In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, I’m joined by Amanda Mountain, Global Vice President of eCommerce at SAP, for a fascinating and timely conversation on the topic of continuous learning.
August marks the start of Back-to-School season. For students, it’s an exciting time that kicks off another year of learning and growth. But we’d like to take the time to focus on the importance of continuous learning for businesses. Now is as good a time as ever to prioritize continued education. The future of work is going to take skills many people don’t have – where can they learn them? In fact, a World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report found that “50% of employees will need reskilling by 2025 to keep pace with emerging technologies.”
Addressing the prevalence of disengaged employees as well as the skills shortage organizations are facing today is an imperative across industries, from retail to the public sector. So what can organizations do to address the current situation? That’s just what Amanda and I are going to be discussing.
Our conversation covered:
- The current state of the workforce, as we are seeing an unprecedented number of people leaving jobs in search of something more fulfilling. At the same time, employers are struggling to fill empty positions leaving a heavy burden on the remaining employees to cover positions they might not have been hired for. We explored data from SHRM that showed a whopping 47.8 million workers quit their jobs, an average of nearly 4 million a month. We also explored research from Pew Research Center on the top reasons U.S. workers left a job in 2021, in which low pay and no advancement opportunities and feeling disrespected at work topped the list.
- We explored why people leave jobs and the important role that creating a culture of continuous learning plays in both talent acquisition and talent retention.
- We discussed today’s workplace landscape and how it is unlike anything we’ve encountered before. As a result of the monumental shifts the pandemic has ushered in, companies are combatting both talent retention challenges and an ever-growing IT skills gap. It has become increasingly apparent that education and training must evolve with the landscape.
- Today’s learners want – and need — different solutions than L&D leaders have relied on in the past. Amanda shared some of the SAP offerings on that front as well as some insights on how learning behaviors and desires have changed, and what technology solutions are doing to address those changes. Amanda shared how SAP is responding to the need with solutions like the Go1 Learning solution, which provides SAP SuccessFactors customers access to the largest marketplace of off-the-shelf content ready to use via the Open Content Network and SAP Enable Now, which is a comprehensive digital adoption tool that delivers time-of-need learning to help people develop the skills they need to do their job effectively.
- What’s an organization to do? When strategizing about how to mitigate the skills gap, who is responsible for implementing continuous learning measures? Is it organizations or individual employees? We have thoughts!
- What exactly is the CURIOSITY mindset and insights from Amanda on things she’s doing on her team to encourage this and how you can implement programs like this too.
Amanda shared details about how some of SAP’s partners are addressing these needs and some of the innovative solutions that are available in the SAP store, including the following:
- Centrical for Enterprise Learning Solutions from SAP
- BLEND – Learning Experience Platform (LxP) by TalenTeam
- The Immerse Platform
- Collaborative Learning Platform
- Global Business Skills from Hardskills
- SAP Litmos
You can find more information on SAP’s wide range of learning and development offerings at the SAP store, and I hope you’ll pop over and take a look. You’ll likely be amazed at what’s available for you and your organization to help get your learning and development programs dialed in to what today’s workers want and need.
Watch the full episode of my conversation with SAP’s Amanda Mountain here:
Or grab the audio by way of your favorite streaming platform:
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below:
Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Transcript:
Shelly Kramer: August marks the start of back to school. I don’t know about you, my children start school next week. I could not be any more excited. So for kids, it’s exciting, for parents it’s more exciting, but what we want to talk about today is the importance of continuous learning for businesses. And I think that now is as important of the time as any to think about, what we’re doing from an organizational standpoint, from a leadership standpoint, to prioritize continuous learning. The future of work, as we know, is going to take many skills that people don’t yet have, some interesting and interesting tidbit from the World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report, for instance, found that 50% of employees will need re-skilling by 2025 in order to keep pace with emerging technologies, 50% by 2025, which is a handful of years from now.
I mean, that’s a big deal. So addressing the prevalence of disengaged employees, addressing what HR leaders need to do and think about what business leaders need to do and think about, that’s why we’re here today, to have this conversation. So Amanda, welcome back to the show. It’s always a pleasure to have you, and I can’t wait to hear what you have to say about this topic.
