An inspirational life journey in tech: Donald H. Taylor: chair of Emerge’s WD network
Profile: Donald H. Taylor chair of Emerge’s Workforce Development Network
Donald H. Taylor convenes Emerge Education’s network to further innovation in Workforce Development (WD) and chairs its Workplace Development Edtech Board that has L&D leaders, CHROs and CPOs as its members from 50+ UK, EU and US corporates.
An influential commentator and thinker in the field of workplace learning and supporting technologies, Donald’s more than 30 years of work in L&D has seen him involved in three companies’ journeys through start-up, growth and acquisition, as well as encompassing director and vice-president positions in software companies. He has been chair of the Learning Technologies Conference since 2000 and personally produces the annual L&D Global Sentiment Survey.
Find out more about acclaimed L&D chronicler and networker Donald H Taylor in this Emerge Education profile.
“It’s a really exciting time in workforce development. There’s a great opportunity, and there’s also a huge challenge. But the greatest risk may be that we play safe and don’t seize the moment,” says Donald H Taylor, pointing to the explosion of interest in skills and reskilling over the last few years, from government initiatives on apprenticeships to the World Economic Forum’s Reskilling Revolution. It’s all feeding into a new focus on workplace development and a shift in thinking about how to do it better.
“Refreshingly, employers increasingly realise that the skills in their organisation are crucial to organisational success, and they haven’t paid enough attention to them in the past. But there’s also a sense of panic and a misinformed fog about what they should be doing,” he warns.
Taylor highlights the danger of ‘management by magazine’ in organisations that don’t know how to identify and develop the skills they’ve got, where leaders latch on to the first buzzy ‘solution’ they see in a magazine.
“That means they tend to fall prey to shysters and snake oil salesmen and revert to their own preconceptions. Too often, their preconception is that learning at work relies on education, which relies on courses which are probably delivered in the classroom or something similar online. All of which is wrong!” he says. “And because learning and development have not been a strategic priority in the past, there are too few L&D people able to express the reality of learning in a corporate environment.”
L&D is changing
But that’s changing. As well as the promise and potential of new technologies and methodologies, L&D is moving on from being a role that people fall into. Instead, it’s becoming a chosen career driven by a radically different way of thinking. The very nature of learning and development is reorienting from delivering training to supporting performance. “We are absolutely at a turning point right now,” he concludes.
Taylor has a fantastic vantage point from which to survey and contextualise trends in L&D. He has been chair of the Learning Technologies Conference since 2000, one year after it was founded, and was chair of the Learning and Performance Institute from 2010 to 2021. Since 2014 he has produced the annual L&D Global Sentiment Survey, charting and telling the story of what’s happening in L&D around the world.
He’s also the chair of the Emerge Education L&D network and its workplace development edtech board, “creating good places for useful conversations,” as he describes it. The network meets quarterly and is enthusiastically attended by L&D leaders from companies such as Novartis, Ericsson and EY.
Taylor is clear about the role of the group: “to help people understand what’s happening, what’s not happening, and what are the latest things they should be considering so they can meet their challenges. And of course, I love trying to understand what their challenges are. I also want to help them to avoid diving into the latest shiny thing for the sake of it, but rather take a considered view of what’s going on.”
He’s keen to create not only rich and valuable conversations within the L&D community but also between it and tech founders. The founders learn about the challenges on the ground in L&D and test their ideas. The L&D practitioners get a heads up on the latest tech developments and assess for themselves, and with their peers, if it will be useful or not.
He’s also clear about the role he plays in the group as chair. “It’s so important that people feel ‘This is a place where I can contribute, I will be listened to, and I won’t be judged.’ When you’re facilitating, your role in that room, virtual or physical, is to generate the right atmosphere, set the boundaries and encourage people so that exactly that sentiment is there.”
A life in learning and tech
Taylor’s ability to put a room at ease and help people feel keen to participate is a skill he began to learn in the 1980s, teaching English in Turkey, and has honed ever since in a career dedicated to L&D in various forms: “since I left university, I’ve been involved in learning and/or technology for my entire adult life”.
