In the last episode of this series, my guest is Vidya Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer and Global Head of Learning and Development at Ericsson, who is at the cutting edge of driving a culture where learning is a habit that matters. When we were planning this episode Vidya and I quickly realised we had a mutual passion for people data and analytics. Vidya also shared with me a view that I found quite profound, she told me that learning is oxygen, invisible but necessary to survive and analytics will make it visible. You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Vidya and I discuss:

• The relationship between learning and business outcomes

• How to cultivate a growth mindset across your workforce

• How to build a skills driven organisation and help employees identify the skills that they need to grow

• The future of learning and why it is wrapped up in the future of people analytics

• The impact of technology on the future of learning

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in learning skills and culture development. So that is Business leaders, CHROs, Chief Learning Officers and anyone in a People Analytics, Workforce Planning, Learning or HR Business Partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Degreed. To learn more, visit https://degreed.com/.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Vidya Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer and Global Head of Learning and Development at Ericsson to The Digital HR Leaders podcast. Welcome to the show Vidya, can you provide the listeners with a brief introduction to your background and role at Ericsson? And I should also say it is great to have you on the show.

Vidya Krishnan: Thank you David, it is great to be here. I am a big fan of this show and all of the great speakers that you bring, so very, very honoured to be on the show with you. I am very proud to be Ericsson’s Global Chief Learning Officer heading our Global Learning and Development Organisation. We are a company that is 140 years old and we never act our age.

We are very excited to be a company that is empowering an intelligent, sustainable, connected world, bringing things like 5G to life. We are a company of over a hundred thousand amazing employees in over 180 countries and we feel it is our sacred mission to create the conditions in which those employees feel that they can change themselves in ways that grow themselves as well as ways that grow our customers and help society.

So it is a great job, there is never a dull moment.

David Green: And I can see the passion that is coming out there, it is great. I know we are going to talk a little bit about 5G later and how that relates to the future of learning technology. So let's start, big picture, what is your perspective on the relationship between learning and work now but also into the future as well?

Vidya Krishnan: Absolutely. I mean, human beings are a work in progress and when it comes to progress in order for it to work, we have to constantly be on a learning journey and we are definitely on one now. So I think it's not cliched for me to say that the future belongs to the learners. So much of what we do now is no longer defined by how much we know but really, especially when I look at what is happening in the news today, how we handle what we don't know. How we handle what we don't understand. Do we approach it with empathy? Do we approach it with curiosity? Do we approach it individually or as a team? So I do think now more than ever learning is really shaping the future of work and that future is unpredictable, but I don't think it's accidental and it really is ours to shape.

So I do believe that companies especially have maybe an even bigger and dare I say an unprecedented responsibility in creating workforces as well as having an impact on our customers and on society, that creates capability in a way that we haven't done before. It is so badly needed now to bring us together, to solve the problems in the world, many of which really do require a technology driven solution that is leveraging not just artificial intelligence, but human intelligence.

And so I think truly, I feel that this is a watershed moment for learning as we stand on the cusp of technologies like 5G and the internet of things, the function of learning is no longer this vertical thing that a company's single L&D organisation has to focus on, but truly becomes something that every part of the business has to call to get us ready for the future of work.

David Green: I think you focus there on some of the huge technological changes that are happening and accelerating as well and obviously there is the fact that we are probably going to be working for longer and you talked about this need for the future belonging to learners and needing to be on a continuous learning journey. In your time in learning has that shifted?

You talked about this as a watershed moment, what are some of the other things that you think are really causing this? Obviously we have got the crisis going on at the moment, that has probably extenuated the challenge.

Vidya Krishnan: I think the shift that we are seeing right now is really the shift from learning to development and re-skilling, while critical, is not an end in itself, it is a means and the real objective is to create a workforce that creates value for our customers. One that experiences and deepens its sense of resilience, which says I can become whatever I need to be and building skills is what happens to me on the way to solving problems that matter to me. So creating value, building resilience, but also I think deepening a sense of belonging that I know I am in a place where I can bring my whole self to work, even though I am developing and reinventing myself and I can become many things here.

