The role of L&D: From skill gaps to business opportunity with Chris Eigeland, Co-Founder and CEO of Go1

Dan: Welcome to L&D in 20, your go-to resource for all things workplace learning. Brought to you by Go1. I'm your host, Dan Hayward, Chief Customer Officer, and industry veteran.

Today, we will be speaking with Chris Eigeland, the Co-founder and CEO of Go1. With a diverse background beginning in theme park design before he moved into human rights and constitutional law, Chris has extensive experience of the education sector from a variety of different perspectives, ranging from building an education, not-for-profit in Haiti, representing Australia at Unesco, and of course, building Go1.

Today we're going be discussing keeping up with the evolution of learning and how companies and talent need to adapt. Welcome Chris.

Chris: Thanks for having me, Dan. Great to see you.

Dan: Excited to, yeah. Excited to see you again.

The first question I'd like to ask you is really, you know, with your experience and the amount of time you spend in this industry, how has learning and development evolved?

Chris: Yeah, so we're in this really, I think, unique moment in history.

So there's a number of trends that are coming together. We have, you know, some massive technological change with the raise, with the rise of AI and other areas, you have increased generational diversity. You know, oftentimes four, sometimes even five generations now in the workplace. You have some macroeconomic changes and instability, which has created a really, I think, unique environment for organizations, companies, and individuals to operate within.

And the flip side of that is that the structure, there are structural challenges in how our large institutions, our governmental institutions have responded to that challenge. And if you look at the investment in an individual sort of lifelong learning, you know, unsurprisingly, that investment drops off cliff after someone turns about 24, 25, which is the sort of natural age that someone may graduate from a college or a tertiary institution.

And so you have two things happening at the moment, which are quite unique.

You have culminating trends in our environment, and you have a sort of structural and institution based funding model that hasn't kept up with those trends. And so I think that's why organizations and companies feel a lot of pressure at the moment to support their teams, support their employees to continue the professional development journey, to both achieve the company goals and the sort of individual's goals because there is a growing need for that skill development, but actually the institutional support is lacking, and therefore companies need to step up and fill that gap.

Dan: Yeah. So that's quite a, that's quite a challenge. And so as you kind of take a step back and look at the, L&D industry, you know, what are some of your thoughts on the state of the market right now in terms of the way in which we're addressing some of those key challenges.

Chris: I think it's an incredibly exciting moment in the, in the L&D market, I think there is an increasing sort of awareness from organizations that this is a problem that they're going to solve. And also an innate sort of increasing derive from individuals to continue to evolve and adapt their skills in a, you know, pretty rapidly changing environment that, you know, may result in pretty significant changes to the lay of market.

And so, you know, when I think about what's important and what opportunities are available for companies in the current market, I think, do you have an L&D program that is, you know, available and frictionless? You know, people want to be learning where they are, not where, not where you want them to be.

Um, do you have, you know, the tools to make people feel empowered, you know, small discretionary budgets to enable, uh, individuals to make their own decisions on where they want grow, and then also share that sort of feedback with their peer group. Then do you have sort an original culture that rewards and recognizes those behaviours and that kind of rapid learning cycle and there's like really interesting tools and programs that sort of entering the market, you know, every month and every quarter that hit on some of those pillars.

Dan: So, there's clearly a, you know, a large variety of options out there for organizations to choose from. As you are, you know, meeting and spending time with your customers, what are some of the ways that you, you are seeing that they're, they're trying to keep pace with change. Both trying to meet the customers, their employees, sorry, where they are, but also, you know, ensuring that they're meeting the needs of the, of the business.

Chris: The reality of the current dynamic environment, we find ourselves in it, there's no single solution to this challenge. I think what you find is that organizations are exploring sort of new opportunities and some new modalities for learning. Do people learn better sort by audio or podcasts or you short form information on their phone? So there's definitely, certainly a sort of emergence of sort of new modalities. Second is a, you know, an awareness that this is a organizational priority for senior leaders in the organization. So whereas perhaps maybe 18 months ago, two years ago, uh, I think L&D would've been seen more in the benefits category, now it's moved more to, this is an organizational imperative to continue to evolve the skills of our company, skills of our team, against company priorities. So you're seeing sort of an elevation, I think of that too, from a nice to have to a must have. And then you're seeing, I think, a strong focus on culture building around, people call it different things, it might be a learning culture or it might be a culture of like speed and execution and delivery. We're certainly seeing a cultural evolution that at the heart of it, it's like a level of agility and ability to adapt, you know, resilience despite the labels that are put on it, and you see it, there's real focus and an emergence of that type of culture, and L&D plays a massive role in culture shift.

