🎙️Building community-driven learning experiences | Alex Khurgin, Co-Founder, People Hat and Global Head of L&D, Vontier

Part of our weekly L&D Interview Series. We chat with some of the top voices in People Ops and talent development to understand what learning looks like today.

Introducing Alex Khurgin, Global Head of Learning and Development at Vontier. With over 17 years of experience in L&D, Alex has led learning design and innovation at learning start-ups like Knewton and Hone. From micro-learning videos and on-demand learning to online test preparation to building virtual classroom communities, Alex continues to push the boundaries of traditional learning methodologies. Currently, as the Global Head of Learning and Development at Vontier, Alex creates learning architecture and processes for empowering transformational change. 

Driven by a passion for innovation and a commitment to delivering impactful learning solutions, Alex also co-founded The Action Company, a behavior change and learning design consultancy. Through this venture, he’s collaborated with Fortune 200 organizations, including Capgemini, IBM, Better, Braze, and Casper, to design learning experiences that drive action, change behaviors, and build new habits. If you have a learning experience question, go to Alex!

Read more to learn more about: 

• How Alex's start tutoring and teaching at Kaplan led him to his position at Hone, a live virtual training platform for managers and leaders.

• Why it’s important to stay away from mandates and instead focus on motivating people 

• Why training programs should be thought of as a product that can be integrated into people’s lives 

• The importance of embracing AI technology and why it’s L&D’s duty to pay attention to how it can help your organization 

• How developing global training programs based on learning styles is inefficient, instead focusing on content or skill is much more important 

• Why human interaction vs AI interactions are so precious and will continue to become even more important in the future 

• How highly collaborative classes can be extremely rewarding and build up teams within organizations 

Hi Alex! So excited to chat with you today! First off, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. Tell us how you got started in L&D!

I've been in L&D for about 17 years. I actually got my start teaching LSAT and GMAT when I was in college through Kaplan and then right when I graduated, I started working at an adaptive learning startup, which was one of the first online test prep providers called Newton.

Newton eventually evolved into adaptive learning for math, and we were running the college math program at Arizona State University. 

I later moved on to a new company called Grovo, which was a microlearning provider who made really short videos at the moment of need. I was the director of learning innovation for about seven years, creating microlearning videos. And then Grovo was bought by Cornerstone. 

After that, I had my own L&D consultancy for a couple of years with my wife, who's a graphic designer.

One of our customers was actually Hone and the working relationship was really great. And eventually I came on full time at Hone. So that was almost four years ago at this point. 

At Hone, we do live virtual classroom training through Zoom which is something that a lot of people have started to do over the pandemic. It's been really rewarding to see that people have had a really great experience in those classes, especially if you give people a chance to talk and practice together in breakout rooms. 

People seem to really like doing that more so than listening to somebody lecture, even thought that part is just as important as well.  I've been an EdTech lifer for my career so far.

What do you think is the most challenging part when it comes to training leaders?

Every group you mentioned, they're all people. Across all groups of people the aim of L&D training is to motivate your teams. 

A lot of the time, L&D people don't feel comfortable mandating training because they're either not that confident in the effectiveness of the training or they believe that they're trading off against everything else those people could be doing with their time and energy instead of training. 

That is like the typical executive's perspective on training like, "Ok, this is fine, but we're taking everybody off of their work tasks to go and do the learning experience."

And what's the ROI of this? And how does this compare to what everyone else is doing? 

Another issue is people don't like telling people what to do and people don't like being told what to do, right? And so we generally, in L&D we tend to shy away from mandates, and instead, we tend to coax people. We try to convince them or persuade them of the importance of upscaling in a certain area. 

Once people are motivated, you actually need to capture their attention. You need to teach them something. You need to support them in applying it. You need to give them feedback and track progress. Every single one of these things is hard in itself, but they're all meaningless unless you get people motivated first. 

For example, if you're designing training for a manager, and most managers are expected to be creatures of habit once they're already in their work, they're focused on their work. And you're like, "Hey, I want you to go in for training to be a better coach."  

That manager internally may think, "I have other things to do, or I'm already a pretty good coach, or the end of the quarter is coming up and I have to focus on completing this project or making sure my team does."

Now, imagine instead of that kind of paradigm where you're trying to coax someone into upskilling, you just place that training right before the organization's annual performance review period. 

So if you want to get someone to become a better coach, it now makes a little bit more sense because performance reviews are stressful for everyone, including the manager. If you can help them prepare for that conversation by honing their coaching skills first, they're going to feel more comfortable. 

So now that training meets an actual need that comes with intrinsic motivation for the learner. 

An even better method would be: as soon as you promote somebody to become a manager or as soon as they join your organization, you tell them how important coaching is to your culture and then you get them to start the training then. This way you can spend way less of your energy coaxing and persuading down the line and way more time worrying about all the other hard problems, like actually training people, capturing their attention, supporting them. 

I've heard a lot about L&D as a product function, only the product is for employees. What do you think about this?

Yes! Let me explain: Think of your training as a product, and you want to market it in a particular way.

Think about the product and the user experience with it: what do users actually care about? What are their lives like? What actions are they performing in their day to day lives? And how can we make a product that fits into their life rather than trying to convince them to do something that they're not already doing?  

I do think product perspective is definitely helpful.

Any trends that you're noticing in L&D and talent development?

