In Leading Learning Podcast episode 440, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele share the questions and topics probed in Leading Learning’s annual survey on learning businesses—questions and topics that can provide a solid basis for strategy conversations in your learning business.
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Jeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Whether you’re setting strategy, revisiting an existing strategy, or planning how to deliver on a strategy, the end of the year is a natural time to do the work.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:14] I’m Celisa Steele.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:24] It’s nearing the end of the calendar year, and, whether the calendar year is also your fiscal year or not, now is a great time to be thinking about strategy.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:33] Dan Pink has a very interesting book called When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:40] He has a lot of interesting books.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:41] He does, and I was lucky enough to get to talk with Dan Pink about several of his books for the Leading Learning Podcast. But the reason I brought him up now is because, in When, he writes about how there’s natural momentum for certain activities at certain times. And thinking about the year ahead at the end of the current year feels natural. It’s common. And so we want to use this episode, one of our last of this year, to talk about strategy and planning.
Jeff Cobb: [00:01:11] This is indeed that time of year when so many organizations, at least [those] that we deal with, really are starting to try to think strategically about the coming year and to formulate a plan around that strategy. We’ll talk a little bit about the difference between strategy and planning here in a minute. But part of what you need to develop a strategy is good information to go on, good data to go on, and there are a lot of places to get that. But one of those places is…
Celisa Steele: [00:01:37] …hopefully Leading Learning. We have been running an annual trends and issues survey among learning businesses for…I guess I should have counted it up before we sat down to record.
Jeff Cobb: [00:01:47] It’s been a while.
Many Trends Have Become Mainstream
Celisa Steele: [00:01:48] Many years at this point. We typically run that survey in the final quarter of the year and then share those results at the end of the year and in the beginning of the new year so that you do have some of that benchmarking data, some awareness around what other people are thinking about that are in similar circumstances.
Jeff Cobb: [00:02:08] For the past several years, we’ve been asking essentially the same set of questions. We’ve been asking about a set of areas that we know are important to learning businesses, where they might be focusing some of their efforts (things like microlearning and blended learning, the types of areas that we know organizations are focused on), and asking them, “Are they doing this now? Will they be doing it in the coming year?” And we’ve gotten some great data from that. We’ve gotten some real insight into what organizations are doing. And I think there are 14 different areas that we’ve asked about.
Celisa Steele: [00:02:41] Yes, I think 14 most years. One year we had 15 and backed away from it. But I think that had to do with blockchain, the one that we wound up taking out.
Jeff Cobb: [00:02:48] We finally decided nobody was doing anything with blockchain.
Celisa Steele: [00:02:51] But what we did find out is that people are now doing a lot in those other 14 areas. What started as more fringe trends—things that people might be thinking about but hadn’t necessarily done a lot with when we first were asking about them—had tipped over into standard practice, into something that most learning businesses were doing. It began to feel less helpful to ask how many people are already doing this or planning to in the coming year once we hit that majority—and often a strong majority were already doing it or planning to in the next 12 months.
Jeff Cobb: [00:03:29] Things like microlearning or virtual conferences or using data to make decisions around their learning—these are table stakes now. As we’re saying, most organizations are doing that type of thing. This year we decided to tear it down and build back up, completely revamp the survey, and try to get at what we think is most important right now or what might be most helpful right now with an eye towards “How does this help with potentially coming up with a strategy or informing your strategy for your organization?” We went through a pretty intensive process to try to come up with a concise set of questions because we know how hard it is to get people to respond to surveys. This one is no different.
Many Thanks to the Respondents Who Help Make Benchmarking Data Possible
Celisa Steele: [00:04:12] And thank you to any listener out there who took the time to complete the survey. We are truly grateful that you gave up some of your time in the survey. On average, it takes less than 10 minutes to complete. We’re grateful, though, because we know, again like you’re saying, Jeff, it can be really hard to actually get people to participate. So thank you to those that did.
Jeff Cobb: [00:04:31] I would say “contributed” some of your time because you’re giving; you’re giving to the community when you do this. If you work in this learning business world that we talk so much about and that we work in, you’ll recognize there’s not a lot of data out there. You can get higher ed data, or you can get association data, but data that’s specific to the providers of continuing education and professional development who are having to market and sell this and serve learners, specific data around that is practically non-existent other than what we’ve been doing for several years and are now trying to build upon and improve upon. If you want that data to exist, if you want to be able to use it in your planning, to make your case for budget, for all of those sorts of things, the only way to get there is for all of us to contribute to it. As you were saying, Celisa, thank you to those who have. If you have not participated in this type of research in the past, please, please, when it comes around, make a few minutes to do it.
