“Tech for Execs”
Learning Experience

The Challenge

Elevate tech knowledge at the executive level to drive a tech transformation strategy across the enterprise.

A Fortune 100 financial institution was on a mission to shift from a “bank” to a "tech” company. Such a transformation required up-skilling at all levels, so the company established a “Tech for Execs” learning program with the following core objectives:

• Educate leaders on relevant trends in technology and elevate tech fluency at executive level

• Connect leaders to envision how tech can help disrupt business as usual

• Demonstrate and inspire application throughout the company

• Emphasize the executive role in helping drive change and advance the tech in each leader’s business

The next step was to understand the executive audience needs and current pain points before designing the future program plan.

The approach & outcome

A future-state learning experience designed for on-the-go executive peers

Research

Our two-person learning team set off to discover more about our executives’ learning needs. We focused our research efforts by conducting sixteen quick empathy interviews to understand the goals, interests, pain points and concerns of the group as they related to tech topics, learning formats, and overall career development needs. We heard several unique stories about impactful teachers from the past, horrible corporate training experiences, and personal and team trepidations.

Synthesizing the research I uncovered that we had two distinct types of executive learners with a potential symbiotic relationship. I created learner personas from the collected insights to showcase the unique attributes of each. I then pulled out the commonalities for both personas and used that as a beacon for ideating touchpoints and mapping a future-state learning experience.

Plan

The next step involved a team ideation session to generate touchpoints and interactions that would satisfy both personas. The winning interactions included:

• Biannual Executive Escapes: Knowing the right destination would get these executives excited to learn, this 2-3 day event would include a program kick-off, peer-to-peer matching, guest speakers, tech-giant site visits and demos, and outdoor activities.

• Biannual Family & Friends STEAM Events: Designed to give executives time to learn with their family & friends, this interactive event would marry tech topics with personal and work life.

• Monthly Newsletters: Designed for on-the-go mobile and print consumption, these newsletters would feature several internal and external curated links to articles and podcasts aligned to data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. Executives would have reading time allocated on their calendars and be encouraged to share content from these newsletters with their teams.

• Podcast Channel: The company had just built and released an internal podcast app and there was an enthusiastic tech executive eager to host a podcast channel. The podcast episodes would feature the host, guests and topics aligned to the annual curriculum.

• Quarterly Peer Hikes: This one-on-one peer interaction would allow executives in a tech-related field to converse regularly with an executive in a non-tech related field, fostering a mentee/mentor relationship. Executives would have time allocated on their calendars to have this casual meetup while doing an activity around campus: hiking, biking, walking, stretching, etc.

Prior to mapping it’s important to note that we also discovered these key insights while planning:

• Administrative Assistants and Chiefs of Staff were core to prioritizing events and meetings on executive calendars; therefore, they should be core to the learning experience.

• Executives, along with most employees, were experiencing burnout from adoption of new company tools and software; therefore, we’d avoid forcing a new mobile app or gadget on them.

With that in mind I mapped out what this experience would look like over twelve months aligned to the following year’s company-wide tech strategy and curriculum. The map displays a quarter-by-quarter, month-by-month view of:

• Known annual company events and priorities which will compete for the Executive’s time

• Interaction points for Executives and their Administrative Assistants or Chiefs of Staff

• A curriculum overview

• Program metric methods for capturing data & insights to inform the following year’s experience

This type of diagram is key for upfront learner evaluation and stakeholder buy-in prior to using costly resources to curate and create learning content. Taking this a step further, we could also zoom in to each row or column and map out every interaction, the curriculum content, learning team operations and activities, and (most importantly) learner feedback and sentiments aligned to the interactions.