Personalized Adaptive Workplace Learning and Assessment, with Luis Garcia

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Luis Garcia about personalized adaptive workplace learning and assessment. Luis Garcia is a seasoned international executive with over 25 years of experience in technology, digital media, and education. He specializes in driving new ventures and products to rapid growth by building effective teams that harness innovation, technology, and creativity to solve complex problems. He is the president of PETE, an Orlando-based tech startup that offers a suite of cost-effective and customizable solutions that enable organizations to deliver personalized workforce learning at scale. The PETE team is dedicated to harnessing the power of AI to help organizations of all sizes optimize their training initiatives, spanning from onboarding to regulatory compliance, product knowledge, technical skills, and more, without hiring additional training resources. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the HCI family of podcasts. We're your source for personal, professional and organizational growth and development. We share our own original research, explore industry trends and interview executives and thought leaders from across the globe. Join us for practitioner oriented content around all things leadership, HR, talent management, organizational development and change management. Maximize your personal and organizational potential with the HCI family of podcasts.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Luis Garcia, welcome to the conversation today.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm happy to be here, John.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  It is a real pleasure to be with you. You're joining us from Orlando, Florida. I'm south of Salt Lake City at Utah. And today we're going to be talking about training and development, learning and development, that area and not just about like sitting in a class and like listening and learning or maybe watching a video and learning something. It's not just about like absorbing through osmosis and hoping that something sticks, right? It's about actually taking something and applying it and actually like assessing whether or not the training works, right? And so that's really what we're going to try to unpack today and explore together and how we can do that effectively or more effectively within our organizations. As we get started, I wanted to share Luis's bio with everybody.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Luis Garcia is a seasoned international executive with over 25 years of experience in technology, digital media and education. He specializes in driving new ventures and products to rapid growth by building effective teams that harness innovation, technology and creativity to solve complex problems. He is the president of Pete, an Orlando-based tech startup that offers a suite of cost-effective and customizable solutions that enable organizations to deliver personalized workforce learning at scale. The Pete team is dedicated to harnessing the power of AI to help organizations of all sizes optimize their training initiatives spanning from onboarding to regulatory compliance, product knowledge, technical skills and more without hiring additional training resources. I love it.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  So Pete is all about what we're going to be talking about. About today, before we dive on in, is there anything else you want to share with your with the audience by way of your background, personal context, or about your company? And then we'll get started.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Ah yeah, absolutely. So as you read, I've been in digital education for over twenty years. And there's just two problems that I have constantly experienced as I manage organizations and grow organizations, not only because they're worthy education, but will happen in in any setting. And it is number one, it's really hard to create learning content that is effective. And but number two, and it's the hardest one, and it happens at all levels of education and learning. It is, it's really hard to evaluate learning, to really know whether a person learn. So we have been living with these two problems for a very long time, and I would use them as the foundation to create P E T. Now, P E T stands for personalized education, training and enrichment.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  And it's really the power of A I, which has given us the opportunity to create something like this. Because you we can, for the first time, are able to solve both of those problems. And solve both of those problems at a price that can be brought into a smaller organization. See, large companies and usually solve their training problems by creating L and D departments, learning and development or training departments, and they have the learning experts in there and the learning managers and and so on. So it is expensive to do that, like my content department at university to deliver content to, you know, thousands of students around the world, cost me a million dollars a year to run. So that is the cost of it.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  But if you're a smaller company, let's say a hundred employees, fifty to five hundred employees, you don't have that kind of money for that. But you do have the training problem. And I mean, so you use other methods, you use a shadowing or you use a, you know, you create a PowerPoint or use, you know, even chat G P T nowadays to create courses. But that only solves half of the problem, and you can only deploy the the content, you don't know if they actually learn. So what we wanted to build is a tool that could solve both of those problems at a price that we could bring into a small and medium sized organization, which in the past had never been able to afford.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's really cool. You and you you highlight, you know, Bunch of major problems in the learning and development space. Uh, that's been, you know, really hard to grapple with for decades. Um, in, in really for decades, the bread and butter of learning and development and training and development has been classroom based learning. Like you sit down, you have an instructor, they have a learning manual. Uh, people may have like a packet, uh, maybe they do a little pre-work, they show up, they learn. Maybe they have an assignment, they have some sort of takeaway, maybe there's some sort of an assessment or an exam or something. Maybe there's some sort of follow-up. If it's a decent pro, uh, training program, there'll be some sort of follow-up, you know, a week later, thirty days out, whatever.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Um, and that's if it's a good training, you know, a lot of trainings don't even have that, right? Uh, and, and, but it's just not effective, it's just not very effective. And, and most of it, you know, learning science tells us, and educational theory and, and educational, uh, research tells us that most of that is forgotten to me almost immediately, most of it, if it's not applied directly, um, you know, it goes in one ear out the other. And it's just not personalized. So, so that personalization piece has always been a, a, a, a real challenge. The assessment piece has always been a real challenge. The, the direct application piece has always been a real challenge.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  What's really cool about modern technology is it allows us an opportunity to address all of those challenges, right?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Uh, so, so let, let's talk through that and tell us maybe a little bit more about how you do that with Pete.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Thank you. You're describing exactly correct. And, uh, and it doesn't matter the setting, you know, corporate training is one of them, but, but you're describing happened in the classroom for traditional education everywhere too, right? And, uh, the best way that we have for evaluating learning was through tests. And tests as a best are poor in, at evaluating learning, the best way to evaluate learning would, would probably be, uh, uh, interviewing individuals about what they learned and have them practice with you in, we, in front of you to see whether or not they grasp the, uh, the knowledge and be able to fill up the gaps as they go along. But that's not scalable, not even scalable in normal class. And format, that's why tests were invented.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  So, so how can I have a conversation with an expert at scale without the expert? So that's what AI allows us to do now, because when we create courses and we, and we in, in, in just all this knowledge, we're able to create this skills engine in which a person can be evaluated. Now, the first problem we wanted to solve is like, how do I can have a conversation with the expert? And the expert can evaluate my knowledge based on the learning outcomes that we did, that the system that the, the, the find. Because by the way, most people don't know that the point of a course is to deliver learning outcomes.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  And so our, our system is rooted on learning outcomes, but because our system is not created for learning experts, we do the work, the algorithm does the, does the work of creating the learning outcomes transparently for the user. But it uses that as a foundation to do evaluation. So we first wrote an engine so to have this conversation to be able to evaluate the learning outcome. And, and that worked really well, but what we realized is like, all we were doing is playing a role. So now the, the, the AI could be the expert that is asking you questions, evaluating your learning. But we could flip the role also and say, well, the, the, the AI can be the customer and you can be the expert. And that's another way to prove that you learn, right?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  And if we do that, then really the AI can be any role. So we started experimenting with that. It could be a customer calling to your support line, being very upset. And now you have to de-escalate that. Or it could be a cold call that you're trying to convince somebody to buy your product and you could be practicing that. Or it could be a number of, of scenarios. So what we ended up building was a skills assessment engine that allows you to practice or allows you to, and allows you to evaluate the learning. And, and all our courses include that by default. Okay, now you can do that in text, you can do that in spoken, you can even do it with a video. You, we have the ability for you to have a live conversation with, with a video avatar to make it as real as possible. So I work in sales and I

