Learning and development (L&D) is stepping into a more strategic role as organizations navigate constant change, evolving skill demands and the growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI). As expectations shift, how can L&D teams adapt?
In this episode of The Business of Learning, sponsored by Instructure, we spoke with Melissa Loble, chief learning officer at Instructure, to explore how L&D is evolving in the future of work and what it takes to stay relevant in an increasingly complex environment.
Tune in now for insights on:
- Why L&D is becoming a key driver of organizational success
- How AI is transforming learning design and development
- The skills CLOs need now to stay competitive
- How to align learning strategies with business outcomes
More Resources:
The transcript for this episode follows:
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Sarah Gallo: Hi. Welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, a senior editor here at Training Industry.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: And I am Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, editor in chief. As organizations navigate rapid change, shifting business priorities and the growing influence of AI, expectations for learning leaders are expanding in real time. So what do these shifts mean for learning and development teams? And how can L&D professionals better align their work to support the business in this new environment? To learn more, we’re joined by Melissa Loble, chief learning officer at Instructure. Melissa, welcome to the podcast.
Melissa Loble: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here.
Sarah Gallo: Awesome. I’m looking forward to our conversation today. And to kick us off from your perspective as a CLO, Melissa, what are some of those biggest shifts you are seeing in how L&D functions are really expected to operate today compared to five or even 10 years ago?
Melissa Loble: Yeah, that’s such an important question and I see two big shifts happening for CLOs. The first big shift is how are we developing our employees, our broader community so that they can handle a rapidly changing future. That’s everything from understanding how to leverage AI where appropriate, all the way through to how do you build resistance and how do you build the ability to endure a really unexpected environment that we’re all trying to operate in. So it’s sort of one category of big changes happening. And then the second category is technology itself and how are we meeting the expectations of our employees and how they want to learn, how they want to engage in content, how they want to be embedded in their own development processes. And how do we use technology to do that, right? So there’s this, how do we deliver the learning experience that’s changing? And then also what is it that employees need in order to face an uncertain future. So, we’ve got these two dynamics kind of folding together and I think CLOs are really trying to figure out how do I grapple with both at the same time so that I can create a really engaging, inspiring and development-oriented environment for my employees.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Definitely. There’s so much change happening in the workplace. I want to dig into that a little more. How is the CLO’s role changing in this new AI-driven workplace, like both in terms of responsibilities and even influence at the executive table. What’s your perspective there?
Melissa Loble: Yeah, the CLO’S role is changing, not just within the key elements of what they’re trying to deliver. Again, ensuring that employees are prepared, excited and engaged in what they’re doing. But that CLO is, as you just described, a key part of the executive team because that CLO has the same set of goals as the rest of the executive team. How do we drive to the business outcomes we’re trying to seek? Those outcomes aren’t just arrived at because of good business practices or because of good leadership. They’re arrived at because of an evolving and deepening experiential employee base. So, we’re all, as we think about it, working towards the same set of outcomes in business, and we have to remember that. And then what we need to do is think from a backwards design perspective. I know many of your guests will probably enjoy a little bit of learning nerd. But from a backwards design perspective, and if these are our outcomes, how are we designing the right kind of environment for both formal and informal learning that then our employees can be significant contributors into achieving those outcomes? Also, I think the CLO needs to have a voice in what are those outcomes? What is possible? How can we rethink our workforce? Especially as you mentioned with the disruption of AI, it’s really causing a lot of conversations to surface around where do I need talent? Where do I augment my talent with AI and how do I create a hybrid environment or a human AI environment in the workplace so that we can not only maximize efficiency, which I think is a bit of a table stakes, but also that we can actually accelerate our growth. We can accelerate the achievement of those outcomes. So they need to be a voice in that, and they need to be a voice in the technology behind how are we driving all of that? And again, creating that sort of hybrid environment in which technology and humans sit right alongside each other in order to reach outcomes.
Sarah Gallo: I love that. An outcomes-first approach is so so important right now. And when thinking about AI, I think there’s often a lot of challenges and also opportunities, right, for learning leaders. So I’d love if you could dig into kind of what opportunities does AI present for CLOs to drive more business impact? And where do you see businesses still struggling to use AI effectively?
