Women’s Leadership in Transforming Workforce Readiness

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Women’s Leadership in Transforming Workforce Readiness

The evolving role of Learning & Development in telecom requires fresh thinking and innovation. With the industry changing rapidly, L&D is no longer just about addressing immediate skills gaps but about preparing the workforce for future challenges and opportunities. Training is becoming a strategic driver of workforce readiness.

To explore this dynamic transformation, I sat down with one of the L&D leaders who is contributing to the current innovation in workforce development to share the strategies she employs to align L&D with business goals.

Let’s hear from Charter Communications’ Senior Director of Learning Services for Field Operations, Abbie O’Dell.

How has the role of Learning & Development evolved in the broadband industry, and how do you see it shaping the future workforce?

O’Dell: The most significant change in learning and development within our industry is the shifting landscape of learner needs. Historically, workplace learning was designed to help learners commit concepts to memory, and lengthy instructor-led programs were the norm. With universal access to internet-connected devices, the need has shifted to teaching learners how to navigate and evaluate the resources available to them instead. For L&D teams, this has led to changes in the types of content we create, and a move towards short e-learns, microlessons and videos. L&D teams are also increasingly tasked with creation and maintenance of knowledge bases and wikis that can be used for informal and on-the-job learning.

While it’s tempting to interpret this as a move away from instructor-led content, it’s becoming increasingly clear that a blended approach is still necessary to achieve optimal workforce development. Learners benefit from classroom and hands-on learning experiences, and the most effective L&D departments are those that seek to create blended programs that combine transformative classroom experiences led by skilled instructors, with high-quality computer-based learning objects.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in aligning L&D with business strategy, and how have you overcome them?

O’Dell: Effective measurement of learning outcomes is the biggest challenge faced by most learning organizations. Being able to show the impact of training efforts and their alignment to business performance is key to L&D departments’ ability to demonstrate their value. Too often, L&D departments fall back on reporting about solely volume of training and learners’ initial reactions (also known as Level 1 evaluation) instead of intentionally and strategically linking to business outcomes.

To overcome these challenges, L&D leaders need to foster and maintain strong relationships with operational leaders to ensure they deeply understand the business needs and strategic goals. By doing so, we can ensure that all training initiatives are grounded in business performance, and that we are prepared to provide reporting and analysis on program success. As Jay Cross says in the excellent book Informal Learning, “The appropriate measure of learning is how good a job one is doing. Training metrics should be business metrics.”

Can you share an example of an innovative L&D initiative you’ve led that has had a significant impact on workforce development or business outcomes?

O’Dell: As noted above, measurement and analysis of the effectiveness of our programs is key to the ongoing success of our L&D efforts. To that end, one of the most significant projects my team has worked on is a partnership with our business data/analytics team to build a dashboard that combines key business performance indicators with training data. Combining training data and business performance data into a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard helps us to share our performance in a meaningful way with our business leaders.

As a female leader in L&D, what advice would you give to other women aspiring to leadership roles in broadband or tech?

O’Dell: Many of us struggle with impostor syndrome – feeling like we don’t belong, or that we don’t deserve to be where we are. We might even have a little voice in our heads that tells us someone is going to eventually figure out that we don’t actually know what we’re doing, and that we’re eventually going to be exposed as great big frauds. My advice to anyone who has struggled with these feelings is to stop and remind yourself that you absolutely deserve a seat at the table. Be fearless and believe in yourself, and surround yourself with people who can be mentors, sponsors or just sounding boards when you need support. Equally important is to make yourself available to serve in this capacity to others – look for opportunities to be a sponsor and an advocate for others as well.

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Other leaders echo O’Dell’s sentiments about transforming telecom workforce readiness.

Throughout her decades in L&D, Verizon Chief Learning Officer Lou Tedrick has put learners at the center of every decision and challenged business leaders to reimagine the impact that innovative learning programs can have on business results. She’s also been vocal about using cutting edge technology, like AI and VR, to help employees develop the skills they need to deliver in a changing world of work. Check out her appearance on The Edge of Work podcast last year.

Comcast Vice President of L&D (CLO) Sara Dionne joined host Al Dea on the same podcast earlier this year to talk about creating a culture of continuous learning and share her team’s efforts to develop a comprehensive and tailored learning strategy that prioritizes personalization and experiential learning to help make employees successful.

And Cox Communications AVP of Talent and Skills Kelli Southern recently examined practical strategies to effectively integrate artificial intelligence into the workforce at one of the most popular panels at TechExpo24.

We have entered a new era of learning and today’s L&D leaders are innovating and embracing new methodologies. Women like Abbie O’Dell, Lou Tedrick, Sara Dionne, and Kelli Southern not only play a critical role in leading the needed transformation in L&D, but they are also shaping our industry’s future.

One of the biggest challenges today is keeping pace with the expedited evolution of technology. AI, for example, is reshaping how we operate and what excites me most is how AI will transform workforce training. Can you imagine technicians working with AI collaborators and receiving real-time certifications based on task completion? We can. We must leverage today’s technologies to prepare the workforce of tomorrow.

At SCTE, the membership organization for the telecommunications industry, we are creating personalized learning paths for industry professionals, combining cutting-edge AI technologies with on-the-job experiences. We are also developing innovative certification approaches that prioritize real-world problem solving over traditional testing methods.

Traditional training is no longer good enough to keep pace with the increasingly speedy progression of technology. We must adopt an entirely new way of thinking about workforce readiness. I am proud to say that in the broadband industry, women are leading the charge!

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