CornerstoneOnDemand: Capability is the future of L&D

CornerstoneOnDemand’s Mike Bollinger and UNLEASH’s Jon Kennard meet to discuss the themes of the learning titan’s People and Workplace Trends Report 2023.

We join the conversation as Jon dives straight into a question around the zeitgeist.

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Jon Kennard: A good place to start in terms of what’s really grabbing people’s imagination and attention at the moment, is about AI (artificial intelligence).

And one of the key findings in your report was that there’s a significant increase – or there will be a significant increase – in the use of AI to predict the next wave of skills. Are there areas of AI you think it might suggest that we explore? 

Mike Bollinger: With the rise of generative AI, it becomes a very wide ranging kind of conversation. How is HR gonna use AI? As you well know, for years there’s been AI in recruiting and everybody had some level of AI, which was usually a variant of machine learning as well.

What we found in the report though, was if you think back to ‘skills’ in the classic sense, we’ve been able to do that for a long time. And in terms of what we used to call ‘KSAs’ – key skills and abilities – the problem was once you set it up, it crashed under its own weight.

What we see from an AI perspective is the ability for AI to help us keep those skill ontologies fresh. And that’s important because it gives us the ability to do comparative analysis.

At Cornerstone, we took it one level deeper and we talked a little bit about it from a equivalent and adjacent perspective. I’ll give you a really good example: Natural language processing is something we’re all looking for in our technology stacks and people that can do that.

But what’s really interesting is marketing people have good NLP skills, and so you can use that as the ability to move from one to the other. And so when we think about AI and predicting the next wave of skills, part of it is being able to look around corners at places that you might not have been able to look at in the past, because of the freshness aspect.

If you think about what’s going on with generative AI or chat GPT, which has kind of taken the media by storm, conversational interfaces do make it accept acceptable. There are downsides to some of those things, but the idea of using conversational interfaces as a mechanism to harvest and scrape some of the AI in an HR perspective is a good thing. And there’s a variety of ways that you could do that. You can do it obviously inside recruitment – it’s been there a long time.

[With] chatbots in particular, you’re seeing more capability coming out of those that are very specific. Beware of large language models, which are static. So you can use it as seating and so on. And in the domain of hr, extraordinarily useful things like content matching and personalized learning journeys.

We talked a little bit about adjacent skills, even things like how do you write up performance conversations or check-in conversations and use appropriate language and sentiment analysis. These are all things that AI can help us with.

And then finally, we’re going to start seeing some near real-time insights from that as well. All of this goes to say that we’re in the early phases of what I think AI is going to be able to do when it comes to not just skills matching, but many of the things that are going on in HR. Really interesting times.

JK: We could talk about AI, all day, in terms of the way that it can be used. But another really important area of the report that really caught my eye was the term ‘capability academies’.

One of the other key findings; you say that capability academies of the future of learning and development. I’m unfamiliar with the term – how do these differ from skills academies?

MB: We learn skills not just by studying, but by doing, right? And classically, we’ve known about that for a long time, but the idea of a capability academy can be defined as a program, content experiences, assignments, credentials, and collaboration.

It’s often led by business leaders and subject matter experts, and it supports the idea that firms should organize their learning around business-specific critical capabilities in that sense, and it really was born from this notion of what happened to us in the digital world.

Over the last 20 years, we’ve digitized a lot of our learning. And what happened out of that was very useful. Don’t get me wrong, we were able to do things with it that are very useful, but as we’ve moved from self-directed to more tailored learning, a capability academy is something that is driven by several things [including] collaboration and practice.

The collaboration is often under the supervision of a coach or a facilitator. And then you’re able to share this expertise across a variety of different domains. It becomes a flywheel effect, an evergreen process. So if you think of the Capability Academy as a superset of programs and content and experience and assignments and credentials and practice, that’s why we predict it’s going to be the future of the learning and development (L&D) function.

JK: To move from capability and skills to another area which saw very strong employee demand, and that was DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging) training, with a 7.7 times increase from 2021 to 2022 in demand for self-directed DEIB learning content.

