be rules of engagement. You should have to, you know, in order to keep this Claude license, you have to demonstrate your improved capabilities.

And so partner with your IT team or whoever is driving that to come up with an ROAI, you know, a return on AI investment, so that you can say, "Hey, we rolled out licenses to this pilot group, and we can measure the projects that they did, and we know that those projects drove this other level of, you know, efficiency or effectiveness or productivity or something like that."

So that you're really a close partner with, with innovation, right? Because that's really where you should be as, as a learning partner. In some companies that are more traditional, you know, their biggest partner is finance because learning is seen as a cost center and learning is seen as Something we want to keep those hours as low as possible and keep those costs as low as possible.

In some companies, it's seen as an investment. So kind of you need to judge for yourself what type of environment you, you work in and how is learning seen. You know, how is it judged and measured, you know, in your organization. 

Julia: Even for those companies that do see learning as more of an investment and maybe not as much of a cost center, what, in your opinion, sort of makes the CFO such an important part of this conversation?

Jenny: You need to be convincing your CFO about the unlock of productivity and efficiency that learning drives. And so you need to have that partnership very strong. Never put out a learning program unless you can measure what impact that program's gonna have. I'm gonna revise the onboarding program because it's going to lower regrettable attrition within the first 12 months of hire.

It's going to increase productivity. It's gonna increase sales rep time to quota. You know, it's gonna increase engagement. Like here are all the things that I know this program will drive because I've interviewed all the new hires, and they all had a crappy experience with the old onboarding program, and, you know, and their productivity was lower, and their attrition was higher.

So I'm gonna change that very specifically, and here's the financial aspect of that. It will reduce turnover costs. Like you, you need to quantify that. I want to put in a leadership development program because here's what I'm gonna teach, and I know that when managers know how to know, how to do these things, it's gonna improve these business metrics, right?

No leadership development program, metrics stay the same or continue to decline. Put in a new program, these metrics improve. You need to quantify that. So, you know, if you ever say like, "Okay, finance, I'm about to write a big check because I heard that the business has this problem. Here's my justification."

You know, it's also good to have, do that hard work of connecting a program with metrics because then sometimes people say, "Well, we don't have the money for the program, but I need you to deliver the metrics." So then you have a, then you're covered, right? It's CYA. No program, no metrics. That you have to be prepared, board of directors, for the metrics staying the same or declining.

Julia: So I want to make this very practical now And I think a lot of L&D listeners out there will agree 100% with the direction of travel, but they're also dealing with legacy systems, limited budgets, smaller teams, stakeholder requests, and teams that are already feeling the stretch. So what, in your opinion, Jenny, should L&D stop doing, and what should it build next?

Jenny: My instinct for what you should stop doing is measuring activity and presenting it as results. Now, that's like the number of hours or completion metrics. 95% of the people who signed up for this class actually attended. Who cares? You know, or just smile sheets or level one, or you know. So my instinct is stop that activity metric But if you have nothing else, at least you have that.

I would say another thing to stop doing is stop defaulting to the answer is a course, right? A lot of the times it's not a training course that they need. They need a newsletter, they need communication, they need comfort and support from their manager. Their manager needs to give a poop about what they're doing, right?

Because they could go and take a course. I mean, there's great research that says, you know, a fantastic instructor, fantastic course materials, a really engaged student, but a manager that thinks it's a waste of time, that course is a, you know, is never gonna succeed. Most important thing out of those four variables is a manager that says, "I think this should be a good use of your time.

You know, be sure and tell me when you come back from this course how you're gonna apply it on the job, right? I'm really excited to hear about how you spent your one day away from the line." Great course, great instructor, enthusiastic learner means nothing if a manager isn't supportive. So I would say, you know, stick with these basics and, and know that the answer is not always a course.

What you start doing, measurement wired to business outcomes, genuine manager enablement, you know, it, and it could be simple, like just explaining what manager's responsibilities are. By the way, manager, you're responsible for motivating your employee. You're responsible for their development, and here are the three ways to do that.

You know, you're responsible for making sure they're engaged, and here's the two ways to do that. I mean, just really simple. It's a one-pager, if nothing else. 

Julia: What do you think good would look like 12 months from now for a learning team trying to modernize all of this, Jenny? 

Jenny: If nothing else, start by educating yourself.

Ask for lots of demos. That's always where I start when I come into a new organization, and I'm typically brought in to do some sort of transformation with a team, and they're operating in an old model. The first thing I need to do is inspire them and, like, have them see how the world is possible.

Because if I know the exact path but my team doesn't, it doesn't matter. I'll run out of energy, right? And everyone is gonna be, not deliberately, but kind of resisting and fighting against me, you know, just because they don't know. 

Julia: So Jenny, we always finish the show with three quick-fire practical questions.

The first one is, what is in your feed? 

Jenny: Major League Baseball, cooking shows, absolutely nothing to do with my job, my job. So I'm very interested in economic history, world history, organizational behavior, why do people act weird in different situations, so I follow a lot of psychologists, cultural anthropology, you know, just basically how humans and individuals behave in groups of different sizes, and how that's changed over time.

So I, I love to study, you know, ancient kind of cultural anthropology. 

Julia: So who's at your table? At this time of rapid change, who do you think a key stakeholder for HR and L&D leaders should be to partner with across the business, and why? 

Jenny: At my table right now, at my company, Greenfield, is definitely Adam, who's the head of innovation, and he has a team of business systems analysts, BSAs, who go from function to function and review current state and recommend a technology solution to, you know, jump over steps and rework workflows and recommend a new technology approach.

So I love, love, love that team. You know, finance is a given, but I would say anybody who's driving innovation in your organization. 

Julia: Absolutely. And finish this sentence for us: at its best, learning at work should feel... 

Jenny: Seamless, easy, invigorating. Can I use more than one word? You should come away from it feeling like, "I'm prepared for the future."

Like, it should make you feel like, you know, you've got an extra shield and a extra sword in your, in your pack, and you're ready to go for the next whatever phase of the journey is. Not that life is a battle. I don't know. Maybe that's not a good metaphor. You should just feel ready. 

Julia: Feeling ready, I love that, and I think that's a great way to end this off.

So Jenny, thank you so much for joining us and shooting this episode with us. It's been such a pleasure to have you. 

Jenny: Yeah, my pleasure. It's been fun. Thanks. 

Julia: Thanks for tuning into the show. I'm your host, Julia Nieradka, and that wraps up another episode of L&D in 20. To continue the conversation, send me a message on LinkedIn through the link in the show notes.

Your comments will help to inform future episodes, and who knows? Maybe we'll even answer some of your questions on the show. We'll catch you on the next episode, and until then, keep learning.

Producer: This show is brought to you by Go1, the trusted learning foundation for a future-ready workforce. Go1 helps organizations build capable, compliant teams through the world's most comprehensive learning ecosystem, making learning easier to manage, measure, and scale with confidence. To learn more, visit go1.com or click the link in the show notes.

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