This is a seminal moment, and it's an exciting moment

as well. I wish I was in my 20s or 30s again, able to start

anew. I can't, but I can support you in doing what you're doing, and I

wish you the best of luck in this exciting new adventure.

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are and wherever you're watching from. My

name is Matt Pearce. Today we're going to be talking with Donald Taylor about the

Global Sentiment Survey. Now, we did this last year, but there's a new survey,

new information, and new results. So with that said, we're going to go ahead and

dive in. So Donald, welcome to the Visual Lounge.

Matt, great to be here. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you first of

all for coming back. We love to hear about the Global Survey

because honestly, it's chock-full with so many great pieces of

information. It's one of those things like as I read through, it's like, oh, that's

interesting. Then I get a little further and I go, that's even more interesting. So

lots, lots of good stuff here. But for those who may not be initiated or

familiar with the sentiment survey, Give us a little bit of the background

and what are we looking at? The survey

has been running for 13 years. We look at the

pulse of how learning and development feels about what's

happening. Typically about 3,500 people answer the

survey. This year it's nearly 3,800 from over 100 countries.

There are 3 key questions. What do you think will be hot in the

year ahead? What's your challenge for the year ahead in learning and development?

And new this year, what have you done in the past 12 months

that's new in learning and development? About half of the respondents come from

workplace learning and development. The rest are consultants, vendors,

they come from the education space, or it's something else.

Okay, so a good mix. And a little bit later, I think

I want to talk about that mix and how it might be influencing things, which

is in the report this year. So you mentioned

the one question that's new, which Is there

anything else that's maybe new or stood out to you this year from that maybe

just wildly different from past years? Well, one

thing I'm very relieved about is that artificial intelligence,

which has topped the table and has been going through a meteoric rise

in terms of what people think is hot, has finally leveled off. So that's a

relief more than a surprise. I am— I was

surprised this year by how many people responded and

how much they wrote. In answer to the question, what are your challenges for this

year ahead? So I'll talk about the challenges

question later on, but it was more than we've ever had. And it left

me with a slight problem of how do I read 41,000

words, which is like a book, and make sense of it all in the

short time I have to write the report. In the end, I had to use

AI to assist me. It turned out to be incredibly useful. Yeah.

Well, I mean, that is a massive amount. And I think it does

beg a little bit of the question of Is it the fact that there's just

greater volume, or is it that people are trying new things, or

what, what maybe prompted that kind of level of response?

If you look at the responses to this question since we started running

it, and we've run it, as I say, for 5 years, and if we look

back to how people have responded to it, in

2022, when we started it,

40% of people responded. And that was about 14,000

words. In 2023, again,

40% and roughly the same number of words. The following

year, 2024, was the first year, because we run the survey at the end of

the year, so it was people's reaction to the year 2023.

At that point, the response rate leapt up

to 95%, and the number of words written was

about 25,000, 26,000.

So that was a huge jump. It hasn't gone back since. The

proportion dropped a bit last year, got back to 95% this year. The number

of words written, as I say, went up to 41,000.

So I think what's happening, and reading through the

responses, I get the view that the

world of learning and development has fundamentally changed with the introduction of

AI. And it's not just what you can do with it, but it's how people

feel about our profession and

what we do. And underlying it all, there

is a base of uncertainty,

which is tinged on the one hand with excitement, and the other

with fear. Yeah, and I, as

I go out to different events and shows and talk to different people, I feel

like that's a very, like, solid take on the theme

that people are feeling. There's a lot of unknown. Now, let's, let's talk

about AI in the report, because last year, AI had like sky skyrocketed

in terms of its appearance on the report. And this year, like you said,

it leveled out a little bit. So from your perspective,

you know, you get to prognosticate a little bit here about like, hey,

you know, you're making your best guesses as we know.

