This is the final part of our three-part conversation with prolific author, researcher, and professor Barbara Oakley, Ph.D. Karen, Krista, and Barbara discuss how the patterns and pathways picked up during past learning experiences influence how our brains react to future learning challenges when building new skills.

Access the episode here.

This is part two of our three-part conversation with prolific author, researcher, and professor Barbara Oakley, Ph.D. Karen, Krista, and Barbara discuss how the patterns and pathways picked up during past learning experiences influence how our brains react to future learning challenges when building new skills.

Listen to the episode

How to learn (and teach) like a pro…

Prolific author, researcher and professor Barbara Oakley, Ph.D., joins Karen and Krista to discuss how the patterns and pathways picked up during past learning experiences influence how our brains react to future learning challenges when building new skills. This is part one of a three-part series.

Access the episode here.

Do you work for a small affiliate of a large biopharmaceutical organization or perhaps a small startup that’s eager to hit the ground running? Are you looking to provide development opportunities that allow your team members to grow professionally and gain new experiences?

If you answered yes to both of these questions then, welcome.

In today’s dynamic environment, it’s no secret that more organizations, big and small, are investing in Learning and Development (L&D). From employee satisfaction and retention to protecting your bottom line and withstanding the tumultuous nature of business, investing in effective L&D programs is shown to prepare organizations to succeed in the future. Consider these figures:

• Nine out of 10 millennials rate professional or career growth and development opportunities as a major consideration in job satisfaction.[1]
• Organizations that have made a strategic investment in employee development report 11% greater profitability and are twice as likely to retain their employees.[2]
• Technological advancements are shortening the shelf life of employee skills; a typical business competency now lasts about five years.[3]

To compete, organizations need to quickly adapt to new business realities by empowering their people to build new skills before they need them. Investing in L&D is no longer a nice-to-have but an economic imperative.

However, small businesses may not have the resources or budget of larger competitors for L&D activities. Yet, to grow and expand their business in a world of continuous change and disruption, L&D programs are needed to upskill, reskill and build capacity for employees to navigate the ever-changing marketplace.

But how do you create an effective L&D program for your small business? Where do you start? Here are a few practical steps to help you get started establishing an L&D program:

1. Clarify the business’s goals: Effective learning programs align to the business’s goals. Collaborate with cross-functional business leaders to understand their goals and define the behaviors individuals and teams should start, stop, and continue to achieve those goals. Establishing a strategic partnership with the business at the onset of your program will secure L&D’s role at the table and be seen as a value-add.
2. Conduct a needs analysis: Once you have identified the business’s need and key behaviors, assess the current state and identify opportunities for L&D. This can be accomplished through stakeholder interviews, simple observation, or employee surveys.
3. Develop a set of capabilities: As the marketplace evolves and the rate of demand for new skills is faster than ever, the workforce is pressured to reskill and adapt. The needs for transferrable knowledge and skills, adaptability, and enduring capabilities are critical.Capabilities are defined as a collection of knowledge and skills that an individual applies across various situations. Using the L&D opportunities identified from the needs analysis, identify transferable knowledge and skills that can be organized into overarching capabilities. These capabilities will enable your workforce to endure evolving conditions through application of transferable knowledge and skills to new domains and contexts.
4. Draft a plan: Since resources are often limited, the key for small businesses is to use them as effectively as possible. First, develop a plan that articulates focus areas and goals. Then, identify what resources you currently have and identify the gaps. A thoughtful plan can also help gain buy-in from stakeholders and can be used to communicate what resources are needed and when.
5. Exercise change management: Inciting behavior change is difficult, but a structured approach to change can make it easier and have a far-reaching impact on the organization. That said, implementing and communicating change is more than a simple email. Gain leadership endorsement and identify opportunities for buy-in from the workforce; change agents are your greatest champions. Set success criteria, keep articulating your plans and provide continuous support through reference materials, coaching, and training opportunities. The development of new learnings is only as powerful as change adoption.

We recognize that these efforts require an investment that an individual or small team may not be able to implement alone. In these situations, quick wins or low-investment, high-impact initiatives can still be attained with some help.

