How to Evolve Training Operations to Empower Data-Driven Decision Making

Today's session will be Designing Data for A Fireside Chat. Here with John Peebles, CEO of Administrate, serving hundreds of organizations and millions of learners across the globe. Administrate enables training teams to organize, plan, deliver, automate, analyze, and scale enterprise training operations, all from one single system. Prior to Administrate, John helped found Fort Lauderdale based Century Data Systems, where he served as Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Operations, all while seeing the company grow to more than thirty million dollars in revenue within five years. He's passionate about education, teamwork, technology, and mental health in the workplace and often speaks in these subjects around the world.

So, John, welcome, and thanks for joining us on today's session. Thanks, Josh. It's great to be here. Although the fireside chat idea is seeming like a little less of a great idea because I'm out of Atlanta today and it is really hot, at least compared to Scotland where our company's headquartered and I normally operate out of. So maybe we'll just turn the fire down a little bit, but we'll I'm sure we'll have a great discussion. I feel like it's the AC side, Chad. I've got the, Central Air on blast up here in Connecticut. Thanks for thanks for joining us and really excited to jump into this. So so, John, you've been on our platform in various capacities, mainly with two episodes of our Joining HR Works, our podcast in the past. So I'd say you're almost a VIP at this point with the group.

But for those who are joining today who haven't had the chance to hear from you yet, I was hoping you could give a quick background on administrate and really the role your company is playing in the learning technology space today. Yeah, sure. I'm, really happy to be on the program because we get to talk about interesting topics that we're passionate about And the role that Administrate is trying to play for learning and training organizations today is really one that I wanted back when I was serving with my previous company. We were startup, We were tech startup. We were in health care, highly regulated environment. There was lots to learn. There was lots that we needed our team to learn, customers learn and partners to learn. And as we scale very rapidly, the whole infrastructure of our training and learning operation was stretched and then eventually broke down.

And it was a problem that plagued us and hampered our growth and hampered our ability to execute on business objectives. And so when I had the opportunity to look for something new, this unsolved problem of how do you scale training and how you effectively deliver training across a complex industry or maybe a complex environment, maybe there's many offices. A lot of the training that we did at the time was classroom based because it was very in-depth, very detailed training. Eighty percent of training today is still done in the classroom, although increasingly it's moving on to a hybrid approach and so forth. And these questions of how do you solve this are what administrate the platform today is really trying to address. So for us, our customers tend to be large multinationals, complex delivery environments, a lot of tech, a lot of different tools, and they've got businesses to run and to build and to grow or they've got challenges like the pandemic or the economy or so forth.

And we're really our goal is to help training teams be part of the solution to those challenges, be that infrastructure that they need to scale and deliver training. And then once they have that operational burden taken care of, be able to dive under the day to day mess and look at deeper trends and analytics that will really help them drive change and get results. Great. Thank you. So you mentioned really working with a lot of multinational companies, organizations and teams spread across different time zones, different regions, different states, countries, you name it. And that really falls in line with the shift we're seeing just globally and especially in the U. S. Market moving to a remote and hybrid work culture over the last eighteen months.

I mean, so many of us were office based and that was all we knew to where we're all everyone is remote and everyone is in a different position. So how are you seeing? And I guess how does learning technology help those companies adapt, when you're in so many different locations? I mean, we're even seeing companies come out and saying they're going to be fully distributed going forward and not have a home base, but still obviously onboarding, still obviously needing to train their companies. So how how can learning technology help those companies adapt and even grow and excel? I think it's a really good question. It's obviously something that a lot of people have been grappling with over the last twelve to eighteen months. I think there is a shift that's underway. I think if people, if you're like most people, our team, we have offices in the Middle East, in the UK, in Scotland and here in the US, and we have remote workers as well.

What we found is that people still need that or still desire that maybe one or two days in the office, but they prefer to do a lot of their job outside of the office. And increasingly, they want to do things like training outside of the office or from their home. And, you know, that's a problem when you look at the fact that a lot of the training that's still done today is classroom based training. And this isn't old, stodgy companies not refusing, kicking and screaming to go into the e learning world. A lot of the training that we see with customers is around things like how do you manufacture something? A lot of that needs to be hands on or at least have a classroom environment, even if it's a virtual lab or virtual classroom in order to get the value and the impact out of it. And so companies are needing to grapple with this.

What we have found is that as the workforce is increasingly distributed, a lot of times the modality of classroom versus e learning has not changed a whole lot, but the delivery mechanism might be changing. And what I mean by that is instead of classroom and seats and so forth and desks, you are in a virtual classroom or a virtual lab or so forth. That immediately brings huge operational challenges, you know, being able to get out all those invites and everything and keep everything organized and make sure you know who attended and so forth is a problem when you don't have tight integration around those tools. And there's also that kind of desire to experiment with new tools, because we've all been on Zoom now for twelve to eighteen months.

