Learning from a distance during COVID-19

Learning from a distance during COVID-19 with Molly Nagler

PepsiCo’s virtual learning pivot

I'm excited to welcome to the show, Molly Nagler, who is the Chief Learning Officer at PepsiCo. Molly, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Andy. I’m thrilled to be here.

I'm excited to have you on. You have such a fascinating and interesting background and wealth of experience and knowledge coming from the world of academia and then applying all of that back in the private working world at PepsiCo. I'm excited to dive into not only what you've learned and how you've applied those things there, but how you've pivoted and done things during COVID-19, the crisis, what learning looks like, your plans for afterwards. We're going to talk about measurement as well, but before we do, we'd start with a little bit of an introduction and background on you. Tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got to where you are.

Thank you. I've been Chief Learning Officer at Pepsi since February 2019. Before that, my entire career was in universities. I ran Executive Education at the Yale School of Management and before that, I worked in customized Executive Ed at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. I'm now the customer that I used to sell to in my old job.

I’ve got to imagine that's different. Can you tell me a little bit about the starkest differences you had moving from the academic world into a company like Pepsi?

The main reason I wanted to move was because as much as I love working in universities, you never get to see the impact of learning over time. People come for a few days or a few weeks and then they leave. That's what I've enjoyed about being able to embed at PepsiCo and a single company and see the journey that the company has been on and starting PepsiCo University and bringing new technologies in. We have a new learner experience platform called Degreed, which has taken us to a whole new level in terms of how learners are able to access and consume content in an easy way. Pepsi, and I'm sure other corporations, move at a much faster decision-making and execution pace than universities, much more action-oriented and practical mindset. We’re extremely consumer-focused and it's a real delight to be here.

It's not just going from university into private company, but you also have the experience of being the consultative creative side of things, like I am now, as a vendor or partner with organizations and then going in on the client side, the in-house side. What's something that you took with you from that that's been useful from your time working on that side of things?

Even when I was in leadership positions at the universities, I always kept my hand in client account management and instructional design. I did that because it's a way to stay close to your customer and also have empathy with the team that you're managing and the challenge that they may have with any given programs or companies. I still do that here. I still consult with our business partners around the company and how to best achieve first and foremost business objectives and whether a learning intervention is even appropriate to achieve their objective. Maybe they need a communications campaign or maybe they need to hire some new talent. Once we decide that a learning program or intervention is needed, then I'll help design that too. More often, it's in a virtual environment rather than a classroom.

Virtual learning At PepsiCo

Speaking of virtual, you mentioned having a platform like Degreed and I want to get into how Pepsi has pivoted and handled a remote workforce. Before we get to that, I'd love for you to paint the picture of what did the learning landscape look like at Pepsi before COVID-19?

Virtual Learning: In the virtual learning environment, you sometimes have to reimagine the entire program, not just translate it.

Before COVID-19, we still had a lot of in-person programs. We saw in-person learning as the pinnacle and that online learning was something that you did if you couldn't join in person either for budgetary or time reasons. Although, we had a lot of excellent online virtual resources. It was more of there’s a subtle hierarchy in everyone's mind about the difference between in-person and online. Now, everything has been moved online and we're planning to have likely no in-person learning for at least the next year, if not longer. You’ve got to think about when can people travel, when will they feel safe to travel and what if the place that you're traveling to has an issue once everyone arrives? Our entire learning team in corporate is upscaling in online learning design, as well as all of the distributed learning teams that are out in the business units.

We talked about how we were both dealing with that same thing. Most of my business was in-person learning workshops and I've always been a big proponent of the power of bringing people together in person. We have talked about doing more virtual stuff. That was all accelerated by COVID-19, where we said, “We've got to start doing things virtually now.” You and I recorded this in May of 2020. I feel like there's been a big shift in the corporate world from, “Let's wait and see,” to “This is where things are going to be for at least for the rest of the year if not longer. We need to start making things work virtually.” Tell me a little bit more about what that pivot looked like once you realize, “This is going to be like this for a while.”