In these cases, we suggest taking the following approach to help you deliver impactful learning:

1. Refresh, reuse, repurpose: Often, help is closer than we think. Invest time to investigate what resources are currently available in your organization. Once materials are identified, assess the gaps and focus on curating new content as needed. This process enables you to utilize existing training and resources to deploy more relevant learning faster.
2. Join an industry group: Great ideas are only a click away. Joining online industry groups allow you to stay informed on the latest insights, find and reuse publicly available resources and develop your skills by learning from communities of practice and other leading professionals.
3. Invest in yourself as an L&D professional: In smaller organizations, L&D teams often play multiple roles––content developer, project manager and facilitator––while also balancing high workloads and competing business priorities. Professionals that invest in their development can become more effective in their roles and gain the confidence they need to maximize their value proposition. Programs like Salience Learning’s Trainer Academy aim to help L&D professions build skills to efficiently design, develop and deliver impactful training that empowers teams to learn new skills in fresh and engaging ways.

Regardless of what stage your organization is in, establishing an effective L&D program will foster growth not only in your workforce but your business as a whole. We encourage you to assess what stage your L&D program may be in and dig deeper to explore the learning gaps or needs of your organization. These initial steps will get you started on your approach to an L&D program that gives you, your employees and your organization the desired results.

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[1] Rigoni, B., & Nelson, B. (2020, October 20). For millennials, is job-hopping inevitable? Gallup.

[2] Ratanjee, V. (2021, March 1). 4 ways to continue employee development when budgets are cut. Gallup.

[3] World Economic Forum. (n.d.). Skills stability. The Future of Jobs Report.

Krista continues her conversation with Salience Learning’s own Kim Portland, Ph. D., about the changes and challenges Medical Affairs teams are facing in 2021, and how L&D experts can better support key roles. This is the final part of a two-part series.

Access the episode here.

Krista sits down with Salience Learning’s own Kim Portland, Ph. D., to discuss the changes and challenges Medical Affairs teams are facing in 2021, and how L&D experts can better support key roles. This is part 1 of a 2-part series.

Access the episode here.

This is the final episode of a three-part series with author Clark Quinn, Ph.D., a recognized leader in learning technology strategy. Karen, Krista, and Clark discuss how L&D experts can advocate for learners and better mediate experiences to drive a greater culture of learning within innovative organizations.

Access the episode here.

This episode is the second part of a three-part series with Clark Quinn, Ph.D., an author and recognized leader in learning technology strategy. Karen, Krista, and Clark discuss using humor to engage learners, and how simple conversations can greatly benefit self-directed learning in the workplace.

Access the episode here.

Karen and Krista speak with Clark Quinn, Ph.D., an author and recognized leader in learning technology strategy, about the latest in cognitive science, and how to hook learners and make knowledge stick. This is the first part of a three-part series.

Listen to the episode here.

In this episode, Amy Parent and Irene Boland of Salience Learning continue their conversation with Bob Sottilare, Director of Learning Sciences at SoarTech, about practical ways to apply adaptive learning in almost every learning scenario. This is the last part of our three-part series.

Listen to the episode here.

In this episode, Amy Parent and Irene Boland of Salience Learning continue their conversation with Bob Sottilare, Director of Learning Sciences at SoarTech, about all things adaptive learning. This is part two of a three-part series.

Listen to the episode here: https://share.transistor.fm/s/fb0a3ea9

In this episode, Amy Parent and Irene Boland of Salience Learning take over to interview Bob Sottilare, Director of Learning Sciences at SoarTech. The company is a leader in developing intelligent systems that emulate human decision-making for military, government, and commercial applications.

Amy, Irene, and Bob discuss all things adaptive learning and how to create programs structured enough to keep learners motivated, and flexible enough to remain practical. This is part one of a three-part series.

Access the episode here: https://share.transistor.fm/e/7c67bb4e

By Karen Foster and Krista Gerhard

These days, you probably hear a lot about critical thinking and how the world needs more of it. It’s true.  Critical thinking skills are in great demand, but they are, on average, not really where they need to be. So, on March 17, we’ll be conducting a virtual session with the Philadelphia chapter of the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA): Using critical thinking to improve strategies and drive performance. We hope you’ll invest an hour and join us for the session. Our goals are to help you boost your own critical thinking skills and to provide some guidance on how to boost the skills of others.

Why are Critical Thinking Skills Important?

Critical thinking skills are growing increasingly important across a wide range of industries. However, the demand for them is especially great in biopharmaceuticals and healthcare. This is because of our industry’s high level of complexity, rapid advancement and the sheer amount of data that gets generated.

