Reflecting on LearningLive 2024

DALL-E 2024-09-16 A gender-neutral human
speaker addressing an audience of robots.

I've been going back through my notes from last week's Learning & Performance Institute LearningLive annual conference, at which I took the conscious decision to attend as many of the AI-related sessions as I could.

Encouragingly, much of the focus was on the human implications for AI, on making our lives easier by automating our boring, time-consuming and repetitive jobs, particularly where they may already be under-resourced.

For the Learning and Development community, the advice was clear - less content and more context - with the requirement for us to help develop others' digital capability, support the shift from roles to skills and develop personalised learner pathways. In short, re-learn how to learn in the new reality of an AI-enhanced business world and society.

In so doing, the suggestion is that we will create more time and space to develop ourselves, to improve our work, social and family lives, and to develop new skills and interests which 'give us joy' and contribute to the greater human good. A way still to go, then.

I'm starting by exploring and improving my AI prompt skills for specific purposes - once I've worked out what those purposes are. I clearly need to put more work into writing AI image generator prompts.

New Normal (2)

And so it begins...

Today is Monday the 4th of January 2016, the first day of my 'new normal' working life. Regular readers of my blogs will be aware of the challenging year 2015 was for me and my family, a milestone year of fantastic highs and significant lows. That is now behind me and I will refer to it no more.

2016 is the year where I choose what I want to work on, how I want to work on it, and with whom. I have over 30 years' experience in Learning and Development, as a business owner and in the public and the commercial sectors. I have succeeded in my various roles and responsibilities by learning as I went along, stepping up into hitherto unknown territories, relying on my own quick study and the wisdom of my colleagues and co-workers, getting whatever training was necessary - and then getting on with the job, the best learning technique of them all.

My proposition is simple. I believe that no-one goes to work to have a miserable time and that, with the right support and encouragement, we can all have fulfilling, purposeful working experiences which benefit us, our colleagues, our customers, our families and the wider community in which we all live and operate. I believe that adult to adult dialogue and conversations between and amongst colleagues and facilitators is the way to achieve this - be it peer to peer, manager to colleague, or 'learner' to 'trainer/consultant'. People make mistakes. I've made mistakes. The big mistake would be to make that mistake again because we didn't learn from it the first time round. So listen. Don't judge (everyone is fighting their own battles that you know nothing about).

And now I'm choosing to step into a #newnormal working life and am offering my experience and pragmatic approach to L&D, Learning Technologies and Social Media to anyone who would be interested in working with me to improve themselves, their people and their outcomes.

If that's of interest, get at me via comments here, via Twitter, LinkedIn or About.Me

Thanks.

Niall