Exploring the World of Online Learning and Development

Ryan Purvis 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In the series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines. The problems they're facing, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took. That'll help you to get to grips with the digital workspace inner workings.

Heather Bicknell 0:28
Okay, some interesting teams pop up, the meeting is locked.

Ryan Purvis 0:36
First, the again, fat fingers, I press the wrong button next to the starting record button. No, but

Heather Bicknell 0:43
I didn't know that was a feature. That's interesting.

Ryan Purvis 0:47
Do you think that the meeting would be locked by default? We think about it. Yeah. Interesting.

Heather Bicknell 0:55
Um, so yeah, I am doing good. How are you?

Ryan Purvis 0:58
Yeah, it's been an interesting week, my wife has had a molar that was root canal and has failed. So she's been nagging me since about Saturday. So we'll be running around the dentist and whatever we're trying to get the tooth taken out. But you kind of have to take it out. So it's simmers down. Otherwise even more pain. So it looks like it'll come up tomorrow. But I've never seen someone in so much pain in my life. So yeah, it's been interesting. So she's very, pretty much. Yeah, so we doing twice a day trips to the dentist to get it numbed, because even the painkillers and the sleeping pills such as taking on helping, because it's pushing on a nerve. So she's suffering. So yeah, it's been a rough week in retrospect. But she live alone, we should have had the tooth taken out and still be charged the root canal

Heather Bicknell 2:04
dental stuff is never fun, right?

Ryan Purvis 2:08
No, no, never. Never, ever, ever. So. So yeah, we live and learn. As I say, there's only so much you can do in these circumstances. Except for I mean, it's easy for me to say I'm not in pain. Which is going to keep going. anywhere else. We'll get there. Get there. Hopefully tomorrow. It's all done. And we're good. Excuse the sound of the generator in the background. We're having one of our well known what he called us things load shedding exercises.

Heather Bicknell 2:45
I actually can't hear it. I wonder if it'll pick up on the recording or teams is doing some audio cutting out the background noise?

Ryan Purvis 2:55
I think Apple an apples on oscillation knots on voice. So there might be teams actually doing? That's interesting. Maybe it's doing what's supposed to be done.

Heather Bicknell 3:06
We'll see what the recording says it might be different than this experience. But right now, okay, here it which is surprising. For the generator for how long have you been without power?

Ryan Purvis 3:18
Since two o'clock? I had Yeah. As I said before, we have the means. So it's a generator. I mean, if I look, if I look down the road, there's so many people putting in solar power. Yeah. Which makes so much sense. Like, yeah, solar panels, batteries, inverters, you'll spend 10,000 pounds 250,000 Rand or so to put them in if you put in a really proper system, but you never have power problems. The off the grid, basically, you know, the ROI is not there. You know, you won't get your return on investment. But you will slowly but surely enjoy your your freedom from the network. So yeah, I mean, as I say, we've got the mean to refine. It's just noisy. You get inverted quiet. But your batteries only last a certain amount of you know, you can only charge so much. I mean, you so much battery. And those things you've got to be aware of, but it's all good. Works out. Anyway, we wanted to chat about the education thing I sent you.

Heather Bicknell 4:33
Yes, I thought this was an interesting idea that you sent over where I kind of, you know, took away from this was the sort of the impact of the pandemic and the subsequent, you know, sort of, like free evaluation people have done leading to the great resignation. How that's kind of related to people you know, starting now Businesses and creating their own learning courses and kind of becoming educational content creators. Is that what you were kind of thinking would be chatting about? Or what was your take on? That?