Overall, there are three primary reasons that strong critical thinking skills are needed now more than ever:

1. Cognitive overload
2. High-volume, high-speed decision-making
3. Human cognitive biases

Cognitive overload is a very real issue for both field- and office-based personnel in life science companies. The working environment involves sophisticated customer groups, substantial and ever-changing regulations, rapid market development, complex science and complicated business models. There is a lot of information to process on any given day. It can be a challenge to keep up with all of it and separate the useful stuff from the noise. Critical thinking is like a lifeboat that keeps us from drowning in a sea of information.

In our industry, we don’t just process information for the sake of processing information. We’re expected to do something with it. Life science professionals have to make a lot of decisions, often under serious time constraints. We need strong critical thinking skills to derive insights from information and make good decisions. 

Human cognitive biases also come into play. These biases, such as confirmation bias, overconfidence bias and “the curse of knowledge” can help us in some ways, acting as shortcuts to help us more quickly process information and make decisions. However, they can also hurt us, and we need to be aware of them. In times of cognitive overload, we tend to more easily fall prey to them, which can negatively affect decision-making. Critical thinking is the antidote to cognitive biases.

When it comes to developing critical thinking skills, it’s important to do so within the domain. In our industry, with all of its complexities, it’s much better to build critical thinking skills by leveraging real-world information from the domain, rather than simply learning critical thinking theory in a general sense.

What the Session Will Cover

As we mentioned above, the goals of our upcoming session are to help you boost your own critical thinking skills—within the healthcare domain—and to help you become a more effective “critical thinking coach” for others.  The session will cover these key things:

1. What is Critical Thinking? —We’ll define “critical thinking” so everyone will have a common understanding of what that term really means.
2. Why Critical Thinking Is Important—We’ll expand on what we’ve written here.
3. Critical Thinking Behaviors—There are clear behaviors and processes that people use when they engage in critical thinking. We’ll outline what those are and even dive into the “language” of critical thinking.
4. Strengthening Critical Thinking—Finally, we will share some exercises, tips and techniques that you can use to develop and strengthen critical thinking skills.

Be sure to join us online on Wednesday, March 17 at 12:00 noon EST. You can register here.

We hope to (virtually) see you then! 

In this episode, Karen and Krista define critical thinking and discuss why critical thinking skills are becoming more important in the healthcare and biopharmaceutical industries. They also discuss how critical thinking and strategic thinking are different, using real-world examples.

In the final part of our interview with Julie Dirksen, Karen, Krista, and Julie discuss what L&D professionals should take away from new research on learning within virtual environments, and how to best communicate with stakeholders to create effective programs.

In part 2 of our three-part series with Julie Dirksen, Karen, Krista, and Julie discuss how to provide learners with constructive feedback during complex scenarios that often lack immediate results in the form of rewards and consequences. How do we keep learners motivated when success seems far off in the future?

Learn more about Julie Dirksen: https://usablelearning.com

Any field of expertise is bound to have its fair share of buzzwords—those terms or phrases that become highly fashionable for some period of time before fading away.  Inevitably, they get replaced by newer buzzwords and the cycle never seems to end.  Learning and Development is no exception.  In fact, our field might be better than most at coming up with new buzzwords!

We could write an entire book on L&D-related buzzwords, but our goal here is considerably less ambitious than that.  Instead, we’d like to focus on a few terms that relate to learning technology, with an eye towards sorting out how those terms have changed over the years.  Hopefully, we’ll clear up some confusion in the process.

From e-learning’s humble beginning…

In general, e-learning is a term typically used to refer to learning that is enabled by electronic technologies.  If you rewind a quarter of a century, back to the mid-1990s, the term e-learning was coined to describe learning that involved a computer in any form.  Back then, it was the height of the dot-com boom, and people were tacking “e” onto everything: e-mail, e-commerce, e-research, E-Trade, e-tailing, e-filing, and so on.  It basically referred to the electronic version of to whatever the “e” was added.

It was the same with e-learning.  Initially, the term referred to any form of electronically-enabled learning, which might include computer-based offline resources (e.g. CD-ROM-based programs) or online learning.  For many years, e-learning as a term retained its catch-all status even as the “e” field branched out into increasingly specialized approaches. 

