Filtered

Filtered has a long, intimate relationship with content, creating our own through to Content Intelligence vs Content Chaos. We have many battle scars, shortcuts & tips to share. Read through the full list by Marc Zao-Sanders in more detail here ⤵️ https://lnkd.in/eyuM2DsG

if you really know your content in terms of your skills, you can build pathways with data, at speed and at scale. so if you're a pathway-builder at all, have a read of this...

Curation before using Filtered: ❌ Time-consuming curation: pathways took over 3 hours to create. ❌ Resource strain: multiple SMEs involved, pulling focus from core tasks. ❌ Inconsistent quality: each SME's niche perspective impacted content balance. Curation after using Filtered: ✅ 83% faster curation: reduced from 3 hours to just 30 minutes, allowing them to produce content 6x faster. ✅ Streamlined process: one person curates, SMEs review — no more duplication of effort. ✅ Higher productivity: 220 pathways created, meeting growing demand for tailored learning. ✅ Strategic focus: key team members now have more time for project and stakeholder management.

11 lessons learned from 15 years of working on discovery in L&D. Please ask more / discuss / debate in the comments. Much of the value of these posts emerges that way. One left to do of these: skills. 1. Discovery is an issue because of the stupefying abundance of content. We created this Learning Panorama graphic back in 2017. We now call the problem Content Chaos. It’s only grown in the last 7 years. 2. Simple definition: discovery is the process through which employees or learners efficiently find, access, and engage with relevant learning content & experiences that support their skills development, job performance & career growth. 3. It’s not easy to measure. Possibilities: Search success rate Time to start learning Usage of assets Usage of suggested assets Feedback surveys Pathway adoption Number of complaints from senior stakeholders What else? 4. The two most common complaints: 1) we can’t find anything 2) There are far too many results (project management often cited here). A different set of problems lurk behind each! 5. Many types of solutions/features can improve discovery: search, filters, sorts, browse, pathways, recommendations. You won’t need them all. But it's worth being aware of them all, and their weaknesses/strengths. 6. There’s a pull-push spectrum with these, from greatest user intention (eg search, where there’s an explicit term in mind) to least (eg recommendations, where the user may have no learning intention at all). 7. A framework for thinking about discovery, from Rosemary Hoskins, and published in CLO magazine will be in the comments. That framework makes the point that discovery starts at source — having the right materials in the first place — and then gets to the signposting (tagging, pathways, personalised recommendations) that happens downstream 8. Learning pathways help lift out special, fit-for-a-particular-purpose assets, from the sea of content to give them a prominence to certain audiences. Done well, they inspire and move careers forward. Done badly, they just contribute to #ContentChaos. 9. The most popular search terms are very similar at most companies. Agile, Excel, Project management, time management and Excel almost always make the top 10. Note that the top-10 searches account for ~30% of all searches. So make the search results for your top-10 very good. 10. AI has a role to play in discovery. Obviously we think that and know that! But it can’t do everything. Even with all the recently developments, AI won’t fully grasp the business context, nor all the specific needs and curiosities of individuals. Use AI for what it’s good at but humans are still required for the last mile. 11. Talking of which, senior leaders & managers also have a role in improving discovery. Senior people should lead by example and talk openly about what they’ve learnt & how it’s been useful for them. Managers need to be on the look-out useful learning content for the people in their teams.

Have you got...? This new release from one of my fave black metal bands made me think of our recent announcement of a new pathway auditing service 🤘 https://lnkd.in/e4S3Mtyh Inferior pathways? Work with us to find and annihilate them like a true medieval tyrant.

🚀 Struggling with Pathway Chaos? Introducing our new Pathway Auditing Service, designed to help organisations cut through the clutter and focus on the learning paths that truly matter. With advanced data analysis and best-in-class skills tagging, we streamline your learning systems, aligning them with your most critical skills. Say goodbye to outdated, redundant learning paths, and hello to a 'less is more', focused, impactful learning experience. Ready to optimise your pathways? Let’s chat! 👇 https://lnkd.in/eNqT25a8 #LearningAndDevelopment #SkillsDevelopment #PathwayChaos #ContentChaos

The third element in this Lessons Learned series is DATA. Eight hard-won lessons this time. One major, overriding observation/lesson is that many people aren’t very comfortable gathering, using, and presenting data. Just 11% of people are fully confident in their data literacy. The story is the same in L&D. 61% of L&D professionals are only capable of basic analysis. And 13% of L&D leaders don’t even analyse the data they collect. Everyone can do better. So many of the insights here are about data skills gaps, along with a quick go at closing them. I’m posting each lesson as comments here so people can reply to the specific item they’d like to address. There are two more to come in this series: skills and discovery. Please REPOST ♻️ if people in your network could benefit from these insights. #learning #data #learningdata

🚀 New blog: Unlocking the power of Filtered Analytics We're transforming how you execute your skills strategy through powerful data-driven insights. Our platform is designed to help you align your content library with your skills framework, unlocking targeted learning plans that deliver real value for your learners. Here’s how: 🔍 Insightful content analysis Quickly pinpoint the content that serves specific use cases and ensure comprehensive coverage for your needs. 🎯 AI-Assisted curation & pathway insights Review and curate content 25x faster with AI-driven tools to strengthen skill coverage across all pathways. 📊 Broad overview + granular insights Get a full content library overview, spot gaps, eliminate overlap, and free up your budget for high-priority content needs. Ready to see how Filtered Analytics can optimise your learning strategy? Book a demo with us today and unlock the full potential of your content library! 👇 https://lnkd.in/eNqT25a8 #skills #learningpathways #contentchaos #learninganddevelopment