For me, I myself always say I am in my fourth career. This is my fourth career. I have been doing different things, which you could interpret them to say either I am spectacularly unqualified or she is always in a state of transition. I hope I maybe have four more careers ahead of me, but I think that is the new normal.

So the big shift I see, partly driven by technology, but I think also partly quite frankly by just human enlightenment, that we really are all in it together is the shift from learning as something where we are creating and curating content, to development, where our focus needs to shift to creating conditions, creating experiences, making assignments accessible to people that actually build and combine all these skills that we are trying to teach and grow on the job.

By allowing people to build skills through assignments instead of saying, the only way to get that assignment is to already have all the skills. And I think that is an important shift that we are in the middle of and it requires this multidisciplinary approach.

David Green: Yes and a more agile way of looking at it as well. Interesting what you said about it not just being about re-skilling people because actually, as you have just talked about you have reinvented yourself three or four times and I know I have done that in my career as well. This need to re-skill is so important because the half life of skills is getting ever shorter, ever diminishing, we might re-skill a section of our workforce now but then we might need to re-skill some of them again or some of them may want to re-skill themselves.

Vidya Krishnan: Absolutely David, one of the sacred tenants of agile is that it is progression over perfection. I think that is so true here when it comes to building skills, maybe again our old ways of working allowed us to say, I am going to build this program. I am going to go into this cave and really deep dive and build this amazing program. It is going to take me 18 months, but when it is done it is going to be amazing. You don't have that luxury anymore ever anywhere, by the time we did something like that people would have moved on and the need would have changed. So this shift that we have to make in our ways of work, to embrace the fact that it is progression over perfection, that it is us building our skills is also a matter of not the level of skill you have, it is the momentum. What is the journey and how well can I visualise the journey that you are on so that learning and development can become the partner our business stakeholders need to solve business problems. That is what we're about, we are not just about learning or development. We are about enabling a level of performance and problem solving that we don't have yet.

David Green: Well, that is a great start. I think we looked at it very much from an individual perspective there is many respects. So let's talk a little bit about the relationship between L&D and the business. How can L&D help create the necessary conditions to help solve some of the big challenges that our businesses face?

Vidya Krishnan: I think in three powerful ways. When you look at what keeps us from solving business problems, there is usually really three things that come out. One is it is very complex, there are issues of time or affordability. We don't have the time, we don't have the affordability. We don't have the tools that we need, so there is a complexity barrier there. I think sometimes there is a reactivity barrier, meaning we don't have all the intelligence we need to do the right thing. We are reacting and we are not predictive enough in how we go about acquiring the necessary expertise and experiences.

So some things are complex, some things are reactive and I think the third thing is to make sure everyone is invested. Problems get solved when people who are responsible for the solution truly feel invested in doing that. So I think we have to solve the business problems from the perspective of complexity, which means when something is complex, you can't scale it. From a reactivity point, which means you have got to go faster. So you have got scale, you have got speed and then the third one is accountability. So from that standpoint, I think learning and development has to create these conditions by focusing on the scale problem through the ecosystem. If it is complex to get the people together, to get the skills together that you need, if it is complex to even be able to be put in the time or afford the experiences then that simplification has to be done by the ecosystem of learning in a company. And it actually goes quite beyond learning, I would say the broader ecosystem of how people connect to community, not just the content. I think when it comes to the speed to go from this reactive thing to this predictive thing, it is definitely a combination of intelligence, that you use the ability to take things like analytics and use them in ways that maybe we have not traditionally done in L&D and I would also say that's such a matter of culture. Actually to me, culture is speed. Culture are the habits that you use and if they are good habits, you go faster and you are more predictive and more anticipatory and if it's not good, you are much slower and reactive. So I think the second thing is the culture system and seeing that learning and development truly is meant to be an empathy engine. For this notion of a culture system that allows people to be on the move through their company in different ways that allow them to get perspectives they would not have gotten before, to connect to people that they may never have talked to, to acquire a diversity, almost a cognitive diversity that allows them to just go much faster. But all of that needs instrumentation to fly that plane and that comes from using things like artificial intelligence and new ways to start to sense what are the skills that are needed to solve that problem? What are the people that are maybe not represented on the problem solving team? How do you go about acquiring the experiences that will help you solve that problem? And then the third thing, as I mentioned being accountability. I think that is all about the business system, is the L&D organisation skilling people in the right direction, on the right things, the things that are truly critical for the future. Is that being done in a way where the business feels a sense of co-ownership or is it being done in a way where the businesses says, yeah I will consume this if I want to, but if I don't want to, I won’t.

