Decoding the Future of Digital Learning | John Cherian, CEO, Enparadigm

Hybrid work, lack of engagement, evolving learning methods and preferences – are you struggling to keep up with all this change? How do you implement tech when you aren’t sure whether it will remain relevant in a few years – or even next quarter? And then there is GenZ, with their entirely different approach to work. Learn from the perspectives of John Cherian, CEO of Enparadigm, on the future of the learning sector and how to design and implement technology for a rapidly evolving world. Tune in now!

Discussion Topics: Decoding the Future of Digital Learning

• Cherian’s journey in building Enparadigm
• Tech is moving too fast for L&D to keep up
• College is structured but corporate learning is the wild west
• The world is all about you nowadays, why isn’t L&D
• GenZ is coming, but the workplace experience isn’t ready
• Questions leadership should address in a hybrid workplace
• Change takes time but we give up too easily

Transcript: Decoding the Future of Digital Learning

Hello all and welcome to yet another edition of HR Tech Talks, where we talk to subject matter experts on all aspects in the realm of HR and HR technology. Today I’m extremely delighted to host John Cherian, co-founder and CEO of Enparadigm.

Sriram Iyer: Now everyone who knows John can easily sense his passion for bringing together business insights, learning methodologies, and more specifically user experience into building the technology-driven learning platform in paradigm. Thank you very much for joining us today, John.

John Cherian: Thank you.

Sriram Iyer: Before we start off, would you like to give a quick introduction about yourself and your journey in building an Enparadigm?

Cherian’s Journey in Building Enparadigm

John Cherian: Alright, so in Enparadigm we are an enterprise talent management platform. We are using generative AI and immersive AI to help large enterprises globally in talent management. So we work with a lot of Fortune 2000 companies globally. We have clients like Google, Amazon, Infosys, Cognizant, Record Banking, P&G et cetera, client list.

Fantastic. John, typically we start off with the first question, which is the most important question. So what are the key challenges from a business perspective and a talent perspective that your clients are facing today?

Technology is moving too fast for L&D to keep up

John Cherian: So I think the biggest challenge for both businesses, both from a business perspective and from a talent perspective, is the fact that we are today in a very high uncertainty world. Just last month I was at a conference in Singapore and I was talking to a big group of L and D people, right?

Every time I meet L and D leaders, I ask them, to come up with their predictions for what the future of learning looks like. And this time when I asked that question and I asked them, what do you think is disrupting the future?

Normally, L and D people are very optimistic about the future, right? But this time I found a difference and I started probing them to understand what they were thinking, right? And what they told me is, John, there was a time when things used to change every two, three years.

So whatever strategy you put in place would be relevant for the next two, or three years. Then it came down to, say one year, then it came down to say one quarter. Today, we aren’t living in a world where what we planned last week may suddenly be irrelevant. This week. Suddenly out of the blue, you have something new coming up.

ChatGPT suddenly came It’s changed the entire ballgame, right? And now for a lot of people, instead of learning and skilling themselves, what they just need to do is to go and ask ChadGPT the question, right? And ChadGPT gives me the answers, right? And a lot of them are saying that, in today’s world, we are starting to wonder what is the relevance of the learning function.

I feel very similarly when it comes to business leaders as well, right? That your company has certain differentiators in the market. You have certain product portfolios and you’re making a revenue on that. But with technology coming in, a lot of your value chain may potentially be disrupted. So that high uncertainty world and how do you navigate it?

Sriram Iyer: Exactly. Which brings us to the next question, right? You’re talking about the problems the L and D teams are facing, right? So what are your products, USP? What are the key differentiators and what are the problems that you’re trying to solve now and for the future?

College is structured, but corporate learning is the wild west

John Cherian: If you look at school education and college education, you find very structured curriculums from grade one to grade 12. And then in college, for whichever discipline that you’re in, you find a very structured curriculum for 2, 3, 4 years.

But when it comes to the corporate world, It’s a very wild west. Everyone just does their own thing and there is no common way, or no systematic approach to developing talent once they join a corporation, right? So our objective is to help companies with people when they, after they join, get inducted, and onboarded.

They’ve got into the company, they understand how the company works. And that takes maybe the first one or two years of the employee’s lifecycle, right? So we come in from year two all the way up to say about year 15, and our vision is to build a curriculum for every employee in every industry, in every role, and help them in that upskilling curve.

Right now when it comes to corporate, this is very challenging because there are, say there are 20 different major industries. Each industry has say 150 unique roles. Each role has about 20 to 30 different skills, and unique skills, and then each skill has multiple proficiency levels, right?