Continuing the lessons-learned theme, this time on CONTENT. Filtered has a long, intimate relationship with content, creating our own through to Content Intelligence vs #ContentChaos. We have many battle scars, shortcuts & tips to share. Hope this is useful to you. These posts are more valuable when readers share their own questions, experiences, objections etc so...please do! (LinkedIn's 3k-character limit means I'll have to add items 10-17 in the comments.) 1. Ugly duckling. Content gets relatively little attention from HR and L&D. The side of skills that gets the attention is talent. And yet, a) it’s a $100 billion industry, and b) the world just went crazy about content, thanks to GenAI. 2. Categories. It may be helpful to split the providers into categories, such as: General-purpose: Skillsoft, LinkedIn Learning, HBR Format-specific: getAbstract, TED Marketplaces: Udemy Aggregators: Go1, OpenSesame MOOCs: FutureLearn, edX, Coursera, Udacity Specialists: Pluralsight Web Internal (Subject Matter Expert Generated) Internal (User-Generated Content) We talk to clients about three buckets: libraries, internal, and web. They’ve found this helpful and tend to adopt these larger categories. 3. Too generic. The #1 complaint about content is that it’s too generic to be helpful. 4. Big libraries. The main libraries are (deliberately unordered): O'Reilly, Udemy, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, Pluralsight, edX, HBP, TED@Work, Go1, OpenSesame, Cegos, Udacity, and GetAbstract. But having given them all an advertisement, we should say that topic-wise, there’s huge overlap among these, and some (not all) are very expensive. 5. Skillsoft & LinkedIn Learning. For large companies, the fastest way to reduce costs is to determine the overlap between two large providers and pick one. We often see this come down to Skillsoft vs. LinkedIn. 6. Niche providers. You can only really go for these if/when you KNOW you’ve got all the main skill bases covered. Do that first with a larger library, then start shopping like an artisan. There’s more love and care among some of these. 7. Vendor selection. You’re not looking for the vendor with the best fit for your skills. You’re looking for the best combination of vendors to give you the skills and topics coverage you need. 8. Costs. The range between providers is huge. The per-license cost between small and large is huge. The difference between pre-negotiated and hard-negotiated rates is huge. 9. Metrics. Easy metrics for assessing content include language, duration, publication date, format, etc. The two most talked about are relevance and quality. Relevance, which is essential and our focus, is greatly desired and hotly debated. There are also several interesting but mostly overlooked factors: industry, business function, durability, gender-related content, creator ethnicity, depth, geography, controversy, current affairs. DM me for an elaboration on any of these.

Is the tagging of learning content a part of your job? Would you like to understand it better? Here’s 15 years of experience distilled into a single post. 🏷️ Tagging is the most popular term for explicitly associating a piece of content with certain topics. Next most popular terms (in order): mapping, indexing, classifying, categorising. We take these to be straight synonyms unless otherwise stated. Indexing seems to be the most persuasive in internal business cases! ❓ What’s the point of tagging? To improve discovery, sure. But how? Is it when a user searches for precisely that term? Yes! Or will it help with other search queries too? Yes, it should. Will it help curation? Will it help with end-user personalization? Will it help curators curate better or faster? Yes to all. Think of it this way: Without a doubt, there are treasures at the bottom of the ocean of your learning systems/repositories (though they may be interspersed with great volumes of detritus). Tagging is one of the ways to surface them so they can do some good for your people. Ask yourself these two related questions too: ↳ How much will it improve discovery? ↳ Do you have a measure for the efficacy of your discovery? 🔤 Title + description are collectively sufficient to accurately tag in most cases. Of course, both will need to be reasonably representative of the full learning content. 🧠 In L&D, we're very unimaginative with tags. We usually tag content with a skill. But what about whether it’s instructive/informative/inspiring? Or whether it’s perishable or evergreen? Or whether it will work well for teams? Or whether it’s controversial in some way? (Put your name in the comments if you’d like the full list of 20.) 🔍 Ultimately, great search can bypass rigid tags. If search starts to work better, user behaviour starts to change—people will chance more adventurous, obscure search terms. Your learning system should learn from this and improve. Users will engage even more. Your discovery flywheel starts to fly. 🔢 Ranked scoring can also beat tags. Tags say that a piece of content is *about* active listening, DEI, leadership, etc, or that it is *not*. The world and learning content are more complex than that. Scores enable a learner or L&D practitioner to go through a list of content, in order, from top to bottom, to decide how to treat it. This prioritisation matters. 🤔Sense-making is an underrated skill and an under-applied tag. 🤷 Sometimes, improving your tags won’t improve discovery. If your learning system can’t accommodate enhanced tags into its UX and search results, you may have perfect tags yet not helped a single user! 💯 Your / your org's tags are 100% more important than those of any vendor. 🤯 This may require a double-take, but try this. Tagging attaches skills to content. Curation attaches content to skills. 4️⃣ And there were 4 additional lessons about tagging from the previous post in this series (link in Comments).