If anyone knows about Training and Development in an international company, that is Neeraja Dorairaj. She is a Learning Specialist at Thomson Reuters and has over 10 years of experience in the field. We asked her about the main trends shaping L&D, the most disruptive changes after the pandemic, and her favorite projects this year at Thomson Reuters in a fascinating interview for Talaera Talks. Read the interview notes and the episode transcript below.
Neeraja, Learning Specialist at Thomson Reuters
Neeraja is a Learning Specialist at Thomson Reuters with over 10 years of experience in bringing content to life for global adult learners. As an education enthusiast, she is passionate about creating innovative and effective learning and knowledge management solutions for business problems in a constantly changing workplace. She has implemented several learning and knowledge management processes at Thomson Reuters reaching thousands of people throughout the organization. She’s an advocate for the power of the learning mindset and continuous learning, and she has received foundations on instructional design, e-learning, and improving human performance from ATD, the Association for Talent Development. We had lots of questions about her job and the trends in L&D. So we asked, she answered…
1. What got you into the field of Learning and Development?
So I think it was in my college days. During that time, I realized that I wanted to be in the L&D industry, mostly because of the challenges that I went through. I had a really tough time communicating with people. I had these great ideas and thoughts, but I didn’t know how to communicate with others. I was shy, I was timid, no confidence to speak. So it took a lot of effort for me to build my communication skills. And that’s when I knew, Okay, this is what I want to do! Build others, encourage others. My former leader, Jenny, recognized my passion and gave me an opportunity to pursue my career in L&D. And it was totally worth it.
2. Did communication help you move into L&D?
Yes, I think communication plays a huge part in terms of making a place for yourself, wherever you are. And when I say communication, it’s not just the English language. Yes, it is important because we are in an organization where we use English as a common language to communicate. But it’s also about your personality, your body language, your confidence. And all of this is a part of communication. And it’s very important. You may have these wonderful ideas and thoughts, and people are there to encourage you, but if you’re not confident to speak, that is kind of is wasted. So I love to encourage people, and it gives me satisfaction. When I see people grow, they step up, they do presentations, I think there’s a lot of job satisfaction that I get when I see people do that after they’ve taken communication skills, modules or courses. So, yes, I think it’s very important.
3. Have you observed any changes in L&D after the COVID-19 pandemic?
Well, I would say it’s been a couple of innovative years that I’ve seen, because the way L&D has evolved in the last year is perhaps greater than that of the last 10 years. There’s been a dramatic change in the way L&D is functioning now, especially after the pandemic.
4. What are the biggest trends in L&D?
Just to start with – training used to be like an exclusive event. Nowadays, corporate training, or corporate learning, is an everyday thing. Employees own their learning. They don’t really have to wait for them to think, “Oh, I need to learn, so I have to wait for two weeks to get started with it”. You have everything. You own your learning.
So having said that, some of the things that I’ve seen, and even Thomson Reuters has implemented, is social learning. We have a lot of book clubs, tech cohorts, and learning cohorts; small groups where people get together with a common goal. When you do something, you remember the most. So employees have the power to choose what they want to learn and how much they want to learn. And they also have a group of people who support and help them to implement what they’ve learned. I think it’s one of the most effective strategies that we’ve seen working for us.
And we also have microlearning. People don’t want to sit through long workshops just to realize that they are not going to use most of it. But anyone can afford five minutes to watch a video or listen to a podcast or read through an article. It’s like learning on the go. It’s easy, easy to search, quick to read, and you’re learning something new.
And one of the major, I would say biggest trend, is the adoption of data. I think data is going to play a major role in decision-making. Even in the future, that’s going to probably be one of the deciding factors on how we draw out learning solutions.
5. How much of your experience in writing and communication has been necessary to offer microlearning?
That’s a very interesting question. And you would agree with me when I say this. I think writing paragraphs of information is so easy compared to writing concisely. It’s very hard to come up with ways to make sure that you convey the same content in a one-minute video or a two-minute article read. But I think it’s worth it because employees find it extremely useful. They have it handy when they want that. And that’s the goal. So as long as you’re making a point and making sure that there is learner engagement happening, and that is aligned with organizational goals, I think it’s worth implementing these methodologies.
6. What platforms or channels are driving the most engagement these days?
E-learning is one of my favorites, as well as reading articles. The e-learning market is expected to grow by 240 billion by 2022, globally. And it completely makes sense because employees own their learning. You can learn at your own pace, and you can choose how much you want to learn today. And I think that is also something that we have been using at Thomson Reuters. And we use authoring tools to create e-learning modules. And as an L&D professional, my focus is, “How can I make those e-learning modules fun and interactive? Because that is what builds the learners’ engagement.
I was talking to one of my cousins about the onboarding process he was going through at his new job (onboarding is something that I do at Thomson Reuters, as well). And he said, “Ah, it’s boring, I’m just scrolling through the videos”. This speaks to me a lot, I start to question whether new hires at Thomson Reuters feel like that. This pushes me to use concepts like gamification and interactive activities to ensure that at that the people are engaged and driven to take those onboarding courses and draw value out of them.
7. What is the role of L&D nowadays?
I’ve always been an advocate of the ‘own your learning’ concept, and managers should be there to guide you. You should evaluate, What are the things that I’m good at? And what are the things that I should be focusing on? L&D should be there to guide you and support you with different learning resources. The focus of learning has always been to upskill and to perform well, eventually. Choose what you need to learn and how much you want to learn about it. That’s how learning is going to support your performance.
