What learning and development (L&D) platforms have you found effective?

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Learning and development (L&D) is platform agnostic because it depends on how good your L&D team is. At Pure Storage, they had a very good L&D team that took it seriously, whether you're in sales, engineering or any other function. I always say, if everyone owns it, no one owns it. But when you have a team that's dedicated to L&D, the platform becomes irrelevant because the content and engagement are both great. All those things are just multipliers on each other.

We're a smaller shop, so it's tough because there are so many things fighting for your attention nowadays. It's very different from two years ago. Now you get screen fatigue, so the last thing you want to do is watch a video or a whole lesson about how to do pivot tables in Excel. It’s not something I want to do, even during the middle of the day. That's the tough aspect to cross the chasm on. I enjoy learning the most in-person, where you have that human interaction. In that setting, you're learning from each other, but when you’re just watching a video telling you how to do things, it's harder. Concentration also becomes difficult because I get so passive when I see things on the screen now. I'll catch most of the content but I’ll also check my emails at the same time.

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Video has become the default choice for learning and development (L&D) because we're consuming it so much for basic aspects of our personal lives, including instruction. There are so many people who want to share what they've learned by creating content, which is admirable. People will do 40-minute videos on particular aspects of a technical area, which are often part of a series rather than one-off pieces. They take time out of their day to create this content for no personal benefit, financial or otherwise.

It’s been interesting to see these practitioners sharing their expertise. There's just more instructive content out there as a result of that, so it's inevitable that you'll land on something that’s helpful, even if that’s by accident. When you’re discussing an issue in a group, someone might share a related video they found helpful. Even if the others would never seek out that piece of content, they all get an opportunity to consume it and suddenly everyone’s gone into learning mode. That's been a very interesting phenomenon. It's not new, but the fact that we have these platforms has made it a lot easier to be able to create and share this content. People aren’t doing this just because they're an influencer; they do it because they’re a practitioner who wants to contribute to the community. The community aspect has been a big driver.

If you think about technical communities, the attendance for AWS re:Invent went up by several thousand every year. The majority of sessions held were by customers; it's good for them from a career development standpoint, but it's a lot of work. You have to go through some curated effort to be able to do it and you don't get real financial benefit out of it. But there has been a bit of a shift, or forcing function, driving people to do that. That's why L&D has to be platform agnostic, because it's ubiquitous in terms of the tooling that’s available to you.

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In K12, L&D is slightly different. We use different platforms for K-5 (classroom) and 6-12 (canvas). Both offer an organized delivery method that can be self-paced, interactive, teacher-guided or collaborative. The students, individual or teams, can then develop content derived from what they learned on the respective platforms.

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Docebo and Cornerstore are best for our purposes

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Whatfix, TalentLMS and iSpring suite

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We are using O'Reilly and LinkedIn online courses to fulfill L&D requirements of the organization. These are supplemented by Instructor led training , Virtual classroom trainings.

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there are many in the industry at present and it all started mostly with Coursera. It still is one of the best learning platform and others that are effective are Udemy, Educative, LinkendIn learning etc for professional and technical development of a person.

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We've had good results since investing in LinkedIn learning. Great platform.

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I am biased on this but I'm going to have to say Practera. The key differentiator is that rather than following your basic theory and test type model it allows your learners to gain actual real-world experience through project-based learning. There are always some skills that are best learned on the job but if you can do it in a structured way, and can show actual outcomes then you can validate that learning actually happened and specific skills were gained.
If you look at the way that double loop learning or the Kolb cycle of experiential learning work then you are much more likely to retain that learning long-term verses what a 2 or 3 day course might teach you.

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Currently there are many learning and development platforms.
Almost all the ones I have had the chance to use are very good and effective. They use AI in order to offer a more personalized content depending on the user's profile.
I personally had a very positive experience with some of them, such as:
LinkedIn Learning

Vodafone University
GoToWebinar

Avado
For me, it is important to have the will, because there are plenty of resources, and almost all of them are very effective.

What learning and development (L&D) platforms have you found effective?

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