Dr. Jeff Bergin has spent his career at the intersection of learning science and large-scale practice. As the Chief Learning Officer at General Assembly, he oversees 350 instructors distributed across nearly every continent, manages future skills boards that define what technical and soft skills will matter next, and leads the development of learning programs for enterprise clients, governments, and individual learners worldwide.
He is also the author of Already Smarter: Simple Strategies for Effective Learning, a research-grounded, unusually accessible handbook built on a simple premise: most people are capable of far more than they believe, and the thing standing in their way is rarely a lack of intelligence, it is something quieter and more stubborn than that.
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The Story That Never Left Him
Bergin does not have a single origin story. His path into learning came through a progression of small moments: tutoring in college, facilitation work in outdoor education, a community college classroom in his first year of teaching. But one moment stands out.
A student approached him after class. She was ready to drop. She felt too old for the program, too old for the peer work, too old to be a student again at all. She had never been to college before and had enrolled because her job required it. Bergin talked with her for nearly an hour. In the end, she stayed.
At the end of December, after everyone else had filed out, she came back to the front of the room with a Christmas card. She had passed. She had registered for the next semester. She was thinking about an associate’s degree.
“It just reminded me of the power of learning and the power of education,” Bergin says. “And it’s a story that has stuck with me. I’ll think about it when I’m working with someone else who has the same fear.”
That fear, he would go on to discover, is not an edge case. It is one of the most consistent things he has encountered across a career spent watching people try to learn new things.
What Actually Stops People
When Bergin asks people why they stopped pursuing something they wanted to learn, the answers follow a pattern. I didn’t have the patience. I didn’t have the time. I don’t learn that way. I can’t learn that. The words are different but the structure is the same: a limiting belief presented as a fact about the self.
“These are the darker voices,” he says. “They stop people before they ever get started, or shortly after.”
His book, Already Smarter, begins here deliberately. Not with strategies or frameworks or research findings, but with the beliefs that sit in front of everything else. The argument is that learning strategies are only effective if you first believe you are capable of learning. Self-efficacy comes before technique. Mindset before method.
This is not a soft observation. It is a practical one. Bergin spent years watching students who knew the right strategies but were not using them, people who could describe spaced repetition or deliberate practice in principle but whose actual approach amounted to practicing here and there. The gap between knowing something and doing it, he found, is one of the most underestimated problems in learning.
“We can know something without actually doing that something,” he says. “And we can delude ourselves into thinking we are using a strategy when in fact we are not.”
The Shift That Is Already Happening
Bergin is not anxious about what AI is doing to his field. He is genuinely energized by it, and the distinction matters.
The job of the learning designer is changing, he acknowledges. AI can increasingly handle the construction of learning experiences: drafting content, building assessments, scaffolding programs. What it cannot easily replace is the diagnostic work: understanding who the learner actually is, what outcome they need to achieve, and how to precisely design toward that outcome for a real population in a real context.
“Being able to diagnose the learner problem or the learner goal and get that right is going to be a core and increasingly important part of the job,” he says. “AI frees up time for the designer to be much more strategic.”
This is the shift he sees as most significant: from builder to strategist. Less time on production. More time on precision. More time on the question of impact.
On impact, Bergin is candid about where the field has been. He gives learning design a D in learner diagnosis when he started his career, rising to a high C or low B now. On impact measurement, closer to a C minus for most of his career, inching toward a B minus. The grades are not flattering. But he sees a real path to something better, not just more data, but data that is meaningful to the learner themselves.
“The goal is impact measurement that is meaningful to the learner,” he says. “Where they can look at it and say: I’m going to make some decisions based on this.”
The Skill That Unlocks Everything Else
When asked what learning professionals should prioritize developing, Bergin names self-regulation. The ability to plan a learning experience, monitor how it is going, and reflect afterward on what to do differently. It is, he explains, built on metacognition: thinking about your thinking, continuously, from the moment you consider pursuing something to the moment you decide what comes next.
He uses Pilates as his example. He took it up eighteen months ago, inspired by an instructor in his eighties who was still teaching. Every session involves constant internal checking: where are the muscles engaging, is this movement correct, where does the next session need to go. That loop of plan, monitor, reflect is the engine of all learning, formal or otherwise.
“Teaching people metacognitive skills enables self-regulation,” he says. “Which enables people to be strategy implementers and therefore to achieve higher impact.”
Now Is Not the Moment to Freeze
Bergin ends the conversation with a clear-eyed assessment of where the field is. The thing holding learning professionals back, he says, is fear of how AI will reshape the industry, rather than actively using AI to redefine what the work can become.
