At this year’s Learning Conference, you’ll be speaking about The Learning Leader’s key to driving real impact, closing skills gaps and greater credibility. What core messages or insights do you hope to share with the audience?

Succeeding in L&D is harder than it seems because of the expectations imposed on us by our stakeholders. But the harsh reality is that the expected and requested  version of L&D cannot lead to meaningful impact at scale and therefore we cannot succeed. Therefore, we need to intentionally increase the maturity of our approach and take our organisation with us. The good news is that there is a roadmap for this and it’s more exciting than staying where we are. This is what I’ll be sharing in my session.

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?

The biggest things in L&D right now is how AI and data combine to help us achieve so much more. Helping to map the skills of an entire organisation, highlight distinct proficiency levels for every role, assess performance and plot personalised development paths for every employee is a game changer. Add into that turning organisational know-how into any form of content, guidance, support and insight and we have a powerful engine to close skills gaps and increase capability.

Why is lifelong learning and competence development more important than ever — and what role do events like the Learning Conference play in supporting that?

If I can hold the mirror up to our profession first, the role of L&D has changed and everybody’s expectations of what we achieve have increased but our skill sets haven’t necessarily kept up. We need to reevaluate our position and grab the opportunity in front of us but we’ll do that by having refreshed aims and an evolved skill set. Nobody will ever master one skill set and have that serve them for their entire career any more. We need to stay ahead of the game and become role models for the rest of our organisations.

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

Stay plugged in to what’s going on. The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. So pay attention to those sharing stories of how they’re pushing the boundaries, experimenting with new tools and achieving a great deal more. Conferences and podcasts are a great way of doing this!