Simon Gibson is the Group Head of Learning & Development at Marks and Spencer. He is a modern, international, adaptable and experienced Executive level People Leader/Chief Learning Officer. 

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Gokul Suresh, Global Head of Growth and Field Marketing at Whatfix and Simon Gibson on “The Right Balance of Technology for Organizational Learning Development.

Quick Takeaways:

• Recognize how enterprise application adoption and learning can enhance an organization’s digital adoption and literacy
• The most effective means for L&D experts to offer instruction remotely
• Making the best technological decision for your company can be challenging

19:54 -How do you bridge skill gaps and the best way to deliver learning? 

• The pandemic has had many countries change their approach to digital literacy to their approach on how they interact with these tools, how people shop online and how they can bank online simultaneously, which then blended with the work
• Microsoft gave teams away for free to make it as easy as possible for employees to communicate and interact with their fellow employees. and we try to make it as easy as possible. But do we think about the user experience?
• We should focus on the user experience more important and don't make it hard for the end user. When we talk about collaboration, everybody should be able to use the tools to collaborate, have conversations, have team meetings, capture ideas, share documents, and work on things. Make it easy for the end-user to consume and that's the way you improve the digital literacy 
• Have you ever read the instructions about how to use an iPhone? Think about the details that they've put into how easy it is to turn on their product and how easy is to start using it. We should start focusing on taking a similar approach and then overlay that with what we're doing in an organisation or a business for a process

19:54 -How do you see the digital transformation and COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation? What's your take on that?

• COVID-19 forced us to adopt technologies we didn't want to before. But predominantly around that with the traditional office work and remote work and what we thought before, it's just shone a very bright light on some things
• My point is we've ignored a function which can give us a lot of flexibility to employees. People can have more flexibility and choice and we can find different people, work in different ways and It's not confined to a traditional structured time bound and I see this as a massive opportunity

25:54 -How do you mix and match different modes of training and learning? Can we have a micro-learning aspect to it?

• You have to get the experience, as rich as you can and make those experiences as meaningful, and impactful as you can make them. For Instance, I want a brain surgeon, using Virtual Reality (VR) to have these first go at, working on someone's brain. It’s quite safe and can't really harm anybody in a virtual reality environment.
• Finding the right blend of training and the right mix of materials will be challenging. Be that knowledge or insight or a new learning methodology. But, based on how thirsty your organisation is to remain curious and continue to look at new ways to learn or new opportunities to learn that correlate directly with what your business is doing
• The focus should not be on learning something that's completely different to what your company or your role is. Because that might not be an appropriate use of your time for blending in the ideal mix and method at the right moment. But, unfortunately, that's the magical solution that everybody's trying to aim for
  
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