With a Straightforward Learning Experience Platform Built for Teams

Discover Your True Learning Power

Discover Your True Learning Power | 2

Learning technology hangs on the brink of disruption. Young workers, desperate to grow their careers, are crushed by over $1.5 trillion in student loans, while soaring tuition prices leave formal education out

of reach for many more.Organizations have stepped up, investing massive resources

into corporate learning and development (L&D), according to

LinkedIn’s 2020 Learning Report. Many large organizations

are also dropping bachelor’s degree requirements; they’re

emphasizing skills development over formal education.

This leaves the field wide open for tech-enabled learning to take the lead.

But traditional learning technology has failed to keep up with the myriad

demands and formats of content, media, and user experiences today’s

world requires. Add to that the structural changes undergone within

organizations — flatter, leaner, and remote networks of teams — and you

have a recipe for category confusion.

No wonder RedThread Research analysts have called learning technology

the “wild, wild west” and offered the term “learning tech ecosystems” to

define next-generation learning platforms.

In short, L&D leaders today need a flexible, nimble

platform to get courses up and running quickly, with

embeddable content, social learning, and analytics that

drive real business outcomes.

And that’s called a learning experience platform (LXP).

With an LXP, you can discover your true learning potential and amplify the

performance of your people.

Let’s see what that looks like — and how your organization can discover

your true learning power.

Discover Your True Learning Power | 3

The Learning Experience Is Changing FastWork itself is going through dramatic changes, leading many

organizations toward reskilling their employees to keep pace.

PwC’s 2020 Global CEO Survey found that researchers and

respondents concluded that four key forces are driving the

reskilling and upskilling imperative:

• Increasing job automation

• Decreasing talent availability

• Decreasing mobility of skilled labor

• Aging talent

Along with these trends, COVID-19 has forced organizations to

shift to remote work nearly overnight.

We’re seeing hard data on these trends, and organizations are

responding. Some are doing well, some are doing poorly.

Discover Your True Learning Power | 4

A Wall Street Journal article, “Why Companies Are Failing at Reskilling,” highlighted

several organizations having difficulty reskilling their people. Why? Because the digital

transformation has transformed industries. To keep up, organizations have hired talent

from external sources. But the labor market grew tight, so leaders had to find a new way

to transform their talent pools. As the article pointed out:

“Sometimes, the required skills aren’t easily taught to existing

employees, experts say. It’s also often because companies have

only a hazy sense of what their internal talent is capable of, and

migrating large numbers of employees into new positions requires

time, money, and commitment.”

Other researchers, such as those at IBM, argued in “The Enterprise Guide to Closing the

Skills Gap” that learning is key:

“While lifelong learning has always been critical, our digital world

now requires new ways of working, which makes lifelong learning

a must to the long-term success of organizations and individuals.

As such, organizations should consider the propensity to learn as a

top skill in employees. The propensity to learn and embrace lifelong

learning should be encouraged and empowered by organizations

and considered key requirements in hiring.”

As a result, at the heart of this

transformation is a robust learning

strategy and a platform to create an

environment of learning. Josh Bersin, as

just one example, argued — and continues

to argue — that learning technology

is quickly evolving, that platforms are

becoming integrated across the employee

experience, and that “learning in the

flow of work” will transform the learning

technology market for good.

Though the COVID-19 crisis has disrupted

the talent market and organizational

structures of businesses, it’s still clear

that a new future of corporate learning is

taking shape.

So, what does this new future look like?

We believe learning leaders need four key

solutions to develop critical talent and

maintain a competitive advantage in this

new future.

Discover Your True Learning Power | 5

4 Key Solutions for Future Learning Technologies

To stay competitive and reskill a

dynamic workforce in a more dynamic

environment, you need to lean into

these solutions that are forming the

future of learning technology.

Discover Your True Learning Power | 6

Because the pace of change is

accelerating so quickly, as a learning

leader you need an LXP that lets you

quickly create and update courses.