I think it takes one good experience than an online learning environment to make a tipping point where your learning professionals and your learners are like, “You pulled this off and this was a great experience.” We’re pivoting our strategy masterclass. This is a multi-day in-person program or vice president level and above that we run a couple of times a year at Pepsi. We started off by saying, “We're going to postpone,” then we said, “No, this is the perfect opportunity to try to bring what's an elite, high-end, and super important program into an online environment.”

The program sponsor came on board with that and that's vital. You have to have your subject matter experts excited about the learning environment. We're building it at an instructional platform and we're looking at all the different types of technologies and how to keep it interactive and maintain the networking, which is very important. That's sharing of stories across the participants in the program. It's looking great. We'll launch it later in June and that will be the tip of the iceberg where people will say, “This is a real thing. We can do this.” It will catalyze a lot more online design.

You've taken a very thoughtful strategic approach about this. You mentioned tools. I was wondering if you've used any partners, any tools that you recommend and how you've been able to enable the networking side of things. That's definitely one piece that often gets lost when we convert some of this stuff to virtual.

There's stuff that we've used and then there are things that I've experienced myself in program. I'm part of a professional development group at the Harvard School of Education and they use a tool called Miro which is a visual online collaboration tool. I was stunned by how useful and helpful that tool was when we gathered. We normally do something in person where it's a brainstorming exercise with sticky notes. We replicated it in this online environment with Miro where you can literally write sticky notes and move them around and it was amazing. It was the exact same experience, just online. That was a literal translation of an in-person to a virtual experience. That doesn't always work well. Sometimes you want to reimagine the entire program, not just translate it. In this case, it worked very nicely and it also introduced all of us to a new technology we might not have known about and help us understand which use cases benefit from a collaboration tool like that.

At Pepsi, we're taking that same approach. We're going to mix and match different technologies. Zoom works great for live delivery with the breakout rooms or price list. That's where you get all the voices out. One of the nice things about an online environment is people have more talking time if you manage it properly. In an in-person class, you might have a Q&A session at the very end and you can only get three questions and answers. People may have a lot of great ideas, but they don't have time to get them out. In an online environment, you've got the chat function, that Q&A. You can send people into breakouts so you can have the instructor visit the breakouts and hear firsthand. There's almost more opportunity for face time and for personalization in an online environment.

I’ve been running some virtual programs and I hadn't thought about that. In every in-person environment, there are always different types of people everywhere. There are always those people who are shy and don't feel comfortable speaking up no matter what their question is, “What if someone might judge me for it?” It feels more comfortable, easier to drop something in a chat versus speaking up, raising your hand and voice. It makes it easier for people to submit questions and then you have time to address all of those.

[bctt tweet="Everyone is learning so much right now; we don’t want it to just disappear into the ether." via="no"]

It feels like it's lower stakes. It’s something I learned from Priya Parker, who wrote The Art of Gathering, a book I love. She talked about the enforced equality of the box size in Zoom where you're all the same size. The physical stature that can get in the way in an in-person environment doesn't exist online. That was a fascinating point.

I hadn't thought about that too. The way people show up in a physical environment, some people sit back confidently and take up a lot of space versus others that are a little quieter and meeker. That affects how they're seen in the room versus on Zoom. We all have the same size boxes or rectangles. We can have different environments around us or behind us influencing a little bit, but there could be less bias, if not more equal. You've taken a lot of your learning to digital, virtual, leveraging a lot of different tools. I imagine as the Chief Learning Officer, you've got to keep the business impact in mind. You've got to think about, how do we connect this to strategy into the business? Being in the strategic position you are, what did that look like before? Has that shifted at all where you're thinking about, “How do we connect learning to the business strategy so we make sure that it's an important part of where Pepsi is going?”