So ecosystem, culture system, business system, this is how L&D has to mobilise itself to be an even better partner to our business stakeholders, in solving the problems that matter. Easy to say, hard to do.

David Green: Of course and we are going to explore how you are doing some of that at Ericsson throughout the conversation, I think we will return to those three areas. I know we are going to talk a little bit about how you can use analytics to predict a little bit and link it to skills needs and everything else.

Let's deep dive a little bit first around the culture piece that you talked about. How do you create a growth mindset, which I have heard it referred to, or a culture of learning across your workforce? How have you done it at Ericsson?

Vidya Krishnan: I think the first thing we say is, learning has to be a habit that matters.

It is not enough that it is a habit, it has to be a habit that matters. There has to be a consequence to the learning that is done. People need to see that there is a meaningful differentiation that occurs that we can, first of all, see you. Today we have very well known, well respected, indices by which we measure financial performance. We know exactly what it looks like to see a company's balance sheet. We have today, very well recognised indices by which we measure a company's employee engagement. We know what those scores look like, we know what they mean, we know how to do that kind of sentiment analysis. We still don't quite yet have a universal well-recognised means by which we visualise an employee's skill development and skill progression. Not just the skills, but this collection of experiences, like what is your journey? What is your momentum? That I see you, I see your profile, I see your passions, I see your experiences, I see your skill progression. We don't have that. If we can build that and then show that, for example, I have to nominate someone for a program, I have to promote somebody, I want to promote somebody, I have to hire somebody. I am looking at these different profiles and I can now see who is growing and who is growing other people.

Who is progressing in a way that brings other people along and who, for example, may be great at what they do, but maybe is not progressing at all and is certainly not teaching anyone else. I can now make a meaningful differentiation to say I have decided that I need to invest in people who have this growth mindset, I can see their growth mindset in action. I can visualise it and that differentiation allows me to show that, hey, your learning and not just your learning, David, I think that we believe in order to have a really effective learning culture at Ericsson, we have to have an equally strong teaching culture. Because when you look into the future of work, when re-skilling becomes a necessary component of recruiting, who is going to do that re-skilling. That is not going to be solved by one vendor or one program or one central thing, that is going to be people who are already on the job, seeing it as their sacred responsibility to help other people ramp up. They should know how to do that. The company should show everyone else who they are and we should go to great lengths to grow those people.

So, I think the way we cultivate that growth mindset is to show that it matters, to show that it is of consequence and by giving it a language and a visualisation that allows us to differentiate the people who have a growth mindset and bring other people along by teaching them from the people who don't.

I think when people see that this gets me to thrive and not doing it, I can barely survive. Especially within Ericsson, we want our people to believe that they are on the move and that there is a zero tolerance for zero learning. I think that is the way that you at least start to seed the kind of culture system that can take us far ahead.

David Green: Yes and I guess the Holy Grail comes when you connect that to business outcomes, customer loyalty, customer retention, sales, growth, all those sorts of things, which is a Holy Grail I guess in many respects. It has always been the challenge for learning to bring it up to business outcomes, but I sense that we are closer to being able to doing that now than we have been in the past?