And by quickly, we mean in a matter

of minutes, not days. We see next-

generation technologies accomplishing

this in three ways: modular approaches;

embeddable, third-party content; and

simple user experience.

MODULAR APPROACHES

Though course design may sound like an esoteric concept, it’s critical

that LXPs have a modular approach to designing courses so your

creation, revision, and distribution of learning content can occur as

quickly as possible.

Similar design methodologies have been adopted by other

disciplines — front-end web design, email marketing, and other

drag-and-drop approaches. Not only does this approach speed up

the creation process, it expands the accessibility of users, who can

now create courses themselves. Traditionally, only experienced web

administrators could build content and distribute it to their teams.

We’re betting that all of that can change.

With this approach, whole sections of content can be deleted or

repurposed in seconds to retain only the most relevant content.

Seamless Course Creation1

Discover Your True Learning Power | 7

EMBEDDABLE, THIRD-PARTY CONTENT

Speaking of content, the internet has given learning leaders

a basically unlimited resource library from which to draw

nearly all information known to our species. YouTube alone

has courses from world-leading experts — for free — on

sophisticated topics like corporate finance and Python

programming, and nuts-and-bolts topics like negotiation

and public speaking. Learners can also find written content,

podcasts, tutorials, sandboxes, and communities for any

subject they have a desire to learn.

Of course, this isn’t meant to exclude the important content

that’s unique to your organization — especially for training

and compliance or content that requires subject-matter-

specific expertise that your organization requires. But it’s vital

to recognize the sheer volume of information that’s freely

available to your people online.

If you’re a next-generation learning leader, it’s become your

job to curate, craft, and moderate these courses so your

learners can consume them in a reasonable amount of time

and in a way that has a direct and positive impact on their job

functions and careers.

SIMPLE USER EXPERIENCE

To help your learners consume the content in a reasonable

amount of time, they’ll need an extremely simple UX to guide

them through the information they’re meant to learn.

You also need a simple UX for your administrators to create and

manage the content, to pull reports and analyses, and to facilitate

discussions and feedback throughout the learning experience.

In our conversations with leaders, the most requested solutions

we hear center on the experience of the platform for leaders

and learners: quick, embeddable content, user-friendly video

players, and assignment creators and graders, and many others

experience-related functions and features.

We won’t belabor the point here. Many of you understand the

value of a great user experience. But it is and will continue for

some time to be a key component of any learning technology.

By making the course creation and administration seamless

and simple for every user, we believe we can usher in

the future that learning is poised to transform.

Discover Your True Learning Power | 8

Another key to the learning experience

is to incorporate social aspects of the

modern learning environment. You never

learn in a silo: Instructors or experts

explain the content, learners debate the

points or ask clarifying questions, and

then they validate their findings with

peers, friends, and family.

Why should learning in an

organizational context be any

different? That’s why we’re seeing

the rise of social learning take hold in

many leading organizations.

Within the modern business, you have more than just departments or

business units. You’ll find affinity groups based upon race or religion,

or have networks of distributed teams working with other teams

in the office or with contractors, vendors, and SMEs both internal

and external. The modern organization is more like an ecosystem

comprising individuals who are all learning different things from

different groups for different purposes.

Much like a modern social media platform or wiki site, we see the

need for LXPs to create communities of like-minded groups taking

courses with each other, commenting and leaving feedback for each

other, all with their own feeds and with content built in.

Unfortunately, we know too many organizations that are afraid to

take these steps and to lead the future of learning. They’re afraid

of letting go of control. With so many distributed teams, dynamic

feedback and course materials seem like a “dark web” waiting to

happen. However, we embrace this future. We learn best when tools

are put into the hands of the people, when questions are surfaced,

and when we all learn from each other — expert or not.

Social Learning Experiences2

Discover Your True Learning Power | 9

That’s why we aim to create deeper

integrations with many other

platforms — from Google Docs and

Microsoft Office to GoToMeeting,

Zoom, Stripe, and Zapier.