Why do we think maybe it's peaked here? Is it— is this a

result that things are changing with AI, or is there

something, maybe something else that we should be looking at in terms of how

L&D is using AI? Just to be quite clear about

what I mean when I say it's peaked, what I mean is that the

responses to the question, what's going to be hot in L&D this year, have

topped out. It's 0.1 of a percent, very small

drop from last year, down from last year. It does not

mean that AI is done. It does not mean

the excitement and the hype is over. It doesn't even mean

that we have an idea of how to use it. What it means is that

the acceleration of interest

has finally slowed. It's a bit like saying, yeah, well,

we hit the freeway, we're now at 70 miles an hour, we're still

driving at 70 miles an hour. The last 3 years we've been speeding up, we're

there now, we haven't reached our destination. So that's what I mean

when I say it's peaked. Now, there's still an awful lot

going on. I don't have to guess about how AI is being used because in

the report AI in L&D, The Race for Impact, that was the

annual report on AI and L&D that Egle Vinarskait��, my co-author, and

I brought out in September last year. In that, we look

at 20 pages of case studies. We interviewed a lot of people, got a

tremendous amount of information back, and we look at what people are really doing with

AI. And I would say there's two levels of change

here. And then I'll briefly sketch

that and then you can come back at me. There's the tactical change. How am

I using AI? To do things. And there's the strategic

change. How is AI altering how learning and

development in my organization, and perhaps the organization itself,

is run? There's two very different levels. We're seeing both,

absolutely. Yeah, and I love the

analogy of the— we've been on the freeway. In

your probably reading of the comments and the challenges people

are facing, do you get the sense that part of

that may be that, hey, we've got up to speed. That is there pushback

towards AI in L&D versus— I know there's

excitement because I see it like, you know, as someone who stands at a trade

show booth occasionally with a tool that has some AI, I see the

excitement. I also get the sense that there's kind of this other

side of the coin, that there's L&D, as you said, uncertainty.

So what would you tell us about what's maybe going on under there in

terms of the uncertainty or just comfort, anything

else you would add to that? There's a whole range of different answers to

that, Matt. I'll try to be concise. Firstly,

people are concerned about AI's impact on their

jobs if their job is creating materials, learning content,

and they're right. They're right, not because AI can automatically create

material which is better than what they can create, but because it can do it

so much cheaper. It can do it at 1/10th, 1/100th of the cost. If

it's doing that, the people who pay the bills, who write the checks for

L&D, are going to ask themselves, why do we pay this team? And I'm

just being brutally honest about this. It doesn't mean everyone's going to lose their

jobs. I do know, and the numbers are there showing there

has been L&D slowdowns, that people who are out of work

are finding it more difficult to secure a new job than they were in the

past. It's taking much longer. And that's true in recent countries I've talked

to, UK, US, Philippines, Australia. New Zealand.

So that's across the board as far as I can see. So there's a real

concern there. At a higher level, there's concerns about,

and this is geographically focused differently. So if you look at

Italy, the focus is on the quality of materials that can be created. If you

look at US, there's concern about the

guardrails, the implementation being done in a

way that is responsible. If you look at the UK, look at

Europe generally, actually, there are concerns about representation

in AI. Are we serving our communities properly? So

there's, if you like, there's ethical concerns.

Beyond that, I think there's a fundamental question which sort

of seeps through in the responses to the question,

what's your challenge? And when people talk about AI,

I talk about that survey running, the question running for 5 years. In 2022 and

2023, The word human wasn't mentioned at all.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, it has

increased each year. This year it was mentioned 68 times.

So that's pretty extraordinary that a word that wasn't in our vocabulary at

all suddenly becomes part of what we're talking about.

And I think that's two things. I think firstly, it's people saying, well,

we want to make sure that we don't lose the human side of learning. But

I think underneath that, there's something else, which is people in L&D

feeling an identification, a human identification with this and what

they're doing, and feeling that AI risks

ripping that away from them. So there's a lot of concern about AI, and

I think most of it is well-founded, but it takes different flavors according to

where you are in the world and what your job is.

Yeah, well, and I know that, and AI just seems to be the hot

topic and we could continue talking, but I want, and as much as I

think people can go read the report, they can get their, take their own sense

of what's happening with AI and L&D, I do want to look at something else

that was in the report that stood out to me. When I looked at the

list, one of the things that had changed, that had a seemingly big

significant change comparatively, was the learning analytics. The focus

on what's hot is learning analytics. It had a, I think, what,

1.2% drop. Um, you know, now that's, you

know, the top 16, which was, I think, the largest one.

Um, but the other kind of contrast to that was showing value was

up like 0.7%. So help me understand the

juxtaposition here because I, I guess maybe inappropriately or

maybe not with clarity, said, oh gosh, I want to show value.