Ryan Purvis 5:20
Well, I think it's, I think you've said that very nicely and is that and it also, you know, coming back to the, the, the freedom, or the time of saved by not having to be forced to go to the office unnecessary. I want to take a new afternoon in office, but I think there's there's time and a place for it, it's given people the opportunity to go and do courses. And instead of having to, again, now travel to go do a course, I mean, I think there's there's benefit in doing some courses, face to face, or at least for the width of your working thing. But it is that that ability to do a course on a platform, and have the flexibility and the access to content to when you wanted when you want to do it. That gives people that ability to tackle a course. And so I think that was interesting, I think, also, because people had time, people are making more courses, sharing their knowledge. And one of the things that, and this is the type of nation this is more the problem we have is a lot of people are leaving roles to go into retirement, early retirement in some cases, because they have been, you know, it's an archaic number, when you hit this number, you have to go. And those people are at least sharing some of their knowledge, because what's happening is the people that are coming in, don't have that knowledge. And they need to leverage it from somewhere. And I was thinking that that's a really good avenue for people to learn about a job. Or learn those core skills as core skills you're not taught in university not taught in high school, or, or whatever it is. And I would see platforms like this will start feeding into the corporate world where we were slightly was sort of doing it in some organizations where, you know, instead of it making the videos, we're getting business users to make the videos. And that has been shared internally. But I'm thinking more now on a bigger scale. And I thought that it was interesting about the here's a platform, you can use it to create your offering. And you can generate revenue from it, because now you are sharing a bunting. But also someone else can benefit and more people will benefit from your learning, like critical thinking problem solving and planning a project. You know, there's lots of methodologies for these things. But if someone can teach you how they've done it and actually give you real life example. And that's, that's really, really huge. So that's what I was thinking about when I listened to the episode that I shared with you.

Heather Bicknell 8:02
That No, yeah, I agree with that. And also makes me when you're describing it that way, think about Microsoft viva, specifically Viva learning. Yeah, I don't know, if you've interacted with much with viva. And I've personally haven't actually used either learning, I only kind of know what Microsoft had promoted as the offering. But that to me was an interesting addition. Because obviously, most of the time organizations are seeking out if they have one, you know, some HR tool or some elearning, like some separate offering, obviously, outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. And then that kind of limits what you know, they might pull over, certainly, they might buy certain courses, right and pull over that content. I think vivo was subscription based. If you have if you have subscribed to one of those, then that gets pulled into your Viva learning. Plus, you can create content within your organization and show it. I'm pretty sure that's how it works anyway, but that, to me was an interesting offering for sort of formalizing and then offering it to employees because I think what can be difficult, especially when you're talking about educating the younger workforce is, you know, if they're expected to go out and purchase things on their own. There's no sort of stipend for learning and development or they're not giving given time within their workday to go do that kind of creates these barriers of like, you really have to be self motivated and also kind of understand what courses would be beneficial to you and kind of roll the dice on whether or not a certain event or elearning course would be, you know, a good one to spend your dollar on

Ryan Purvis 10:02
Yeah, and there's lots of these, these things around, I mean, Udemy, you've got Coursera yes, there's a few, as you pay subscription and get access to. And those are, those are good. I mean, I've done a couple courses on them. And they're reasonable. I mean, if you think about what you would spend on a course and a degree, or something like that, and the amount of subjects you have to do that are not relevant to what you want to do. And then you've got these options that you can go and do. The one that I quite like for our industry is kind of my brain called bison, something IT pro, IT Pro TV, that's what it's called. And you can pay a subscription. And if you do want to lay deals throughout, we get the 30% discount, it's a lifetime discount, and it has access to every common piece of technology out there. And they teach you how to use you know, ITIL, or how to use some of the market products or whatever it is. And it's really bite sized lectures. And I definitely think you're going to start seeing that and actually watching from MIT stuff yesterday. The acronym for this is MOOC, which arguably stands for MWC, I can definitely see in the future courses becoming made up of sort of in on premise practical, in or theoretical lectures, plus online materials, and bringing that down to the device. So you know, if I look at the schooling here in South Africa, there's a lot of apps floating around now where your whole curriculum is actually on the app. And as long as you got a tablet or a laptop, you can use it. And you can do everything except for it exams, exam, just enough to go into the examples. And I can see that filtering up into the corporate world where you want to do a prince to what you can do this anyway, go do a prostitute course. Now, I use a service for that. And then you just write the exam in the center, and you end the exam remotely, you can sit there and they've got a an online application that you use, and then that ties into your camera, and they can watch you while you do your exam, and make sure no cheating. And you're filling in the for the exam paper.