Revamping the Survey
Celisa Steele: [00:05:25] Now we’ll put away our soapbox. Jeff, back to revamping the survey. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the process and the thinking that went into that. We’ve already talked about it at the highest level—that we recognized a need to rebuild it from the ground up because it seemed like the data we were getting back was no longer as valuable as it had been initially.
Jeff Cobb: [00:05:47] We did this in close collaboration with one of our new best buddies—good old ChatGPT. This was not simply a “Hey, ChatGPT, write us a survey” sort of thing. We’ve been in a continuous dialog. I have a conversation set up with ChatGPT that I’ve been feeding data and thoughts into for several months now, taking the data we’ve collected from different events, from conversations we’ve had, from things we’ve written—feeding that all into this conversation and continuing to ask questions and probe and have conversations and getting to the point where ChatGPT has a good understanding of this whole learning business world that we work in.
Jeff Cobb: [00:06:30] We’ve developed personas for the type of people who are leading learning businesses. It’s very, very well informed at this point. And so the conversation was, “We want to go out and survey around what’s going to be most important for this group, for the learning business in the coming year? Where are people going to be focusing? Where should people potentially be focusing?” and have that conversation. And that led to, I think it was the sixth iteration of the survey that we finally went with after a lot of back and forth and actually arguing with ChatGPT. I prompted ChatGPT to be much more critical of the survey at one point and really tried to poke holes in it, and we ended up with what we now have used for this year’s survey.
Starting with Strategic Goals
Celisa Steele: [00:07:14] Once you get past a few upfront general questions about the kind of organization you represent, then we get to strategic goals.
Jeff Cobb: [00:07:24] One of the first things we wanted to ask about in the survey is what’s your primary strategic goal for the coming year? And, for that matter, what’s your secondary strategic goal for the coming year? This was a place where, because we have done so much work in this world of continuing education, professional development, the broader learning business, we had a pretty good idea of what the choices might be. We did lay out some choices for respondents to select from, and we did also leave it open for people to say, “No, it’s none of those; it’s something else.” But maybe we can talk about what those choices were.
Celisa Steele: [00:08:00] We offered seven defined choices based, like you said, Jeff, on conversations and our observations of learning businesses and what they’re dealing with. Those seven are increasing revenue; enhancing learner engagement; growing enrollments and/or registrations; strengthening alignment with workforce needs; advancing equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility; improving marketing reach and effectiveness; and then, finally, increasing operational efficiency. For us, starting off with these strategic goals puts a frame around all the following questions. In the past, when we had asked about trends and issues, we got pretty quickly to those trends and issues. I think this puts people in a different mindset to start off by asking about strategic goals, and this aligns with our own thinking. Rather than chasing any particular trend or issue, hopefully, whatever you’re doing, even if it relates to a trend, has some connection, some tie to a strategic goal.
Jeff Cobb: [00:09:04] Of course, this is a critical element of developing a strategy. You have to know what your aspiration is for whatever time period you’re defining for this. So what is it? What is it you’re really trying to achieve in the coming year? If you’re not clear about that, if everybody who’s involved isn’t clear about that, it’s hard to get clear about what you’re going to do tactically to achieve it. You might end up being all over the map, which we find happens with a lot of organizations.
Celisa Steele: [00:09:31] At an event we hosted last week, the difference between strategy and planning came up a lot. I think a lot of organizations, including learning businesses, can feel mired in the planning. It’s much more about the to-do list and getting things done and checked off rather than understanding the strategic “Why are you doing any of those particular things?”
Jeff Cobb: [00:09:55] Yes, those should all track back to the choices you’ve made. Strategy is about making a set of choices around who you’re going to serve and your general approach to serving them. You have to have that well defined before you can then start talking concretely about what we’re going to do—X, Y, and Z—according to this time schedule. Those were what we defined as potential primary strategic goals. But, of course, part of the reason that we’re raising all of this in the first place is to prompt you to reflect a little bit. You heard what we asked about as potential strategic goals for your organization, and you may even want to pause right now and think about it. Are you clear on your goals for next year? Of the goals we suggested, do any of those align with what your primary or secondary strategic goals are? Or is it something else? Make sure that you’ve been clear about those choices and the people that need to know about the choices have been made are aware of them.