His view is that this moment is not a threat. It is an opening.
Lifelong learning is no longer an aspiration. It is a requirement. The skills required for that navigation, the coaches, the mentors, the designers who can help people learn how to learn, are exactly the skills the field has been developing for decades.
“Now is not the moment to freeze up in fear of change,” Bergin says. “It’s the moment to think about what work you can really do and how AI can help you do that work.”
The student who almost dropped the class, who stayed, who came back with a Christmas card, did not need a new platform or a better algorithm. She needed someone who believed she could do it before she believed it herself.
That part of the job, Bergin is confident, is not going anywhere.
Listen to the full conversation with Jeff Bergin on The LX Ops Show or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast Transcript– Jason Gorman with Jeff Bergin
Jason Gorman (00:01)
As the world speeds up, there’s at least one way we are all in the same boat. We all have to learn new things more often just to keep up. And for learning professionals, the core skills of our work have stayed relatively stable for a long time, but that is no longer true. We right now are having to accelerate our own learning, not just to keep up with new tools, but to understand entirely new concepts, new frameworks, even new fields.
that maybe we never needed to understand before, like data science. So I can’t stand here today and tell you exactly what we all need to know in the future as learning professionals. But what I can say with confidence is that the list of skills that we need three years from now is not going to look anything like it did three years ago. And that makes our own ability to learn so much more important. And that is exactly why I am so excited about our guest today.
Dr. Jeff Bergen is the author of Already Smarter, Simple Strategies for Effective Learning, and the Chief Learning Officer at General Assembly. Welcome to the show, Jeff.
Jeff Bergin (01:12)
A.J. some nice to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Jason Gorman (01:16)
Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for joining. So ⁓ let’s just jump in with some lightning round questions.
So I you do a lot of things, so this might be a little hard to do in 30 seconds, but what is the 30 second elevator pitch about what you do?
Jeff Bergin (01:31)
Yeah, I can be fast. I’m the chief learning officer at General Assembly. And what that means is I’ve got all of our global instructors, about 350 of them in total, report up into me as do our future skills boards, who define the future of technical and soft skills. And together, we develop great learning experiences that are delivered to students worldwide.
Jason Gorman (01:57)
And what do you love the most about your work?
Jeff Bergin (02:00)
Honestly, the thing I love the most is working with students who did not think that they could learn a technical skill and who are undertaking that for the very first time and seeing the satisfaction and the confidence that they feel when they’ve actually produced something and they have made it across the finish line. It’s very rewarding.
Jason Gorman (02:24)
And when you are doing your work and you’re totally dialed in, what is the activity you are most likely to be doing?
Jeff Bergin (02:31)
This ⁓ won’t surprise you, but it is the activity of learning itself. ⁓ People don’t think about the people who are developing and delivering learning as learning, but with the pace of change that we’re all facing right now.
in learning new AI workflows and new AI technologies. Every single ⁓ client engagement that we have, every single learning program that we release involves some kind of learning, including, of course, learning new ways of doing our own jobs. So I love the learning part that I’m actually getting access to.
Jason Gorman (03:08)
What is an event or a moment that inspired you to do the kind of work that you do?
Jeff Bergin (03:17)
Yeah, I would say that there was ⁓ no single event. It was a progression of a variety of small events that happened over the course of my early career and that continue to happen today. But there are a few moments that always stand out in hindsight that you look back on. And one that has never left me.
is an experience that I had my first year of teaching at a community college where I had a student who approached me after class and she was very worried about her ability to be able to continue. And she was prepared to drop the class and that would have meant dropping the program that she was contemplating taking. And her reason for it was that she didn’t feel like she could learn, she felt too old.
for the class, she felt too old for the peer work, she felt too old to be a student again, she had never been a college student before and had to do this as kind of a job requirement. And I talked to her for about a half an hour, 45 minutes, and tried to reassure her that she could do it and she decided to stick with it. She said she’d stick with it a little bit longer while she ended up completing the course. And I remember it wrapped up in December right ahead of the holidays.
And she waited until everyone left the room and she brought up a Christmas card and said, look, I want to thank you for all of the encouragement you gave me. was surprised that I was able to learn. She actually got a great grade in the class from what I remember. And she informed me that she was going to carry on and had registered for classes the next semester and that she was contemplating getting an associate’s degree.
Jason Gorman (04:56)
No.