Heather Bicknell 12:27
Yeah, I think that's a good point, I think the younger generations are going to be primed to use online learning throughout their career. Not to mention just working in a more flexible way, knowing how to use tools like teams and zoom, knowing how to use online file sharing, all that kind of being just what they grew up in. And then the ability to, you know, absorb online lectures and have that be what you, you know, base your degree on. I think that's so a more recent thing, and good training to kind of do that self directed learning, because if no one is, you know, if you're not in a classroom, you have to take on a certain amount of accountability, I guess, and, and you're the one who's helping yourself pay attention rather than like the social pressure of being in a classroom where you know, your professor is looking at you. So, but yeah, I guess I'd be interested. So do you, when it comes to learning and development and your career? Do you try to set a certain amount of time aside? Do you like how have you managed that throughout your career? Do you think about it in any sort of formal way or just look for opportunity? Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 13:57
So at the moment, it's opportunistic. And I started doing some stuff and I just got a, you know, a two kids, you just don't have the time as much as you think you do with with getting up before him to do that stuff. And then still, there's kind of a better now, but when my my daughter was born, and we came here to say she was three months old, that period I was trying to study at the same time, and it just didn't happen. Now it's getting better. Ironically, it's probably getting to the point now that I could start studying something against I probably will start and then I honestly believe that you've got to get up and do it as the first thing you do in the day. So that means you up at four or 5am to do it, then that's when you do it. And an hour a day is much easier than trying to cram any over weekend, stuff like that, because with kids, that doesn't work. In fact, I was talking to somebody before this and he's got assignments work stuff and he's running a business supposed to be on study leave. And he was sitting, explaining to me about all the stuff he has to do this week. And to keep the business going. I think it's very, it's very difficult to work and study. So you've got to really set the time aside. And you're going to be so selfish about it, which is why it's so difficult to study when you're working, and you got family and all that sort of stuff. So my advice is striking down before you have kids, or at least waiting because they're a bit older, you know, my son is four, I can sit and work for an hour on something, and he can watch something on TV or play with his cars. And I don't need to be with him. Whereas about six months ago, I'd have to be with him the whole time. And so it's those things that you you look for. And find nowadays, there's so much you can learn in short snippets. Like I was doing, I wanted to refresh myself up on on scram the other day, so I just found three or four YouTube clips. And I watched those of Dota, two EXPEED. And it was like, oh, yeah, I remember this now. Okay, cool. Make some notes, things I forgotten, write it down. And that's it. You know, I don't, I don't feel like I need to go and write the exam, to know the stuff. You know, and I think that's just a personal choice as well. And I don't feel like I need an exam, credential where some people would want it. And I'd love to do an MBA one day. But in some respects, I don't think I need to necessarily do the two years I just need to go and learn the content, or reading the books, talking to people that have MBAs.

Heather Bicknell 16:34
What would you say? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right, is that there is really kind of you so much content is out there and freely available, it's just finding the stuff that's worth your time. And then, you know, figuring out how to work some structure around it. So I think obviously, that's where elearning packages can be super helpful, because they put the structure in for you. And then like you're saying, you get some certificate at the end. So hopefully, it has sort of some sort of return on investment for you whether you know, helping you step into a new role or increasing your value within your organization. But I think this is just more pure knowledge that you're seeking, I think, you know, the approach that you've described, of just kind of looking out, you know, consuming the content that is out there. You don't necessarily need to, you know, have a formal around it.

Ryan Purvis 17:42
It depends on what your goal is. And I don't know, do you need to type off to this point, I mean, if you if you want to be a scrum master, the dev team, then you need to go into certifications. If you need a general knowledge, like I do, usually, then you don't need to know the certifications you need to do course, you can pay for the course and some of these things, you can do the course and only only pay if you have a certificate, which means running the test, and often, you don't need it, which means you can learn all of the stuff for free. Just the core concepts and move on. And then you're good. I do need to run. But was good chatting.

Heather Bicknell 18:17
All right. Yep. See you later. Thanks. Bye.

Ryan Purvis 18:25
Thank you for listening today's episode. Hey, the big news app producer, editor. Thank you, Heather. For your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW W podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www dot digital workspace that works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace that works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.

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