Amanda Mountain: Well, thank you for having me, Shelly. Yeah. It’s, back to school season, is a great excuse to have this conversation, but like you said, it’s really about continuous learning in the enterprise. It’s not a once a year thing, or a once a month thing. At this point, it is continuous and it’s on the job and the stats from the World Economic Forum are no surprise at all, particularly with the pace of change that the economy is going through, the markets are going through, and with some of the changes ushered in with the pandemic, there are companies facing real retention problems, with their workforce. And at the same time, an increasingly growing IT skills gap. And when you have that, I think that employees can feel, it’s a bit of a catch 22, because you have sometimes fewer people in the workforce as you’re facing the retention problems.
And yet you also have the pressure to learn new things and add more skills. So how in a day-to-day where there’s increasing pressure put on the existing people in the workforce to just get the work done, they also need to be up-skilling at the same time. And I think that can feel, like a pretty tight situation for a lot of people. So we definitely see changes coming, I think that 50% may actually accelerate. So by the time we’re getting new stats in 2025, they’re probably going to be telling us 60 or 70% because the pace of change is only increasing as well.
And yeah, so it’s really driven a change in how companies need to think about their learning and development programs and how to make things bite sized, how to make things in the moment. So learning moments instead of classes. And one of the things, one of the trends that I’m particularly interested in, and I think could be real positive change in this area is the idea of kind of peer to peer learning. So how do you learn from other people on the job instead of a trainer, instead of even a virtual classroom, how do you have a peer to peer exchange? How do you facilitate that and have that happen?
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I think that, we of course have been focusing on digital transformation for the last decade before we even were calling it digital transformation. But one of the things that we talk about a lot is, you have to create a culture around data and understanding the data is the lifeblood of business. And you have to create, there all different kinds of things that I think from a cultural standpoint that leaders and organizations need to do, and creating a culture that embraces innovation and curiosity and change and continuous learning, and boy, that’s a lot because human beings in general don’t love change. But as you mentioned, for anybody who thinks, and I say this all the time, actually I tell anybody that I’m interviewing for a job, I tell them, here’s one reality.
If you hate change, you will not like working with us, because we are all about change and we are all about learning and we are all about quick pivots. And I think that really is the secret to success for businesses of all. I mean, we have a very small company, but even at the enterprise level, I think that’s incredibly important, but that culture of curiosity, I know curiosity is one of your touchpoints, and of continuous learning is super important. And I think that statistically, and I know that. I’ve talked with another SAP partner on this topic, and I can’t remember off the top of my head who it was, but I did an interview with them sometime last year.
And I will find that and link it in the show notes because he was amazing. But I think that from a learning and development program standpoint within organizations, there was a time when that was really a big priority. And then that shifted, and we kind of got away from focusing on corporate learning and development programs. And now what the research is telling us is that we don’t have any more time to fool around. We have to get back to making this a priority within our organizations. And I’m pretty sure you all agree with that.
Amanda Mountain: Oh, definitely, definitely. And yes, the white paper I was reading recently actually mentioned that just having a learning program can improve employee engagement by like 20%. So it’s vital.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, absolutely. I was, and I know you’re a little bit of an information checky. I was looking at some data points on the Great Resignation. And from HSRM last year they reported 47.8 million workers quit their jobs. That’s an average of nearly 4 million people a month leaving their jobs. That means that 2021 was the highest average on record for that. And for comparison purposes, the lowest that we had was in 2009, where we had about 1.75 million workers quitting each month. Now, of course, that was, the market was a mess in 2009, we had lots of things going on, that low number doesn’t surprise me because it was a time when you were incredibly lucky to have a job. But I thought that was really interesting. And I also thought that there was a few research survey out that was in the spring of this year.
And it showed the top 10 reasons that employees left a job. Of course, the highest reason and not surprising at all was that the pay was too low. But the second, most important reason that employees left a job was that there were not opportunities for advancement and that 63% of people left because of that reason. Other people felt like, there were other things like feeling disrespected or not enough flexibility or whatever, but I believe that opportunities for advancement, that lack of opportunities for advancement that’s cited here speaks directly to learning and development opportunities. Because if we’re not providing those for employees, if they’re not seeing how they’re able to learn and grow and progress and focus on building their careers, they’re out.
