Speak leadership's language to gain their buy-in: Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft

To truly enable learning and development in an organization, three things are required, according to Nellie Wartoft, CEO of Tigerhall: a well-designed program, a positive attitude by top leadership, and HR's ability to present it in business terms

- Mint Kang

Learning and development has become a huge focus for many organizations and individuals today, driven partly by the disruption of COVID-19 and the need to rapidly adapt. But are organizations going about their L&D strategies as effectively as they could? People Matters asked Nellie Wartoft, the CEO of knowledge-sharing startup Tigerhall, for her take on the challenges facing L&D today and how organizations can get more value out of their learning investments. Here are the highlights of what she shared.

There's plenty of content available these days, but the conversation seems more focused on how to get learners to actually pick it up. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Enterprise learning hasn't changed a lot in the last 10-15 years. Many companies are still investing in classroom training, and even for those which have moved to video learning, their platform is often not as user-friendly as it should be.

One problem with learning platforms today is that they aren't competitive in terms of ease of use. Instagram, Netflix, online shopping—these are all oneclick functions today. But learning platforms still lag behind in comparison, and many learning tools are not mobile-friendly either. So if we want to make learning consumer-friendly, we need to make it more customized. A big part of that is design—UI/UX, how to tap into people's attention, how to meet people's expectations around content—these days, Netflix and other programming has raised the bar in terms of content.