The Learning Hack podcast

In this episode, John talks to Tracy Capaldi Drewett, Executive Director at International Centre for Parliamentary Studies, about a programme ICPS launched in February 2022 to train Georgian diplomats. The programme launch co-incided with the outbreak of war in Ukraine, providing another complication compounding difficulties associated with Covid. Despite it all, the programme has been a success, and John also hears how ICPS, like many other organizations, has pivoted during the pandemic...

The return of workers to offices in the UK had stalled for the first time since restrictions were lifted at the start of the year, and may well have plateaued. Hybrid working is with us, it seems, for the foreseeable future. Laura Lee-Gibbs, Founder of Learn Fox, returns to the podcast to discuss the challenges this is throwing up for learning professionals. Having got through the upheavals of the pandemic, they now have to adjust to a world where hybrid learning is business as usual. The...

With more than 9,000 attendees from 50 different countries, 200 seminars and 200 exhibitors, Learning Technologies is Europe's leading showcase of organisational learning and the technology used to support learning at work. A major conference runs alongside the exhibition, featuring talks from more than 90 of the learning industry's foremost speakers, thinkers, visionaries, and practitioners. This special edition of the podcast was mostly recorded at the show, and features interviews...

This episode will be highly relatable to anyone who works in L&D within organizations, but is of more general interest too. Now semi-retired, Performance Analyst and Instructional Architect Guy W. Wallace proves more than happy to spill the beans about the wiliness that is often need to keep programmes on track amidst the sturm und drang of corporate politics and misapprehensions about learning in the C-suite. Guy has been designing Enterprise Learning since 1979, has been a...

Susi Miller is Founder and Director of eLaHub Ltd, the only provider of eLearning accessibility specialised services in the L&D industry. The company provides training, auditing services and consultancy on every aspect of eLearning accessibility for clients including Amazon, Thomson Reuters, London Stock Exchange Group, and Govt of Canada. In this episode, John talks to Susi about the prevalence of disabilities in working populations, and how to meet all access requirements in production...

John talks to Julian Stodd, Captain of Sea Salt Learning, a strategic consultancy that partners on the design and delivery of global solutions around leadership, culture, learning transformation and change. Julian has an academic background in communication theory, psychology and neurophysiology, learning design, educational psychology and philosophy. He has written 14 books, including most recently, 'The Humble Leader', released in March 2022. Follow...

Federico Presicci is Head of Sales Training & Enablement at GDS group, an accredited personal coach (ACC) and a certified Meditation Teacher. He won the Gold Award in the Rising Stars category at the 2022 UK Learning Awards. Impressive achievements for any 27 year-old – but Federico came to the UK only five years ago. At the time he knew nobody here, and didn’t speak English. John, who was one of the judges of the Rising Stars award that Federico won, listens to his story, and hears...

John's guest this time is Donald H. Taylor, Chair of the Learning Technologies Conference, of the Learning and Skills group, of the Learning and Performance Institute, Network Chair of Emerge Education, Editor of Inside Learning Technologies Magazine and a Non Executive Director of Filtered. He's also been called the James Bond of learning. Each year since 2013, Donald has produced his L&D Global Sentiment Survey, which asks the question: ‘What will be hot in workplace L&D next year?’...

When a car accident brought an untimely end to Trish Uhl's athletic career, equestrian sport's loss became a massive gain for IT and learning technologies. Trish is founder and CEO of Owl's Ledge LLC, a firm that helps learning professionals improve their performance, drive business results, and produce organizational outcomes. She works with Global 500 and Fortune 500 clients on four continents. Describing herself as someone who, in words often attributed to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky,...

John talks to David Lockie, an entrepreneur and investor in leading-edge web technologies who is Co-chair of the British Interactive Media Association’s Blockchain Counsel and passionate about blockchain, open source software and crypto. Over the last two decades, the internet and the world wide web have had transformative effects on workplace learning. Now around the corner is Web 3, and everything’s about to change all over again. So what is Web 3, and will it be good news for those...