• 8:40Speaker 01

  A long time, you had to do a lot of role playing with people to train them to take that first call. And so that takes time from the supervisor or whoever is doing that part. Here they have a safe environment to practice all these conversations and be ready for that first call.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love it. The, the, we've come so far. So, so the fact that like you can do it with a, a, an interactive video avatar in real time, get real time feedback, that simulated environment, that role play environment. Um, you know, I, I'm a university professor. So in a classroom environment, that was always, you know, like actual application, classroom-based activities, role plays, um, you know, case, applied case studies where students are like doing real projects with real organizations. Like those were always the bread and butter. Like that's the real stuff, right? If you could do that with your students, that's where they gain the real skills. That's where you can assess real competency.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  But it's hard because it's hard to scale. Uh, and it's, it's, you know, and so, so what you'd end up doing is you would like pair off students. So they're like role playing with each other. Um, or you know, there's a variety of ways you try to do it. But that's limited because now you, instead of having an expert with a student, you have a student with a student, right? And there's only so much, you know, a novice can teach a novice and you know, there's, there's always, um, you know, one of the best ways to learn is through teaching. And so, you know, having, having a student working with a student is still valuable. Uh, but, but having that expert, you know, on the other side via the, the simulated role play with the, the AI video avatar, that is really, really cool. And that's something that we didn't have before.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Like that, that's a new emerging capability that we have with these technologies. Now it takes a lot of computing power. It takes a lot of, you know, tokens. It takes a lot of those sorts of things. Um, but it's getting better and better. It's getting cheaper and cheaper, um, uh, to be, to be able to do that and to be able to do it at scale. Uh, so it's becoming more and more accessible for organizations, not just big corporations, but even small businesses.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. We are able to deliver a, a very, uh, affordable, uh, price. And uh so that small companies can have it. Now, what is also interesting that we found in this work is that eighty percent of the workforce doesn't have a desk. It's frontline deskless workers, yet only one percent of the software investment goes to software for them. So that they are the first people that are representing your brand, yet the least trained people out there. And uh so because we're starting getting these customers for frontline distributed workforces. That uh needed to hire a lot of people deploying them really quickly, like I think concert, right? You know, band is in town, uh you see all these people around protecting, helping people. They get really no training to do that.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  And uh but those are, those were our first customers. They wanted to be able to to train those folks. They are not trained on how to deescalate a difficult customer in life, so now they can practice that. Uh so we started getting more and more uh those kind of customers. Today, a lot of our customers are frontline uh distributor workforces. That before we're getting no training whatsoever. And and now they're not only getting a good instructional sound content. They also have the ability to practice and and get their position certified before they are out in the field.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, well, either no training or or really generic, you know, not personalized training, right?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Um so that's what I've seen in small business is, you know, there there's so many free resources out there. There's MOOCs, there's, you know, there's YouTube, there's, there's, there's not a, there's not a, you know, a limitation around content. There's so much content out there. Um and so, you know, and a lot of of scrappy, small business owners, CEOs, entrepreneurs, whatever. Like, you know, they they can go out and find content. The problem is, is it personalized to your business, to your, to your strategy? Is it personalized to your team? Is it personalized to the individual learning needs of your people? Uh and where they're at, to your products and your services, right?

