Collection of Sketchnotes from Learning Technologies Exhibition, London |May 2023

 I found lots to interest and challenge me when I spent two days at the Learning Technologies Exhibition at Excel in London in early May. I carefully picked out a few of the very many free sessions to Sketchnote and I am going to be sharing my five Sketchnotes that I created here.

My first pick was a session on Optimizing Learning for the Hybrid Workforce and I chose it because one of the speakers was Fiona Leteney from the analysts Fosway Group. She shared some of the key market trends across L&D field in the use of technology and you will find these captured in my Sketchnote below. The point about poor digital experiences for cohort based courses linked in my mind to a point raised in a later session on Benchmarking about the reduction since 2016 in the use of blended learning - I wonder if they are connected?

My second selection was the always insightful David James, from 360 Learning.  He was talking about the skills challenge that we face and the need within so many organisations to upskill at scale and the particular advantages of doing this when it is hard to recruit for many roles. It makes sense to grow your own and hire from within by building skills. He focused on practical ways to do this by getting subject-matter experts involved - not in developing content as might be expected but by engaging them in solving pressing business problems. Check out my Sketchnote for more details.

My 3rd Sketchnote is of Toby Harris, from Filtered, and his session on 'Applied AI: How to unlock the power of your learning content'. AI was all over the exhibition floor and drew huge crowds to some of the sessions. Toby focused on how AI can be used to solve real problems and specifically Filtered's experience over many years of using AI to make content curation more practical for busy L&D teams needing to create learning journeys or playlists for diverse requirements for colleagues. Manual curation is becoming more and more of a challenge as the range of content materials has grown and expanded along with the different formats of content. The session included a demonstration and fortunately the wifi just about held out for this!

I knew  right away I wanted to Sketchnote this session because it had a winning line up of speakers - Laura Overton,Michelle Ockers, Nahdia Khan and Ross Garner.

The session was marking 20 years of The Learning Performance Benchmark, which is a wonderful tool to aid L&D teams and organisations to gauge the effectiveness of how their organisation is using L&D and provide opportunities for reflection and action as a result. It is free to use and the session include great examples of its use by organisations. The session also included some key insights and trends from the benchmarking tool across organisations. You can access the tool by contacting Mind Tools.

This session was all about how we can transform the way we think and act around delivering business impact in L&D. The speakers were Laura Overton and Bo Dury from Lepaya and they were sharing insights from the Impact Lab's which they have been running with 200+ Learning Professionals. From the experiences of these professionals Laura and Bo have created a wonderful metaphor of the journeys which L&D teams are on to deliver business impact - take a look at my Sketchnote and have a think about your own journey. What do you have in your rucksack that is helping that journey, what might you need to discard and what might you need to pack?

It was great to meet Bo for the first time and to continue the discussion afterwards with Laura and be joined by Paul Matthews and the L&D Detective Kevin M. Yates.

I hope you find some useful morsels in these Sketchnotes to help your thinking and L&D practice. 

Rachel Burnham

24 May 2023

I help individuals and organisations to use visuals to think, learn and work more effectively, particularly though using Sketchnoting and drawing.