In December 2020, I was invited to host three live Learning podcasts at last year’s HR Innovation and Tech Fest (#HRTechFest), a week-long event hosted in Sydney, Australia by Hannover Fairs; I’d previously attended as an in-person delegate, and loved the energy and vibrancy of the Antipodean L&D community I interacted with, so I was more than happy to help out when asked (and can’t wait for it to go back to being real-world again later this year!). My first live podcast was with this week’s LITNW guest Dr. Sydney, GM Learning/CLO at Air New Zealand and a former chief of education strategy at Dell-EMC and Learning leader at Booz Allen Hamilton. Sydney is definitely a prime candidate for us to profile her as one of our Learning Leaders, where we meet new and seasoned leaders from industry, academia, and technology who have made significant contributions to workplace learning, edtech, and talent leadership disciplines. After all, she does truly believe that “creating a true learning culture starts at the top with embracing the power of democratized learning to reshape mindsets, human capabilities, and organizational culture.” Hear hear! So in our conversation look to hear more about her personal journey, which includes being crowned CLO magazine’s Chief Learning Officer of the Year 2020 (Better Work Media Group), as well as: what it’s like when 60% of your company’s income goes away overnight
her belief in personal purpose and providence; working life in a nearly COVID-free New Zealand; the importance of her 20 years in the US Air Force on everything she does; how you crunch 7 LMSs down into one (cloud) one; how she got to her mantra of ‘survive, revive and thrive’ and what it really means; and much more.