GE’s Journey From Crotonville to BrilliantYOU™

GE has one of the world’s most renowned and recognized leadership institutes. Yet only 30 percent of the company’s professional employees were able to participate in a learning experience at Crotonville, as the company’s decades-old leadership institute is known. To remain at the forefront of our increasingly digital future, GE had to expand learning and provide development opportunities for the more than 300,000 employees in more than 180 countries around the world.

Join Sara Ley from GE as she walks through the company’s evolution from Crotonville to BrilliantYOU™, the company’s new, digital learning model and experience platform.

In this session attendees will learn:

• How GE’s building a continual learning mindset
• What GE’s learning about their learners
• How GE’s shaping the “Brilliant Way”: lessons learned and plans for the future

About Sara Ley

Sara Ley is the Crotonville Digital Learning and Technology Leader for GE. Since assuming this role January 2014, Ley has led GE’s BrilliantYOU digital strategy, strengthening the company’s performance culture through the development of a next-generation learning community. BrilliantYou offers transformational learning experiences from the Crotonville Leadership Institute, and from world-class partners across academia and business, to GE’s global workforce

Ley joined GE in 2007 as an IT project manager supporting the GE Aviation business. She established and managed Aviation IT’s More T in IT program that focused on developing technical skills of Aviation IT employees. Ley moved to corporate in 2011 as the IT learning and development manager and was responsible for the IT function employees in technical and leadership skills. In 2012, she transitioned to the Crotonville leadership development organization leading online learning and curriculum for GE.

Ley is the leader for Jacksonville Women’s Network Hub. She is a graduate of Florida State University, with a master’s in instructional system design and bachelor’s in communication for business. She is a member of GE Veteran’s Network Grow Pillar and GE Volunteers Council and active in the United Way of Northeast Florida. Ley currently lives in Jacksonville, Fla., with her two children.

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First Kill All the Role Plays: Innovation Can Live in Classroom, Too

Because of its profound impact on the learning landscape, technology is often viewed by learning leaders as the answer to any question about innovation (or, at least, as the answer’s starting point). But in the rush to build better learning through technology, have we left behind opportunities to assess and improve our classroom practices?

Takeaways:

• The evolution of live, classroom-based learning practices has failed to keep pace with either the changing needs of modern learners or the advances in our understanding of how people learn.
• In this age of on-demand resources, the practice-to-perform model of classroom-based instruction is largely obsolete for knowledge workers.
• The work effort applied to creating blended solutions often seems weighted toward the technology-based elements. This may be appropriate — but it should not be assumed.
• It’s time for a paradigm shift that goes beyond “minimize lecture.”

About Michael Kennedy

Mike Kennedy is the NBA’s global head of Learning and Leadership Development, responsible for the L&LD team’s design and delivery of innovative, enduring learning solutions to the league’s 1,300 employees worldwide. Kennedy was hired as the NBA’s Director of L&D in 2012, and in 2015 launched its Leadership Development function, which has since established a new standard of practice within the sports industry and distinguished the NBA as a premier developer of top talent. In his time with the NBA, Kennedy has overseen a dramatic expansion of the league’s professional development catalog, implemented its learning management system, introduced competency-based learning, and founded the NBA Business Academy to support the growth of the league’s high-potential population. His team was awarded Gold in Brandon Hall’s 2016 Excellence Awards for Best Advance in Leadership Development.

Prior to joining the NBA, Mike was an Associate Director of Learning and Leadership Development with KPMG LLP. During his six years there, he headed the learning function that supported one quarter of the firm’s 20,000+ employees; oversaw instructional design for major Audit training programs; led the development of the firm’s pre-Partner leadership program for client-facing Senior Managers; rolled out a series of business development e-learning courses under the direction of the firm’s Vice Chair of Market Development; and authored the Audit function’s Presentation Skills and Facilitation Skills programs, which rank among the top-rated and most-attended courses in firm history. Mike was a frequently requested instructor for the firm’s major national programs, and served as the master facilitator for its annual New Manager Training.

Additional past employers include Tiffany and Co., where Mike specialized in organizationaldevelopment and held primary responsibility for the company’s performance management process, aswell as learning initiatives on customer service and behavioral interviewing; and smaller companies in the civil engineering and community mental health industries.

Kennedy draws upon his commanding platform presence and deep expertise in leadership, communications, and learning theory to deliver powerful development experiences that produce real-world results. He holds facilitator certifications in numerous training programs and business simulations, including Situational Leadership II and Marshall Goldsmith’s BreakOut!, and is qualified by education or certification to administer a wide array of assessments, including EQi-2.0, DiSC, MBTI, and FIRO-B. He earned his Certified Professional Coach credential in 2013.

Mike received his B.A. in Psychology from Brown University in Providence, RI and his M.A. in Counseling Psychology from Assumption College in Worcester, MA, where he trained as a psychotherapist specializing in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. He received his Certificate in Training and Development from the University of Rhode Island in Providence, RI.

Brooklyn-born and raised but now living in New Jersey, he is a father of four children and husband of one adult. He is also a poor but enthusiastic guitar player, a less-poor but equally-enthusiastic singer, a lifelong fan of several New York-based sports teams, an avid TV-binger, and an occasional improv comic.

The Future of Learning In An Era of Artificial Intelligence

What are we teaching machines — and what will they start teaching us? In this mind-bending keynote session, futurist Amy Webb will offer a provocative series of snapshots from the near and far future of artificial intelligence. For as long as we’ve had computers, we humans have been trying to anthropomorphize them. Conversation between humans and machines, and ultimately machines with each other, is the foundation upon which modern AI is being built. Right now, we are on the brink of a great AI awakening, and that will dramatically impact employee training, performance and development. What happens when the machines really do learn not just to think – but are trained to out-think us humans?

In this compelling keynote talk audiences will learn:

• How emerging technologies impact learning
• A methodology for predicting future trends
• How AI can be integrated with learning productively

About Amy Webb

Amy Webb knows what’s coming. The futurist, author and founder of the Future Today Institute, she identifies emerging trends maps how they’ll transform the future of business, international relations, culture and the world. A recent Wall Street Journal profile described her methodology, which combines data-driven research with “aggressive computation.” Webb’s forecasting tools are taught in universities, and her Future Today Institute team advises Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, government agencies, large nonprofits, universities and startups worldwide. Her futures forecasting work has been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, CNN, NPR, and more. She was recently named to the 2017 Thinkers50 Radar list of management thinkers most likely to shape the future.

She is the author of three books, including “The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream” (PublicAffairs, December 2016) which explains how leaders and organizations can predict and manage technological change. It was selected as one of Fast Company’s Best Books of 2016, was an Amazon’s best book of December 2016 and was a #1 Bestseller. Signals has been translated into a number of languages.