So if you really want to find a solution to the level of the person and make a personalised experience. That’s about 500,000 unique combinations that you should worry about, right? And that’s a very mammoth task for LD teams. So to help L and D teams with this, there are three questions that we want to answer for the L and D and talent management teams.

Question one for a particular role in my company, what skills does an employee need? Question two. Or what proficiency level is someone in on those skills currently? And question three, what is a pathway from where someone is currently in terms of proficiency to where they need to be successful in that role?

So today these three questions are addressed by very disparate teams within the corporation and by a very disparate set of vendors. Talent management providers, right? So to understand the skill profile of a role you have to go to consulting companies. There are a lot of them in the market to get a sense of where they are proficient in that skill, what’s their level of proficiency?

You had to go to talent assessment companies and for example, companies like Mattel, Hogan, et cetera, et cetera. And for us to know how the development side is taken care of by training companies, freelance facilitators, and a lot of e-learning platforms like Coursera, Udemy, LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera, right?

What happens is the data is very siloed here. No team talks to the other team over here. No vendor talks to the other vendor. And because of this, what happens is that your skill profiling is done by a separate team. The data of the skill profile of the competency profile, it’s typically a 12 to 18-month project that lies in an Excel or PowerPoint presentation.

The assessments are done by a separate team, which comes as part of organisation development or talent management. And the learning is driven by the teams that do their own thing, right? And because the whole picture is not coming. Therefore organisations are having low ROI from this whole process, from an end-to-end perspective.

So we decided that we needed to solve this problem because, for a long time, we realised that most of the time in companies L and D teams are not spending time actually driving learning. Most of the time, they’re spending time understanding what learning we need to drive. This means the first two questions are not being answered very right.

You can have a very digital pathway, which goes end-to-end, and the data flows end-to-end. So we’ve built a very hyper-personalised adaptive and continuous learning platform where you start off with profiling the skills and then you put people on adaptive learning pathways where they get hyper-personalised and experiential.

They get a hyper-personal experiential pathway, which adapts to the proficiency level, the skill requirements and the whole platform is personalised to the person’s industry or culture, role, skills, career pathway, et cetera, et cetera.

Sriram Iyer: If you look at a lot of learning platforms out there, what they’re doing is they’re taking content that is historically available offline.

John Cherian: I’m just putting it up online, right? And you get maybe PowerPoint presentations, you get slides, you get videos. And the expectation is that someone will go through a video and then they will go through a small quiz at the end, and they will develop a skill, right? But that’s not how anyone develops any skill, right?

Think of how you are developing your skills and say singing or dancing or sports or influencing or coaching, right? None of these skills are developed by going through videos. They’re developed by actually spending your time in real-world experiences, getting some quick feedback from the environment, and getting some clarity on how you can do that better.

So our platform is also built ground up to help people go through this three-step process, right? Step one, get into a real-world situation. Do something in a real-world situation. Step two, get feedback from the environment, and step three, get some conceptual clarity on how you can approach that problem better.

Now, if you look at skill or if you look at proficiency levels, a person improves their proficiency levels when they go through the cycle hundreds of times. And the more times you go through it, the better you get at that scale. And this is something that today, the world of learning is completely missed when it comes from a vendor perspective, right? And we are trying to do this to facilitate this process.

Sriram Iyer: Okay. So, in terms of John. What we are seeing, traditionally, my opinion is that HR and L and D teams have been always very slow in adopting technology for the respective function right now. Are you seeing any game-changing trends that are happening in the marketplace that will ensure that the L and D teams are now in an accelerated mode of technology for the function?

The world is all about you nowadays, why isn’t L&D

John Cherian: So I think one of the challenges for anyone who’s a learning leader is that when you go to your company, you have two major stakeholders, right? You have your business sponsors, and then you have your actual users. Who has to learn, right? L and D teams run into a roadblock on either side, where the business user is not convinced that technology can play a role and they want more traditional experiences where it is a high human touch kind of experience.

They want facilitators, coaches, et cetera, and not tech. Secondly, the challenge may be on the user front where your users may not engage well with a digital platform, and therefore you’re forced to bring in the human experience so that you’re able to keep the user’s attention and focus on the learning, and they don’t get distracted in a very digital world, right?

So these are the challenges right now from a game-changing perspective in today’s world. Today’s world is all about you. If you remember in 2006, YouTube became the star of, Time’s Person of the Year. And ever since then with every year the world has become more and more about you, right?