Maybe we want to try a new tool that can provide some sort of context or whatever that, would improve the learner experience. If you don't have a platform that allows you that flexibility, that's where we see folks struggle. So our kind of mantra remains the same, which is we really want to be infrastructure for training operations to allow them the freedom to experiment, to allow them the freedom to adapt when things like pandemics come up. Hopefully we don't see one of those again for a while, but you never know. And and if you don't have that freedom, it can be a very limiting thing, not only for the training team, but we believe that when the training team is limited, the business will ultimately be limited or the organization will be limited in its mission. Yeah, and you mentioned adaptability.

I mean, that's something I think we've all learned to, and grown with and become more adaptable and just more, flexible to change in the last eighteen months, but, still needing to onboard, still needing to bring teams into group and oftentimes bring them on faster because there is just this gap, this need to grow and often we're even seeing with the great resignation that a lot of employees are leaving their current roles. And we're also seeing that employers are now looking to fill, backfill and get back to speed quickly. So how have you seen the role of kind of data analysis and the role of the learning platforms really help, identify issues and conversely help companies keep their talent?

I think that's a big question, right, is what is what is making the top talented employers leave? What is increasing? What is causing talent churn? And how do you create an environment? It's kind of retain your top your top and best talent. For example, I mean, going back to your podcast, you mentioned Boston Whaler. I thought that was a great example of seeing seeing an identified problem, and being the solution. So I'd start to steal your example if that was the one you're going with, but that's correct. Was maybe gonna use an example from ourselves in somewhere where we failed, right? Because we're not perfect. And as much as we like to get on these things and present the image that everything is amazingly perfect at Administrate and with all of our customers all the time, it's just simply not true.

You know, we've been in a high growth phase for a long time as a startup and that's great. That's exciting and it's, it's fun. But it also means that we tend to experience challenges that are unique, maybe in terms of a lot of other businesses. But at some point, every business is gonna face the challenge. And like you said, the great resignation is putting huge pressure on employers to understand why are their employees maybe leaving? How do they replace that talent? How do they make sure it doesn't continue and so forth? And there have been periods of time in administrate where we were under high growth. We were bringing on great people and, you know, they were giving us high marks on our onboarding experience. You know, the training was really great and we get these ten out of tens on surveys and they get all the way through the program and they might even do it very quickly.

And we'd ask them open ended questions, you know, what would you have done to improve all this stuff? And yet they wouldn't stay for longer than maybe a few months in some cases when when it was really not going very well for us. And I think that is probably a scenario that is similar to what some of us are facing the great resignation. And it's a really good kind of example of how our surface metrics that we tend to focus on with, in learning and development, at least on the first level, don't always tell us the full story. And I kind of going back to talking about, you know, sports. We were talking about sports before we even got the program started here. Those are your baseball card metrics, right? What's the batting average and you know, etcetera, etcetera.

What we found was that when we then tied the learner, not only the performance that they had in the onboarding and the training, but we then factored in or layered in their job performance using metrics from whatever job they were doing. If they're an engineer, how many bugs are they fixing? How much code were they checking in? If they were in customer support, how many tickets were they closing? What were the ratings? That then gave us a more holistic view, which is everybody was saying the training was great. Everybody was giving it a high marks. Nobody had any ideas for improvement. But then they get into the real world of doing their jobs and they wouldn't be able to do them very well and they would struggle. And usually that wasn't their fault. That was a training problem. And so we could analyze those areas, invest in those areas, and that would prevent this problem from spreading or continuing.

And it's that example of linking in training data that we all know and love to actual business performance or employee performance data and marrying them together. That gives you the idea of right, this guy's baseball card is selling, you know, such and such a stat. How does he play well with the others on his team? You know, how's the team doing? How's the season going? Stuff like that. And that's where we get really passionate, because that's where traditional learning products tend to break down. Linking into the business and linking into those other systems tend to be very difficult means spreadsheets. It means, you know, munching tooth spreadsheets, three spreadsheets together. And and that's the part of the equation that is often missing that we think is really important for most leaders in this industry to focus on.

Wow. Okay. Yeah, we all need more spreadsheets, right? Mean, that's endless no one ever spreadsheets. No, but I mean, you touched on something really great, too. I think it's identifying pain points and where employees may be getting burned out, too. I think that's been a big driver to the resignation is and going inside those numbers seems like you have an opportunity to find, okay, where is that burnout point? Where is the pain point that that we're losing so much? I think that's crucial. And I think the the real tragedy for me with burnout is you're more susceptible to burnout when you think things aren't going well. That's true for me. That's true for I think anyone, you know, when when deals are coming in and the teams are having success and you're playing really hard and you're fighting the good fight and stuff's going well, you don't tend to see burnout as much.

