Michelle Parry-Slater is the Learning & Development Director at Kairos Modern Learning and the Author of the L&D practitioner's toolkit, The Learning and Development Handbook. Her mission is to support L&D professionals to improve the impact of their profession by taking a strategic, holistic approach to people and workplace development. 

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Kriti Arya, Team Lead Business Development, Whatfix and Michelle Parry-Slater on the secret to the success of The L&D Handbook.

6:45 -Do you think learning techniques should be changed for different people/ groups/regions? Does the one shoe fits all approach work?

• Learning and development are actually wearing very comfortable shoes. If you got your comfortable shoes on to move to a new set of shoes, they're new, they're not worn in yet, they can feel different and uncomfortable but we need to perhaps go through that uncomfortableness, ourselves as a profession
• Learners don't necessarily embrace uncomfortableness, but the people who are learning or need to learn for their jobs deserve the best opportunity to learn
• We need to look forward to solving learning challenges with modern ways of working and that's what our learners will be expecting. Therefore we need to figure out a way by which we can provide learning in a way that suits the individuals concerned

12:36 -Should the learning approach reflect real life? What advantages does this learning approach offer L&D professionals, and how can they implement it?

• To buy a car or choose our life partner, we don't do courses for these, we ask our network, friends, and family, we look at magazines, online and YouTube videos and do our own research. So we've got these skills innately, so learning and development professionals really do need to harness the skills of our learners and should focus on giving them what they need when it comes to content or paving the learning pathways
• It's actually lazy not to help our learners with the right content and learning pathway or force people to go on a course, to force people to wait six weeks to learn something that they need for their jobs right now
• Create communities of practice networks for people to talk to each other about their work and learning to create social interaction, people are loving face to face learning activities but what are they loving? Are they actually loving sitting in a room getting the knowledge dump? or are they loving chatting with their colleagues?

17:57 -What would you like to suggest to the young L&D professionals to build the right future?

• It's always been networking. Some people just hate even the word networking, because it just fills them with dread speaking to strangers and so on. Pushing yourself to meet other people, and engage in community is really what will open your eyes to new ideas, and new opportunities
• Focus on empowerment, if you give young people a voice, they will really come up with some fantastic ideas. So it's not a cliche to say, young people are the future, but sometimes they're not met where they are. They're met with criticism and judgement
• If we can reframe, and invite the people who are the future of our profession, into the community of a fully networked invited open space, then I highly recommend that young people push their way in, but I also recommend that everyone else put their hand once probably had and pay it forward

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