Jeff Bergin (05:01)
⁓ And it just really, and she invited me to Christmas dinner actually, but I didn’t take her out. ⁓ But it just reminded me of the power of learning and the power of education. And it’s a story that has stuck with me and I’ll think about it when I’m working with someone else who has the same fear. And we hear it all the time. You hear it all the time. And ⁓ just as a good reminder of the power of education.
Jason Gorman (05:04)
⁓ man.
Hmm.
⁓ I love that and we’ll get into I think some some additional moments maybe that you’ve had over your career too. I’m excited to get into more of that. Two more lightning round questions though. So we’re gonna go from hope to hope to anxiety. ⁓ What are you most anxious about for the future?
Jeff Bergin (05:45)
many things. I think the thing that is worrying me most at this moment in time, I feel like we have a of a once in a generation opportunity to really use AI for good, for good purposes. And that means using it to improve our healthcare system, to improve and scale education, to improve how we’re tackling our response to climate change and
My hope is that we are using AI with all of the best intentions and all of the best opportunities to improve humankind, to improve life on earth, to improve the quality ⁓ concerns that we’ve seen in different industries and areas, and that we are really using it ethically and with ⁓ effort toward the implications of using it and thoughts toward.
implications. So that’s the anxiety that I feel, but it also is countered by a lot of promise and a lot of opportunity if we get it right.
Jason Gorman (06:50)
I love that. You took my question about anxiety and you made it about hope again. Well done. Well, this is a very appropriate question that I ask pretty much everybody, but it’s perfect. It’s a perfect question for you. What is a skill you’re trying to pick up right now?
Jeff Bergin (06:54)
Ha
The skill that I have been working on, I’m working on now, I worked on it last night and I’ve been working on it for about 18 months now is Pilates. So I’ve come to Pilates a little bit late, a little bit late in life compared to many Pilates students. And I was inspired to do it because one of the instructors who I saw at a local Pilates studio was I think in his eighties. And so…
Jason Gorman (07:30)
Wow.
Jeff Bergin (07:31)
He did my first session with me about 16 or so months ago and I’ve been sticking with it at least once a week and I finally am feeling it pay off ⁓ and the instructor last night said, wow, I’m really seeing progress with you, which felt really good to hear at last.
Jason Gorman (07:50)
That’s wonderful. That’s excellent. I love that. Actually, I’m inspired to go back to the gym. All right, so that’s it for the lightning round questions. We’ll kind of go into regular ones now. You gave the 30 second elevator pitch about what you do, but maybe you could go into a little deeper into your work in general now. What does your work look like if we were to look at what’s a normal weaker month of your work life like?
Jeff Bergin (07:56)
Cheers. ⁓
Yeah, I mean, right now, the work that my team does is really around launching new programs. And those are new programs that are publicly available for anyone to take via the GA website. And they’re programs that are geared toward enterprise clients, toward small to medium business clients, and toward governments and government partnerships. So we’re all over the world, but my team is responsible for
Jason Gorman (08:26)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Bergin (08:49)
helping to develop and then to deliver all of those programs. And so we are constantly, A Day in the Life is constantly about how do we get ready to deliver something and how do we make it high quality? How do we ensure that we’re getting a high MPS score and a high instructor rating in each of those classes? So that’s what we do.
Jason Gorman (09:10)
What kind of scale are you working at now? I’ve been around for a long time I was I think first aware of it when it was primarily face to face in person and There’s been a big shift in what you do and I know that you cover all kinds of terrain subject from a content perspective But how could just in terms of the volume of what you do? How big is GA? How much stuff do you have out in the world?
Jeff Bergin (09:36)
Yeah, there’s a lot and it’s hard to quantify it. I don’t have the exact number of students that we’ve had this last year in front of me, but I will say we operate in almost every continent. Not quite, but almost in our speculating and some that we’re not. So we’re a global company operating around the world and we work on everything from reskilling programs to upskilling programs to custom corporate programs to ⁓ workshops and free
classes. So if there’s something that anyone out there would like to just experiment with, check out the website. There’s lots of freebies that you can join and short form workshops all the way up to much longer form boot camps. And we’re getting ready to launch a series of cool new pathways that are going to be kind of shorter form programs linked together.
that you can take. So the answer to your question is we’re everywhere, we’re working around the world, and there’s a lot of new programs being spun up. So the scale is large. ⁓ The instructor population that I work with is about 350, so it’s a big group of people, and they are distributed worldwide. Yeah.
Jason Gorman (10:47)
Wow,
that’s incredible. I’m kind of curious just from a trend standpoint, one of the things that I see a lot in L &D conversations in particular, so this is people whose work is to help people learn at work, there’s a lot of, I don’t know, shaming, maybe too strong, but it might be the word.
about creating courses, creating really long experiences for professionals and that there’s been this real focus on how do we help people at the point of need to develop skills. As somebody who’s spent a lot of time in higher education and who’s also developed lots of things for corporate and similar.