The Drivers Behind the Strategic Goals
Celisa Steele: [00:10:52] We also asked about drivers behind the strategic goals. Again, for me, the idea of drivers is that those reflect the broader context in which your business is operating, in which you’re trying to realize those strategic goals. Being aware of that broader context is important because it ties very directly to some of the choices you might make about how you achieve any of those strategic goals or even potentially help to keep you aware of the need to shift any of your strategic goals, based on if any of the drivers might change, for example.
Jeff Cobb: [00:11:28] I think of this in terms of one of our favorite theorist writers about strategy, Richard Rumelt. He says that strategy always starts with a diagnosis. You have to have the diagnosis correct. Having an understanding of your drivers is an essential part of that diagnosis because, when you’re making the choices about strategy, you’re trying to respond to that context, to that diagnosis that you’ve made. And so this question is asking people to say what are they seeing? How are they diagnosing their situation and seeing the major strategic drivers for their education business?
Celisa Steele: [00:12:06] We offered seven choices again. (I believe it’s seven. Anyway, we’ll see if my counting was correct.) But this one was a multi-select. For the primary and secondary strategic goal, we were looking for one thing in response to each of those questions. For this question, they could select as many of these as they felt really informed their strategic goals. The options we have include evolving learner demands, a need for stronger competitive positioning in the market, a need to increase financial sustainability and/or profitability, better alignment with mission, a desire to be seen as setting the pace in the field or industry served, compliance with industry standards or regulatory requirements, and then, the last one we named, internal pressures—that could be from management or administration, from a board, for example.
Jeff Cobb: [00:12:58] Having heard those—you can pause and repeat if you want to. That’s the beauty of listening to a podcast. Or you can go read the show notes when we’re all done with recording this and reflect on those. Reflect on your own and/or reflect with your team. Do any of those reflect your strategic drivers? How many of those reflect your strategic drivers? Because there’s bound to be some overlap. And there may be some other ones that are specific to your situation. But that’s the key here: objectively understanding your situation, diagnosing it well, and having those strategic drivers inform the choices you’re making about strategy, those goals that you’re going to pursue.
Trends and Issues Impacting Learning Businesses’ Strategy
Celisa Steele: [00:13:41] After looking at strategic goals and looking at the drivers behind those strategic goals, then we got to trends and issues. This is the part of the survey that, in some ways, most closely parallels previous iterations of the survey, but even this list of trends and issues we refined and tweaked this year. We asked about eight specific areas. We asked essentially how important these are on a five-point scale from “not important” all the way up to “critical.”
Jeff Cobb: [00:14:14] These again, for me, are a part of that diagnosis. They’re part of the overall context, understanding your drivers and also those trends and issues that are going to play into your strategic choices. The things we asked about—first one is probably no surprise—advances in artificial intelligence; then workforce and employer needs (for example, job readiness, upskilling, and reskilling); then learner preferences for flexibility, which might include formats, scheduling; then providing more personalized learning experiences.
Celisa Steele: [00:14:48] And then the last four that we asked about: increasing competition from other learning providers; growth in microcredentials, digital badges, and other forms of alternative credentialing; virtual and/or hybrid events; and then diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in education offerings.
Jeff Cobb: [00:15:10] There’s also an open box on this. If there’s something else that you feel is impacting you in terms of trends and issues and that is going to inform your learning business strategy in 2025, you have an opportunity to put that in.
Celisa Steele: [00:15:26] Yet again, this is an opportunity for you to pause the podcast and do some reflecting, whether right now later and whether you want to do it on your own or with your team, if you do it later. But do think about what are the trends and issues that are informing, impacting, and influencing your strategy in 2025. It might be some of these eight that we mentioned. It might be some other things. But again this is all about being aware and being on the same page with your team. And so this is a good exercise of making sure how clear are you in making sure that others would agree with the same answers that you’re giving here?
Partner with Tagoras
Jeff Cobb: [00:16:11] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.