I need to show my analytics, like my analytics are going to be important. So

tell us a little bit about any insights on those two changes there.

And just to be clear for people who are listening and saying, well, these sound

like small numbers. I mean, they are small numbers, but

they, in the scope of the survey, these are big numbers. So showing value went

up 0.7% and learning analytics was easily the biggest drop this year,

1.2%. 2%. And what this means

is that for me, the interpretation

I get talking to people about this and listening to them,

if I ask people, what is the

reason for value, showing value rising so much this

year? People say one of two things,

either, well, it's because we can use AI to show value.

But most people say it's fear. We're concerned about our job loss, our job

and what will happen to them. And there's

one of the quotes in the survey absolutely deals with this.

You ask people, what's your greatest

fear for the future? And one of the— or what's your greatest challenge for the

year ahead? And one of the comments, all the person

wrote was, I need to provide value to avoid redundancy. And so

the idea is you're going to provide value because if you don't, you'd lose your

job. But why is analytics on the way down? It

makes perfect sense that you use the power of AI to

manipulate the data to show value and to

prove the learning analytics. And the concern is

not that it's not an important thing, but that people

are seduced by the power of AI to personalize

rather than being, rather

than wanting to grab the opportunity to get in there

and look at the learning analytics.

And I think for me, this tells a story about learning and development as a

whole, which is that we are focused typically on content creation

distribution. So personalization is an easy, quick win with AI.

But in contrast, learning analytics requires not just the use

of technology, this new technology, but also a leap into doing

something we don't normally do, which is looking at data,

analyzing it, making correlations, explaining them. That is

something so far beyond the normal role of L&D

that people would rather not think about it. And so the learning analytics has gone

into what some people I was talking to recently called the too-hard

bucket. It's just is a bit too much to do. We'd rather concentrate

on the personalization. And I think that's dangerous. Yeah,

it feels especially dangerous. And I can imagine with the

added pressures that L&D teams have that they're also

feeling, if we're trying to already ramp up and scale because AI is making it

faster and cheaper to do, then if I have to say, well, I need

more time to go and get these things to show

analytics, oh, too hard, too much time. I could do the more,

I could do 5 more courses, right? 10 more courses. And people are maxed out.

Look, people are maxed out. This is, it's a real thing. I'm not trying to

make out people are being lazy. People are super maxed out just trying to get

the day job done and creating content takes time.

And if you're working on creating a course, you know, you've got to create

it, edit it, go through an iterative process.

You don't have any more hours in the day to do this new complicated thing

of learning analytics. But I think

what makes this such a seminal moment for learning and development is the

fact that we don't have a choice about it. AI is going

to undermine the

proposition, the value proposition of us as content

creators, because it's so easy to create content and anybody can do it

now that it's very difficult to say, well, mine's better

than his or hers because Well, why?

Well, because I'm an instructional designer. Yeah, okay. But the person writing the

checks doesn't see that. They just see the price tag.

The content's going to become commoditized. Faced with that,

even if it is difficult, even if it's something that's unusual, we have

to start doing things which are new to us, but still fall

within the remit of learning and development, and which provide value to the organization.

We can talk a bit more about that a bit later on. But I think

that's the crucial thing about this time right now. Is that

we have no option to stay as

we are. We've got to change. Yeah,

well, I appreciate the, the blunt and directness there, because

I think it— well, I think it's important, right? As someone who has, you know,

grown up in this industry and been part of it for a long time,

it is, it is true that we need to change. And there's things that are

going to continue to change. And there's, there's definitely a lot of uncertainty uncertainty.

I also, I also wonder, like, when it comes to showing value, and I

think about, like, just in my own experiences— and I, I mostly sit in a

marketing department now versus the time that I spent, you know, a decade

in L&D directly— that the, the mechanisms I have

as a marketer to look at analytics, to tie data together,

is greatly and vastly superior

to anything I ever had access to, even when I started adding

in like an LMS or other pieces that could

potentially provide data. And so I do wonder if some of the— this

new world is figuring out, hey, we need systems that are

going to allow us to do what we need to do to show much

better and much more clearly than, than I think most

average L&D person will have access to. I think you're 100%

right. I think marketing is a very good analogy to draw with L&D

because we know that marketing has been transformed. In two ways

in, let's say, the last two decades. Firstly, it's been transformed

not just by the internet, but largely by the use of the web, from a

solely creative endeavor to something with strong numbers attached to it.

