Muhammad Tahir Rabbani risked poking the bear on LinkedIn when he asked the Learning & Development Professionals Club: How can we differentiate between hard and soft skills? His question was serendipitous because I had been giving that very question some serious thought, and where I landed was that the successful application of hard skills can be measured definitively. For example, the code you write works as intended, or you arrive at the correct mathematical solution. Hence the metric is a hard number, or a binary yes or no (1 or 0). On the other side of the coin are soft skills, so name ..read more

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I beheld much to admire in a recent podcast in which Hayley Curcio, Head of MECCAversity, shared the iconic retailer’s approach not only to training its workforce but also to educating its customers. The host Marnina Diprose set the scene aptly: As an expert “we assume that people will just get what we’re saying, without the context of us being in the industry or being educated for multiple years.” To which Hayley added: “It’s the why … Really understand how it links back to the problem they’re trying to solve.” I think those two observations describe ..read more

“Those who say it can not be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it.” Who said that? Was it George Bernard Shaw? Elbert Hubbard? Or is it one of those mysterious “old Chinese proverbs”…? Regardless, in my experience it applies to the scaling of training across organisations, and I was honoured to discuss it with Michelle Ockers on her podcast ..read more

I for one welcome the Australian Government’s proposal to establish a National Skills Passport. Tabled last year via the Working Future whitepaper, the idea is “to help people more easily demonstrate their skills to employers and reduce barriers to lifelong learning.” Bravo. But of course the devil is in the detail, and so far there hasn’t been very much of that (perhaps by design). Indeed, the Department of Education and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations have jointly released a consultation paper which advances the idea a smidgen more. For example, “Stakeholders have long ..read more

G’day & Kia Ora to the new year! As my greeting suggests, this year’s instalment of conference alerts is an Antipodean affair. Due to popular demand – well, two people – I’ve added events from the land of the long white cloud into the mix. If you’re aware of any other L&D conferences in Australia or New Zealand this year, please do let me know… Conference List The details of the following events may change, so best check the latest information on their websites! Australian Tertiary and VET Conference Sydney, 6-8 March 2024 International Conference on Education, Learning and Training ..read more

It’s about that time again when I look back on my blogging year and choose a theme that connects the breadth of topics that I managed to cover. This time I’ve borrowed “Think different” from Apple’s advertising campaign at the turn of the millennium. While the adverbial in this phrase omits the “‑ly” suffix in the American fashion, I chose it because it encapsulates the spirit of blogging – which is to add something fresh, independent, and above all, personal. Sometimes my views are contrarian, sometimes they’re counter-contrarian. Sometimes they raise eyebrows, they’re misinterpreted, or they ..read more

Evidence-based practice is the darling of Learning & Development geeks. And with good reason. Amongst all the myths and barrow pushing, not to mention the myriad ways to approach any given problem, empiricism injects a sorely needed dose of confidence into what we do. Friends of my blog will already know that my undergraduate degree was in science, and although I graduated a thousand years ago, it forever equipped me with a lens through which I see the world. Suffice to say my search for statistical significance is serious. But it is through this same lens that I also see the limitations o ..read more

Way back in the pre-pandemic era, I proposed a solution to fix our senseless compliance training – or to be more accurate, its management – yet it remains broken. The central premise of my argument was that it’s inefficient to repeat the same mandatory training when you change jobs within the same regulatory framework, so a centralised system to recognise your prior learning could save your new employer and the broader economy some serious coin. My proposed solution was based on open badges, and these days I’d imagine that blockchain could power it. At the time, I pitched my solution to a num ..read more

I confess that whenever I see someone has cited their job title as “Learning Experience Designer” my first reaction is skepticism. As the joke goes, a data scientist is a statistician who lives in San Francisco. So too at times, it seems a learning experience designer is an instructional designer who lives in Sydney. Aggrandising one’s title is hardly new, so I’ve been pondering why this title bothers me so much. And I think I’ve cracked it. According to yours truly, a true learning experience designer applies User Experience (UX) design methodology to their role. Sure, instructional design a ..read more

I often miss webinars. That might be because it was delivered at 3:00am local time, or during a manic working day, or after hours when frankly I’m not in the mood. So I’m grateful when the event is recorded and I can play it back later. But, more often than not, I don’t do that either. There’s just something about a 1-hour recording that turns me off. Unless the topic is irresistible, it’s too easy to move on to more pressing matters. I’d rather read a summary of the key points – and according to the likes received by my recent tweet and the results of a poll I ran on LinkedIn, I’m not alone ..read more