Leverage Technology to Drive the Future of Learning

In a world where learning technology is exploding and new apps and solutions are launched daily the future of learning is evolving faster than ever.

During IQPC’s CLO Exchange, HR Exchange Network editor Mason Stevenson had an opportunity to sit down with Head of Learning Technology at Americas at Siemens, Casper Moerk.

Mason Stevenson: First question; what are some of the challenges that you are hearing from your peers in the learning space? Of course, these are challenges that transcend industry. How your peers are addressing those? What are the solutions that they're finding? 

Casper Moerk: Well, I think at the very, very highest levels, the key challenge that we're facing across all industries is an immense need for reskilling.  I think that is our primary challenge, as we look two, three, five, 10 years into the future. When we look at it, and try to analyze it, we notice that the need for training, learning, across industries is massive, going forward.

Mason Stevenson: That's the big world picture, let's go a little tighter now to Siemens specifically. What are some of the challenges and learning that you folks are dealing with? How are you trying to mitigate those challenges? 

Casper Moerk: Well, I think our strategy is really to try and leverage technology to drive the future of learning. So we have a lot of projects going on right now to rethink the way we're doing things, to rethink the experience that we want to give to our employees of how they interact with us as an organization, and how they really develop their skills to be ready for the future.

So we're investing massively in learning right now. Inside of Siemens, we're spending some money on new technologies, on moving from classroom training into more scalable E-learning solutions, we're trying to be smarter about how we spend our money.

Mason Stevenson: Give me a success story. What is something that you've had to get through? You came through on the other side, you can look back and you can say to yourself; we really did good business there, and we got something done.

Casper Moerk: I think for me, as a person who is in learning technology, one of the things I'm really happy to see is how we are leveraging content curation of digital content to really provide some good experiences for our employees. On a global level, we have of course, quite a few different topics that are really important to us right now. One of them is digitalization, like I said, that includes topics, like the future of work, and being more agile, like you said. We also have other topics that are really important; global collaboration is becoming increasingly important.

Mason Stevenson: How much feedback do you get from employees in terms of what you're doing in the learning space, and how does that feedback mold what you're doing? 

Casper Moerk: Well, we try to get as much feedback from our employees and our stakeholders as we can, as part of our daily work. We have very formal ways of gathering feedback about our learning solutions, like many others, we measure the impact, we have a good system in place for that.

Beyond that, we have a model, where our learning organization constantly is in touch with the business. So we have people in learning, who are assigned to a specific division, a specific unit, and are really charged with keeping an ear to the ground, and trying to figure out which way is this organization going, what do they need.

Mason Stevenson: Thank you for sitting down with me today.

Casper Moerk:  Thank you.

Casper Moerk is the Head of Learning Technology at Americas at Siemens.  He was a speaker at the Chief Learning Officer Exchange in February of 2019.  To learn more about the CLO Exchange, click here.