I mean, we still will see it, but it's you're not as susceptible that I think when when things are hard, when change is happening, when there's a global pandemic with maybe no end in sight at some at some points over the last year, that's where we're more susceptible to burnout. And that's where as leadership we need to dig in and say, you know what, where is where are there good stories, in in these numbers? Where are good things happening and reinforce those and, and draw people's attention back to them? You know, I think like a lot of folks, at Administrate, you know, we had our commercial teams, right? A lot of spending, a lot of buying was frozen right at the early stages of the pandemic. And you have teams that are doing all the right things that they've been doing for years and know will work and then they're not working.

And that is a very difficult challenge to manage. And we succeed in some areas and we weren't successful in others. But it's being able to, have that data as a base layer, then apply other areas on top of that, maybe the business performance metrics or whatever past performance metrics. Very interesting to keep people's minds fixed on. Okay, it's not working right now when nobody's spending any money, but it did work twelve months ago and everybody was. That's the next level. And then the last bit is just, you know, re centering and focusing on the things that are going well. And I think that can be really transformative. Completely agree. So so you mentioned metrics and going to the baseball analogy.

I know on our podcast, which again, I recommend anyone who's who's watching here today, go back and listen. Their episodes got them up jot down episodes one hundred twenty five and one hundred twenty seven of HR works. Really great listens with John joining, joining our team to have some great conversations here. But you mentioned Moneyball in the podcast, and I wanted to make sure we circle back. This is a great time to do that. Getting inside the numbers, right? So Moneyball, Michael Lewis, book from early 2000s focused on the two thousand and two Oakland Athletics and how Billy being their general manager got inside of the team and decided to look at numbers, right, go beyond just the back of the baseball card numbers and look at, okay, are there other metrics we're missing?

Sabre metric, are there other things? What's making a good team? What makes in a situation this this is a valuable player who's overlooked otherwise? So to that point, are there any metrics that companies should be looking at that will tip them off to, okay, this may actually be a top performing player, or top performing talent to the organization? And conversely, are there any metrics that could kind of flag flag issues or are being overlooked that that should be focused on. Yeah, I love I love this topic. It's a great film. I think it's an even better book. And there's an amazing article. I think it was written The Atlantic about Shane Baty with the NBA. So if basketball is your cup of tea and not baseball or rounders, as we would say in the UK, you know, check those out.

I think when I first started thinking about this, you know, the idea of stats and analysis and business intelligence, it's, it's all super interesting. And for most of my life, bringing it back to sports, I followed just really awful sports teams, you know, so I'm very passionate about very bad sports teams. And you sit there as an armchair coach and you think, yeah, if there's just these one or two analytical things that we could think of and you know, we could figure this out and crack this crack this nut, then all of a sudden everything would be would be easy and that's it. And so you kind of get this idea when you think about maybe a of There's just some hidden thing that nobody's ever thought of, that if we could just get that, it would crack it and away we would go.

And I think what I've come to the realization over the last ten years of being in this industry is actually every learning leader that I've ever talked to knows all of this, whether it's intuitive or, whether they're talking about it. But they know what they really should be looking at and their businesses know what they should be looking at. You know, these businesses, they're manufacturing, they know the metrics of their assembly lines and their error rates and defects and all that type of thing. If they're a software company, they know stuff like their churn, the renewals and their margin and all this stuff. And so everybody knows this stuff and everybody wants to look at these numbers. But the problem is, is being able to take the business numbers that they know are important and marry them up against learner performance and the things that the training team are doing in a quick, intuitive, iterative way.

That's where it falls down. And it's nobody's fault, right? Because, we have been conditioned to buying learning products that are very student specific and focused. We've been conditioned to buying products that are kind of features, you know, things like zoom. That's a feature product, right? We need to make a video call and there has not been investments and a lot of time and attention put towards where is a spot that we can put all of this data into from all of the different wonderful tools that we want to use and that we are using so that we can then quickly marry up this data together. And so I think it's a problem of execution and not a problem of imagination. I think it's a problem of we've been prevented from doing this as leaders and leadership.

It's not a problem of we don't know what to do. And that's both a liberating idea and also very tragic one. And that's one of the things that we're trying to solve at administrators. Give that platform to folks so that they can do this much more easily and do the things they already know. Because back to your original question, you're going to know what what you're what's important to your business. I so rarely walk into a company and they're like, yeah, we just don't know what's important for us. It's more about how do you translate what the goal of the business is in Boston Whalers cases was they wanted to double manufacturing output within the next eighteen months, and that meant a whole bunch of downstream stuff had to happen. They had to hire a bunch of people. They had to make sure that their quality stayed consistent or improved, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And being able to get that baked into the learning and training operation, have that team be on the forefront of that change was was really transformative and very satisfying to see.