We've always been tied to the strategy in the sense that the capabilities that we train to are ones that are selected, vetted, endorsed by the senior leaders in the company as the strategic capabilities that are going to take the company into the future. We have a strategy called Winning with Purpose. It has 5 or 6 strategic capabilities underneath it. Things like end-to-end supply chain agility and omni-channel point of choice excellence. These are mouthfuls but they're super relevant to a consumer goods company like PepsiCo. We have training agendas mapped to each of those. Those North Stars haven't changed during COVID, but what has changed is the role that learning can play during the crisis. I see that as two special roles.

One is to capture and share stories at scale. These are stories about learning. We had one town hall for the entire company where different business leaders went around and talked about what they had learned up to this point and in the crisis. There were these amazing stories of agility, speed and flexibility. People coming together from different functions and different teams would never work together before. Leadership coming from unexpected places. The role of your title isn't as important when something needs to get done. I've challenged my team to come up with a series of case studies to analyze these stories and present and disseminate them through the organization with a learning lens to understand not how to manage the next coven, but how to work in a cross-functional team and how to innovate under severe constraints. These are things with a lot of shelf life that we're getting some varied examples of now. That's the first role of learning during a crisis.

Moving Towards Informal Learning

The other one is to teach our employees how to learn from experience. Everyone is learning so much right now and we don't want it to disappear into the ether as times change. We’re looking at how to get the simple tools out for your next team meeting, like how to do an after-action review, for example and that's from the military, how to use structured reflection processes. This builds on the long-term trend of moving from formal to informal learning. What new behaviors you're seeing during COVID that are durable and which ones are going to flip away, the ones that you were seeing before in terms of trends that the crisis has accelerated, those are the things that you're going to hold on to. More opportunities for informal learning are here to stay.

When you talk about moving from formal to informal learning, I would imagine before this, most learning was done formally, organized programs. It sounds like there's a lot more informal learning going on. You're encouraging everybody to say, “You're learning from experience through all of this.” How can you do more to teach and share some of those lessons, especially from mistakes made so that you can help other people and we can almost build a playbook for how do we handle things like this in the future?

It's not that there used to be less informal learning. There's always been so much informal learning. It's just under the radar and it's not something that learning professionals felt like was in their purview. We were here to provide all the formal learning opportunities. The informal stuff happens in due course. What's changing and what I'm excited about leaning into is how can learning professionals steward the learning environment, steward and build a learning culture so that informal learning is captured and happens more often. It gets captured and more valued and recognized from here on out. It's probably going to be less about formal programs and more about perhaps communities of practice. That's something I'm excited about. How do we help communities of like-minded or like-experienced professionals come together and work in a learning way and see their work as opportunities to learn rather than thinking about sending people through formal programs.

You mentioned when we talked before that you also encourage people to create case studies of the things that they're learning that they can share with others. I wonder if you could share an example of one of those.

Virtual Learning: For some people, it feels easier and more comfortable to drop a question on chat rather than raise their hand and actually speak.

I mentioned the strategy masterclass. That has several case studies in it of specific strategic decisions that the companies had to make over time, take an acquisition for example. How did we decide we needed to do that? Where was the gap in the portfolio? What's the analytical process? How does the decision-making go? What's the risk-cost-benefit analysis and how do you integrate that new team? We'll have the leaders come who were part of the process and people love to hear those stories. It's the learning professional’s job to draw out the transferrable lessons and skills because we'll never go through that exact acquisition again. We already did it. What's the point of talking about it? It's to learn how to do it better next time or learn about a scenario that might have similar elements that you can apply the same success tactics.

For COVID, we're looking into all these brand-new scenarios that our company is going through. In Ireland, they have a process whereby they can produce kosher food by having a rabbi come all the way from London to certify the process. The rabbi couldn't do that, so they worked with technology, some sophisticated and some less so. Zoom was a huge part of this and the rabbi was able to observe the process completely remotely. There are things that we never thought we could do that we're doing. My team's job is to say, “How did that success come to be? Who had to work together in new ways to pull that off and what did they learn and how can you do it too?”