Melissa Loble: I think as I mentioned at the very beginning, there’s two sort of main tracks of work that the CLO is grappling with. If we want to think about the development of learning experiences, this is a great place for AI. I don’t see AI replacing instructional designers or trainers, but I absolutely see AI augmenting the kind of creation that’s being leveraged of content. How do we create contextual learning experiences? I’m a big advocate for scenario-based, simulation-based, context based experiences where employees can learn In a directly relevant way to both their role and those larger outcomes we’re talking about. So, AI gives lots of opportunities for content creation that even three, four years ago would be really burdensome to develop. Similar to that, AI gives you a lot of opportunity to rapidly update content and automate a whole development process. So that piece I think is really exciting when we think about the learning experiences we’re developing. The last piece that I think AI enables from those learning experiences themselves is it allows for personalization, which is essential. Many companies are facing, or I shouldn’t say facing, many companies have employee bases that are multigenerational. And I do research around generational change, differences in how people like to learn. Depending on which generation you fall in, how do you engage in those learning experiences? Where are you comfortable? Where are you not? What are your technology preferences? Well, many companies have multigenerations and there are pretty distinct differences in how and where and why you want to engage and what you expect from that learning process. Again, three, five years ago, it was really challenging to create personalized tracks of learning. That’s a lot of content, a lot of leaning in, especially if you’re trying to keep that content relevant. But now AI can really do that. It can create personas for you so that as you’re thinking about your different audiences or your different departments and you’re delivering learning, you can now match to the kinds of preferences that those different audiences have. So I think AI’s first track is how do we create more engaging, meaningful learning experiences at scale. How do we manage the content process differently and even automate that so that trainers and instructional designers and learning leaders in organizations can now be the facilitator of those and can reflect on the progress employees are making in their own journeys, which is what I think the second piece is. If we think about how do employees address the fact that the world is changing and the skills you have now are probably not the skills you’re going to need in two to three years. You know, as much as you need to relearn and reskill regularly, you also need to be aware of yourself as a learner and where AI can really help. That is where AI can visualize your paths. It can take insights and data from what you’re doing in your work. How are you achieving your own outcomes? And visualize that not only for learning leaders and managers, but also for individual employees so they can see their own growth trajectory and how they’re developing the skills needed to be more and more successful in this rapidly changing world. And those are just a couple of examples of where I think AI can have real opportunity to rethink their practice perhaps, or even to leverage and scale their practice in different ways.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: I love that. It’s really such an exciting time for learners to be able to have personalized experiences and AI is really helping make that a reality. And so from that aspect, it’s very exciting. But all that change comes with some challenges. As we see technology evolve, skills also evolve. So I’d love to hear what skills or capabilities you are seeing that CLOs really need to develop in order to be successful in this technology-enabled environment?
Melissa Loble: Yeah, I think for CLOs to be successful in this sort of rapidly changing and very technology rich environment, they need a couple of really core skills. One is being positive. As you path through that, those changes are going to rapidly change from either the technologies that you’re using the capabilities within those to what’s expected of you. As a CLO, I’m seeing significant shifts away from, for example, compliance work and more towards continued employee development so that you can maximize both the employee experience and what they’re delivering within the organization. So, there’s a resilience component. I think creativity and even a desire to think completely differently about your practice and be comfortable with that. It’s hard. One of the things that is just natural in our brain is we tend to hold on to information or skills or competencies that we’ve had forever because we think those make us unique. But the challenge is a lot of those are irrelevant now. And so we have to learn to let go of those and be comfortable replacing with new skills and be constantly curious about how can my role evolve with the organization and even help drive those outcomes and innovation within the organization. So, this creativity and this willingness to think differently and let go and add skills is really important. And then I think, perhaps the last and I’ll say this as a collection of skills, there is a need for an understanding of the impact of all the technologies that are changing in the workplace. So it’s not necessarily how can AI be used in creating really engaging learning experiences, but how is AI, for example, being used in my R&D organization? What are the tool sets that they’re using? How is AI changing sales and our go-to market motions, these different components? Learning leaders need to understand technology in a broader, more rich way because so many of those different technologies are pockets of insights into employees pockets of how are we driving towards those outcomes through learning, and they also create really interesting opportunities for rethinking our own work. I’ll give you a super simple example. Our R&D team heavily manages all of their development work in Jira and Jira is typically thought of as a very product or engineering oriented platform. Well, one of the things that my team’s adopted is leveraging that to manage our own lifecycle of the work. What we found as a side benefit is we can now start to tie the work that we’re doing with the work that R&D’s doing, and see a more holistic dashboard to show where do we have skill gaps? Where do we have skills we didn’t even know, and that we can leverage as we’re trying to implement new opportunities. So, me being willing to go, I don’t know Jira, but I’m going to learn it, I’m going to understand, I’m going to be exposed to it. I don’t have to know it in the very deepest ways, but I’m going to be exposed to it to see is there an opportunity and is the synergy of me using it for my needs alongside what R&D is using it valuable? Is it a one plus one equals three kind of situation? And for us, it has been.
