Meet Acorn’s team at Learning Leadership & DevLearn

Promotion, succession and deployment decisions draw on whatever skills data an organization has. Much of it is inferred, either scraped from profiles or predicted from learning activity. That might be enough to suggest an opportunity, but not to appoint someone to a critical role.

Blake Proberts, CEO and Co-Founder of Acorn, works through what each of those decisions runs on today, and what it would take for each one to stand up if challenged. The evidence that does is the work itself, captured against the capability it demonstrates, confirmed by a manager, and assessed against a standard that doesn’t get rewritten between cycles.

• Which talent decisions can run on inferred data, and which need validated evidence
• What evidence from the work looks like for promotion, succession and deployment
• How assessing against the same standard each cycle makes change visible
• How to build the case with your executive team on work your function already does

A readiness score says whether someone could do a job. It doesn’t show what doing it well looks like. That’s in the work your top performers do every day, and most of it stays with them.

In this session, Blake Proberts, CEO and Co-Founder of Acorn, shows how learning teams can capture that work against the capability it reflects, have a manager confirm it, and make it the benchmark for the next person in the role. L&D leaders get a picture of how the job is done well across a team, and instructional designers get real work to build from.

• Why most readiness scores can’t show how the job is done well
• How to choose which work to capture, and how manager confirmation makes it usable as evidence
• How confirmed examples feed development for the next person in the role and the wider team