Visa was one of the earliest enterprise adopters of building an xAPI-enabled digital ecosystem from scratch. And this ecosystem is centered on two pillar systems:
- The LXP, which empowers 17,500 learners through an open and personalized learning experience
- The LRS, which enables admins and business leaders to access standardized reporting and analytics
So what does all of this mean, and how does it apply to you?
Come find out as we have a conversation with Gordon Trujillo from Visa, where they’ll explain how they designed, implemented, and scaled their digital university with xAPI during the past 4 years.
Webinar Recording
Q&A
During the webinar, attendees were encouraged to ask questions. Below are Gordon's responses to the questions we didn't get to during the session.
Senior buy-in is key to creating a learning culture. What are the top KPIs that helped you secure leadership support? And how do you make the business case to procure an LXP and LRS?
Understand where the business is going and align your strategy so it's headed in the same direction. We leveraged our employee survey data to start a discovery of what our people like and didn’t like about accessing learning at Visa. Making the business case is simple from that point.
Consolidating technology can happen at this point. You can either go the cost-savings route, or the more fun way—focusing on improved user experience, which leads to more active learners. And active learners are a great indicator of a growing learning culture.
Are you leveraging any adaptive/personalized learning technologies?
We continue to leverage what we have in our ecosystem, starting from the point of entry for our learners (i.e. Learning Hub). Each platform we bring in tends to have some adaptive and/or personalization features. We also focus on guidance first, as that tends to scale better for learners who are looking to grow in ways that are contextualized to their needs.
How do you measure the efficacy/effectiveness of L&D programs?
Every program we run does not go live without a standard NPS score. We review that score routinely to ensure our experience has not become misaligned with the needs of our learners. This a simple way to ensure what we have designed is exceeding the needs of our learners.
How do you view "mandatory" training for internal courses? Does that change the dynamics of the offerings, or how associates view Visa University?
We still have our mandatory training and it is mainly compliance driven, but that doesn’t mean our learners should still see that among the other available professional development opportunities. Incorporating mandatory training into the daily learning experience actually makes it simpler for our learners to realize they only need to go to one place to get learning.
I'd love to hear more about how you curated learning coaches and where they came from, the business or within your own learning org?
We have a specific role for this in Visa University that is funded by Visa University and does not come from the business. We absolutely partner with the business to ensure what we curate is meeting the business needs, but curation involves looking at what we have built, bought, or borrowed and the business does not have that holistic view. Visa University can offer this view while ensuring the curation is unbiased and focused on learner need, regardless of the source.
If you have Tableau, why do you need Watershed?
Every operations group is using something different. Tableau, Power BI, and Alteryx are just a few that might be in play in any operations group. These tools provide a suite of capabilities around premium data visualization and analysis techniques. Watershed acts as an ETL (extract, transform and load) system that ensures the learning data is in one place with demographic data attached to it so that it can be reported on and extracted easily to these external business systems.
What are the roles of skills and skill management?
These are essential inputs to personalization of learning and driving the future of talent matching for role needs in the org. As we break down our own jobs into tasks, the skills and their respective management become important because of how they connect tasks to outcomes.
Is there a proper balance between content that is designed and delivered internally and relying on external vendors for L&D? What percent of the content gets used more than minimal? Does it tend to be internal or external content that gets used the most?
It really depends on what you are trying to solve. In all honesty, you’ll have to be able to leverage both if you want both depth and breadth of resources to fit specific needs. If I’m building a program for a specific manager audience, you can bet we are going to have to create our own point of view and related content for this.
However, if along that journey there is a new topic that requires an injection of perspective (e.g. managing remote staff in a pandemic), then—based on time and resource—we can quickly pull from our external vendors to supplement at speed.
As an L&D org, you want to be able to leverage both quickly. This is about moving at the speed of business so L&D be a good partner.
How do you promote Give or Go 40 hours of learning? Do employees need to log their hours? Is it recognized?