John talks to Stefaan van Hooydonk, Founder of the Global Curiosity Institute. Stefaan has lived, worked and studied all over the world, in a learning career spanning three decades. He has held numerous leadership roles in large companies. As Chief Learning Officer at Cognizant he was in charge of L&D for 300,000 people. Last June he published The Curiosity Manifesto: How Curiosity Helps Individuals and Workplaces Thrive. Curiosity, he believes, is the key to an organization's...

Josh Bersin describes Cornerstone's new platform, Xplor, as a ‘skills-based, AI-powered platform designed as an LXP, talent mobility, career, and skills platform, [with] the potential to change the L&D landscape.' In this episode, last of the present season, John talks to Summer Rivers Salomonsen, VP Content Product at Cornerstone. Is this type of huge, all-inclusive system that brings together LXP, talent management system and skills really what organizations and learners need right...

John is joined by Megan Torrance, Chief Energy Officer of Torrance Learning, a custom development company based in Michigan USA. With an MBA from Cornell and a consultancy background, Megan has a firm grasp of the business value of learning initiatives. But her two decades of experience in learning technologies also includes a strong bent towards using data for learning. She is strong advocate for xAPI, and organizes the 'xAPI Party'. How does she feel about the slow rate of adoption of...

John Helmer talks to Craig Weiss, the straight-talking learntech analyst and consultant. Craig is CEO and Lead Analyst for The Craig Weiss Group, and the founder of FindAnLMS, a learning system search engine. With the so-called 'Great Resignation' underway, skills issues are uppermost in many business leaders' minds: do learning systems have a part to play in helping organizations deal with the fallout? Craig has a view – and as with the other topics that John has crowdsourced from...

How is digital technology impacting the way people work, learn and think – and what upcoming technology trends should we look out for? In this episode, John talks to Ezri Carlebach, writer, lecturer, communications expert and imagineer, who has worked extensively in educational and workplace learning contexts. Why is imagination so important to learning – and in what ways has the pandemic changed the way we relate to technology? 2:31 - What is 'imagineering'? 5:54 - Ezri's career...

John talks to Tom Hickmore, award-winning Creative Director of video learning company Nice Media, about his newly released book Watch & Learn. The book aims to help learning professionals in designing, commissioning and producing effective video drama for learning. Tom has also produced a popular series of videos drawing particular lessons from hit movies and TV series such as Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and the Bond franchise. But can video dramas for learning paid for by...

This time John is talking to Laura Overton, an award-winning international speaker, author and facilitator, with multiple institutional fellowships. Laura is probably best known for helming Towards Maturity, the research and benchmarking organization, from its inception as a Government initiative, through independence and commercial success before it was bought out by Emerald Group in 2017. Does she think during her time there she really managed to bring about change in the practice...

John talks to Dr. Jane Bozarth, Director of Research at The Learning Guild, about how the rise of digital technology is changing expectations about the sort of skills and qualifications a learning professional should have in the 21st Century – and about her own, long career in learning. That career includes numerous books, work as a columnist for Learning Solutions Magazine, and a long-standing position as E-Learning Co-ordinator for the US state of North Carolina. More than all that,...

Another chance to hear the inaugural episode of Great Minds on Learning, which was originally aired back in March 2021 to considerable acclaim. In this series, Donald Clark – the internationally famous author, blogger and entrepreneur, joins John Helmer to discuss the history of thought and theorising about learning. This particular episode is about The Cognitivists, a group of theorists who made a vital contribution to what we now know about the mechanics of memory and...

Internationally respected author, blogger and learning expert, Donald Clark joins John Helmer of the Learning Hack podcast to discuss the history of thought and theorising about learning. From the Greeks to the Geeks, they cover 2,500 years of thought and science on learning. The inspired, the enduring, the wacked-out weird and the just plain wrong, from Socrates to the present day. Starting with a repeat of the popular pilot episode The Cognitivists on 30 August, the series proper...