At this year’s Learning Conference, you’ll be speaking about unleashing L&D’s Strategic Value.  What core messages or insights do you hope to share with the audience?
Over the years, LD seems to have been mired in content creation and delivery. Somewhere along the way we moved into more of an order take a role over being a true strategic partner. This session will walk through ways to recapture that role and value! We offer so much more than training to an organization! We will go deeper into how to make that strategic shift.

As someone deeply involved in the future of skills and learning, what key trends or challenges do you think organizations need to pay close attention to right now?
Obviously, the elephant in the room is AI! It will free LD to play a more strategic role in employee development, and not just from a knowledge perspective, but from a performance perspective. Organizations are going to need help understanding how to integrate AI into the learning ecosystem. They are also going to need to understand how it impacts jobs, roles, and workflows. We are experts at that! We can play a significant role in adopting that technology into an organization.

Why is lifelong learning and competence development more important than ever — and what role do events like the Learning Conference play in supporting that?
We are often the cobblers children who have no shoes. We spend so much of our time supporting organizations that we don’t take the time to step out of that role, network with our peers around current trends, and grow our own professional development. Conferences like this are more important than ever to keep the saw sharp and help us collectively look at new learning methodologies, and technologies in a powerful way. These events are more important for in industry now more than ever!

Finally, what advice would you give to professionals or leaders who want to stay relevant, grow, and succeed in a constantly evolving world of work. – communities of practice are more important and powerful than ever and today’s ever-changing landscape? 
We have technologies and systems that enable the sharing of ideas and best practices in ways we have never had before. Again, AI is a huge enabler of that, but so are many of the systems and platforms, such as LinkedIn and others, that we’ve used for years that are going to become more important than ever. We need to be students of our trade and are more powerful together than individually. Let’s use this opportunity, and these technologies, to accelerate our collective knowledge of this ever-changing landscape.