Vidya Krishnan: I think our identity is this right? We exist to solve business problems. We exist to create and build future critical skills that enable and unlock business performance, that is the ultimate purpose of what we do. Absolutely we are in a business that serves customers, employees and society so by doing this, this notion of a triple bottom line, we want to create the skill sets and the mindsets to win at all of those three things. But I think you are absolutely right, it is a moment where our identity is pivoting in a very good way, I think, to be seen as a must have, rather than a nice to have, when it comes to business performance and that is why I say all of these things, our culture, our learning culture, our teaching culture, every single one of those things has to be grounded in what does our business require us to become? And that linkage has to be so clear.

I think the only way you have it is to not see learning as this vertical function anymore but to really see it as this horizontal thing that everyone in the company is sort of a co-owner of.

David Green: I think we are seeing the more progressive organisations, such as Ericsson and others, that are linking learning with skills and they are looking at it horizontally.

I know when we spoke a couple of weeks ago, we talked a lot about skills. How do you actually go about building a skills driven organisation and how do you connect it to learning?

Vidya Krishnan: I think it requires several things. I think the first thing is just the foundational systems that you have.

All of your systems, especially your HR systems, are traditionally built on some sort of career framework and competency model. One important thing we have to do with those models is to really shift them to a skills basis, because this is a much more transferable, transportable currency by which people can understand what are the jobs to be done?

How do I find out what level I should be aiming for that? How do I build the skills necessary in order to advance? So I think that many people can easily dismiss this work as plumbing but it is not. It is absolutely creating the framework, I would say the scaffolding, for how to have a skills-based organisation in the first place. You have to get the whole company, quite frankly, to just speak the same language of what skills are what, how we describe them, what they consist of, where they matter, how they relate to jobs to be done. So I think that even though it is sort of a scaffolding thing, I think that is very foundational and we see it as very, very important.

I think the next thing though is how you visualise these skills. As I said earlier, this is the one thing that is like oxygen, they are necessary, they are vital but they tend to sometimes be invisible. You know you need them, but you can't really see who has them and whether you have them. So I think visualising them and here things like AI give us new tools, new dashboards, new technologies to visualise things like progression. I don't really care if Vidya is a level three and David is a level four, but what I really care to see is David has gone from level zero to level four and meanwhile Vidya just stayed at a level three. It is not about who has the higher number it is about who is on the move and that momentum and that visualisation. So I think the scaffolding, but then the visualisation.

Two more things. One is the prediction of skills. How do I know what skills to build? Usually I am just reacting but AI gives us the power of prediction if we use it well and it is not magic prediction, it is things like, what is in my pipeline? My sales pipeline, what key words are appearing there? How do I merge that with what the market sees in my sector and how do I merge that even further with the skill profile of my team? What they are already good at and what they are not good at and if I put all those things in a proverbial blender, it might show me a much more accurate predictive model of where I should build my skills. But that same capability will show me not just the prediction, but the proof that I actually did it, that it will visualise and make real that skill shift that I am trying to enable in the company. So I use it to predict, but I also use it as a proof point.

Then I think the final thing, and maybe this is the most basic thing of all, is that I should be able to see with a level of transparency that I think most transparency and democratised access, I should be able to show and see very transparently what opportunities are out there. Not just vacancies, but what assignments are out there that I can pursue, that I can apply to that would build my skills and not just look for content, but look for people, look for the teachers, look for the assignments. So I think those kinds of things, the scaffolding, the visualisation, the prediction and proof through AI and then just this connection to what the opportunities actually are, I think these things are very concrete, not easy but concrete, but I believe that is what it means to be skills driven.

David Green: And I think that transparency you spoke about is how you connect skills to learning. So me as an employee at Ericsson, Let's say I've got skills ABC and D, there is technology that says, well David if you want to progress your career in this way, this is where you want to go you need to look at skills E and F. Here is some training or some assignments that will help you to acquire skills E and F and further your career within the organisation. Is this the key to bringing skills and learning together and actually, as you say, democratising it to the workforce?

