488: Auditing Portfolios and Pressure-Testing Strategy with Lauren Brechner

The new year will be here before we know it, so now is a natural time to make plans. While it can be tempting to copy and paste this year’s plan, make a few tweaks, and move ahead, now is a great time to reflect more deeply on what your learning business does and why.This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast pulls on past interviews to offer six perspectives that might help you rethink and reimagine the year ahead. Tessa Forshaw, Eric Ries, Luke Dowden, Artesha Moore, and Stephanie Mercado each speak to the importance of questioning a default, and Nancy Harhut is our reminder that that questioning isn’t the same as following through.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode489.

Many learning portfolios accumulate over time—a Webinar added here, a course there—until nobody’s quite sure which offerings are still earning their keep and whether, collectively, they reflect what the organization is trying to accomplish.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Lauren Brechner, founder of Ember Forge. Lauren shares how a portfolio audit can double as a pressure test of a learning business’s strategy, why she recommends focusing on a handful of flagship offerings rather than tackling an entire catalog at once, and how her background in marketing and digital experience design shapes the way she diagnoses what’s really behind an underperforming offering.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode488.

Courses and conferences are the backbone of many learning businesses’ portfolios, but for frontline and deskless workers—who make up roughly 80 percent of the global workforce—that model often doesn’t fit how the jobs actually get done.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with JD Dillon, founder of Every Shift Counts and author of The Frontline Enablement Playbook. JD explains why frontline and deskless workers need a different approach to learning—one built on reliable access to information and connection to peers rather than courses and events—and makes the case that what works for frontline learners tends to transfer to desk-based ones too, so there are lessons here even for learning businesses that don’t serve frontline workers directly today.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode487.

Many learning businesses are data-rich and insight-poor. It’s easy to track what’s easy to count—e-mail opens, registrations, completions—but harder to know if the products are doing what they were created to do.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss what learning businesses should be measuring and why. They identify the most common metric traps—including surrogation and vanity metrics—and introduce a five-lens framework for thinking about which metrics matter at which stage of a product’s lifecycle: Validate, Reach & Convert, Engage, Retain & Reactivate, and Prove Impact. They also make the case that a metric without a target is just a number and that the most valuable feedback often comes not from dashboards but from conversations with learners and employers.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode486.

Many learning businesses evaluate their programs with data that only tells them what already happened. By the time a lagging indicator like a completion rate reveals that a learner is struggling, the window to help has often closed. The good news is that shifting to real-time and predictive analytics is readily achievable for most learning businesses.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Steven Khraiss, who heads data strategy and analytics at Holmes Corporation, about the ideas behind the e-book The Association Leader's Guide: How to Turn Learning Data into Personalized Member Experiences. Steven explains what an engagement score is and what it enables, why there’s no mention of AI in the e-book even though it’s powering a lot under the hood, and why he names culture, not technology, as the harder challenge in becoming data-driven. He also offers a practical first step for any learning business leader who wants to start but doesn't know how: Start with one question you wish you could answer.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode485.

The association sector is at a genuine inflection point because so much is changing at once. AI is reshaping entire professions. Federal funding is in flux. University pipelines are shrinking. And, in the middle of all of it, associations have an extraordinary opportunity to play a critical role in workforce development—if they’re willing to move fast enough.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Artesha Moore, CEO of Association Forum, about what that opportunity looks like and what it will take to seize it. Artesha shares why mission-led thinking matters more than member surveys at this moment, how associations can close the visibility gap with employers, and why the leaders most likely to succeed will be the ones willing to imagine broadly and fail productively.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode484.

The credentialing landscape is changing fast. With 1.8 million credentials now in the U.S. marketplace and AI reshaping entire professions, organizations need to understand not just what credentials to offer but how the meaning of competence is evolving.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Denise Roosendaal, executive director of the Institute for Credentialing Excellence (I.C.E.). Denise shares how assessment is moving from point-in-time tests toward ongoing, real-world evidence of competence, why the most important skills of the future may be the uniquely human ones, and what it takes to build a culture of foresight that helps credentialing bodies and learning businesses get ahead of what’s coming.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode483.

Many learning businesses market what they offer. The ones that get better results market what their learners need.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Amy Michalski and Shelly Strickland, who handle business development and marketing at the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM). They share what moves the needle in marketing education offerings—from how they segment and nurture prospective learners to what they've learned about conversion, measurement, and the difference between reach and genuine engagement.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode482.

When everyone has access to the same powerful tools and technologies, polished content becomes table stakes, and learning businesses that compete primarily on content will find it increasingly hard to stand out. So what do you compete on instead?In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Panos Siozos, CEO of LearnWorlds. They discuss why engagement remains the core unsolved challenge in digital learning, how we’re moving from a content economy to a trust economy, and what role AI should and shouldn’t play in a learning business. The conversation also covers the shift from courses to learning ecosystems and what business model innovation might look like in the years to come.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode481.

Learning is, at its root, a neurobiological process. But most workplace learning doesn’t recognize that reality.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Dr. Tessa Forshaw, cognitive scientist and faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studies how people work, learn, and create in the flow of their work. They discuss five principles grounded in learning science and what each means for how learning experiences should be designed. The conversation also explores the specific advantages external learning businesses have when applying these principles and why making space for metacognition may be the single most impactful thing you can do to improve your programs.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode480.