• 12:42Speaker 00

  And that's, that's the sticking point because, you know, there may be, if you're lucky with those generic resources that you find on YouTube or, you know, on whatever. Um, you know, you may find fifty percent, sixty percent, maybe even eighty percent alignment with what you're trying to accomplish and what that resource provides. But it, there's still probably a pretty big gap. Um and it's static, right? It's because it's a resource that someone else created, there's no interactivity with it.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Uh that's actually right. So at best, you're consuming good content.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  And uh but you don't know if they learn it. You don't know that I'm able to apply it. So a- a- absolutely. Again, but what I call a contact artifact is at best half of the learning equation. And uh, so we have really focused on the evaluation.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and and talk about that. So one of the things that I love about the the new capabilities of the of the current technology is not only does it provide, you know, real time access to uh role plays and app application, um you know, simulated environments, um you know, personalized learning, but behind all of that then is assessment capability, right? So talk more about that and what you can do with with your tools and like why that's so important.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing is is that you don't have to be a learning e- e- expert to use our tool. You don't need to know words like assessment or evaluation of learning or learning outcomes. We're doing all that heavy lifting behind the scenes uh to make sure that you can deliver a training progress that are effective. So that's that's first. It's rooted in instructionally sound rules that you don't need to know anything about. Because our customers are, you know, business leaders. Um, the second part is having an engine that will allow you to role play at any level. That even if it's asking you questions to see what your knowledge is, or you being the one that answer questions, or having very specific operational knowledge that need to be practiced before you are deployed, or or to take you to the next level.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  The other part is that we have found that in in learning, and you will know there's this interactive activities, and those are really hard in digital education to deploy at scale. If you wanna do a simple drag and drop, or or something, you know, how to teach my piece of software or a complicated form. You know, the best you can do is is record a video, and then again, hope that they consume it and understand how to use your software. So one of the most sophisticated things that we do is we have an app maker. So you can take, let's say it's a piece of software, you can take screenshots of the software, feed it to to our app maker, and the application itself will create an app in which you walk through all of all of the points of the UI and tells you exactly what to use and why you're using it.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Then evaluate your learning over that. So it's not only conversational, it could also be systems driven. So we really focus on all those areas that are important for the small business for the people to know so they can do the job better.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that, I mean, that's so powerful because that's one of the biggest gaps that's pretty much always been there. Um, with, with learning and development in the space is how do you assess impact? Um, I mean, frankly, that's, that's one of the biggest gaps in a lot of business areas is like, how do you really truly assess impact? Of whatever initiative, whatever project, whatever thing you're trying to accomplish. Uh, what's the ROI of it? What's the actual learning objective outcome? Um, are you actually moving the needle? But, but it's like the assessment like gets embedded into like the actual uh product itself and how,

• 16:17Speaker 00

  you know, you, you can actually measure the actual like learning taxonomy and the actual skills and the competencies that you're having this, the, the learners, you know, um, develop as they're going through, you know, whatever role play or whatever simulation or whatever, you know, thing that they need to learn, develop, whatever. Um, and that's, it's, it's incredibly powerful because then you actually have, you can create a baseline, you can actually, um, then see, you know, movement and you can see you measure delta over time and you can translate that into ROI, which is, you know, for any small business owner, of course, that's going to be super powerful. Um, for you to be able to continue to make the case on any L and D spend.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  If you're in a bigger, you know, medium sized to large business, it's going to be critical as you're making the case up through the C suite, you know, to get, you know, dollars towards your L and D budget. Um, and, and there's a reason why, you know, in any kind of economic hard times, why training L and D budgets are often tend to be some of the first things that get cut. It's because they usually don't have, you know, a whole lot of um, strong data to show how their budget is producing outcomes. Um, there's kind of the assumption that what they're doing matters and like what they're doing helps, you know, improve um, how. The businesses run and you know how you know the employees do their work and how

• 17:40Speaker 00

  salespeople sell and whatever blah blah blah but there's often no real evidence of that because measuring the outcomes is challenging and and a lot of organizations just don't do it or they don't do it well and so having something that's embedded into what you do you know is a really powerful feature well Luis I know the time I need to let you go here in a minute but before we wrap things up for today I just wanted to give you a chance to share with the audience how they can connect with you find out more about your work your team and then give us a final word for today.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much for having me if if what you heard today resonates with you and please go visit our website we have the best easiest website to remember is pete.com P E T E dot com you go right there and you can read about what we do and and you can sign up for our newsletter or you can ask for information and we'll call you right back and see what are your challenges and and see if you're a good fit for for Pete. Thank you so very much.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. I encourage the audience to reach out to get connected find out more about what Luis and his team can do for you. Check out the really cool tools and and resources that he has to offer and as always I hope everyone can stay healthy and safe they can find meaning and purpose at work each and every day and I hope you all have a great week.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Thank you, John.