Vidya Krishnan: Yes. I think it is the key to bringing skills, learning and opportunity. I think those three, it is that trifecta, that you need because traditionally where you go to build skills has been something very different from where you go to pursue opportunity. And we see now platforms like Degreed are trying to bring these things into the exact same place and I think many, many people are recognising these three things need to happen in the same place. When they do and an employee can go from reactive to predictive, they can also go from viewing learning as this gap filling thing like “I must fix my deficits and reduce them” to also seeing that “Hey this thing is showing me I have strengths that I never realised before, but because I have these strengths I could actually pivot into this field that I never even considered it before because I always saw myself as whatever role I occupied at the moment.” But now actually through the power of AI, what this thing is showing me is that if David is today a Data Science Engineer and tomorrow he wants to be a Sustainability Engineer. He might have thought of those things as being on two completely different planes of existence but what this thing is showing him is that he is just three degrees of separation away. And if he just works on this skill, this skill and this skill, this is now an option to him. You didn't know that was possible, but now you do. So I think that is the other thing that it will allow people to think differently, not only about their skills and their learning, but about what directions they could go in and maybe realise that there are directions they just never considered before that they could pivot quite easily. It will show them that enlightenment to some extent, things they couldn't see before.

David Green: So that is that kind of career path thing and creating your own careers within your organisation is powerful. I guess from an organisational perspective as well, all this data and information can really support better workforce planning for example. Also understanding that these are the skills we have got, so we have got this gap, but now the data is telling us that this group of employees could close the gap quite quickly here so we will actually be all right. We don't need to go out and buy another organisation or hire loads of people. So I think that that kind of forms the circle really and as you said, it takes learning out from being this silo, to just putting it out across the organisation.

Vidya Krishnan: There is a cost saving for doing that too David. Because when you can re-skill and re-deploy rather than release, then when you recruit, you are really recruiting with a very high intentionality. You are recruiting for potential, you are recruiting not just for expertise and you are able to say that in my company, people can become many many things as the business needs. We can become whatever we need to be and this is how we do it because we are making it so easy or much easier for people to pivot now. Before they thought, my role defines me, my job stage defines me and actually no, it does not. You are this beautiful combination of skills, experience, interest and that defines you and defines you in a new way. I think that is also really empowering for individuals, I consider it empowering.

David Green: Yeah I do as well and now I am going to turn our attention to something I know that we are both very passionate about as we spoke about this a couple of weeks ago as well. You actually said something really interesting in our last discussion, you said learning is oxygen, invisible but necessary to survive and analytics will make it visible, which I thought was fantastic.

Can you expand on that a little bit and tell us a bit about how you are using analytics in L&D at Ericsson to measure things like capabilities, skills, knowledge and some of the other things that you might well be using it for?

Vidya Krishnan: We definitely see it as a really critical journey that we are on and we feel inspired when we look out in the industry and say that once upon a time when you went to go purchase a product, you would ask a bunch of people, you would try out a bunch of things, you would go to a store and hope somebody would talk to you. Now the way we go about making a consumer purchase has changed because of companies like Amazon and things like ratings that have given us a new intelligence and a new language for something that used to be kind of invisible, which is how we make a purchasing decision.

They have made so much of it actually quite visible and quite easy to navigate. I feel inspired by that and feel like a very similar transformation is what we need to enable in the space of learning and specifically learning analytics. I think here at Ericsson, what we are hoping to do and what we are intending to do is to take for example, as I mentioned earlier, can we connect workforce and people analytics much more powerfully with learning development. So that when we ask ourselves, what are the business impacts of learning, the answer comes out of the people analytics. That we were able to, for example, re-design the workforce, this role might have been overrepresented and when we looked out in the future, we thought we don't need so many of that we need more of this, were we actually able to make that shift happen?