And not about the big stars of the earlier world. The earlier world had movie stars, CEOs, and corporate executives as the stars, but today the star is you, right? People are going be respond much better to personalised experiences that are bus-built and designed around them. So any HR system that builds personalization into the employee experience and into the career journey of the employee, right? That is what we need to look for from a game-changer perspective.

Sriram Iyer: Very valid and pertinent. Typically why do you think organisations hesitate to invest in HR Tech, and how does Enparadigm help them get the leadership buy-in and overall organisational buy-in for adopting tech?

GenZ is coming, but the workplace experience isn’t ready

John Cherian: A lot of time when it comes to tech investments, the big challenge you have as leaders is that, first of all, clarity on what we want as an outcome, right? What are we trying to achieve, right? Because it’s very fancy to say, you know what? Let’s automate this.

Let’s automate that. Let’s bring in systems here, right? But probably that’s not the starting point, right? The starting point is to look at the assessed situation and the situation, right? What are we trying to achieve from an outcome perspective, right? So there’s a lack of clarity on that.

The second challenge is a lack of awareness of the importance of the employee experience when it comes to HR tech, right? And not being cognizant of the fact that if an employee is working productively for you today, quits, it takes six times more cost to get a replacement, and there’s a very high risk of failure when the replacement comes in.

So that becomes a big challenge, right? So not having the cognizance of this, not giving enough importance to employee experience, not having clarity on what you want as an outcome, right? Also not generally having some kind of a perspective on technology itself, right?

What problems cannot be solved for what is happening in the world of tech? How does tech come and help shape experience? I think people need to invest time to give answers to these questions. And then you find that once they’re a little bit comfortable with the space, then you find the HR tech adoption happening a lot better.

I think the number one challenge, as I mentioned earlier in this podcast, is the problem of, hey, you know what, we don’t think people will learn on a digital platform. They will not engage. They will just do a tick box and move on. We want people to come in, we want them to be in a workshop.

We want them to experience learning from leaders and facilitators, et cetera. And I think there’s a thought that, a very interesting thought freedom, that if you are sitting in a classroom in front of a facilitator and just because you’re looking at the facilitator and nodding your head, there’s a feeling that the person is learning.

But if you actually introspect, you realise that the facilitator is the one who’s really talking. He’s the expert. He or he’s the one who’s giving all the inputs, right? We don’t know how much of it is being received at the other end, right? So there is a belief that digital may not be effective physically.

But that is only so true from an attention and engagement perspective. When it comes to other aspects like knowing whether someone has actually learned something, whether they’ve retained something, whether they’re able to replicate something, et cetera, et cetera, that understanding is definitely not there.

So I think this is a conundrum. And this is one bias against HR tech investment, right? That a digital solution is not as good. It may be inferior to a physical solution, but if you can actually solve the engagement problem and the attention span problem right at the beginning, then digital actually gives you a lot more insight and data and analytics into whether someone is really learning or not.

Right, which you cannot get with the physical experience, right? So that’s number one. So a lot of times when we are going to business sponsors, the mistake that we make is we run to them with the solution. We are very excited by the solution. We run to them, we show the solution, we ask for a budget, and then we get to know that their points are very different, right?

So before doing that, we need to first spend time understanding what challenges they are perceiving and what challenges they want to solve. And their point of view on things, right? We need to understand their point of view first, and we need to then understand how we influence and shape their point of view first, and also make them look not only at today’s world and today’s constraints but also.

What is the expectation? 3, 4, 5 years down the line, right? You have Gen X moving out of the workforce slowly. You have millennials and Gen Z increasingly getting into the workforce, and therefore the expectations from employees in terms of the employee experience are going to be very different, right?

So you need to design for that world, but your business sponsor may not have that perspective because they will be looking more at it. What is missing in the current world, right? And they will want to solve today’s problems first, right? So being able to do this and then going in with, okay, now I understand your problem.

I understand your point of view. I understand what you want to drive as an outcome. I also try to give you my view on where the future of work and, the future of employee experience heading. Only after all these do we start coming to, therefore, what kind of problems are we going to solve?

What solutions can solve those problems and how much money is it going to cost? And also a very important point, what kinda of ROI do we get in that investment today? If you do that today, how does it help us, say a year down the line, two years down the line, or three years down the line from a business standpoint?

Sriram Iyer: Don’t start with the solution. Start with the problem that you’re trying to solve with the business leader. That’s a very valid point.

Questions leadership should address in a hybrid workplace

Sriram Iyer: John, do you have any specific thoughts on how you visualise the post-pandemic hybrid workplace, assuming that we are now in the post-pandemic phase?

