Transforming Learning With Innovation And Technology

The L&D tech summit focused on crafting personalised learning to build a skilled workforce. Moderated by Asha Subramanian, Chief Human Resources Officer, Subex this discussion was extremely insightful and very important for overall organisational success in terms of skills. 
It shed light on the fact that gamification and L&D goes hand in hand, as of now.  

Gamification and L&D  
Roydon Gonsalvez, Senior Vice President, Head of Talent Management and Development (APAC), Northern Trust shared his views by saying that, “I think using gamification is part of your learning strategy to drive the culture of learning. However, you cannot use it alone as even though it is an important ingredient and could be leveraged to create more engagement, and to create more impactful learning experiences.” He went on to say that using gamification just for the sake of using it is not going to really help serve the purpose, and there is no requirement for it only if it is trendy at present. 

Moving on, Neelacantan, Global L&D, Tekion Corp stated that, “One of the things we often end up doing is design a learning intervention for a team and then you use gamification on top of it.” He also said that what happens in the end is that organisations start using gamification as a decoration at times, and fundamentally, if there is gamification, it should be fun and motivational in nature.

Strategies for talent management

On the topic of strategic development whilst building skill based organisations, Vikas Maheshwary, Assistant Vice President Human Resources, Biocon Biolologics stated that, “If you look at tools and the plethora of content present which is amazing in terms of volume, as it up skills employees.” He went on to say that, if we have to progress in an organisation it is all about learning and development and also very sincerely implementing all we learnt. 

 
Gamification while designing sales training

Talking about gamification in sales departments of different organisations, Pankaj S Khandewale, Vice President and Head – Training, Future Generali India Insurance said that, “We have to understand the psyche of sales employees. They are normally always competent internally or externally. We take advantage of that by saying that there should be healthy competition. Typically sales employees enjoy scoring over each other.” He also described how on a daily basis there is a spurt of energy. According to him there is a lot of teamwork that happens when gamification is used as a tool for learning. 

Summing up
The fact that a data driven approach is very important as well but it also has its limitations was touched upon. Business outcomes depend on learning a lot in the right manner. Vikas Maheshwary also said that L&D data is rich and we need to upgrade to new procedures and strategies in this endeavour. It is not about the number of training hours that we do, and data is not just numbers, according to him. In a nutshell, we can say that L&D has various forms and approaches, but what we need to stick to is the fact that we have to focus on upgradation of all forms in a consistent manner. 
This panel discussion was held at the BW People (a vertical of BW Businesssworld) Festival of L&D.