As I said, connecting things that are data sources today, but maybe aren't sufficiently connected such as our profiles, our interests. Today we go to LinkedIn and look for somebody’s CV, but so much of that information inside the company, when you combine it with things like what's in our sales pipeline and what skills are those things demanding?

What happens when we can combine all of that to create this composite picture of this team, to pursue these deals with these people in it who have these strengths, these areas of development, this is what they need to do in the next year, 18 months, six months. So what they need to go from an average level three to an average level seven. We know very well, there is no such thing as this perfectly multi capable competent person. You can build those models and nobody actually looks like that. A team is made up of people with very distinct, unique strengths. So what you are really trying to do creating this well-rounded team is say, okay, you are really good at this, can you get the rest of us to half your level? And collectively, we are not very good at this, can we get to this level? So I think for us we feel we have a firm grip on the roadmap we need to now build and execute in order to make skills visible. The key to doing it really is to take so much of the intelligence and analytics power that is in our people analytics and really collaborate in great ways with learning and development to ask what questions can analytics answer about learning before it happens, but also after it has happened. What better way to show the business the impact of learning, not just by net promoter scores and how many people took it and how much they liked it, but did we actually shift the workforce composition? I think that is at least the beginning of what we are trying to do to get down that road.

David Green:  Exciting, exciting stuff. You also said to me and I think you have touched on it there, that you think so much of the future of learning is wrapped up in the future of People Analytics. I love that.

Vidya Krishnan:  I tell my colleague, Jane, your future is my future, my future is your future. As our capabilities grow in the people analytics space it is so influential and consequential for what we can do in learning to actually shift from learning to development. Development is all about showing the proof in the language of people analytics and then using all the intelligence and the dashboards and the strategic visualisation of data.

It is not enough that you have the data, you have got to put it in a format that I can easily understand and digest it, that moves me. When we combine data visualisation with data integrity, with being data driven, I think that those futures are so intertwined and anyone who doesn't think so I would say you are not positioned strategically enough for the journey ahead.

David Green:  Well you are preaching to the converted here so I definitely would agree with you on that. Lets move on to how at Ericsson you assess credentialing, i.e. the learning that's completed, also contribution. Can you talk a little bit more about this and also the teaching culture that you have mentioned earlier as well because I think that is a really important point.

Vidya Krishnan: Absolutely. I guess when I think about a growth mindset I don't really just think of that as an individual thing, I think of it as a team sport as well. It doesn't just mean that you have a great mindset that promotes your growth, it means that you care so much about giving, in a way that promotes the growth of others and you see a measure of your performance being how effectively you are able to bring others along and help them grow. Which means that the notion of credentialing, I think actually becomes more critical than ever, but the definition shifts somewhat. In the past, credentialing was okay, I have completed something and by completing it I have earned this signifier of what I have already done.

But I think we are shifting now to viewing credentials as a key, meaning I have a driver's license and I don't use that driver's license to tell you that I passed driver's ed. That is not what you attribute or ascribe that license to mean. This is the key for me to get on the road and without this, I can't do that. So by earning this license, I now have the ability to drive and I think more and more of our credentials have to be of that genre. That is the credential is not just measuring that you completed some curriculum, it is measuring that you contributed to a project, to a business outcome. Back to your earlier question, how do you make sure that this relevance to the business is the most important thread that never gets cut, that the contribution has to be contribution to a valid business outcome and contribution to other people.

So when we say it is a point of pride to teach for Ericsson, to be recognised as somebody who teaches for Ericsson, we are recognising not only that you have expertise, but that you share it. I don't mean like you hit the forward button and send it to a bunch of people but that you actually care about enabling the comprehension of other people in a way that puts them to work in new ways.

So when we give you a credential for contribution, we are now getting to evaluate not just whether you completed some learning journey but that you can apply it properly with context on job, you can secure business outcomes and that you are giving back and paying forward as a matter of cultural habit.