In fact, his interest in technology started even sooner, in the mid-1980s when he left school and, on his own initiative, spent a year learning to be a computer programmer (“on a DEC PDP-11, which is now in the Museum of Computing, Bletchley, it was so long ago!”) before studying PPE at Oxford. His five-year stint in Turkey followed when he not only taught English but also worked as a translator, a publisher of city guides and a writer of several books on business English for adults.
On his return to the UK, he entered the world of IT at “the beginning of an explosive time in learning technology”, working through the 90s in a fast-growing computer training company before founding a successful internet startup in 2000.
He had a successful exit after 18 months, went straight to another startup in 2002 specialising in talent management software and sold within six years. He attributes his success to understanding the market and the ability to make a compelling case for the unique value a company can bring to a trade buyer.
“I can absolutely see a clear thread going all the way through, back to my computer programming days as an 18-year-old,” he says. “There’s a retrospective coherence to my career. From working in almost every area of the learning and development field to learning effective facilitation to experiencing the challenge and excitement of startups, it’s all prepared me for my work with Emerge.”
Skill up and get serious!
Through Emerge and his own widely respected writing, he is constantly conveying an urgent message for L&D people: they, too, need to skill up and get serious.
“In L&D, we focus too often on the procedural, on the day job. We focus on helping people through all the things they have to do at work to do their work better. But the skills you develop doing that L&D job well do not develop the skills you need in order to have strategic input in the organisation — the listening, conversational skills, the knowledge of the organisation and the business context in which it operates. These are crucial to develop and deliver strategic input to the business,” he urges. “The only way L&D gets to have a seat at the table, and gets to be serious, is if people develop those skills independently of their day job.”
There is also a risk particular to the pandemic. While it offered an opportunity to start doing things differently, with training delivery moving entirely online, there are some fundamental issues as a result of the accelerated way in which it’s been done, Taylor believes. He offers an interesting analogy with how things played out after 2001.
“When 9/11 happened, all training went online, which, back then, consisted of getting the slide deck from the tutor and putting it online with a ‘click next’ button in the bottom right-hand corner. That was a temporary solution, which never got ‘un-temporaried’. It carried on being like that for a good number of years. In fact, depressingly, you could still see it today. And it’s a shadow from which e-learning has failed to escape,” he says.
“We are in danger of something similar happening right now, but rather than it being ‘click next’, it’s Zoom dump — people going into a room and having content dumped on them via Zoom. And for L&D to really rise above the situation it’s in right now, it has to find another way of delivering that’s at least as good.”
Emerge Workforce Development Edtech board — a network for those serious about edtech
In his role as chair of Emerge Education’s WD Network, Taylor is at the heart of many of the cutting-edge developments within edtech. Set up as a “curated and safe space to talk about serious edtech”, the network brings together people in senior roles in WD to discuss their challenges and possible solutions and hear from selected startups that have been quality filtered by Emerge.
“It has become so clear through the workforce development board how many people in senior roles in corporates want to talk deeply with their peers about edtech. There are so many startups out there plying their wares there is a real need for some filtering of this. The Emerge team help our members filter out the market noise. That’s something that I absolutely can get behind,” he says.
The WD edtech board meets once a term for a fast-paced session packed with insight and useful, shareable information such as market maps, and is seen by WD leaders as relevant, fresh and value-packed. Regular research deep dives result in well-respected papers looking at how edtech can enhance different aspects of workforce development.
As for Emerge itself, “Emerge are very smart, straightforward and honest, with a complete focus on action, and their hearts are totally in the right place with what they want to achieve with the fund. They come from a place of wanting to democratise education and want to make the experience of learning better, and widen the opportunity for learning at work for everybody. They’ve developed a very clear thesis-driven process that drives what they do — the fund’s been really successful to date as a result, as they know where to invest. The team, their values, their belief in supporting early-stage founders is something that I absolutely can get behind,” he says.
