Ep18 - What Happens to Learning When AI Changes Everything with Wanda Shoer

Okay.

So one of the things I find interesting, Wanda, is maybe a decade ago within the pharmaceutical industry, there were not, or the CLO title barely existed.

Why do you think it's emerging now?

I think it's really important now, and I, I, uh, when I was thinking about, um, you know, the, the CLO role g- two and a, two and a half years ago when I was coming into this role, it was, um, just the timing with, with so many changes happening, whether it's AI or just structural changes in the industry or, you know, just things moving so much faster than they had in, you know, in, in, you know, maybe a decade or, or, or even two decades ago.

It just is a time where people really need the support, and there, there's just a need to invest more in making sure that people are able to learn at the speed that is required.

And, um, the, the learning function is also changing.

We need to evolve the learning function as well.

But it becomes even more important when you're needing to, you know, reskill on new ways of working, where, you know, you have an organization, you know, that is, um, you know, built upon the knowledge and expertise that got us here, and then all of a sudden there's a lot of changes and a lot of things that need to be done differently because everything around us is changing.

The, you know, you can't possibly hire at the same speed that you need to produce, so you need to really invest in reskilling and, and upskilling the organization to be able to accommodate all of those, the newness of, of what's happening.

Yeah, one of the things that I found interesting working in big pharma are the number of training teams and training departments, and how often some of the information content vendors that you use seem to be redundant in, in a lot of cases, and then the complexity of some of the challenges that exist now are, are, are quite different than they were even 10 years ago.

ago.Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think one of the things that we were doing, um, in the, in the role that I'm in, is looking at the learning operating model and, uh, trying to build a learning organization that's really truly supporting the business.

And, uh, that's, that's one of the, you know, that was one of the drivers is, you know, you have a lot of overlap when, when, when the learning organization is fragmented across many, many businesses, you, you find, um, overlap and maybe even utilizing similar vendors and similar content to try to drive, you know, a slightly different maybe, you know, a, a 10% different or even a 20% difference in the content.

Um, but there could be a better way to do that, it, that is more, um, you know, connected.

And, um, and so, so some of the things that we've been doing is really looking at our portfolio of learning and seeing where can we work together, where do we need to do things differently because that is what w- what is required, and where can we, you know, have some synergies so that we're not doing sort of this redundancy, uh, you know, type of, uh, t- type of thing.

So, um, really proud of the team that I work with and, um, the, the effort that they've done to, to connect the dots and to really work together and collaborate.

I mean, we, we have, uh, learning, uh, teams that sit, um, and support the digital organization, working with the learning team that supports our medical organization and R&D to build out AI training that con- has some of the, you know, the, the concepts that we're trying to upskill from an enterprise perspective embedded in, in what we really need for R&D and medical.

So, so I, I think that, um, you know, the, the, the organization that we have really supports that connectivity and the, you know, being more efficient with our resources and, um, and also really looking at our suppliers and saying, you know, "How can you help us partner better?" Um, so that we're not creating, you know, fragmentation, you know, w- without intending to do that.

It makes perfect sense.

It seems like the best way to be able to pull everybody together.

I remember earlier in my training career working with one organization, we competed or put in a, a, a proposal for the Training Magazine Top 100, and it was interesting because it was the one way we were able to see what a lot of the other training teams were doing across the organization.

It gave us an opportunity to be able to share tools, different types of resources.

Uh, this makes more sense bringing, bringing in a chief learning officer that has an opportunity to pull all of those threads together to make a, a pretty dynamic organization, training organization, and be able to support all of the, the needs o- of, of the organization.

Yeah.

I mean, and you, you get s- you gain so much from it.