Dan: That's super interesting, and I think on several of our previous podcasts, we've had conversations around learning culture and I, I know that you are, you are really passionate about creating that for your organization.

So maybe you can share just some of your thoughts and maybe some of the tactics that you use with your L&D leaders to ensure that you embed that, that culture of learning.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely happy to. There's something which I feel pretty strongly about, as you can imagine, given the Go1 journey. I think the start of any good learning culture for me is you have to move it from the kind of theoretical to the practical.

There's so no having, I think a theoretical learning culture where people, you know, make it together and even sort of book clubs and those sorts of things, I don't think they necessarily capture a strong learning culture. For me was a strong learning culture look like? It is something rooted in nearly three things.

So one is curiosity, one is velocity, and one is a high trust team. And that those three things together will accelerate business outcomes.

From a curiosity perspective, I think in the, uh, rapidly changing world that we're in, having people ask questions around why the ability to absorb new information, to not stop at the end of their job role and to help solve problems that are outside of their job description is critical.

From a velocity perspective, I think the best learning actually happens in the field. It happens when you sort of absorb some new information, deliver something new, and then learn from it. You know, action creates new information faster than any theoretical mechanism. And then the high trust team component is around kind of required vulnerability and ability for a team to then reflect on that sort of action cycle and then learn through it quickly. And so the, a truly successful kinda learning culture embodies curiosity, velocity, and a high trust team, and is all about conceptual understanding, your information, applying it, and then having a high level of sort of vulnerability and trust at the end to close the cycle and learn what worked and didn't.

Dan: Yeah. That's super interesting. And as you think about embedding that within an organization, what are some of the, I guess the key metrics, KPIs or the kind of like, I guess, the signals that you're looking for from the workforce and from your teams, that it's, you know, that, that you are gaining traction, that you're moving forward?

Chris: So I think there's some really practical ways in which you can bring your culture to life, and particularly a culture that continues from adapt and grow and evolve as the environment around us to, to grows. So, you know at Go1 we do a number of different things as an example, so we have our learning days in which part of that is.

Sort of mandatory cohort based learning based on the organizational's needs. And part of that is kind of team based, optional learning based on what the team needs or the leader needs or individual needs. And you can sort of fact participation and engagement in those pieces.

The other thing which we believe is super important, is having a level of sort of discretionary budget that is available for you to learn. Things that may be outside of your role. If you think about the skills that are gonna be really important in the next 10 years along the transferrable skills, resilience, critical thinking, communication, so someone you know that may be, I don't know, a sales person, learning, I don't know, improv or something like that, actually, from my perspective, creates a much stronger skillset for them to move into the future.

So we have discretionary learning budgets that we allow people to deploy and that creates peer-to-peer connections. Because people will see, oh, actually, Dan just purchased, you know, this book on AI or did this sort of short course on improv or whatever it is, maybe I should do that.

And that signalling is, is really critical to building sort of the culture. And then of course we have our own sort of talent priorities and talent frameworks, so then mapped back to sort of learning journeys and learning pathways as like the combination of all those things that starts to move the needle on, you know, building a, a fast moving, high performing learning culture.

In terms of what we measure, you know, obviously engagement, obviously. Are people deploying their learning budget? Are they reporting back to their teams and sort of the lunch and learn formats and what they learned? You know, engagement with the learning pathways, we actually measure and, uh, in our performance evaluations, the, the, behaviors of things like of curiosity and velocity and ensure that, you know, any performance evaluation takes into account both someone, did someone do the job, but also, how did they do it?

And if they missed the outcome but demonstrated the right learning behaviors, then that's a really high signal that that person can continue to grow, you know, they may have missed their, their target for that particular quarter.

Dan: That's great. Thank you, Chris. So now we're going to move on to our next segment. It's called the 60 second budget breakdown.

As you think about, you know, your work and obviously engaging with, you know, hundreds of L&D professionals every year, what are the three most important things that you recommend that they spend their money on?