8. Hard Skills and Soft Skills –Are these terms still relevant?
Um, well, I think it’s necessary that there is a differentiation between hard skills and soft skills. But having said that, I would prefer to call them essential skills as a whole. So imagine using a tool like Smartsheet is something that I need to learn to do my work. And I have to do that. But if I’m taking a whole lot of time and then my due dates are getting impacted, the whole team is disturbed by it. I need to learn how to manage my time. So that is an essential skill for me. You need to decide, What are the skills you need? I’ll just park hard skills or soft skills aside for a while and discuss or evaluate what are the essential skills I need to get my work done.
9. How does an employee figure out what they need to learn?
I think a combination of both [list out the core competencies needed and get managers’ support] has been really helpful for me in the past. Other important questions are: How can I align those core skills with organizational goals? How much of it are you going to use in your work? Where do they fall on my priority list? How much time do you have to dedicate? So how much can you afford to learn the skills? You should have a list of priorities in the order that you want to learn them, considering all of these. What I recommend, which has worked for me, is to list out what you want to learn, your focus areas, and then discuss it with your manager.
10. Is English a soft skill or a hard skill?
English is definitely a hard skill for me [jokes]. I think it’s necessary. I am not a native-English speaker, and when I work in an environment like this, at Thomson Reuters, where English is a common language that we use to communicate across different locations, it’s extremely important for me to learn how to speak that language. That’s how you’re going to talk to your colleagues and you have to be good at it. It builds trust, it saves time, and language should never be a hindrance in your work.
When we conducted these listening sessions with managers, one of the consistent feedback that we received too was, “I think my folks are having challenges in the way they communicate”. And it can be verbal, nonverbal, written… So that was one reason that we came up with these learning solutions like speaking club (inspired by Toastmasters), to provide opportunities for employees to build their public speaking skills and leadership skills, and we also partnered with you (Talaera), because we loved the human-centered approach that you have. And it is working really well for us! Because I have challenges in terms of writing, but my colleague may not have the same challenge, so she needs a different approach. I now feel a lot more confident in terms of writing communications, especially when writing concisely. That’s how we ensure that our employees are not having any challenges in the way they communicate using English, especially Business English.
11. You mentioned social learning at the beginning. What is it?
Social learning is where a group of people with a common goal come together, discuss, and learn from each other. You learn a lot from people by observing. Kids look at us and they kind of mimic what we are doing because that’s the quickest way to learn. It’s one of the most effective strategies. So we have book clubs, learning cohorts, and tech cohorts where people can enroll themselves, and then they can sign up and we have this for three to four months and we can be flexible about the time as long as they know what they want to learn about. And then they meet often maybe weekly or bi-weekly where they have the topics drawn out and they discuss.
With social learning, you curate resources, you have guest speakers, and you can be very flexible about the approach on how you want to learn. People often say, “Hey, this is something that I’m good at, can we discuss it?” And then you learn from each other. They get to collaborate, they get to meet people from different business functions, and you get, you get to build your network. It also drives engagement, as people feel part of something. We’ve seen people from a learning cohort who want to start a cohort by themselves. And eventually, they are owning it, they’re being accountable, they want to share the knowledge that they have with others, and it’s really good to see that happening.
12. Can you tell us a bit about some of your favorite projects this year at Thomson Reuters?
Digital Literacy and I Am Remarkable are the two projects I’ve enjoyed doing the most this year. When I spoke about how data has been trending up, Digital Literacy is a perfect example of that. So we asked employees, “What are the tools that you use every day?” “What is your expertise?” “Do you think you’re a beginner, an intermediate, or an expert?” Based on the responses that we got from employees, and drawing from that data, we were able to determine the best learning solutions. And when we asked for help, all of the employees stepped up, and they said, “Hey, I’m an expert in this tool. So I’m okay to create a resource so others can use and we had people we contacted people who can help us with, you know, conducting webinars.” People kind of choose what they want to do and we’ve been hearing great feedback. It’s working really well. We’ve had 70% engagement from the Digital Literacy project, and we had 575 learning hours in just two weeks. My colleague Ziella and I, and I should say the entire L&D team that we have in Thomson Reuters, we are a very passionate group of people. We have solid support from our leaders, which helps us to work on and focus on the things that we love to do. So it’s great to work with colleagues who are so talented.
I Am Remarkable. I recently conducted a workshop and I think they loved it. At least that’s what I’d want to think. It’s majorly for underrepresented women, who can be underrepresented. When you speak about yourself, it’s hard to promote yourself, when you want to talk about others, it comes out naturally to you. But when you want to speak about yourself, people may think it’s bragging. We found, and Google found, that women are having these challenges and they came up with this initiative called I Am Remarkable, where it challenges preconceived notions across talking publicly about your accomplishments and challenging the gender modesty knots. I had women and men both invited to the session. It was really fun to see how much men value women, and it is women who kind of feel that I shouldn’t be talking much about themselves. Maybe because there is a cultural impact as well, since women tend to be considered selfless, giving, and caring. And even in Fortune 500, only 30% of women make it to the board. So there is a lot of differentiation that I’ve seen, and there’s so much that we have to work on. The first step is to have people, both men and women, speak about themselves. And when you speak based on facts, it’s not bragging because you’re just talking about your accomplishments.
Conclusion
It is clear that the world of training and development is evolving faster than ever. The pandemic has propelled digitalization, and microlearning, social learning, and e-learning are leading L&D in 2021 and upcoming years.
We totally agree with Neeraja when she mentions that employees should own their learning. They should learn what they need and want, at their own pace, in the way that’s most effective for them. Every year, we strive to provide business English communications training to professionals that is personalized and tailored to their level, interests, and needs. If you are considering personalized communications training for you or your teams, get in touch and we will tell you how other companies are doing it.
