Part 1: Key takeaways from World of Learning Conference 2024
The World of Learning Conference & Exhibition is a two-day event that brings together leading experts, brands and professionals from the L&D community under one roof. Little Man Project’s Gill Chester shares her key takeaways from the conference, including a video summary.
Productivity and performance
- Improving our productivity is the only way to improve our living standards in the UK. We significantly lag behind other countries, and a lack of investment keeps us in our current situation (Robert Peston – Author and Journalist).
- If you change the context (to a problem), you can change the performance. Do we need training, or can we change the environment?
- Organisations must stop thinking we shouldn’t do it if we can’t win (or be the best). Recognise the ‘Power of Tiny Gains’. If everyone across the organisation improves by 1%, multiply that by the number of people, and you will make significant gains.
- Research from Ipsos Karian and Box has found a strong link between employee engagement and high performance. They can also connect high-performing managers to high-performing teams (in financial terms).
For example:
- ‘Regularly seeing or hearing from a leader’ ensured significantly better engagement and fewer absences, whereas staff that never engage with leaders have the highest absences and lowest engagement.
- Psychological safety plays a critical role in driving productivity and innovation.
- Training is a strong correlator with falls in short-term sickness.
- The seven key traits of high-performing teams are open-listening, a clear mission, empowerment, psychological safety, customer focus, coaching and agility.
- When it comes to our learning interventions, we don’t have an engagement problem. We have an awareness problem. They need to know what is available and how it will improve their performance before they can engage
Impact
- We must focus on organisational impact to change the organisation’s view that learning is a ‘nice to have’ to something that is a ‘must have’.
- We need to build strategic business partnerships, understand business objectives/strategic plans, start engaging early, consider what measurements we’re using, and create time for evaluation and measurement.
AI
- Our ability to identify what is true (correct) will be more important than coded (memorised) knowledge (Julian Stodd). The school system needs to shift the focus from memorising facts to developing skills like flexibility, creativity, active listening, and adaptability (Robert Peston).
- We will need to redefine what we consider intimacy when engaging with Gen AI because it is a social technology with which we are in dialogue.
- The harm of Gen AI is in motion (it is continually changing) while the most harm we currently do in society is embedded; even though we could change it, we don’t (gender equality, the environment) (Julian Stodd).
- Stop saying there are no stupid questions… there are… but at least now you should ask Gen AI before you ask people 😊
L&D in general
- The type of learning matters. When asked about their preference, people want on-the-job training (i.e. learning through job-related tasks) significantly more than any other training. Next are practical courses, followed by coaching and mentoring, and closely behind that is eLearning.
- Marketing your learning should raise awareness and spark interest/desire/action.
- The six steps to building a learning campaign are goal definition, audience identification (personas), design channels and key hook, quality resources, plan and execute, and test and optimise.
- When reviewing your induction, which three words are the actual impact you are having, and which do you want. The words they considered were ‘Belonging, Mastery, Purpose, Inspiration, Confidence, Clarify.’
- Nesta created an ‘experience day’ instead of an ‘induction day’ that allows new starters to experience each strand of the work the organisations do in a really practical way. Each strand was also linked to their values, which helped embed this connection early in their journey with the organisation.
- We never see project teams of one, so why do we have L&D teams of one 😊
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In this video Gill Chester discusses her key takeaways
Read part 2 of this blog:
Key takeaways from World of Learning 2024 – the Exhibition
The exhibition is a brilliant opportunity to discover and sample new ways of working or ways to revamp current pracitices. Filled with leading industry providers, free seminars and interactive zones, Little Man Project’s Jen Compton, shares a roundup of her two days there.

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