Chris: Absolutely. So. 60 seconds.

So first is that the learning needs to be available and where they are.

So that might be different modalities of learning online, offline, but you need to have a variety of tools available for learning to be available, like where people, where and when people want. It has to be easy.

The second is people need to be empowered and sure like that they themselves, the accountability, ownership of their learning journey. So that's likely from small discretionary spending budgets, even though maybe small makes a big difference to mindset.

And the third is it has to be led from the top of the organization and it has to be built into the senior leadership, so KPIs. And so I'd have a small amount of budget available for recognition from senior leaders, for the organization of people that are starting to, uh, really take, take accountability of their learning journey.

Dan: Great. Thank you. Super succinct.

So moving on to our next segment, Lifelong Learnings.

This is one of my favorite segments. I would love for you to describe a time where a situation turned out differently than you expected, could be more positive or more negative, but importantly, what were some of the things that you learned from that situation?

Chris: I think Dan and I think from the intro probably gathered that my career has not been linear. There's not been one thing after another and one progression step after another. And I think in reflection on reflection, that from my perspective is the type of career that will fit the new economy and fit the sort of new and rapidly changing landscape. And so think of well, what went to plan and didn't go to plan, I mean, a ton of things didn't go to plan in my career and my journey. But just one example which is I was absolutely stoked, studying theme park design. I actually created my own degree in theme product design. Didn't exist yet. A mix of industrial and graphic design. Got what I thought might be sort of my dream job, working at a theme park here in Australia, Dreamworld, designing some of their new sort smaller rides while still at college and university.

And then about like three months into it, I was like, ah, I was so wrong. This is like super fun, but this is not, what I wanna do for my sort of career and as my day job and then much to the shuddering of my friends and family who lost all their free theme park tickets, I actually changed to studying law, which just that was far away from the impact designs you could possibly get everything about.

Well, that was pretty big career pivot for me. I'm sure many people listening have had big career pivots, but you have some of the, the sort of transferable skills that are a part of that, that journey. Storytelling, experience design. How do you bring experiences to life in a way that are engaging, you know, creativity, problem solving constraints. How do you do something that is like creatively amazing, but within the physical world and operating within constraints to like breed creativity. And so, I used to think that that's sort of one specific example, but the kind of squiggly careers that people have.

Uh, in my view, fundamental to success in this next phase because, you know, something like experience design, how you make people feel is a big part of L&D and people wanna feel inspired, they wanna feel engaged, feel heard, and how you design L&D experiences goes hand in hand with that.

And so those types of transferable skills I think have served me pretty well, hopefully today and will continue to do so. But that was not the path that I expected to take.

Dan: Yeah. I love that. That's, thank, that's great. Thank you so much for sharing. And so now we're going to move on to our final segment. It's all about self-development hacks.

So really interested to know kind of what's your, your favorite self-development hack or learning resource? Like where do you go to personally grow?

Chris: Absolutely. So personally I'm being listened to podcasts and a big reader of books and then combine that with short form online sort of courses to get snippets.

That's kind my learning triangle. So you know, podcasts while I'm on the go audio long form books in the evening, and then can short form online pieces of training where I need to sort of learn a particular skill. That's sort of me personally. For L&D generally, I think what do I go to when I think about how to upskill myself in sort of L&D?

Actually, it's not for me, anyone particular L&D resource. I actually believe that the best L&D is highly cross-functional and draws upon other industry's best practices. And so for me, great L&D is at the heart, like nails three things. It's like motivation. It's the experience that people have, and it's the business impact.

And so three resources that I love on those topics are on motivation it's who was the sports psychologist for the England football team. On experience, it's a book called Unreasonable Hospitality. It's about creating delight moments and exceeding expectations and how that changes people's emotional resonance. And on business impact, it's Sustaining People by Claire Hughes Johnson versus the COO of Stripe, and I think great L&D hit all those three marks when it's done really well.

Dan: Well, that's great. Chris, thank you so much for coming on today's show and sharing all of your insights with us.

Chris: My absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Dan: I'll see you soon. Thanks for tuning into the show. I'm Dan Hayward, hief Customer Officer, and that wraps up another episode of L&D in 20.

We hope you found today's discussion as engaging as we both did. Whether you are listening on the go at your desk, we'll catch you on the next episode. And until then, keep learning.