Measuring Learning Program Outcomes

There's so much learning, innovation and creativity that comes out of this to change processes and get things done and do a lot of things virtually that we never thought would be possible. I want to talk about what things look like after all this. When we talked about connecting things to the business, generally when you get strategic and you talk about business impact, measurement is a big part of that as well. I know it's something that you've spent a lot of time studying and working on. How do you look at measurement in the business and how do you go about measuring the success of these programs?

I'm working on a measurement strategy. It's got three components. One is to measure learning program outcomes. You look at the learning objectives, this is for formal learning, and how do you know if it produced those outcomes. That's a combination of short-term and long-term participant surveys, talking to managers, looking at career outcomes, promotion, retention. It's a lot of different data points that we're going to bring together. We can do that by working across functions within HR and with our people in analytics team. It's going to be mainly correlations. You can't say that someone was promoted and 20% of that promotion was due to the leadership program that they went through the year before. It's still valuable information. That's one pillar.

The other is learning activity and this is necessary but not sufficient to talk like an economist to understand the impact of your learning agenda because you don't know that they're internalizing something if they complete a course, but it's useful for drawing correlation. If you get promoted, is that a time when you're looking for more learning? What's the activity level right after promotion and what does that mean for when we should be delivering learning? If that's an important moment of need? The third pillar is the learning environment. This gets back to the informal learning I was talking about. Those are a few components to the learning environment.

One thing we're going to look at is drivers of learning culture and we use the Watkins and Marsick model. It's called the Dimensions of the Learning Organization. It's from the ‘90s, but it's still as relevant as ever and they have a diagnostic where you can measure learning culture at your company. It's things like do people feel comfortable asking questions in meetings? Are people rewarded for learning? Does Pepsi or any company make its lessons learned available to others? We're picking a few of every year to go after and drive and then measure before and after how we did.

The other component of that is attitude toward learning. How are people feeling about the offerings? Are we targeting the right skills? Do they perceive that learning is supporting success in their job? Is it a driving factor in their growth and development? When I need to upscale, do I go to the formal learning or do I go to the LXP? Do I go to Degreed when I need to learn something or do I Google it? What are the attitudes toward the usefulness? The other one is the flip side of the coin, which is barriers to learning. We’re inadvertently discouraging people from learning by having too many resources. They get choice fatigue. Are we saying that learning is something that takes a lot of time and only formal learning matters here, therefore people discount all the informal learning opportunities that they have? How can we make people perceive that they have more time to learn? We did a little bit of research and found that time to learn is the number one barrier at Pepsi. Thankfully, we seem to have a strong supportive environment in terms of manager support for learning.

I know from being in this world for a long time that part of the challenge is getting people to sit down and make time to learn. They're often in reaction mode, all the things coming at them. Also, having the support of their manager so that they're not going, “What are you wasting your time on? I need you to get this project done,” instead of, “You need to spend some time investing in learning because we want you to get better for the future.”

[bctt tweet="Time is the number one barrier to learning. People need to perceive that they have more time for informal learning." via="no"]

Company Culture That Supports Learning

It's a huge privilege at Pepsi to have a culture that supports learning but that doesn't mean you don't have a long to-do list. There's an interesting study I found that shows psychologically, if we're pursuing two different goals that we feel are in conflict, then we feel time constraints. Even if the goals have nothing to do with time, like the goal to be healthy and eat tasty food. I wonder if employees in general feel like the goal to learn is in conflict with the goal to get their work done. If we could somehow communicate that learning enables you to get your work done, then they would feel like they had more time, even if I never interfered with their calendar at all.

It's like the old story of sharpening the axe from Stephen Covey many years ago. He keeps working and working and the other person's taking a rest. You think, “You're getting ahead,” but they are sharpening the saw and enables them to work faster, be more productive, maybe more engaged and happier in the long run. A lot of people, it's hard to see that in the short run sometimes for yourself and as a manager. I've referenced that in the book that I'm writing. I want people to realize the importance of investing in learning because it does take time. Speaking of learning, you've made this big pivot to learning under COVID-19. I know you've also been starting to make a plan for what does it look like post-COVID-19. Some companies are bringing people back to the office in different phases. I am optimistic we will be getting together in person again for conferences and learning but it may not be until 2021 or even farther into that year. What are your thoughts and what kind of plans are you putting in place for the future of learning at Pepsi?