Challenges in Maintaining or Growing Enrollments or Registrations
Jeff Cobb: [00:16:46] Having asked about drivers and about trends and issues, we turn to asking about challenges that learning businesses might be facing. What are the top challenges? We characterize these as specifically in maintaining or growing enrollments and/or registrations for your education offerings in the coming year because we know that is in fact going to be a major focus for most learning businesses.
Celisa Steele: [00:17:14] We offered seven choices. In the context of the survey, we said pick up to three. As you’re reflecting and thinking about your own top challenges, we would encourage you again to…. If you’re nodding your head and saying yes to every one that we’re going to read off here in a minute, that may be true, but perhaps there’s some value in prioritizing and thinking through which of these challenges are posing the largest problem or challenge for your learning business. You might think about it as up to three. Which three are giving you the most trouble? We asked about limited marketing resources, increased competition, pricing challenges, lack of learner engagement, difficulty proving return on investment to learners or to the other stakeholders like employers, content that’s become outdated or declined in relevance, and then insufficient internal resources—that could be staff (maybe you don’t have the right human resources) or that could also be budget (maybe you don’t have the dollars to do what you want).
Jeff Cobb: [00:18:18] Once again, an opportunity to reflect here. How many of these challenges align with what you’re facing and what would really drive your strategic choices? Again, as you were saying, Celisa, we asked folks to prioritize these, to only pick three because that’s part of being able to make those strategic choices. You have to decide what is most important, at least for some period of time, to focus in on what challenges are you going to try to rise to in the coming year? And there might be others. We do provide that other possibility here as well, depending on your specific circumstances.
Barriers to Innovation in Education Offerings
Celisa Steele: [00:18:54] After challenges, we turn to barriers. We characterize the barriers as being about innovation in your education offerings. Again, we ask you to prioritize. We asked survey respondents to prioritize, to think about, “What are your top barriers?” Out of the list, we asked them to pick up to three. This was a shorter list, though. We only offered five preset choices and then again an open-ended opportunity there. But the five start with internal resistance to change and then difficulty finding skilled staff or resources.
Jeff Cobb: [00:19:32] And then we asked about concerns about return on investment, focus on short-term goals over long-term planning, and then insufficient technology infrastructure. As you said, this is a somewhat shorter list for folks to choose from, Celisa. It reflects our experience with organizations. In the first place, we hear people talk a lot about how they’re not able to innovate within their learning business; that is a challenge for them, which is why we wanted to ask about this in the first place. But then these are some of the most common barriers we feel like we hear from folks. Again you can reflect. Are these the types of barriers you’re facing, or is there something else that’s holding back innovation in your organization, your learning business?
Celisa Steele: [00:20:17] I’ll note that one of those options focuses on short-term goals over long-term planning. We opened with talking about the balance between strategy and planning and the long term versus short term. We hear that in this answer choice. We’ve seen a lot of organizations trying to strike that proper balance between long term and short term, between strategic and more tactical decisions and actions.
Confidence in Ability to Achieve Strategic Goals
Jeff Cobb: [00:20:43] Right. Some challenges and barriers there. We thought it’d be good to cap off those two questions with a question about confidence. We ask, “Given your learning business’s current resources”—and we focus specifically on resources; we know there may be other factors—“how confident are you in achieving your top strategic goals for 2025?” We’ve asked people to say their goals, think about the drivers for those goals and the trends and issues and some of the barriers and challenges they’re facing, and so now, at this point, knowing what they have to work with—their team, their technology, their resources—how confident are they? And this was a five-point scale, so we said, “not at all confident,” “not so confident,” “somewhat confident,” “very confident,” and “extremely confident.”
Celisa Steele: [00:21:40] This is interesting to think about in the context of assessments that take place in learning, where there is an approach to assessment that asks a learner, particularly in the context of multiple choice, to not just select a multiple-choice answer but then to say how confident they are that that answer is right. That can be a useful tool, as a learner to then recognize, “Okay, I was really confident about that one, but I got it wrong,” so it can point you to what you need to go and assess. Obviously, in this case, there is no exactly right or wrong answer, but I think this idea of tapping into confidence is valuable because you can have your plans, you can have your strategy, but there’s a certain amount of mindset that goes along with being able to make that achievement, which ties to confidence.