Today, the term e-learning can be polarizing.  It can be a bit of a turn-off for some, because it hearkens back to experiences that were just glorified slide presentations that people clicked through with a quiz at the end (not the most effective way to facilitate learning).  For others, it generates enthusiasm and promotes effective learning practices. It is a skillset that is promoted and in high-demand: the e-learning designer and developer.  

Ultimately, e-learning is still a relevant and popular term that is intended to broadly describe both synchronous and asynchronous learning enabled by technology.  Its most popular use is to describe self-paced learning that is formalized and often delivered through a learning system such as an LMS. 

A collection of “specialized” buzzwords

Now, a broader collection of specialized buzzwords are available to help us distinguish between different forms of…well…e-learning.  And that has caused some confusion, so we’ll attempt to clear up some of that.

Digital Learning

Digital Learning is sort of like today’s e-learning.  It’s a broad term that refers to various forms of learning where the delivery is facilitated via digital technologies and mediums. Because of the broad nature of this term it is often positioned as a learning strategy. It can refer to learning delivered via a web browser, e-mail, a learning management system, or even offline digital media.  That learning can be self-directed, but it doesn’t have to be.

Virtual Learning

Many people use “virtual learning” to refer to any form of online learning, where the internet is required.  However, these days, its definition has morphed a bit, primarily referring to live, synchronous learning approaches, such as live webinars, virtual instructor-led training (VILT), or other forms of synchronous learning that’s enabled by online technologies (whether instructor-led or not).  It’s fair to say that all virtual learning is digital, but not all digital learning is virtual.  Confused?

Platform-Based Learning

Platform-Based Learning refers to any form of digital learning that must be accessed via some type of portal, LMS, or some other system that integrates various services like data analytics and assignment management.  It’s not one you often hear, but when you do it is usually meant to call attention to the system functionality nuances and services that differentiate the experience.   You might hear people refer to a learning curriculum or program as a “learning platform.”  That’s not a correct usage of the term, as the “platform” is the digital system that hosts the learning experiences and the portal through which they can be accessed.  The curriculum is delivered through the platform.  In the end, this term is a nuanced way to talk about digital and virtual learning experiences.

Where do we go from here?

Most assuredly, digital learning technologies will continue to expand and proliferate.  As they do, more buzzwords will be developed to describe them. 

However, other buzzwords not related to technology will also continue to blossom in the field of L&D.  Just think about synchronous and asynchronous learning.  A few years ago, nobody outside of specialized L&D circles used those terms.  And even then, they didn’t use them much.  Now, everybody is using those terms…a lot.  Thanks to COVID-19, schoolkids all over the country know the difference between synchronous and asynchronous learning, as their schools now routinely use those terms to describe their pandemic-altered approaches to education.

In future articles, we’ll tackle other buzzwords and digital learning nuances that are emerging and explore them with you.

In part 1 of our 3-part series, Karen and Krista are joined by author and instructional designer Julie Dirksen to discuss how to best encourage behavior change through better design, and what really motivates learners.

Learn more about Julie Dirksen: https://usablelearning.com

In this episode (our first of 2021), Karen and Krista reflect on the lessons learned from 2020 and provide critical takeaways for L&D professionals seeking success in the new year.

It’s no secret that the life sciences industry is getting more complex each day: Customer and stakeholder groups are becoming increasingly sophisticated, evidence requirements are getting more stringent and the need to engage more effectively with key stakeholder groups is paramount.

This growing complexity is driving an important phenomenon: The rise of Medical Affairs as a highly strategic pillar for biopharma companies, alongside Clinical Development and Commercial & Market Access.  McKinsey & Co., in their recent report, A vision for Medical Affairs in 2025, documents this trend that many of us have seen with our own eyes over the past few years.

There is a challenge, however: As Medical Affairs gains in prominence and strategic importance, the capabilities that medical affairs professionals must possess are compounded.  It used to be that strong scientific acumen was the key qualification.  However, as needs in medical affairs have changed, so have the job requirements.  Now, medical affairs professionals need to be highly strategic, think critically, have excellent communications skills and possess strong business acumen to be successful in this evolving environment.

Excellent training is needed to ensure these professionals are prepared for the tasks at hand.  Medical affairs teams are aware of this need, but they’re confronted with a challenge:  The traditional approaches to medical affairs training — and the resources available for it — have not advanced as rapidly as the job requirements.  Here we explore the challenge and what can be done to help.

Read the full article here.