We are pivoting a lot of in-person things to online, not as permanent substitutes but as options. Options are good and it may be that five years from now, we do still want a choice between an online version and an in-person version. I think that's an investment worth making no matter what happens. The other is to lean in to these informal learning opportunities and the learning communities of practice. How can we help people work in a learning way? There's a research project from Harvard School of Education that shows there are certain behaviors in a conversation that promote learning. Things like sharing a provocative point of view and eliciting others' opinions promote learning. Can we have a communications campaign around that about, “You'll learn more if you do these small conversational habits?”

That bigger picture, we're wondering if the learning audience might change not just at Pepsi, but everywhere. Let's think about college students. I read one article that 25% of enrolled college students aren't going to go back. Does that mean that they'll be looking for work opportunities or nontraditional internship opportunities? Could companies like Pepsi bring them on for a few months? Would that lead to a more formal partnership with universities to add vocational elements to the curriculum in a long-term so that there's more of a fluid relationship between universities and work rather than four years and then never again?

The working world or the companies could support the learning. It almost could be going back to the older days of longer-term internship or apprenticeship where you're learning and also involved in doing the work and going back and forth. Since it's virtual, you don't even have to worry about going off to a campus and then a job in a different city. It can all be done in conjunction.

That's a great point about these things might happen virtually anyway. As the employee experience changes to be more virtual, as people are onboarded virtually, as they do interviews virtually, their team meetings, it's a new opportunity to deliver learning nuggets and these different moments in your life. One trend I've heard about is now that we're all on Microsoft or Slack or Yammer teams, are those learning then used now? Should we be delivering small bite-sized learning elements into the platforms that people are already in day-to-day?” What about this text messaging?

Meet the learners where they are, that's the platforms they're using. That's how you communicate and deliver learning and catering to the learners. I did a trends report of the top five trends in talent development based on interviews with dozens of guests before this. It’s something I need to update, but it is still available. If anybody wants to access it, it’s at AdvantagePerformance.com/trends. One of them was catering to the learner and how that's changed so much over the years from one-size-fits-all to let's provide learning and meet learners where they are. If they need classroom, if they're looking for micro videos, text, Slack, whatever it may be. There are all these different modes and modalities now, so we don't want to ignore them. We want to figure out what's going to be most effective.

This goes to the point of the holistic view of the employee, meeting them where they are in their technologies, but also new topics that are suddenly permissible to invest in from a learning perspective like mental health and emotional well-being. When you have a 2 or 3-day leadership program and you have that scarce real estate of a few sessions to pack all of your content into, things like meditation and well-being might end up on the cutting room floor. We see now that most mental and emotional health are very important to employee well-being and productivity. Now that work in life have collided, why not continue to service the whole person going forward with new forms of expertise and sessions?

Virtual Learning: Right now, learning professionals are leaning towards creating a system where they can steward the learning environment and build a learning culture such that informal learning is captured.

I was a big proponent of not the work-life balance, but work-life integration before. It's more integrated now than it ever has been. You and I are both in our homes looking at each other while we record this interview and doing work from home and kids coming in and all kinds of stuff that integrates all of it. I'm a big fan of meditation and mindfulness, and health and wellness. Those things are more important, critical more than ever. There are so many different new added stresses and anxieties that can come up from the challenge of working from home with all the things going on, especially if you have kids and pets and other things you've got to take care of.

Throughout this crisis, we've had a weekly webinar series on emotional and mental well-being. We got to explore new speakers that I hadn't ever had the chance to use before. Tracy Brower who writes for Forbes is excellent on work-life fulfillment, as she calls it. We had a Zen Buddhist priest talk about grief. At least in the US, we don't like to talk about that and other cultures, they're much better about it. It was definitely a bold move and I think it was incredibly necessary.