Yes for sure! I think AI is like the most interesting topic in the world. Everybody's hopes and fears are kind of wrapped up into this one issue.

I'm currently doing some training for Hone members around using AI tools to do better work and I've been thinking about how people approach AI can be categorized in several groups.

There are people who are the kind of quiet superheroes, who are off on their own using multiple different AI tools to become more efficient than they used to be. And they're happy letting others think that it's all them.

Another group of people are people who started using AI tools like, "Wow, this is amazing. I'm going to literally tell everyone else at the company about it."

There are other people who realize that they can't actually use AI freely in the organization, due to concerns about customer privacy and intellectual property so they might be prodding IT to get their organization set up.

Then we have people who are skeptics or naysayers who just don't believe in the technology or don't like it for various reasons. 

You could argue that it's within the purview of L&D's role or HR's role to pay attention to which people in the organization are using AI productively. Those are the people we need to bring on board and develop a trusting relationship with. 

It might be easy to look at AI and say, "Okay, this is a great way to automate a lot of work and reduce our expenses and potentially let some people go." But the L&D perspective is more like, “ This technology allows people to become more capable, serve customers better, create more value for the organization.” 

I think that perspective is just more helpful for society, even though the first one is really tempting. L&D should be part of the vanguard leading the charge on a more pro-human plus AI capability perspective. 

How do you adapt learning content to globally distributed teams with different learning styles and preferences?

It's very common for L&D people to dunk on the idea of learning styles for a good reason. There's not very strong evidence that people have distinct learning styles.

Instead we should focus on whatever content or skill you want somebody to learn

to determine the modality. Be honest about what exactly you expect somebody to learn and what skills you expect somebody to build up. And then identify, based on expert testimony, what it really takes to develop those skills.

If we do DI training with people in the US versus people in India or Japan or Poland, the case studies are just going to be different. You may have different kinds of biases that are more likely to pop up in certain cultures. 

If you're the designer or if you're purchasing a program, you really need to do your due diligence about identifying what are the actual issues or challenges that people have with a particular skill.

Then I think that really is going to color the programs that you create. Be sure to also consider people's lives and time. If you have a global team, it's unfair to expect people in one country or in one office to be learning at a time that's really inconvenient for them or when they're really tired. Just being fair in that respect is also really important. 

Do you have a favorite program or initiative that you’ve run in your career and why does it stand out to you?

I'm really proud and lucky to have been a part of three tech startups and have seen them grow from a handful of people to become major players in the space.

I do think that the work we're doing at Hone, building highly collaborative live classes, is super rewarding. People come away from each class chatting and learning with other like-minded people who have similar goals and are working through similar challenges. It doesn't create magic every time, but a lot of the time it does.

That kind of interaction is going to become more and more precious as we move quickly into a world that's mediated by AI, which is another kind of magic. The intense focus on only AI interactions can sometimes come at the expense of time focused on other human interactions.

I think in the future, human interaction is going to become more precious and more of a science.  For example, we can get people all together in a room but what are we going to do with that time? I think we're going to spend less of that time, at least at work, together and more time mediated by AI.

We hear a lot about continuous learning, Alex. What does that actually look like in real life? How do you create a continuous learning environment? 

Focusing on a person’s needs is a pretty continuous phenomenon. If you were to ask somebody, "What do you need to do today?" You're not going to get a weird look.

But if you ask someone, "What's your goal for today?" You would get maybe a confused look or an anxious silence or maybe a guilty pause. I think the reason for that is people have goals for the long-term. But in general, we're all operating on the timeline of needs, which have an urgency to them. Sometimes those needs are going to match up perfectly with some learning experience.

Let me give you some examples. Let’s say you're going into an interview for the first time in a long time, or you need to delegate a bunch of work and you don't feel comfortable doing it, or you have to present to the executive team; you’re going to feel nervous.

Sometimes those needs sneak up on us and other times they're more foreseeable and we have weeks or months to address them.  

When you tie learning into those needs, which are continuous, you get continuous learning.  Learning is not a neutral thing. It's actually actively interfering with the needs people already have. 

I have to do this training on X, but I need to do Y right now. I need to be thinking about Y and devoting my energy to Y. So why are you trying to train me on X? There's an interference there. 

But if you're providing training on Y when somebody needs to do Y there is perfect synergy and you don't have to worry about motivating people because the intrinsic motivation is going to be already there. You will have this natural, continuous thing to ride because the needs are always going to be there. 

And you can always just put learning experiences at those moments of need. 

You could call this method provocative, but I would say that if you don't do it this way that you're actively harming somebody's productivity.

Thanks for reading Yen's Newsletter.

I’m Yen, co-founder at Kona. My goal is to help every manager be a great leader. You might be managing a team yourself, or supporting better managers at your organization. Hopefully, this newsletter helps you look at the ever-changing landscape of leadership in a new way.

Since late 2019, I’ve interviewed 1500+ remote managers, People Ops leaders, and tech executives to learn how they lead teams and design incredible distributed company cultures. While every company’s different, everyone’s trying to answer the same big question: “How do you enable amazing people to do amazing work, while remote?”

That’s the great thing about big questions, they bring people together. Learning is sharing, and I’ve always looked to share everything we know as soon as we learn it. That's the goal for this newsletter: capture and synthesize all of our remote management learnings in a neat and shareable archive.

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