And the idea of madmen sitting around drinking whiskey sours

and considering what advert they should put up with what tagline

is just gone. Yes, you still need the creativity, but there's a whole

swathe of statistics behind it. The

same thing is going to be happening to L&D with this additional

concern that, by the way, the stuff you used to do, which was your bread

and butter, creating courses, yeah, almost certainly within

5 years, I would say the soup-to-nuts course

will be dead, with some exceptions. So the idea that everyone has to come

in and do a course that begins here and finishes there, I don't think it's

going to be happening in the future. It doesn't mean content's dead, But the

old way of doing things is dead. We have to change with it. There's lots

of things we can do, but we have to change. And you're absolutely right, we

can take a steer from marketing. We also need to ask

ourselves, why haven't we done it before? Part of the reason we haven't done it

before is that L&D, it's a good feeling

to sit down and create something that's a good product. You know, we like that.

We have to get away from that and be much more in contact with the

business Having relationships with parts of the business where we can say, look,

I want to check something, can I get your data just so I can see

that what we're doing here is making sense? That very simple

request is something that relies on a

relationship with that department so that you can go to them knowing that they know

who you are, knowing that they take you seriously, and knowing that they are likely

to say yes when you ask them for their data. If you're in

L&D, ask yourself, can you do that right now? How would sales

think about you if you knocked on their door and said, can I have your

sales data for the last quarter? Some might say yes, other people might just say,

who are you? And I think we talk a lot about technology,

but the future for L&D relies on analytics,

yes, data, yes, but ultimately having the relationship with the business

that you can go in and ask for the data and be

trusted to receive it. Yeah.

Gosh, so many, so many thoughts that I will save for another time.

But because I do, I do want to ask, going down this value

kind of road already, I want to ask you quickly on page 13 of the

report, it talks about the role that maybe impact

vendors have had on the research. I believe it's that

vendors are potentially driving up this issue of showing value.

And I just want to get your take. Is that, is that a concern that

you have? Is that like And someone as a vendor, right? Like,

obviously I have my own kind of take and perception of the world

versus maybe someone who's truly sitting in an L&D department who

has no care about anything other than I want to do a good job

in L&D. Um, any thoughts about— was like, it was

enough to be mentioned that there's this potential there. Obviously, uh, research

data, you know, you got to look at the numbers, you got to kind of—

you're reading between the lines a little bit. So I was just curious

before we leave the value topic, if there's something there.

So I divide the audience up between 5

different, what I call, work groups. Half of them are in

workplace learning development. The rest is split across being a consultant,

being a vendor, being in education, or something else. Now,

there are something like 305, so about 10% of the responses,

slightly less, are vendors. But

Whereas the L&D people ranked showing value as 6th on their

overall results, for vendors, it was the 2nd most important thing after

AI. And I think we have to ask ourselves why. And I think that

for the vendors, it's important on 2 levels. Firstly, they have

to show value themselves. But secondly, they

recognize what's going on here. They recognize that it's crucial for learning

and development to show value in the organizations L&D

being their customers, if L&D isn't showing value, there's a risk to the

vendor. So I think it's not altruistic, but

the vendors recognize there's an issue here that needs to be tackled. And

they see this and they raise it as an issue.

They can't necessarily do much about it, although some vendors I know will

be supporting the L&D workplace people in

actually showing value. Yeah,

I love that perspective, right? Because I do think if your

audience is L&D and you're selling to L&D and L&D doesn't see—

continues to exist, you're going to want them to show all the—

Yeah, big problem. Your whole market dries up pretty quickly that way.

The other thing I want to talk about from an audience perspective, you mentioned, I

think this was— I don't know if this is the first year you did, but

it seemed like it was new to me that you split the audience in kind

of like new people that were coming into the report this year versus returning.

And there were some differences in the way they ranked kind

of what they thought was going to be the hot thing that they're going to

focus on. Any, any insights into like, why

are new people maybe seemingly so different than what the

returning folks said? Is it that returning folks have like maybe context of

insight of the report, or maybe something else? It's a

really good question, Matt. And it comes down to who's answering this

survey. So there are

people out there who have never heard of the survey, will never answer it, they're

not interested, fine. The people who do answer the

survey, there are a number of things they have to be. They have to be

online, they have to have heard about it, they have to be probably

interested enough in new stuff, probably technology,

to respond. Okay, so that's a subset.

