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TIM MUNDEN: Unilever's in the fast moving consumer goods business, and our industry is going through massive change driven by digital disruption, the ease of new entrants into the marketplace. And so we have to shift learning to reflect that reality. We have to help people to both learn deep skills for the future, but also learn the skills they need right now for what's changing in the jobs they do. So for us, the starting point is about making sure that each of our business partners and line managers on the ground feel that they can own a learning for their people.

If that doesn't happen, you lose speed in responding to what's happening around you. We've backed that responsibility with a global learning team of experts who can deliver learning in new formats, new technologies, relevant to those groups of people. That's made a big difference to us. One of the key things we've tried to do is to give everyone the opportunity to be curious, to learn every day.

And we've encouraged them to do that through communication and by putting it in place a learning experience platform that makes learning pleasant, easy, and social. We've encouraged our employees to learn every day. And a change in habits has been significant over the last 18 months, we've seen probably a doubling in the number of people who we can track learning every week and every month.

Another thing we've been doing is focusing on the behaviors that will underpin performance in the future. We call that our standards of leadership, but actually it's for everyone in the business at the heart. Of that standards of leadership in what we call the inner game is purpose and service, helping everybody to be clear on what their purpose is so they can build a career based on that.

But the second piece of it we call agility, which we define as being constantly curious and courageous. That behavior is going to be fundamental for the future. It won't be easy to build in for everyone. And so it's part of a long term plan to keep talking about courage, curiosity, agility, and building that into people's deep development.

The biggest hurdle people talk about is not having enough time. But we've been trying to focus on that. So we're doing experiments with nudging people through their calendar to invest time, to mark out time for learning. We mark out lots of time in our calendars for lots of things. The challenge for people like us in the learning business is to ask people to mark out time to invest in themselves now and for the future.

The learning profession has to learn the skills of digital marketing in order to get people to learn in the world today. Learning technology is a hugely important part of what we now have to do. Technology in itself is not a solution though. You need to use technology to do the things you want to do. So for example, we realized that assessment is particularly important. So building good assessment technologies is one thing we've done.

The second thing we're investing in is technology to make the learning experience a consumer grade experience. Traditionally, learning management systems haven't looked like that. But this is really important. If we want people to learn, we know they learn really well when they learn together, when you share, when you recommend, when you can follow people. All those behaviors we see out in the social media space are relevant for learning.

So as a result of all of this, what do we see? We see more sophistication in the range of learning content that is available to people as well. From deep development programs through to micro learning that you can do in five minutes. Learning transformation isn't easy and it takes time. One of the big shifts I think happening in learning is away from the learning function, having all of the answers and creating all of the content.

Actually our job is to make sure there is great content, but to also create an environment in which people can get the content, create the content that they need.

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