Sarah Gallo: Such good insights there, Melissa. I love what you said earlier about the need to sort of unlearn skills that are no longer serving you or that may no longer be relevant. I think that can be really scary, you know, and it’s something we don’t talk about enough. I guess while we’re talking about skills, another one that we often see come up for learning leaders, especially in the C-Suite like CLOs, is business acumen. Do you have any practical tips that CLOs can take to deepen their understanding of the business and align their strategy with business goals?
Melissa Loble: Oh, yes. You’re so spot on with business acumen and I think I did mention it, I take it a little bit for granted. I have to remind myself, I actually stepped into a CLO role from an operational role in our organization, so I am an educator by training. That’s where most of my work is done. But, I’ve been 12 years at Instructure. Prior to the CLO work, over the last two years, I was our chief customer officer for eight years. And then I ran business development functions, so I was already somewhat attuned to it. But, coming from being an educator into those roles, a couple of things that I did that helped me understand the different facets of the business, in a sort of safe and relatable way: one was I spent a fair amount of time, and there’s a lot of opportunity for AI in this, just trying to go and learn what are the common metrics each of the divisions in the larger industry leverage. So, for example, on a customer success side, a lot of the metrics revolve around customer retention, revenue retention, price increases. There’s a common set of metrics there that for a chief learning officer, as an educator, I didn’t know what those mean more broadly in the industry. And then how do I relate those to what those specifically mean to my organization so that when I’m sitting in executive meetings, I can actually look at dashboards and be able to understand what I’m looking at and even start to ask questions or make suggestions related to those, even if it’s not related directly to my function. So, that’s one piece. Around just business acumen metrics, there’s free courses out there, even AI. Or you could even, depending on the AI tools that you use within your organization, just take in and have an exchange with an agent around what do these things mean? Of course, do it safely within your own work environments, but you can start to really ask questions and understand. So, I would start with metrics and backing into what are the metrics actually tracking? And one of the things, related to that, is not make assumptions, you know, because I was surprised. There are probably six different metrics from managing customer attention, for example. And they all slightly mean different things, and they all calculate differently and then we calculate them in very specific ways. So, once you get a higher-level understanding, challenge your own assumptions about those metrics and then start to peel away that onion. So that’s one thing in business acumen development. The second is lean into your industry. This is, again, another great place for AI, setting up alerts and agents that are tracking to thought leaders in this space, that are tracking to research publications in this space, you know, tracking to the work you all do is, is really important, I think. Making yourself knowledgeable about your industry will also help ground the way you can contribute to those executive conversations, right alongside unpacking metrics and understanding what metrics mean. And then the last thing I’ll say is quiet and ask a lot of questions. I know that, especially as an educator, sometimes I worry about, well, I’m the educator in the room and people are, you know, aren’t and wonder why is she asking that? But it’s actually the opposite is what I found that when you do ask questions and you do have conversations either individually with the rest of your executive team or as a collective. It’s helpful for them as well because you’re coming at it from a different perspective than they are. And again, this is another one plus one equals three situations where you could actually surface up things just by each of you taking different frames that you might never see in your organization. So just be out there and be comfortable and be curious and ask questions and just own the fact that you’re the learning expert, but you may not be the expert in either of those metrics or the industry.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: I love that, because as we know, building and having those strategic partnerships with senior leaders is so important for L&D to build and strengthen. And so, kind of from that perspective, I’d love if you have any advice for how learning leaders can position themselves as that strategic partner to other executives in the organization.