I'm glad to hear that and glad to hear it's paying off. I know more organizations are also providing mindfulness apps like Calm and Headspace and things like that as well. I'm a big fan of those. Let's shift gears, Molly. I want to talk about you and ask you, what's been your greatest accomplishment or proudest moment in your career so far?

It’s my ability to change. My first job after college was as a copy editor for international development reports at the World Bank. I went to graduate school and I became a higher ed administrator and moved in to executive education. From there, this is my first corporate job at Pepsi. That was a huge change and it's such a growth opportunity. It's so hard to make big changes like that, the lifestyle changes that it requires. It's so rewarding that people are people. Human nature pervades everything. It doesn't matter if you work in the government or the private sector. That's the red thread but if you have some emotional intelligence, if you have some social skills and some soft skills, you can adapt to any environment and that's been very rewarding.

Being willing to adapt and change. First corporate job at 43, but breaking in as chief learning officer, that's a great place to start. I didn't know you started as a copy editor. We talked about your greatest accomplishment. What has been one of your biggest failures or mistakes and what did you learn from it in your career?

I've learned the value of go slow to go fast. When you start a new job or you maybe as a personality quirk, people have contribution anxiety where it's like, “I need to get something done. I need to accomplish something. I need an early win.” You hear a lot about the value of that. I learned from experience, but also from the book The First 90 Days, which I loved and used when I came to Pepsi, is that don't absolve yourself of the pressure to accomplish big things quickly in a new environment because you have to get to know the culture and people who’s powerful and who's not. I can't tell you the number of times I thought that I had aligned everybody only to find out I hadn't. You don't know until you step in it. It's such a delicate balance between focus and get things done fast, which is absolutely appropriately one of the values at Pepsi and taking the time to understand the situation in full. Do some good perspective-taking and make people feel heard and understood before you put your foot on the gas and you'll be a lot more successful.

I remember before I do what I do now, I used to work for this consulting company called BTS, which has a strong culture and a pretty steep learning curve to get in to be a successful consultant. After I was there for a while mentoring younger consultants, the biggest piece of advice I always gave was that everybody we hire is very ambitious and wants to be successful and valuable. You're going to feel like you need to contribute. You're going to be frustrated because you feel like you're not contributing, but at the same time you have no idea what's going on. You need to take time to slow down and embrace it and learn, even though you see everyone else around you working hard and doing a lot of stuff. You feel like you're obligated that you should too. You've got to take this time to learn before you end up in a position later where you're responsible for delivering on some type of projects, whatever it may be.

I think there's a new twist on it during the work-at-home phase where you've lost the signals that you get in the workplace of where you stand. I was talking to my boss about this and explaining that I was feeling a little bit ill at ease and he said, “Everyone feels that way. The feedback loops are broken. People used to see you in the office and how they treat you and how would you treat them, those are gone.” It's like animals that use echolocation. That's what I think of it. You do things and you get responses. You get signals back and a lot of that's broken now. It’s unmooring in a way.

[bctt tweet="Employees need to feel and understand that their learning goals need not be in conflict with their work goals." via="no"]

Behavior was more observable. You could be like, “Molly hasn't quite been delivering on the projects, but it seems like she's been a little out of it lately. Maybe we should talk to her,” versus out of sight, out of mind, “I don't know what's going on.”

How do I know if I'm doing a good job? How do I know if I'm doing a bad job? The interactions you have with people are more transitory and almost more transactional because you're on Zoom and then you’re off Zoom.

This is why I’ve been talking about this on the podcast, when we moved to this working remote world, communication is so important. You can't communicate enough. You can't be transparent enough and having those conversations and asking people what's going on and showing empathy and asking questions because otherwise people start to make assumptions and mistakes happen.

With my team, we have virtual coffee chats for half an hour every day and that's great for us. There are lots of other teams that you can't have virtual coffee chat for 30 minutes a day with every possible stakeholder. You can't replace that environment, but we have to learn to navigate where we are.

Molly, what's the biggest trend in talent development that you're following right now?