So the credential then becomes a key and I know this is going to sound clichéd and simple, but no matter how fancy the technology gets people learn from other people. People learn with other people and I think by grounding some of our credentials in these kinds of things, we are honouring this sort of timeless truth that people learn from people and we value being a giving company. We want the people who do well in our company to be the givers, the ones who for them learning is not consumption. It is really this catalytic reaction that I become something so that I can turn around and help other people become something too. So I think again, the digital credentials now that we have are giving us a new power to do that and they give us beautiful power to share the journey, one click and I can show you my Credly badge on LinkedIn. Now my customers can see what I am doing to myself for them. So I think this is the shift that we are making in credentialing and making it more focused on contribution is actually, I would say, a very meaningful enabler of the teaching culture that we want to have. It is allowing the visualisation.

David Green: I was just about to say how that feeds the culture that you are trying to create. I guess within a team, if you are really good at some specific skill or proficiency, you can be a teacher. But then in other areas you are going to be a learner because you are going to be learning from another expert on the team who is strong in that and then the team as a whole is increasing its proficiency and you can visualise and show that, which is a pretty powerful actually.

Vidya Krishnan: Yep and in some cultures there is this beautiful principle of each one, teach one and I think it is just scaling that.

David Green: Yeah and you can see how that could scale much more than the way we have learned in the past.

Vidya Krishnan: Sometimes I think David, that is the only thing that could scale because any other way would just seem very centrally forced and again, back to the consumption model, please take my class, please take my program. It is much more likely to happen when it truly becomes the defacto habit in your company. That the most revered, rewarded and recognised people are the ones who are not just keen to teach others, but who are also really good at it.

David Green: Great, let's move on unfortunately, we could probably talk for about two hours but I'm not sure my producer would be happy if the episode was that long.

How is technology impacting the future of learning? You mentioned 5G at the start and presuming that is helping act as a catalyst in many ways?

Vidya Krishnan: Absolutely. I mean, we go around and telling people 5G is ready are you? And the reason we ask that is because we truly believe 5G is a watershed moment in the world, but I think it is specifically a watershed moment for education. 5G is the next thing that changes everything. We say that all the time and what we mean by that is it is not just one thing. It is not just about having a faster connection. It is also having this ability to do things like virtual reality, immersive gaming, augmented reality in a way that is so natural because there is no latency anymore. There's no lagginess in your videos, imagine the level of connectivity that instead of you and I talking to this two dimensional little screen, we could be standing next to each other in a virtual room, both drawing on the same whiteboard, being physically so far apart but feeling like there was no distance.

So I think that application of 5G allows us to be ever more digital and ever more human, but it is also the standard that allows for things like critical machine telecommunications. Where we could have a raise of sensors feeding back information that now we have the intelligence to really process. But also things like robotic surgery that we can't tolerate any delay whatsoever. So this standard allows for all these different things to happen and I think it is a watershed moment for two reasons. One is, it is a very positive, but real disruptor for industries. When industries get disrupted, people need to get re-skilled. So I think it is an impetus for the workforce to really look at, are we ready for 5G? For how it is going to disrupt our business? And is our workforce ready to become something more because of that?

But then I think it is also a watershed moment for how learning happens. You look at the pandemic and look at the digital inequity that has become even more stark. That people who don't have secure, reliable, digital access are literally not able to progress educationally compared to people who do. How is that even remotely okay. That is so wrong, it is so wrong for diversity. We need this to combat institutionalised racism. We need this to heal the world and bring all the great minds that think differently together to make a vaccine.

So I think 5G is going to create this notion of a virtual village that we couldn't have before and the technology, in terms of how it connects platforms and industries, is going to allow us to almost have it as this empathy engine. Through which we can connect and know and maybe even feel the perspectives of other people. Just in ways that we couldn't do before. So yeah, totally more digital, but also done right, much more human. So I think we feel very strongly that this technology has to be technology for good. It has to be sustainable, has to advance all the things we care about in the world.

This is really about the future of technology being the future of learning and the future of learning being necessary in it and enable industries to make 5G work for them.