Amanda Mountain: Yeah. And I think that it speaks to a couple things. So, one, yes, continuing to provide development opportunities. So not just new skills, but the types of skills that are going to set employees up for future success, and will make them, more and more valuable in the internal job market, within a company and externally. And that also speaks to, you mentioned curiosity, and I think that as much as the responsibility is on the employer to provide these learning opportunities and to provide them, sort of meeting learners where they are. So, looking at different ways to deliver this type of learning, it’s also on the individual employee. There is a responsibility to have that mindset of curiosity, of being a lifelong learner, of asking why, and wanting to understand how things work and be more agile in your own learning.
And that’s one of the things actually on my team that we try to reward a bit. So we actually do a quarterly recognition and rewards program. And one of the things that we honor there is a light bulb reward. And that’s for folks who have fought out of the box, they’ve tried something new, it doesn’t have to have succeeded. They just have to have tried something new and learned from it and optimized from it. So there’s a little bit of learning from fouling in there as well. And then we also have a true grit award, which is for demonstrating resilience, and being able to problem solve and drive for results despite setbacks. So both of those help foster that curiosity mindset. And I think that you need both, you need the curious learner and you need the corporate strategy for how we’re going to get learning and development opportunities into the hands of the employees.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah. And I think that those are such smart initiatives. I will say that, I think back to my time in college, I didn’t go to college immediately after high school, I went into the workforce for a little bit, and then I went to college and I was paying for my own education at that point in time. And, I love academics anyway, but I’d be in a class and I’d have a question, and I’d raise my hand and have another question. I’d raise my hand, and have another question, and I’d raise my, and I would oftentimes be the only person doing that.
And I see this in my own kids, sometimes a reluctance to step up and put yourself at center stage and say, and my point in all this is that, it sounds like what you have is that there’s no dumb ideas category, there’s no such thing as a dumb idea, like bring all of your ideas and all of your suggestions and together we can suss them out. I think when you create a culture of that and you really encourage people to not feel self-conscious, or, oh, people are going to judge me or whatever, I think that really leads to great, great things. And I would imagine you’re seeing that.
Amanda Mountain: Actually, yes, that speaks to a concept that we’ve really been focused on lately, which is that psychological safety. So not just, we need you to be curious, but you should feel safe asking questions, no judgment, everything is an opportunity to learn.
Shelly Kramer: So what I want to talk about now is the skill shortage. And so we’ve talked around this topic a lot, and we know that the skill shortage is having a big impact on business. I mean, you can’t read an article, you can’t exist in this business community without knowing that the skill shortage is having a big impact. What I want to know is what are some of the things that you are seeing and hearing from customers and vendor partners?
Amanda Mountain: So I think maybe one of the biggest data points we have to look at, to understand the need and the continued demand for learning and for continued skills enhancements is the uptake of our comprehensive learning management system, our LMS system, which is SAP learning hub for our customers. So that has over 750,000 online subscribers. In 2021, there had been 3.5 million course enrollments and over 400,000 learning room members. And then there were also, 40,000 live learning session attendees last year and 4.5 million SAP learning journey views. So what we’ve seen is an uptake in that type of enterprise learning that we would expect to see in the face of a skill shortage. So that really speaks to that. And then what we have also seen are two things.
So one, customers are telling us that they need some of those adjusted types of learnings that I’ve talked about earlier, that peer-to-peer gamification, possibly the use of, is there a way to use AI or virtual reality? They’re looking actively for innovative new ways to enhance some of the learning programs that they already have in place. And also even when it comes to adoption of kind of existing apps or software solutions, they’re looking to have some stuff built in, so that the new tools, the new technology that is continually pushed into the workplace needs to have some learning built in as well, so that people can get up and running quickly. And then on the partner side, the partners are responding. So there’s this customer need for the shift in learning.
And then we have the partners really doubling down and delivering. I’m super impressed with our SAP ecosystem and the innovation that’s coming out of it right now in this space. For example, there’s Centrical, which is, Centrical for Enterprise Learning, which ties into, existing SAP investments, but that helps folks who are remote stay connected and have continuous learning and feel like they’re part of a team. So this has some of that gamification built in, it enables peer-to-peer team and individual competitions, but in a fun way, they also have personalized micro-learning, which is triggered in workflow. So it comes in right when it needs to and has the impact it needs right when it needs to and fills that knowledge gap for a person.