We want to harness the power of the open internet to facilitate learning at every level.

That’s how we all progress as a

society and as businesses — by

giving everyone access to the

information they need, so they

can spark innovation and growth

to drive us forward.

Discover Your True Learning Power | 10

Meaningful Analytics

Data and analytics is the future of business.

We don’t have to convince you of this. So, how

can analytics transform learning and learning

technology? A few important ways.

FIRST, ANALYTICS CAN HELP DETERMINE WHAT KIND

OF CONTENT YOUR LEARNERS ARE LOOKING FOR.

For example, a data collection from Google shows that

“how to” videos are the most watched content category

on YouTube, and that 7 in 10 viewers use YouTube for help

with their work, studies, or hobbies.

Information like this can help you as a learning leader

double down on quick, pragmatic content that helps your

employees learn new skills that help them complete daily

activities, like how to advance their Excel wizardry or how

to enhance their PowerPoint presentations.

SECOND, ANALYTICS CAN HELP DETERMINE HOW TO

DISTRIBUTE CONTENT TO YOUR LEARNERS.

It’s no secret that large firms like Netflix and Facebook use

advanced analytics — machine learning, for example — to

personalize relevant content to their users. However, you don’t

need bleeding-edge technology to make a big impact on making

your content more relevant. With just a few reporting features, you

can distill insights into actionable tasks for your L&D team.

Here are two examples:

• Pull weekly reports on the most visited courses and

communities to get a pulse for what your organization is

looking for.

• Use data to see what content learners want to narrow the

scope of the content library.

From these very simple reports, you can generate insights to more

effectively use your seamless course-creation tools to create

content your people are already otherwise consuming.

As a leader, you know data and analytics are the future of business. Our point here is this doesn’t have

to be intimidating. You don’t need to spin up neural networks and quantum computers just to help your

people learn. A few basic reports on how your employees are navigating your platform will do the trick.

3

Discover Your True Learning Power | 11

Transparent Pricing

It’s uncommon for learning technology providers to

price by administrator. That’s a more typical pricing

model for a content authoring tool or other SaaS

platforms. Traditionally, however, learning technology

vendors price by the user, which can cause a problem

for larger organizations that have thousands of users.

They eventually will want to limit the amount of users —

limiting the amount of learning.

We believe the future of learning must be

completely different.

A while back we were brainstorming durable ways we can

better support companies and their learners. We know

the importance of resilience, action, connection, and

continued learning, so we wanted to make sure we were

empowering organizations, leaders, and teams in the best

way possible.

Without diving into too much detail, it was a profound

meeting for our team. We asked ourselves, “Wouldn’t

it be crazy if we didn’t charge per learner?” And then,

“Wait, why do learning management systems charge

per learner?”

It’s as if the whole industry were set up to

disincentivize its own usage. And we were right there

with them! So, we decided to make a major change.

That’s why we committed to pricing our LXP by the

number of administrators. Now, your organization can

get your people — all of your people — back to learning.

Innovations like these will help us stay far ahead of

whatever the future of learning may bring.

4

The Future of the Learning Experience Is Yours to DiscoverThe future of the learning experience is wide open, and it’s up to us

as learning leaders to bring it to fruition. We hope you’re excited by

the possibilities of learning technology.

NextThought was built to create accessible learning for all of your

employees, administrators, and beyond, so you can achieve your

business goals — and discover your true learning power.

For all the talk of learning experiences in the flow of work, learning programs haven’t

evolved. Learning is still tied up as a department when it ought to be operating as a

mindset for individuals and teams.

NextThought is a learning platform built for teams. With social learning experiences,

seamless course creation, and meaningful analytics, NextThought delivers the learning

technology your organization needs to drive consistent outcomes for your business and

your customers. You know what you do best, so NextThought provides just what you

need to help your teams thrive. A straightforward solution built for learning.

That’s NextThought.

Request a Demo