Melissa Loble: Oh, I love this because the CLO has so much to offer to the conversation from a different perspective. So, a couple pieces of advice: One is as you are developing your own plans, naturally connect your own plans to either business outcomes or business strategy or both. So if you tie it into language that the other leader will understand, let’s say you’re building a strong relationship with your revenue leader, helping them see I’m doing this work. This AI training is really valuable and embedded in it keyways that we’re making sure as your team goes out to visit customers and prospects, they have all of the information they need. To have more strategic conversations, right? Speak it in their language. Relate your strategy to their strategy because not only does it show that you’re understanding and driving towards being of service to them, but it also gives them a good sense that well, you actually do have that business acumen that we were just talking about, and I actually want to come to you and ask you questions because I need another thought partner in that. So that’s one piece that I would suggest. And then the second piece that I would suggest to CLOs is regularly surface all of the really powerful workforce data that’s being discussed right now. We see all sorts of stats from really impactful organizations that are doing large studies on the changes in the workforce. And so everything from, you know, how much CEOs value learning or do they see it just as a compliance aspect and they can’t see that connection. So that’s the kind of data that we’re needing to combat or surface alternatives to what are the most common skills that we’re seeing as skill gaps or what are the challenges that we’re seeing coming out of education environments in which your employees will come from and how are those influencing the preparedness of your employees? Right. There’s so much rich data and those are the kinds of things we need to do. I’m always sharing in our executive Slack channel, for example, I’m always sharing articles around, this may not be relevant to our industry, but understanding the workforce inside and out, and the changes we’re seeing in it more broadly is actually really, really important. So I’m always sharing articles, different experiences, different expressions of that. That establishes you as a thought partner for each of those executives because you’re helping them navigate. They’re all thinking about how am I hiring? How am I retaining my employees? How do I make sure they have the richest skills possible to be able to be as successful as possible. They’re thinking about all those things, and so you’re giving them the background context in which their employees are existing in, and that helps them reframe their own thinking. So I would do both those things, right? Align strategies to each of the leaders that you’re becoming thought partners with, and then also be the expert in workforce changes and all that’s happening in that space.
Sarah Gallo: I love that. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground today, Melissa. But to close us out, what’s one piece of advice you’d like to leave other CLOs or executive learning leaders with as they navigate the future of work?
Melissa Loble: While I’ve always thought CLOs and learning leaders are essential and critical parts of organizational success, we’re coming into our day in a lot of ways because of that change I talked about earlier. How people learn, how people skill, reskill, upskill, forget skills like we talked about. How that is going to be a key business differentiator and those that do that well and foster that among their employee base are going to be those organizations that succeed. Those organizations that don’t lean into that are going to struggle with the kind of disruption AI is having. The other part to that is employees are craving this, the younger generations in particular actually look to organizations where they believe they can develop themselves and have a positive contribution. And so not only are you serving the organization in a really meaningful way, but you’re also serving those employees in that organization in the way they want to be served. And so it’s like I said, we’re coming into our days as CLOs. This is our time and we need to step into that and really help shape and guide the way all organizations are shifting in this era of rapid change.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: On that note, Melissa, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. How can our listeners get in touch with you if they’d like to reach out?
Melissa Loble: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been an honor. Your questions were amazing and I love that we’re thinking about these things and I am super easy to track down. Any listener can email me anytime. It’s melissa@instructure.com. Super easy to find me or just reach out to Instructure, but I’d be happy to chat, and I would love to learn what you all are doing out there and, in the field, because we have to help each other, right? We have to lift each other up and let’s have a continued conversation.
Sarah Gallo: Awesome. Well, for more resources on topics like this one, check out the episode description or visit the show notes on our website at trainingindustry.com/podcast. And don’t forget to rate and review us wherever you tune in to the business of learning. Until next time.