So I’ve been super impressed with that. There’s also the Immerse platform, another one of our partners and this uses virtual reality and other immersive technologies to help transform employee training. And obviously this can lead to improved outcomes for onboarding, for technical expertise, and for soft skills. So it’s not just always the hard technical skills that these focus on. And what’s really cool is that companies can create, deploy, scale, and measure integrated virtual reality training for their teams. There’s a great case study actually up on our SAP store, which is where all these partner apps can be found, great case study for GE Healthcare and the immersive learning platform, which again, I’m continually impressed with the innovation that comes out of the SAP ecosystem.
Shelly Kramer: I think that’s really exciting. I’ll link that in our show notes here for our audience. I think that, for any of us who have ever done any kind of online learning or certification or re-certification or whatever, you even think about that and you have a grown, it’s an involuntary grown, right. Because for years, many times, those have just been arduous, boring, kind of just plotting programs that we had to wade through. And so it’s so great to see, and not only, we have become, I was looking around, I can’t believe my cell phone isn’t right here, I don’t know. But, we have these computers that are in our hands 24/7, or by our side 24/7. And so we’ve become so accustomed to when I don’t know something, oh, here’s a YouTube video, here’s this, here’s that.
And so it makes absolute perfect sense that learning applications and platforms and offerings and everything else, they need to be able to be quickly accessed. They need to not be arduous, they need to be fun and interesting. And by the way, I mean that as a middle aged woman talking with another middle aged woman, thinking then about this next generation of people in the workplace who are, 10 and 20 years younger than we are. I mean, it’s like they don’t have the interest or the patience in plotting through anything, and nor should they be expected to have that. So I think that seeing what the need is in the market and seeing vendor partners really step up and provide some really innovative things I think is exciting. I think it’s very cool. Paying off of the things that we’ve just talked about.
One thing that I want to mention that I think is really important is that, as we are living through these great changes, some of which we’re spurred by a global pandemic and changes in the work landscape, and that kind of thing, I think it’s important, we’ve seen sort of a new era ushered in for employees and a new way of thinking about work and careers. And a lot of the way that we find employees are thinking today is, is this worth it? What’s in this for me? And it’s a shift in the way people work today. And I don’t know about your career history, but I can tell you in my career, I came of age at a time and was building my career at a time when you were darn lucky to have a job, and you took whatever salary they would give you, and you took whatever poultry salary increases you got when you got them.
And I also came of age in a time when you didn’t want to be a job hopper, and you needed to stay in a job for a certain amount of time, or people would think you were a job hopper and all of that has changed. And I think what we’re seeing, especially coming out of the pandemic is that employees have realized that in many instances, that for them work is not everything. And they care about wellbeing, their physical wellbeing, their mental wellbeing, and their financial wellbeing, they care about learning opportunities and mentorship opportunities and career advancement opportunities. And how organizations that they’re working for embrace DEI initiatives and how organizations that they work for think about sustainability. And I think that a lot of the key to talent retention today, not only retention, but recruitment as well is addressing these things.
And as we’ve talked about here before, a lot of this is a cultural thing. And I think that what leaders need to do is to understand and recognize that these things are important. They have to break down the silos that exist in HR, and they have to do, as you’ve mentioned, and as we’ve talked about here, build a true culture based on continuous learning. I know that you have read this report and I read it as well. The LinkedIn’s 2022 Workplace Learning Report. And one of the best tidbits of information I saw, and there was a quote from a site from Linda Cai, the VP of Talent Development for LinkedIn. And she said, the responsibility of learning has always been to help organizations navigate uncertainty and chaos in the world. Well, I think that we probably both agree that we have certainly experienced massive uncertainty and chaos in the world, and we’re not through that yet.
So I thought that was really an interesting report. And I know that a lot of what we are able to do and a lot of what a quick pivot and navigating so many changes that a pandemic brought is cloud technology, cloud technology allowed us to do so many of the things that we were able to do and we are able to do. And I know that, of course, I’m preaching to the choir here yet. You know very well about the importance of cloud technology and the benefits it can deliver. But I’d love for you to share with us a little bit about your thoughts on rethinking and learning change management as it relates to cloud, and what you are seeing there.
Amanda Mountain: So I think the first thing that is important to understand is that with the shift to cloud, and to agile working, we have to recognize that it is, we’re going to hear this word continuous again, but it’s a continuous journey. There is no goal post for your learning in cloud. It’s a milestone, but that horizon and where you need to be is always going to be out in front. So I think it can be very, very hard for people to come to accept that there’s no work post. You’re not crossing the finish line. The finish line is going to move on you every single day, and so-
Shelly Kramer: You’re never done.