I am following the gradual, and maybe picking up speed, move from well-defined roles into less defined roles or more time spent in projects, in project teams that may switch rather than a permanent home with a single team. I think that's very interesting. It was a trend before COVID and it's accelerated during COVID as we have things that we've never had to accomplish before and they require cross-functional teams to get done. We've seen so many examples of that at Pepsi, in my own work and then stories from around the organization. I wonder what that will mean for learning. To an extent, we have formal programs. Should these be delivered to these cross-functional teams to help them work better together rather than all the directors in the company or all the level sevens.

Rather than using those kinds of HR slices, use the team as an intact unit to consume learning. I had mentioned communities of practice before. If we break people's affiliation with a permanent work group, what does that do to their identity at work and their psychological well-being about having a permanent home in the office and in a work identity? I wonder if communities of practice can stand in there where you say, “I'm not always in the team that works on branding for Lays potato chips, but I'm always a marketer.” I'm now part of this marketing community of practice and I have more interactions with my peers across business units than I did before and that's my home now, even though I move around in other projects.

I'm fascinated by this move into what you call the future of work or some call it a gig economy, whatever it may be. A lot of times people talk about the gig economy, they talk about more people out there being independent consultants like me. Inside of large companies, you're going to see it with people doing more project-based work then sticking with one job or one role for many years. That's something I've been thinking and talking about for a long time. It's interesting to question about what happens to their identity when you're not part of a group for a long-term but I think it also creates more obligation, more need to create your own personal brand, personal identity so that people recognize you for the type of work you do. You can get those different projects, different gigs and that's something I'm excited to explore and help more people with in the future. It is going to keep changing and we want to be prepared for it.

Companies are going to need the right technologies to have an enterprise view of all the skills in the company. If I need to staff a project team, how do I do it? Who's available to me? Who has time? Who has the right skillset, the right geography background? That's going to be a new frontier.

Virtual Learning: Part of the challenge is getting people to actually sit down and make time to learn because they're so often in reaction mode.

Learn more from the big professional services firms and how they staff these projects and putting people together. UI, KPMG, Deloitte, even BTS where I came from. We were always piecing project teams together to staff projects. Molly, you've already mentioned a couple of books. Is there any other that you highly recommend or has made a big impact on your career?

I can tell you what I'm reading, which is called Superminds. This is by a professor at MIT, Thomas Malone. The subtitle is The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together. I like the school of thought in which AI is not going to steal all the jobs. It will create new jobs and will augment human capability. If we take that perspective, how do we set ourselves up for the best working relationships with machines? What is the future of human-machine interaction and what would that mean for learning? That's what I'm thinking about now.

Molly, last question. For anybody reading in talent development learning, HR, anywhere in a corporate world looking for ways to accelerate their career, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

I think industry associations are places where you can go and meet people from other companies and understand how other professionals think. It's very valuable. Organizations or whoever your employer is at the moment would probably value that benchmarking and understanding external trends. We always like to locate ourselves and understanding where others are. Now that all of these conferences are virtual, go to a bunch of them. Maybe you never could have maybe gone to Vegas seven times a year for the other conference. Log in to Zoom and hear some cool speaker. There are tons of new access. Learning is more accessible than ever.

I love going to conferences and meeting people in person but there's only so much time, money you can spend. It's more accessible to get to these virtual conferences. I spoke at a virtual conference that had 400 people and I was swinging my kids in the backyard. I went and spoke at the conference and then I was off Zoom and then onto the next thing. I stayed for a couple more sessions because they were good. There was no travel and all that stuff made it easy. That's why I'm starting to organize more of those things as well because I want to provide more of those resources. I know how valuable they are. I appreciate you saying that. Molly, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on and spending time with us and sharing some of your knowledge, wisdom, experience, point of view. It has been valuable for me and I know it has been for our audience as well. Thanks again for coming on the show.

I've been honored to be here. Thank you for having me and if anyone wants to keep in touch, I’m @MollyNagler on Twitter. I'd love to keep in touch with anyone who's reading.

I know you're on LinkedIn as well. Thanks again.

Thank you, Andy.

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