Celisa Steele: [00:22:24] I think too, if you recognize that you’re not particularly confident, that then leads to a question about, “Okay, well, why am I not so confident? What might we be able to do that would change how confident I am in our ability to achieve this?,” which might get to staff or budget, or it might be then a lever you can use with making the case for additional allocation from the budget, potentially. But it’s again this awareness and being clear on the drivers and on your own confidence level around achieving what you’re setting out to achieve.
Jeff Cobb: [00:23:00] This doesn’t happen enough in strategy formulation sessions or in planning sessions that follow on from strategy, asking the people involved, “How confident are we really about this?” Just pausing and saying, “Do we have this right—both the overall strategy and then the tactics that we’re going to use to pursue the strategy?” And, as you said, if you’re not at all confident, you might want to ask why. But I think the reverse is also true. If you’re very confident, you need to ask why because you may want to do some worst-case-scenario planning. What could go wrong here that we’re not giving enough weight to right now? That’s just one small question in this survey, and we focus specifically on resources. There are other things, like the environment around you, your context that you’re operating in; they could be big factors. Spend some time talking about your confidence overall, though, when you’re doing this strategy work.
Top Areas of Investment in the Year Ahead
Celisa Steele: [00:23:53] And then we asked about areas of investment. This aligns with our philosophy in the way we ask a lot of questions. We do a lot of surveying as part of our consulting work. But one thing we always like to ask about is actions and behaviors more than preferences or plans. And so, in the survey so far, we’ve been talking about trends and issues, and here this is around investment. What areas are you planning to most actively invest in in the coming year? It’s putting your dollars where your mouth is. What are you actually serious about? What are you going to spend some of that limited budget on?
Jeff Cobb: [00:24:33] Of course we can always see how things actually go during the year—if we’re seeing that—and then how questions are answered the following year if we ask this question again. We’ve seen that with past versions of the survey. But what we ask here…I’ll take the first few, and you can take the second few, Celisa, because we give a number of choices here, out of the investment areas. We start with increasing learner engagement; then measuring learning outcomes more effectively; developing employer-aligned offerings; implementing artificial intelligence; and expanding microcredentials, digital badges, and/or other alternative credentials.
Celisa Steele: [00:25:13] So that was five. We have another five that we listed there: increasing efforts to sell to corporate and/or organizational purchasers, increasing efforts to partner with other organizations, enhancing marketing and outreach efforts, improving capabilities and data analytics, and then the last option we listed was providing personalized learning experiences. Again, we wanted people to think in terms of priorities, so we asked them to select up to three, and there was again an open-ended box there. I think this is a really good question to talk about with your team. What areas are you investing in in the year ahead? See how that matches up with your strategic goals. This is a good place to look for alignment. If you have a clear strategic goal, are the areas where you’re investing supporting that strategic goal and making sure that those really do match up?
Jeff Cobb: [00:26:10] Yes, probably all of these areas could align with a variety of strategic goals. But, for example, if your primary goal is to increase revenue, and then you say that you’re going to invest in increasing learner engagement, you want to make sure you understand the bright line between learner engagement and revenue. What’s your operating theory as to why increasing learner engagement is therefore going to drive that bigger goal of revenue, and how are you going to measure that? You’ll be able to measure revenue growth, but then how are you going to measure that increasing learner engagement supported that revenue growth? You need to get down to that level of detail to get your plans and your strategy in alignment.
Evaluating Success
Celisa Steele: [00:26:53] Related to measuring, we asked about evaluating success and how learning businesses are evaluating the success of what they have in their portfolio. We asked about a number of different ways that are pretty common among learning businesses and asked if they’re currently using these approaches already, planning to in the year ahead, not planning to in the year ahead,” and then we gave a “not sure,” just in case a respondent wasn’t clear there. But I’ll do the first few. We asked about self-reported learner satisfaction. We also asked about self-reported learner application of knowledge or skills. In both those cases, these can be those post-course evaluations, but you’re asking the learner, “How much did you like the course?” in terms of that learner satisfaction.
Celisa Steele: [00:27:41] For the one around application of knowledge or skills, it might be, “Have you applied something that you learned in the course?” And that might be something you ask a week later or a month later. Or you ask what they’ve done that applied what they’ve learned. The third option that we asked about was enrollment numbers: “How many people are enrolling in whatever that option is in your portfolio?” Then completion rates. Out of those people enrolled, how many of them are actually finishing that course? And then revenue generation and/or profit margins—so not just how many people enrolled, but then what does that mean in terms of revenue? Or, even better yet, what does that mean in terms of profit once you deduct any of the expenses related to providing that opportunity to learn?