John Cherian: Yeah I do feel we are in the post-pandemic phase today, right? And there’s been a lot of angst from senior leadership about the hybrid workplace because I think a lot of us at senior leadership level miss the kind of, people dynamics that is there when people were working a lot more physically together.

And there’s always a worry about employee loyalty and employee alignment to the organisation, purpose, vision, culture, et cetera. That’s a big and very legitimate worry at the senior leadership level, right? So you’ll find that today people are not at the senior leadership level. People are not very good at hybrid workplaces.

At mid and junior levels. People are very happy about it because they get a much better work-life balance according to them, right? And this is the dichotomy that we are facing today. Another question is given the new employee expectations around the availability of hybrid workspace and the need for balancing personal and professional lives as leaders, we need to design for those expectations, and we need to see how we can still keep things productive.

How can we still get the kind of productivity, how can we still get the kind of culture that we want? How do we infuse the vision and mission of the organisation into each individual employee? And I’m sure it’s quite challenging when people are working remotely because the engagement level is very difficult to know.

If someone is sitting somewhere else, they’re not even gonna turn on their video in a group call. It’s very difficult for you to perceive their engagement levels. At the same time, technology also enables you to do a lot more. And, there are a lot of advantages to a hybrid work environment, right? So it’s a balance, right? You lose something, you gain something. You need to figure out how to compensate for what you’ve lost.

Sriram Iyer: Fantastic. And that’s a great segue to the last question, John. So there is a lot of focus on adopting tech today by HR teams, by L and D teams. So what would be your key recommendation to some of these enterprises, the HR teams that are looking to adopt and bring digital into the learning?

Change takes time but we give up too easily

John Cherian: Yeah, I think it’s extremely important for us in this role to build cross-functional skills. If you just apply and approach it from the HR or the learning angle alone, it’s gonna be very difficult to ensure success. So from a product skills perspective, we need to develop empathy for end users who will use the product, and understand how it adds value to their lives.

From a tech perspective, we need to understand what tech and digital can do, what cannot, what they cannot do, what is realistic, what is unrealistic, what kind of timelines are involved, et cetera. And there’s a whole change management process in terms of making users actually adopt these systems, right?

And many times we miss out on the change management process, right? We may conclude too early that an initiative is either successful or unsuccessful, From a business sponsor perspective, you need to from an HR and Land D standpoint, you need to put in place mechanisms to review adoption, usage review, and ROI, and be proactive about providing an executed dashboard to business leaders on a monthly or a quarterly level on these metrics the mistakes that we sometimes make is, we wait until the business sponsor asks for this data.

Or we wait until the contract renewal time to give this kind of information to them? And you never know at that point in time whether the sponsor has an expectation mismatch, whether they’re happy or unhappy with the implementation and the outcome. And there may be a lot of misalignment that comes, and sometimes that actually jeopardises the entire HR data transformation roadmap, right? So I think these are things that we need to be very proactive about and keep in place.

Sriram Iyer: You hit the nail right on its head. John, a lot of takeaways from today’s session. We started off talking about how HR and L and D teams were actually having this existential question on what value they are providing to the teams and how they should continue to deliver value because of the impact that generative AI has had on all functions in an organisation, including the HR function, and that’s where we saw how N Paradigm is actually focusing on providing hyper-personalised, adaptive and experiential learning, and which is the actual need of our, and what is also important is, L & D leaders have to actually come out of the myth that people do not learn from digital platforms.

People are actually learning through digital means, and they need to, in an accelerated fashion, adopt it. The key reason why a lot of HR and l and d teams do not adopt tech is that they lack clarity on what outcome needs to be delivered. And they do not focus on the importance of employee experience as a feature.

And finally, the two aspects that you emphasised. One, don’t start with the problem, start with the pro. Don’t start with the solution. Start with the problem that you’re trying to solve. Don’t assume the problem. Talk to the business leader, understand the problem, and then work with them to provide the right solution.

And finally, change is a continuous journey and not a destination. So your change management process has to be always in motion. And what is missing in most HR tech implementations today is change management. John, that was really a learning-filled journey, which is always true to what you have always stood for. John, thank you very much for joining us for today’s session. We hope to have you back on our show again.

John Cherian: Thank you so much. Wonder talking to you.

Our Guest: John Cherian Co-founder & CEO of Enparadigm

Maverick bootstrapper. Eternal discoverer of first principles. Filtering the signal from noise. John is driven by the potential of purpose-driven business to make the world more meaningful.