David Green: That leads really nicely on to the last question. Actually this question we are asking all the guests on the show in this series. What will be the role of learning and development in 2030? We just picked 2030 because why not. Obviously taking the technological aspects of some of the other trends you have described what do you think the role of learning and development will be in 2030?

Vidya Krishnan: I think we will no longer see it as one specialised function. We will see it as this multidisciplinary thing that has many co-owners necessarily kind of permeating the entire business. This role of Chief Learning Officer will be so much more about performance and development and not just learning for learning's sake. So I think that is one big thing, the number of people who say, learning is part of my job I hope will exponentially rise.

I think also we see the future of work and just the dynamics of teams, there is so much self forming, agile teams, sort of flatter organisations, people who are cross-disciplinary, they are bound by a shared evolutionary purpose and where you live in an organisational hierarchy becomes more and more inconsequential. It is important, it is your home base, it is like your mailing address but it no longer is the thing that dictates what you do every day. So I think that is going to enable people to say we have to come together and all these different ways of work and our ability to outperform our competition and make good on our promises to our customers will truly be completely dependent on our ability to outlearn our competition and how effectively we have this workforce resilience at becoming something new and the amount of guided reinvention that can happen within the company.

So I think in 2030, we are going to recognise that it is even more connected to things that matter like wellbeing, to diversity, to belonging, to how we value people in the workplace. I think today again it is sometimes seen as a vertical, I think tomorrow it won’t be.

David Green: That sounds brilliant. I guess a measure for a Chief Learning Officer will be, what percentage of people in the organisation are saying that learning is part of their job, could be a way of measuring the impact.

Interestingly this is an extension on the Chief Learning Officer role, there has been a few articles recently that I have seen something from BCG recently, Deloitte and I think McKinsey have written about it as well. Will the Chief Learning Officer still sit within HR in 2030 or is there a case for it to report directly into the CEO?

Vidya Krishnan: I think one thing I am very proud of when it comes to being part of Ericsson is that we have always been rooted in our Swedish culture. We have been a very matrix company and I think in a matrix company, you don't have these notions that your organisational proximity from a particular role, even if it is the top role, that that distance has anything to do with your impact or your responsibility.

So it is not even a measurement that I think we consider about, oh, if we were closer in reporting we would have more impact. I don't think we think that way, I don't think that way, my team doesn't think that way. I think I like having learning and development be a part of the people function because, I say this as an engineer having engineered networks and having engineered digital systems, I love that my job means I get to engineer people experiences. What more meaningful place to call home base when it comes to engineering this most special experience of all, which is how do people create the capability to become their best selves and to become their next selves. And I think it just makes all kinds of sense to me that it lives as part of the people function that is responsible for creating people's stories and enabling them to bring their stories to life.

I don't see that as anything that diminishes our vitality or our importance and I don't think that moving us closer to any hierarchy, changes that. So that is my view.

David Green: I tend to agree with you, to be honest on that one. So, it will be interesting to see how it evolves.

I think what it shows when people are making those suggestions, it shows that learning is becoming more and more important and as you said, isn't this silo that is tucked away as part of HR. It is something that doesn’t just go across HR or the people function, it goes across the organisation as well.

Vidya Krishnan: Co ownership. There's a governance of shared ownership for what skills to build. It is no longer up to L&D to tell the company what skills to build, it is up to the company with L&D to decide together, what skills are we going to build.

David Green: I can't believe we come to the end of our conversation, but we have. So the last thing for me say is thank you. Thank you for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders podcast and also can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media, if you do social media?

Vidya Krishnan: Sure, sure, vidya.krishnan@ericsson.com.

I am on LinkedIn as well and welcome connecting with people who feel passionately as we do about the future of work, the future of technology and the future of learning.

David Green: Vidya thank you very much again, it has been great to talk to you today.

Vidya Krishnan: Same here. I am such a big fan of yours, it was such a pleasure and a privilege to be here discussing this stuff with you. So thank you.