My question’s a little leading, but I’m interested in your answer. Do you think the addition of belonging to the more established trio of diversity, equity, and inclusion is down to the proliferation of remote work and specifically the need for ‘belonging’, and the idea that there needs to be a better understanding of belonging in the workplace?

MB: I absolutely, a hundred percent, agree with your last statement; Better understanding of belonging.

What we found was, in our own internal analysis, a 7.7 increase in DEIB learning, content consumption. Obviously that spike was driven by a strong interest from learners. But what’s really interesting to me about DEIB and the sense of belonging, and your question is the idea of what is ‘belonging’. And so we did a separate piece.

I didn’t say it in the beginning, but I manage and run the Cornerstone People Research Lab and a separate research piece that we just released, we actually looked at what we call the ‘belonging score’. And the belonging score is based on the idea of acceptance, respect, and appreciation at work.

We know from what we’ve found inside that research is that sense of acceptance, appreciation, and understanding in our relationships with individuals and groups of people, including managers, has an impact.

High belonging employees are three times more likely to say their manager is gonna support their career growth. Low belonging employees are two times as likely to say they wouldn’t consider other careers inside your business.

And so the last thing that I would say is high belonging employees are way more interested in learning for their future and for their own personal interests as well as for their current job. And, low belonging employees are six times more likely to say that they don’t, that their manager or employer doesn’t know who they are or are tracking their skills.

So we now know what belonging means, and we also know what the impact is to the individual’s perception with belonging. If you think about it from acceptance, respect and appreciation, that is not necessarily new to the hybrid workplace. It may be more emphasized now in the sense that I’m not necessarily connected in a physical level going back to the office, but the sense of belonging and its impact on the psyche has been around a long time.

And there’s some significant research in particular at the educational level, which we’ve translated into this workplace belonging score that we created in this report.

JK: Thanks, Mike. I’ve got one last question and maybe another one that I’ll add on at the end, but, another area of interest…

MB: Anything you want, I’ve got an answer. Go for it.

JK: Okay [laughs], I’ve got another one around sustainability. We’ve certainly seen sustainability, governance, and ESG (environmental, social, and governance goals) – to bring it all together. Those concerns have come to the fore in the last two, three years. Do you think ESG will eventually develop its own significant area of learning in future?

MB: I think absolutely. And, there’s again, a couple of moving parts there. I am always mindful that there’s not one thing that is causal. There are casual implications here, but ESG is here to stay. And it really is around – from an HR perspective in particular – risk to the business. And in some ways, it’s also around business performance. Europe in particular has been really good about reporting on this stuff, well ahead of the US.

An offshoot of what’s going on with ESG is this notion of reporting requirements; material HR transactions that are now part of public company recording requirements that came out of in the us the SEC – the Securities and Exchange Commission. But the EU and, and the SASB (Sustainability Accounting Standards Board) have been around for a long time.

So being able to report that in a way that is material, in a way that actually looks at what disclosures are, means awareness for the individuals in ESG. And that’s gonna require a level of expertise and not just being able to understand what those things are, but being able to grab the data around them.

One of the best examples that I’ve seen is Papa John’s in the US. It’s a pizza place. Well, what’s the E S G for the pizza? Well, they break it into people, pizza, planet, and community. What’s really interesting is that every company is starting to think in those terms and every company is going to need individuals who understand the implications of all those things and are able to get at the right data and report it out, minimizing risk to the organization.

ESG is here to stay, absolutely. And there are a lot of people coming up and into the organization that are going to need some understanding of the personal implications in the organization they work for.

JK: We’re going to drop the link to the report itself in the show notes, I hope. One last question Mike, will you be at UNLEASH America? It’ll be great to meet you in person.

MB: At this moment. I will be at UNLEASH America and I look forward to attending and meeting a lot of folks. I was at Paris, and what you guys have done with the Unleashed brand and what you’ve done now with some of these shows is exceptional, and I wanna be a part of it.

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