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New Approach to Continuous Talent Development Unifies Content, Process, Big Data and Talent Analytics to Facilitate an Employee-Centric User Experience Skillsoft, a global leader in learning and talent management, wrapped up its largest ever customer conference, 2015 Global Skillsoft Perspectives, last week in Orlando, with nearly 1,200 conference attendees and social reach, according to the event hashtag  #Perspectives15, exceeding 3.5 million people. Buzz at the conference centered on the company’s recent announcements and innovations, including the recent acquisition of Vodeclic,  Skillsoft’s big data initiative with IBM, and the unveiling of the “Self-Developing Organization,” a progressive, employee-centric approach to accelerating talent that leverages the fully-integrated capabilities of Skillsoft and SumTotal solutions.

2015 Global Skillsoft Perspectives featured an impressive lineup of speakers and keynote presentations delivered by visionaries and Skillsoft executives, including:

• Skillsoft CEO Chuck Moran and Chief Operating Officer Jerry Nine kicked off the event, welcoming learning and talent leaders from hundreds of global organizations and detailing how the company’s latest investments and innovations will drive next-generation talent development. These advances underscore the company’s ongoing commitment to delivering employee-focused solutions that improve the performance of organizations by continually improving, quantifying and optimizing the performance of their people.

• Skillsoft Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Development John Ambrose delivered the event’s opening keynote, Dawn of the “Self Developing Organization,” to a standing-room-only audience.  During his presentation, Ambrose outlined the company’s strategy for helping organizations build cultures and capabilities that foster innovation and agility through the delivery of personalized, content-infused processes that allow learning to occur naturally and contextually as part of the daily flow of work.  According to Ambrose, “Clunky old practices of treating talent content and talent platforms as separate, disconnected solutions will not work in a world where millennials now make up 50 percent of the workforce.”
• Conference headliners, Sir Ken Robinson and Mike Walsh offered their thought-provoking, often humorous, perspectives, in two separate keynotes, on how technology, education and culture are converging to shape future workplaces that look radically different than they did just five years ago.  In the wake of digital technologies, growing competition for skills and increased organizational transparency, both keynotes encouraged attendees to push the envelope on new work methodologies and rethink their employee engagement strategies.
• Day two of the conference opened with Humair Ghauri, Senior Vice President of Research and Development for SumTotal, delivering a preview of the company’s next-generation platform designed to support “Self Developing Organizations.” During this session, Ghauri demonstrated how, by linking rich talent profile information with Skillsoft’s more than 60,000 content assets and patented search capabilities and layering in Big Data models developed with IBM Research, self-developing organizations become “self-learning.”  The more users interact, the smarter the system becomes about who an employee is and how  that employee learns, providing a dynamic, hyper-personalized learning plan that can help employees improve their performance and achieve their maximum potential.  A real-time analytics engine continually correlates and quantifies the business impact of each learning interaction to identify the learning experiences that are having the greatest impact on business performance.

• The event’s general sessions culminated in a lively, heavily-tweeted about debate on talent analytics, featuring Shreya Sarkar-Barney, president and founder of Human Capital Growth; Anshul Sheopuri , principal research staff member and senior manager of digital at IBM Research; , Gene Pease, CEO of Vestrics; John Mattox, senior consultant of talent solutions at CEB;  and influential HR speaker, blogger and author, Laurie Ruettimann. Panelists offered insights on Big Data’s role in learning and talent management and advice on how organizations can advance to the next level of talent analytics maturity and impact business decisions.

The conference served as the setting for 2015 Global Skillsoft Perspectives annual Innovation Awards, honoring customers who have demonstrated exceptional business success using solutions from SumTotal and Skillsoft. Read more about the Innovation Award winners

Attendees participated in more than 50 pre-and post- conference workshops, instructional sessions and customer break-outs to learn, network with peers and exchange industry best practices.  Throughout the week, customers also had an opportunity to preview the latest innovations from Skillsoft and SumTotal, including Vodeclic’s video courses on digital productivity applications and a live demo of the joint work Skillsoft and IBM are engaged in to help address HR’s mounting Big Data challenges.

Skillsoft customers in Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa will have additional opportunities to learn about Skillsoft’s latest innovations at 2015 Skillsoft Perspectives EMEA in London on June 25 and 2015 Skillsoft Perspectives Australia and New Zealand in Sydney on August 19.

For more information on the announcements at 2015 Global Skillsoft Perspectives:

• Watch a video on Skillsoft’s and IBM’s Big Data initiative
• Learn more about Skillsoft’s acquisition of Vodeclic
• Download Brandon Hall Group’s 2015 State of Succession Management study, which was featured during the conference in a session with Laci Loew, Brandon Hall Group’s principal analyst and vice president of talent management.
• Follow us on Twitter @skillsoft
• Follow us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/skillsoft  and like us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/skillsoft

Tweet this: .@Skillsoft unveils concept of Self-Developing Organization at #Perspectives15 #HCM http://ow.ly/NvhGI

About Skillsoft

Skillsoft is a pioneer in the fields of learning and talent management with a long history of innovation. Skillsoft provides cloud-based learning solutions for its customers worldwide, ranging from global enterprises, government, and education to mid-sized and small businesses. Skillsoft’s customer support teams draw on a wealth of in-house experience, flexible delivery platforms and a comprehensive learning e-library to develop off-the-shelf and custom learning programs tailored to cost-effectively meet customer needs. Skillsoft’s courses, books and videos have been developed by industry leading learning experts to ensure that they maximize business skills, performance, and talent development.

Skillsoft currently serves over 6,000 customers and more than 19,000,000 learners around the world. Skillsoft is on the web at www.Skillsoft.com.

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