HR professionals are often curating useful learning content for the rest of the organisation, but how can they get value out of the data they access online themselves? A new app could help, discovers Cath Everett.
Whether you would like to improve the way you exploit online information to help achieve your professional goals, or support other members of the workforce in hitting theirs, one tool that might prove useful is social learning app, Scredible.
Scredible is a form of machine-learning software, which studies patterns and algorithms based on your online behaviour and automatically serves up relevant content and suggestions.
The app sees what you read and engage in and share, and sees what other people heading towards your goal have done to get there.” – Colin Lucas-Mudd, Scredible
It was recently launched as a mobile phone app that is programmed by answering four basic questions about your aims in using it.
The software learns from both current and past online activity, including your use of social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook (assuming you allow it to access this data).
It will then find useful online content and information, which is intended to fill gaps in your knowledge or strengthen areas of weakness to assist you in achieving your objectives.
If you decide to write a blog post through Scredible, for example, it will scan the content and point you to other relevant posts, synopses and comments.
It will also let you see how many likes, shares and clicks the posts generate so you can see how popular they were – or were not.
Colin Lucas-Mudd, the firm’s chief executive, explains: “The app sees what you read and engage in and share, and sees what other people heading towards your goal have done to get there. It’s heuristic so it learns by trial and error, but it feeds you things and is always looking at who’s successful to see how it can apply those rules of success to you.”
He cites the example of a former head of HR at Accenture, the company’s pilot client. Scredible helped her to become more effective in recruiting women into key roles, especially in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“In less than six months, she went from underachieving in her targets to gain all she needed from 60 connections worldwide – which just goes to show that when you start the ball rolling, you can achieve a lot,” says Lucas-Mudd.
The product is free of charge for individuals and for organisations signing up to group training sessions. These sessions cost between £2,500 and £3,500 per day and are provided by the firm’s talent development training division in Brussels. If training is not required, professional users can also sign up to the app for between £7 and £25 per month.
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And Lucas-Mudd sees a far broader role for apps such as Scredible in the future.
He says: “I think education is broken. We’ve got all of this information but increasingly people don’t know how to use it. Artificial intelligence will change the nature of education – and I want to be at the centre of that.”