Amanda Mountain: It is a really hard thing sometimes for folks to accept that. But once you do, it’s very freeing. And, if you think about that, my team, which is really, our online commerce, our digital store for customers, we have a lot of development work that we have to do, to continue to improve the customer experience, add new functionality, add new capabilities. We had to move a few years ago from more of a waterfall dev model to an agile model. And you need to be able to apply that same mindset, that’s always iterative. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You do it in little short sprints. So it’s the same approach to learning, I think is very, very necessary in the cloud.
And with that recognition that you’re never going to cross the finish line, which is why I’m going to come back. I’m going to sound like a broken record a little bit. Why you’ve got to have some of that gamification built in the learning. You have to have some peer-to-peer because nobody is ever going to get a certificate and be done, we’re done with that. So you need some stuff that makes it social and fun and allows people to pause for a minute and feel good about the milestone. they reached, that badge, that that pat on the back, those points from a peer, accept those as a good thing and keep moving, because the finish line is not there anymore,
Shelly Kramer: I think about how we reward ourselves. So I’m in my office all day, every day, I’m working, I’m up to my elbows in things and meeting what seems like the needs of many, many people. And that’s my job as a leader of a company. That’s my job. I’m not complaining about that. But how I reward myself sometimes is that I’m like, okay, I’m going to play a little game, and I love word games. And so, I’ll grab my phone and I’ll open a word game and I’ll spend five minutes catching up on the word games that I play against other people. And then I put my phone down and I’m done. And my point in that is that when you can make learning as rewarding as that little break is I think it’s a game changer.
And I think that’s what people are looking for. And many of us like to compete against ourselves, against one another, people like to be first, people like to be the best, people like to be the quickest to complete something, and they also like helping each other. I remember one time I was talking with somebody who was involved in low code, no code applications within an organization. And she had a very, very entry level job, but she was in a program where she learned how to develop low-code, no-code apps. And I remember talking with her and she was just saying, I just never imagined I would be able to do something like this. I mean, I look forward to coming to work.
I’ve become an ambassador, as it relates to this program throughout the organization, I get to teach other people how to do this. When they have a problem and they’re stuck somewhere, they call me, I mean, and to see the light in her eyes, as she spoke to me about this, and to see how she felt about her career and her future with the company and how excited she was about being able to take on something that she had never, and I think her job before was pretty, kind of an administrative, repetitive task sort of job that automation replaced. And so to me, that’s what’s so fulfilling when we’re talking. I mean, it’s easy to talk about these things, from the 30,000 foot level, but you really look at the impact that this has at the employee level, beyond what it does for the organization. To me, that’s what’s incredibly fulfilling and exciting to see.
Amanda Mountain: Yeah. And encouraging that knowledge transfer and that sharing. So that learners become teachers and vice versa. And it’s very, as you said, it’s rewarding for everybody, particularly if you come from a… You’re starting in a place with less confidence and it’s growing over right time.
Shelly Kramer: Well, and you mentioned knowledge transfer and that’s something that we haven’t touched on, but we have a massive amount of people in the workforce who are nearing retirement age. And so when you think about learning and development and the vast amount of knowledge that these individuals have and think about how we can share that knowledge from them throughout the organization, I think that’s a really important part of learning and development initiatives as well. I’m sure you’re seeing that too.
Amanda Mountain: Absolutely.
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely.
Amanda Mountain: Being able to crowdsource some learning.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, absolutely. So we talked about so many different things. Well, let’s talk about, where we go from here. So we know we have a skills gap, we know what the challenges are. We know what employees want, who’s responsible for implementing continuous learning measures? Is it organizations, is it employees, is it, what are you seeing? Where, is it HR? What are you seeing?
Amanda Mountain: So we’re seeing it come from a lot of different places, actually. One of the things that we have also is SAP Enable Now, which is like a digital adoption tool. So it helps companies deliver, time of need learning to people. So again, within the context of their job, provides that extra kind of support and confidence building that helps improve productivity and performance. So you can see continuous learning being fostered from the IT department. They are starting to do that. You see it being driven from HR, when you look at more of the comprehensive management systems that help put that infrastructure in place, to make sure that you’ve got the baseline program there, but then you’ll also see it coming in from line of business leaders who recognize the need for it, maybe tailored within their organization.