Yeah, thanks for that, John. Yeah, I mean, just looking at and I'm glad you brought kind of the boardroom into this. Are we seeing more CLOs and business leaders, using learning analytics to address problems or identifying an opportunity and say, Okay, how do we get inside these numbers to to go to go in that direction? Right? Is like it's a bit of chicken and the egg, but is it is the problem that drives the solution or is it more of an end goal that that using using learning analytics as a tool? You know, I think it's an exciting time for us as an industry. If you rewind, I don't know, I'm dating myself here ten fifteen years, there was no such thing as marketing automation software, right?

And marketing was this black hole that CEOs and companies would dump huge amounts of money into, and maybe you'd get a graph back and maybe sales would go up. And there might be an argument between the sales leader and the marketing leader as to whose responsibility that was for the for the success. And, you know, there definitely be an argument as to who was responsible for any failures there. And then all of a sudden, marketing automation software appeared and it solves problems and it does a lot of wonderful things. But in my view, the reason why it was so successful is because it provided that focal point for marketing tech to get to begin building against. And now marketing leadership had a system where they could generate reports. They could track what they were doing in much more meaningful ways.

Now, I think that transformation that already happened in marketing is the same road map or game plan that we're going to see happen in learning tech. And there are definitely people that are starting to think about this. A few years ago, it was like screaming into the void that this was important, for us at Administrate. You know, we believe that this was a thesis that we had tested with a number of multinationals. We had some great case studies, but there's just widespread skepticism of, well, we've got our four or five LMSs and three of them came through acquisition and all this stuff. We've made these investments and they haven't really panned out in some of the ways that we're talking about today. They've been very successful in other areas. And so what we're starting to see is that based on, you know, the some of the stuff that we've done, but I think on just the every day that goes by is another day where every team in most organizations has this platform and learning teams and training teams don't.

And it's starting to dawn on people that this is a gap and it needs to be filled. And we've been dumping huge sums of money into L and D and not being able to see a whole lot for it, or it's very difficult to evidence that. Obviously, teams can can provide that, but it's just difficult. And so I think over the next five to ten years, there's going to be a renewed interest in where is our infrastructure? Where is our platform that can be an analog to what sales teams, marketing teams, production teams, manufacturing teams have had for a long time. That's great insight, right? It's taking a look at kind of what's around you and seeing that opportunity and applying it into into the learning market. And it's it's really smart. So we did get one question as what the five minute mark.

I'll stay true to my word here and check-in on our Q and A's. So it looks like we got one from Ross Sellers. I'll read this verbatim or as best as I can. It's interesting to think about learning tech as more than just a financial or training investment, but also as a change management investment. Can you speak more to that?

It's a really good question, and I think it's kind of at the heart of what we've been talking about when we feel like this is working is when we have a customer or, you know, I'm not trying to sell anything here. When we we see a situation where there's an organization that says we've got to make a huge change. An example of this is a was a customer of ours is a customer of ours, a Canadian company. They were a manufacturer of medical devices and simulators and so forth. The pandemic hits and they're asked by the Canadian government to build out, you know, thousands and thousands of ventilators in the early days of the pandemic, and they start doing that. But before they started doing that, there was a decision point and it was, can we actually do this?

And the manufacturing folks are like, yeah, of course we can do this. We know how to build something and we build aircraft in another division of our company and that's no problem, right? And they were like, no, no, no, no. These ventilators will require training and we're gonna have to train a lot of people and we're gonna have to get the training done in days or weeks. And this is going to be a huge that's the problem. It's not the construction, the design, the manufacturing of the thing, it's the delivering the training at scale. And the training team said, yeah, we can do it. It's no problem. We've got the infrastructure. We made the investment. We didn't know we would need it for this, but we made an investment. And that confidence meant that they were then on the forefront of this business initiative. They were on the forefront of this objective, and I think that was a sea change for that team within that organization, because now they are one of the first people that get one of the first groups that gets called when there's a new thing that's, being batted about and potentially contemplated.

And that's kind of for us, that's evidence that it's working and that, we're on the right path because we need to have that flexibility and training cannot just be this afterthought bolt on thing. Otherwise, you'll rewind back to where I was ten-fifteen years ago. We're growing quickly and we've got the brakes on because we can't train our people, whether it's partners, customers, our own employees quickly enough, effectively enough. So that's just kind of, I think, a different way to think about it, hopefully, in terms of the importance of training within any organization. Right. When you know you've got a rock solid training program, these opportunities that obviously will need training and onboarding, it's not an overnight just flip of the switch.

When you know you can do that, swiftly and still keep moving forward, that just enables the business as a whole to make those more aggressive decisions to stay relevant, stay kind of in front of competition, which ultimately is the end goal. All right. So, John, we are right about time. So unfortunately, we're going have to wrap this up here. But I do want to just you especially for coming on today and just sharing so much great information, in this short time, but also thanking our sponsor, Administrate.