Now within that, there are at least two groups. One group is the group that

knows about the survey, is interested in the topics that are being raised, is

keen to come and share their views. And actually, we identified this group back in

2018, but it was, it was very difficult to know who they were. It's much

easier now. Now I've got people, now I know if people are coming back or

not. So we've got people who know about it and are

responding quickly to it. Usually they respond to social media. And then

you've got the other people we send an email to, and they hear about it,

and they probably it's the first time and they respond to it. So the difference

between these two groups is that the people who are familiar with

the survey and are coming in ready with an opinion that they want

to share, and interestingly, the people who are

coming back, who are

coming for the first time, say less in terms of venturing

new opinions than the people who have been on the survey before. So the

people who come in who've done the survey before typically are keen to share

their views, and they are keen to talk about the stuff

they've been immersed in during the year on social media.

I think that's the key thing. They feel themselves to be part of a conversation.

They want to continue that conversation. What that means is that they

are almost the

embodiment of the current conversation on

steroids. So are they interested in AI? Yes, they absolutely are.

More so than anybody else. So they are like 3% higher

on artificial intelligence than the new people.

They are also very keen on showing value because this is a topic that is

relentlessly pushed online in conversation.

But they're much less interested in learning experience platforms, for example,

because for them, that's business as usual, done and dusted.

So if you imagine the Everett Rogers diffusion of innovation

curve, The people who respond to the survey are right at one

end of it, but probably the people who

come back are the innovators, and the people who

are coming for the first time are more like the early

adopters. So they're both at one end of the curve,

but the people who come back year after year are the people

who are really at the cutting edge talking about this

stuff. Whether they're doing it, I can't tell. It's a piece of further research I

need to do in the future. Yeah. So I guess just looking

ahead, you know, let's say we get 5 years down the road, we get

a chance to talk again. We've done— well, that would be— let's see, we'd be

at what, 19 years? Let's say we get to the 20th year of the report,

whether you want to do it or not. I don't know. Hopefully it keeps going.

But like, would you hope— what would you hope to see from the audience? Would

you want to see, you know, if you're thinking about that curve, you want to

see kind of more people coming from different parts of the curve to maybe more

accurately represent? Do you want to keep it kind of where it is?

What would you hope for? I don't think there's any way of changing that

composition. I think the people who choose to respond, because it's voluntary, will always be

people typically that part of the curve. I would like to do other surveys

and other research where I talk not to L&D at all, but to

operations and the executive suite, ask them, what's their view on all this? And it

will be, I can guarantee, completely different. But what I do plan

to do over time is to look at this business of the new

voters and the returning voters and see if there is a shift

in the pattern. So that if one year the

new voters are particularly excited about something, for me that

shows that it's something that's been talked about online a lot. Does that

then lead to, in the following year or the year

after, the new people also finding it

exciting? Does that excitement transfer, or are

the new people largely talking in a bubble? Oh, sorry, are the existing people

largely talking in a bubble, or is it between the two? Are there some topics

which will never get widespread exposure, and are there other topics which

have what it takes to go wide?

Yeah, I almost wonder if you could take that and then correlate it with

various conference sessions that are submitted and

accepted at conferences and see Because my guess is there's some influence there,

right? I'll tell you what you can do. With reskilling

and upskilling, for example, it is very easy to see that everything

kicked off with the January 2020 report from the

World Economic Forum talking about reskilling and upskilling. You look at the Google

Trends on that, bang, there's a huge kick afterwards to

that curve, and it gets reflected in the survey.

2016, there was a huge input of

VC funds into companies selling microlearning in the States, which led

to increased spending on marketing, which led to a 2017 increase in

microlearning being a big thing on the

survey. So there are some times where we absolutely can measure something.

I don't think I've got the willpower to go and track every conference

session though, Matt. Somebody else can do that one. Well, maybe that is a

perfect use for AI to go and let it do the research, right?