We are early in the promotion of this and will leverage our Learning Hub as the aggregator for how our people are giving or going to learning. What is convenient about Learning Hub is that you can capture how people are learning or teaching in a variety of ways. So, if I go to a class at Visa University related to Visa’s approach to payments technology that instance is captured. If I get interested in a topic like artificial intelligence because of what I learned from the class, I can find it on Learning Hub and have it tracked. If I attend a conference on a related subject that is captured. And if I do a “lunch and learn” session for my team, that also is captured.
All of this information is captured. And because it’s verified and/or self-reported, it creates an accountability and responsibility for each of us to yearn to learn for ourselves, our teams, and our organization. It is not formally recognized yet, but we will eventually create badges to show the substantive accomplishments achieved.
Did you build the configurations or did Watershed or did somebody else? How difficult was it?
At the start we partnered with Watershed to learn from experts, and then as we did more we could manage it on our own. It is not difficult to execute, but it is difficult to spend the time properly designing for the data and ensuring the sanctity of the data is not compromised. This means you have to design for the ingestion of that data so you aren’t left with data cleaning that needs to be done down the road. You want all of this set up at the start so that downstream, others can leverage it with minimal overhead.
What is the way of teaching that you use? Lectures? Seminars? Team work? Other?
All of the above. We also host Visa Learning Festival—an annual global event that touches 79 countries in one week—to ensure everyone at Visa has the opportunity to teach as well. This event has been instrumental in creating a culture of learning.
Does Visa have a capability roadmap that shows new future capabilities that support the long-range plan of the company's strategy?
Yes, we sat down and put together a plan around this when we created our position paper for why, what, and how we would commit to continuous learning here at Visa. We looked at this by business function and then we looked across to see where there was a common thread, which led us to the core enabling capabilities that would drive us into the future.
Who did you work with to create the Inside Track Challenge game?
LEO Learning from LTG. They are a part of the family that includes Watershed.
How does degree attainment, either undergrad or grad, integrate into the Learning Hub suite and career pathing for associates?
Learning Hub captures the lifelong learning profile of an individual. As we get more granular with skills and skill mappings, these will play a key role in our quest to ensure our learners can have visibility to their entire learning journey and we as a company can help them find the next milestone (how large or small that might be).
Why did you choose Degreed? Why did you choose Watershed?
Their expertise in the capabilities that we needed for our learner experience, plus they’re great people to work with. When you have both, the solutions are on point.
Very good point about keeping it simple for the user even if there is a vast ecosystem behind the scenes. Do you market the LXP (to your employees) as an alternative to the LMS, or blend them (LXP on top of the LMS)?
Sarah: The LXP is the front face to all learning while the LMS is on the backend.
Gordon: We market the LXP, but we brand the LMS in a subtle way that doesn’t make you feel like you were dropped off at an unfamiliar location. We are purposeful that we market the LXP as Learning Hub (connects everyone, the place to go to collaborate on learning) and our LMS plus other providers are simply that—providers of content along the built, bought or borrowed curation themes.
So the courses in your LMS are available through the LXP?
Sarah: Yes, but to clarify, they are not stored in the LXP. The LXP provides access so employees can get access to all resources (i.e. LMS, informal, format, etc.) in one place versus multiple places.
What application do you use for the Visa Learning Hub? Is it Cornerstone or the company intranet? How do you drive traffic/get employees to use the Learning Hub more?
Sarah: Learning Hub uses Degreed with a large ecosystem behind it.
Gordon: Learning Hub is powered by Degreed. Everything we market and communicate points the learner to Learning Hub.
Meet the Presenter:
Gordon Trujillo
Vice President, Global Head of Learning Enablement, VisaAs the head of learning at Visa, Gordon Trujillo is starting the movement to revolutionize corporate learning and development. He is responsible for setting the vision and strategy for how to position global learning as not only a digital hub for how people learn, but also a mindset shift for creating and fostering curious, independent learners.