Portland, OR – 10 November 2020 – Open to anyone and convenient for everyone, Learning Unlocked — the first-ever public learning and development conference from elearning innovator OpenSesame — connects attendees with authors, athletes, and other thought leaders in an entirely digital and uniquely digestible format. 

Unlike other online conferences that take attendees away from their work for hours at a time with back-to-back sessions, Learning Unlocked brings inspiration to participants in a series of one-hour sessions broadcast live every Tuesday and Thursday over six weeks.

“With many traditional professional development programs canceled this year due to the pandemic, OpenSesame recognized an opportunity to leverage our expertise curating the best online training courses to create a truly engaging virtual conference experience,” said Spencer Thornton, Senior Vice President of Curation at OpenSesame. 

Since the series started in mid-October, thousands of people have tuned in to hear from a diverse lineup of speakers including Jake Olson, whose unprecedented success as a blind football player for the University of Southern California inspired millions; Lisa Bodell, bestselling author and founder and CEO of innovation firm Futurethink; and Mark Whitacre, who became the highest-level corporate executive in U.S. history to become an FBI whistleblower. 

Learning Unlocked continues live through 19 November with sessions from:

• Casper Mørck, Head of Learning Technology – Americas at Siemens, who outlines ideas for overcoming the challenges of digital transformation. 
• Julie Sexton, Vice President of Human Resources at Land O’Lakes, who shares what COVID-19 taught her team about implementing learning initiatives.
• Jessica Mendoza, a two-time Olympic medal winner and ESPN sports broadcaster, who discusses standing up to societal conformity and embracing uniqueness.
• Matthew Knowles, founder of Music World Entertainment and Destiny’s Child manager, who explores the traits highly successful people have in common.

To register for these sessions and get on-demand access to previous sessions, visit www.learningunlocked.com.  

About OpenSesame

OpenSesame helps develop the world’s most productive and admired workforces. With the most comprehensive catalog of elearning courses from the world’s top publishers, we are here to help you every step of the way, from finding courses, mapping them to your core competencies, syncing them with your LMS to increasing utilization and improving your L&D programs. Not only will you have the flexibility of multiple purchasing options from OpenSesame, but you’ll also find it simple to use and administer your elearning courses. To learn more, visit www.opensesame.com.

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I was reminded of this when I spoke at a conference for users of a highly specialized and technical piece of software. Standing in front of an international audience of process engineers and manufacturing control managers, I wondered how my message would resonate with them. Would they dismiss business relationship building as just another “soft skill?”

My worries were unfounded. The audience was interactive, enthusiastic, and engaged (everything a speaker could hope for, in fact). Several audience members approached me afterwards, eager to share their own relationship building success stories.

Relationships Drive Success

As a specific and measurable job function, business relationship building is often ascribed to the sales and marketing team. Of the conference attendees I spoke with, however, few were directly responsible for managing relationships with clients or customers. Instead, they talked about building connections and maintaining relationships with people across all stages of the manufacturing cycle, including:

• • Vendors
  • Consultants
  • Partners
  • Coworkers
  • Bosses
  • Employees

I heard stories of engineers collaborating with marketers to produce operator-friendly communications, plant managers taking time to appreciate employees for a job well done, and technical support staff going above and beyond during large-scale installations. (Maintaining good relationships up and down the supply chain is mission critical when you are dealing with expensive and complicated software installations. These are long-term commitments that are not easily unraveled.)

Business Relationship Building Skills are Timeless

The importance of relationship building in business is nothing new, of course. In 1918, the Carnegie Foundation published A Study of Engineering Education by Charles Riborg Mann which concluded that soft skills were much more important to career success than hard skills.

In 2016, a group of researchers from Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation, and Stanford Research Center extrapolated statistics from Riborg Mann’s 1918 report and concluded that 85% of job success comes from having well‐developed soft and people skills. The other 15% comes from technical skills and knowledge (i.e., hard skills).

So here we are, more than one hundred years later and the data still points to the indisputable fact that soft skills—like collaboration, communication, and connection—are essential to job success. Yet many companies still spend 75% or more of their training budgets on the development of hard skills. Isn’t it time to revisit these numbers?

Offered through OpenSesame, The Galvanizing Group’s library of interactive online courses—focused on relationship building and personal effectiveness—helps develop learners’ essential business skills and transforms the way employees build and maintain relationships.

Patrick Galvin is a TEDx speaker, author, and the chief galvanizer of The Galvanizing Group which was founded on the belief that business relationship building is a skill that can be learned, improved, tracked, and measured. Patrick is also a keynote speaker at OpenSesame’s Learning Unlocked 2020.

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