Jeff Cobb: [00:28:26] Right, that business side of learning business. And then some additional measures/metrics. We asked about post-learning assessment of knowledge or skills. Once the course, the event, whatever is done, are you following up with that post-learning assessment? Post-learning assessment of application of knowledge or skills. Engagement metrics—things like time spent in the activity or interactions in the activity. And then finally post-learning career impact.
Celisa Steele: [00:29:00] Now, you might have a variety of different ways that you’re measuring some of those last ones that you just ran through, Jeff, but the idea is that we know that being able to show career impact is very valuable. If you can do that and collect that data and then be able to use that in marketing efforts, that’s probably going to be very valuable for your learning business. And you could do that in different ways. It could be through some sort of survey. It could be through some sort of interaction with a manager once the learner’s back at work, depending on what your level of connection is in those environments.
Business Models and Approaches to Products and Pricing
Jeff Cobb: [00:29:37] That was some measurement related to learning, related to business, how you’re evaluating the success of your education offerings. We also wanted to ask a little bit about business model issues, indicating your status with respect to certain product and pricing approaches. Many things we could have asked about here. We homed in on some that we feel are common, or we see some trending in their direction. This included things like discounts for bulk enrollments or registration. For example, if you’re selling to corporate buyers, doing that business-to-business-type approach, are you providing those discounts? Another was subscription access to full or part of your education catalog. Are you providing a subscription model for doing that? Again, something we’ve been hearing a lot about, and we wanted to see how well that’s playing out out there. The third one was bundling products together for a discounted total cost. Do you have a bundling approach to give people more value if they buy more from you?
Celisa Steele: [00:30:45] We also asked about purchasing a set number of enrollments or registrations and then maybe getting the next free. So, you enroll in nine online courses; you’re going to get that 10th one free. And then we also asked about tiered pricing levels. Maybe you have essentially the same product, but there’s a premium, standard, and basic level. At the premium level, you get some additional perks that you don’t get if you’re just buying at the basic level as a learner. All of these are about, as you said, Jeff, the business models behind this, and it’s often around trying to grow the amount of dollars that any particular learner or any other stakeholder, on behalf of learners, is spending with your learning business.
How AI Is Being Used in Learning Businesses
Jeff Cobb: [00:31:31] You may have noticed that AI didn’t come up in that question, around putting AI into your products, or it hadn’t popped up a lot in these questions, and that’s because we asked specifically about AI in some of the questioning that we do here. Specifically, we wanted to know where organizations are, where learning businesses are in implementing artificial intelligence, and then we have a follow-on question from that. But, in terms of implementing, we basically gave a range from “not currently discussing AI” up to “actively using AI across most or all offerings,” just to give us a sense because obviously AI has been such a huge thing over the course of the past couple of years, and it does have amazing potential in the learning business. In fact, we have a keynote speaker at our Learning Business Summit for 2025 who’s going to talk about artificial intelligence as part of what he covers in his comments. So we wanted to see where are we with it?
Using the Survey Questions to Think About Your Own Strategy
Celisa Steele: [00:32:30] That’s a walkthrough of the survey, and we’re going to be sharing some results from the survey in another podcast episode here in a few weeks. Even before we got to sharing any results—and we do think that’s valuable; we think that can provide some benchmarking data and insight for you and your learning business. But we also believe that the kinds of questions and topics that we probe on in the survey can serve as an aid in your own thinking about strategy, in your own thinking about areas of focus, in your own thinking about areas where you’re going to invest in in the year ahead.
Jeff Cobb: [00:33:09] Hopefully, everything we’ve raised here are good points for reflection, good areas to prompt some questioning, whether that’s sitting down with a piece of paper or your favorite digital note-taking tool yourself or whether it is a conversation with your team. Leverage these questions. Of course, we also hope that you’ve participated in the survey or will do that when the opportunity comes around again. But having this as thought material we felt would be extremely valuable.
Jeff Cobb: [00:33:47] Whether you’re setting strategy, revisiting an existing strategy, or planning how to deliver on a strategy, the end of the year is a natural time to do the work.
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