Well, Donald, I do want to ask one more question before we wrap up, and

I want to read a little bit from the report about the

conclusion, because I do think we've talked about a lot of things. We've talked about

kind of the anxiety and fear I think that the industry is

feeling, the challenges that they're facing, not just with AI, but just

across the board. I think it's— we're in it again, as I think as we

started our show, may you be cursed to live in interesting times. So here's Here's

what it says. It says, for L&D, this transformation is already here.

AI is making new things possible with content creation, personalization,

skills management, simulations, and more. Combine this with

uncertainty around the economy and job security, and it seems that the old norms are

breaking down. The new norms are yet to emerge. And

it's in this chaos that the future will be decided. Inevitably,

there's no clear route map for navigating this new world.

Instead, L&D will have to draw from it, draw its own

charting a course through experimentation, pivoting when things don't

work, redoubling efforts when they do. So

you've, you've been in the industry for quite a while and you've seen a lot

of the trends and understand, I think, maybe better than most,

the directions that we're headed, the challenges that are faced.

What advice or wisdom would you give to someone who's

reading this and saying, oh my gosh, I just, I don't know,

I don't know if I— where, how am I going to navigate

this, this current day circumstances that we're in?

I'd say don't look backwards, look forwards. Because

right now, the past is not an accurate guide to the future. The past

was great. And I grew up writing and

delivering classroom courses in the 1980s. Great, still exists, that

business. But it's a smaller proportion of what L&D can do.

There will always be a role for courses, there'll always be a role for content,

they will both change. Now, with new

technologies, there is a vast new series of things

that we can do, which we haven't had the ability to

do before because it just took too much effort.

Simulations, skills practice, surfacing and sharing

implicit knowledge, Understanding the skills of the organization,

providing coaching and mentoring as a combination of human and

machine activity. There's a whole range of things which

previously were just beyond our reach,

but now we can do. So don't look backwards

to a world of content, look forwards and find which of these things

we can experiment with that you are good at and

which work for the business. I think the phrase I use in the

report is, we do not have a map, but we do have

a direction. The direction stays the same. The direction is we need

to get to that point where we are helping individuals as part of the

organization. Fine. We just find a new way to do it.

And you find that by trying things out. As I say,

if it works, continue. If it doesn't, stop. But also,

and this is important, by sharing that with other people.

So, if we all work together and we share with our networks

what's working, we're in a much better position to

build great stuff for the future than everybody running a series of experiments

replicating each other's failures. Let's support each other and

let's work towards the future much faster and more efficiently.

Yeah, of all the industries, I feel like that is a great

call, right? Like, because The things that we're learning and work well,

we can transfer. And it's not— Absolutely. You know, it's not necessarily

proprietary. Some technology, some ideas are proprietary, but hey, this

is good for learning. That's good for all of us. Yeah. Yeah.

100%. Well, well, Donald, this has been a fantastic

conversation. I don't know if my listeners care or not, but I have enjoyed

it greatly. I hope they did. But so, you know, if people

want to learn more about the Global Sentiment Survey, they want to learn more

from you, connect with you, where should they go? I'm

Donald H. Taylor everywhere. So online,

LinkedIn in particular, just find me on LinkedIn, Donald H. Taylor, or my

website is donaldhtaylor.co.uk.

Would be great to hear from you. Absolutely. Well, Donald,

as we wrap up the show, we like to ask our guests for their kind

of final view and final take. So Donald Taylor, what is your final

take? I'm in my 60s now. I've been doing this for a long time.

I can say with certainty, This is a seminal moment,

and it's an exciting moment as well. I wish I was in my

20s or 30s again, able to start anew. I can't, but I can support you

in doing what you're doing, and I wish you the best of luck in this

exciting new adventure. All right, well,

Donald, thank you so much for joining me in the Visual Lounge. It's great to

be here. Thanks, Matt. You bet. Well, everybody, you heard it.

We are in times that are changing quickly. There's lots

going on. A couple things I want to just highlight: make sure you're sharing what

you're learning about learning, sharing what's working, what's not working, and

look for the new opportunities that are going to lead you to success.

Don't, don't keep focusing on the things that don't work, but look for the things

that are. Look for ways that you can continue to grow those skill sets. There's—

the world abounds in opportunity if you look for it. So with that

said, we're grateful for you listening to the show. If you got comments, feedback you'd

like to connect with us. You can always reach out at thevisuallounge@techsmith.com.

And as always, take a little time to level up every single day.