So you’ll see like specialist learning, so there they’ll be learning for customer service or customer-centric organizations or the frontline retail folks. So you also start to see learning differentiated by industry, by the type of employee and the business objectives that those employees have. So it’s really a problem that is being addressed from multiple facets.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah. And I know one thing, that is tremendously important is thinking about an access from an accessibility standpoint. And I know that this has been part of my conversations with some SAP vendor partners, but it’s, we can’t think about, when we think about continuous learning, not all of us sit in front of a desktop computer or a laptop computer. There are whole, hundreds of thousands of workers, employees who are in the field, who need to be able to learn, this is the benefit of cloud, right? The beauty of cloud is that, they need to be able to pull out an iPhone or any kind of phone, any kind of mobile device, not just necessarily an iPhone, but they need to be pull out a device, learn on an iPad, do whatever they need. And they need to be able to quickly learn and solve problems and get past wherever roadblocks they have as they’re in the field doing their jobs. And I think it’s really cool to see so many of vendor partners focusing on solutions that facilitate just that.
Amanda Mountain: True,, and there’s a lot there for virtual or remote learning for mobile, et cetera. But when you say accessibility, there’s another aspect to that too which is you can’t, it needs to truly be multimedia in order to be accessible because not everybody can watch a video.
Shelly Kramer: Sure.
Amanda Mountain: Sometimes they need the visuals described to them because they don’t see well enough to be able to watch the video. Not everybody can read the transcript or read the text, they need it to be spoken to them. And so kind of rich media that we have available today and in the cloud is another really important aspect of how we make things accessible to folks. So it’s not just being able to access it on the fly, but actually in a format that best suits the way you can receive and understand and consume information.
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely. Well, that makes perfect sense. So this has been a conversation filled with so much information. What I want to wrap our show with is for organizations, who’re looking to upscale or re-skill employees, which I think is every organization, where do they start? What’s your best advice?
Amanda Mountain: Well, start by talking to the employees, they have surprisingly, insightful ideas about how they would like to learn and what they would like to learn. So that would be tip number one, survey them, talk to them, somehow gather input from the employee base.
Shelly Kramer: And don’t just do it once, right? I mean, on a regular basis.
Amanda Mountain: That’s a theme today.
Shelly Kramer: That’s a theme today.
Amanda Mountain: And then anybody can check out a variety of options on SAP store. We have a ton of learning. And some of those things that I mentioned earlier with the micro-learning or the peer-to-peer learning, and the virtual reality, all that you can check it out and browse. It’s really good to get an idea and make a survey of what’s out there. And then you marry that to what you heard from your employees.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, and I think one thing I want to point out, you mentioned this earlier in our conversation, but it was quite a bit earlier. So some of the things, there’s an SAP learning, there’s a full learning portfolio. There are the center goal for enterprise learning solutions from SAP blend, which is a learning experience platform-
Amanda Mountain: From talent team. Yes, I’m remiss by not mentioning them earlier. That is one of the best selling partner solutions we’ve got-
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely-
Amanda Mountain: The learning space and some really, really good customer success stories there.
Shelly Kramer: There’s the Immerse platform. There’s the collaborative learning platform, which I think we may have mentioned before. There’s the global business skills from hard skills platform. There’s the SAP Litmos. And I know that that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what resources there are available, what applications there are available. Again, I’m going to include a link to the SAP store where you’ll be able to find much more information on this, but the reality of it is there’s so many resources that are available. And so I hope that, I hope that this conversation has inspired our listening and watching reading audience to want to think more about learning and development programs, and to embrace a culture of continuous learning and see the benefits that that can deliver for your organization. Amanda, if you have just one piece of advice to leave our audience with, what would that be?
Amanda Mountain: Stay curious.
Shelly Kramer: I love it. I love it. I’m wired that way. So that’s not a problem, but stay curious friends. That’s amazing advice. And with that, we’re going to wrap our show, Amanda Mountain from SAP. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s always a pleasure. I know that the two of us could talk on this in many other subjects for a long time, but it’s always great to spend time with you. Thank you.
Amanda Mountain: Thank you, Shelly.
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
