Big Data (BD) seems like a great match for Learning & Development (L&D) practices in organisations around the world. After all, it relates to the compilation and analysis of data sets most commonly related to human behaviour. By looking at a large amount of information gathered over extended periods of time, HR practitioners are able to identify patterns in human habits and interactions that can then be used to make razor-sharp decisions for sustainable staff improvement and satisfaction.

The managing director of Daimler Benz claimed in 2017 that as computers are becoming more intelligent, they have started to deliver more precise and faster decisions than humans. IBM Watson already helps doctors in diagnosing cancer, four times more accurately than human doctors. There are companies who build a medical device (named after the "Tricorder" from Star Trek) that works with your phone to take a retina scan, a blood sample, and a breath test and that will analyse 54 biomarkers to identify diseases. So in a few years world-class medical analysis will be widely accessible, nearly for free. Watson is also reported to deliver legal advice (so far for fairly basic matters) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. As these trends unfold will artificial intelligence soon replace HR decision makers?

However, others argue that there is no such thing as Big Data in HR. The idea that empirical methods can give an all-encompassing answer to big age-old HR questions is thoroughly rejected by authoritative sources like Harvard Business Review. HBR claims that Google’s Project Oxygen, a multi-year project that analyses people data and was poised to figure out what makes a good manager, has come to a conclusion that researchers had identified decades ago. Big Data’s role in HR, sceptics argue, is not one of acumen, but of analytics.

Where is the challenge?

Clearly, there is a debate about the pros and cons of applying Big Data to HR management.

Part of the reason may lie in change management at the area of disruptive digitalisation. Traditionally, change management has been at the forefront of digitalisation, but also its biggest obstacle, because it relies so heavily on the personal attributes of the manager, and the willingness of employees to follow through with their plan.

Professional services giant Deloitte is quick to point out that prior to embarking on a data-driven digital journey, change managers must align the entire organisation towards digitalisation and agree on the value it adds to the whole operation. Obviously this includes HR and L&D.

The use of Big Data opens up a world of possibilities for L&D departments, but it is also a substantial challenge, according to Learning Wire. Those challenges include the imperfection of current tools, the lack of human skill in analysing the data, and internal resistance to this sort of generalised data-based decision making.

And so it falls on leaders of all departments, change managers, and C-level executives alike, to tackle these challenges and turn them into opportunities.

What opportunities does Big Data present to L&D?

Challenges aside, there are some practices that have already taken root and have proven to work. All of them build upon existing HR methods, but also borrow heavily from other fields such as consumerism and marketing, which have benefited greatly from digitalisation.

Little Data

The routine measurement of things such as number of participants, courses, hours spent, costs, duration, participant reaction, and amount learned has long been analysed by L&D managers. However, the fact that this is not typically cross-referenced with other metrics leaves most L&D divisions with “little data” instead of “big data”.

Still, years of gathering this kind of information has allowed for the understanding of the impact of learning on employees. L&D departments nowadays are more aware of the impact of their work on overall productivity than divisions such as “talent acquisition” and “rewards”.

These practices should be continued but, more importantly, they could be used as a base to build on and expand Big Data analytics.

Employee-centric design

This has to do with designing L&D tools that cater to the employee, rather than the manager. It is a shift from so-called “instructional design” to “experience design”, phrases coined by senior Deloitte L&D analyst Josh Bersin. Experience design makes learning and information support easy and intuitive to use. It borrows from the IT term User Experience (UX), which puts ease and preference of use above all else. Designing apps, intranet resources and even non-digital tools with this philosophy in mind can be achieved via Big Data analytics by tracking the way employees use these instruments to learn.

According to Bersin, L&D managers can no longer see themselves as trainers or instructors:

“While instructional design continues to play a role, we now need L&D to focus on “experience design”, “design thinking”, the development of “employee journey maps”, and much more experimental, data-driven solutions in the flow of work.”

Data-driven content

The current L&D framework at companies around the world is similar to the way digital marketing is conducted. Guillermo Miranda, IBM’s Chief Learning Officer, describes it as being composed of various types of content, whose data on interactions and activities is meticulously collected and analysed. This data is then used to create intelligent systems to promote this content and monitor the way employees are using it in order to personalise it to their needs.

Big Data is at the centre of this approach, since it is able to track the preferences of employees with regard to the content they are receiving and the way they are processing it. By the way, Facebook uses a similar algorithm in its News Feed, and that has helped turn it into a multi-billion company. 

Read Part 2 of the article here.

This article was kindly provided by Christophe Coutat, Founder and Managing Director at Advent Group.