I like this argument and really can’t stand this argument. Because on the one hand, I think it’s really easy for people in this industry to overdo it with what we’re delivering. On the other hand, there really is a need for long form content. mean, right? It’s not fair to expect somebody just to learn from little micro events. And you have such a nice viewpoint over
what people really want in how they learn. When you’re thinking about, you know, length or this question of point of need or the kinds of things that people really want now in terms of how they want to, you know, enable their own learning, what are the things that you see people really want?
Jeff Bergin (12:22)
Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the goal, but I ⁓ think there is room for everything at the table. I really do. think that there are people who, when I think of learning, I think of it very broadly defined. And that may mean that you need to learn how to fix something that’s broken in your home, spur of the moment, and you pulling up a YouTube video on your phone.
is the fastest way to do this. did it to change a tire a few years ago and the fastest way to do that was to pull it up on YouTube ⁓ and be reminded of something that my dad taught me a long time ago.
Jason Gorman (12:59)
You
Jeff Bergin (13:01)
And then there’s those things where we know, okay, this is going to take either lifelong learning and I want to string together a series of courses or I want to string together a series of learning. And the cool thing about that is there’s no been no better time to do that. You can build your own learning network on social media with following people who are sharing tips and ideas, who have expertise. You can also register for courses, many of which are online. You can attend conferences.
and you can put together formal modes of study. And so I think it’s great to be able to leverage all of that and kind of piece it together into a lifelong learning path. Or if you’re looking at a very particular career outcome.
like becoming a doctor, then you need long-form programming that you’re going to be investing in very strategically and very carefully over time. So don’t think that there’s a one-size-fits-all ⁓ answer. I think it’s really around what you’re looking to learn and maximizing the opportunities in front of you.
Jason Gorman (14:03)
great. All right, I’d love to dig into your career past a little bit more. ⁓ Before this conversation, we kind of exchanged some information. You told me that in your second year of college, you were a tutor. That was your first job in education. And then in your third year, you were involved in Upward Bound. I’m really curious about Upward Bound. ⁓
Tell me a little bit about what it is and what you did in that program.
Jeff Bergin (14:35)
Yeah, I I’ll start by saying it’s not to be confused with outward bound, which is people often mistake it for, but upward bound is a program that helps first generation and low income high school students prepare for and succeed in college. And it was one of the first times that I had worked ⁓ with that population of students who were really eager to and motivated to go forward.
Jason Gorman (14:40)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Bergin (15:05)
but didn’t always have ⁓ easy access, especially when I was doing this a few decades ago. And what you’re really providing those students is academic support, which really often boils down to tutoring and mentoring, to ⁓ really powerful learning experiences, and to things like homework help, which is what I was doing with them, is really working with them.
after school to say, hey, here’s how you can get some help if you’re struggling with some of the material that you’re learning. And having that experience was one of those things that was powerful for me, not only because I could see the learning outcome and I could witness it in real time and contribute to it, but just having access to the folks who worked on that program, who were my colleagues.
gave me a sense of, there’s a lot of different career paths in learning and in education besides what we often think of as a teacher or an instructor, but actually around curriculum development and program delivery and design and tutoring and coaching and mentoring and all of these other things that go into really this world of learning in the larger ecosystem. So it began to get me thinking about different career pathways for myself.
Jason Gorman (16:00)
Hmm.
I’m kind of curious to hear about some of the things that maybe you learned in that work that feel formative to you still, that you carried forward, that you still maybe even use in your work now. It’s so interesting, ⁓ the arc of your career, ⁓ but I’m curious if there are some things that you have just held onto from those early jobs.
Jeff Bergin (16:51)
Yeah, I I think the thing I learned in many of my early jobs that I continue to see today and I continue to lean on today is one of the things that prevents people from learning or from sticking with learning is their own core beliefs about their own learning and their abilities and the way they learn and…
You know, you will hear many, people describe, ⁓ I tried doing this and then I stopped, or I wanted to do this and I stopped, or I thought about doing this, but I didn’t pursue it. And when you dig down deeper, you often learn that they’re holding a belief around, ⁓ just didn’t have the fill in the blank. I didn’t have the patience for it. I didn’t have the time for it. didn’t have.
Jason Gorman (17:32)
you
Jeff Bergin (17:40)
⁓ the mental bandwidth for it, or I don’t learn that way, or I can’t learn that, or I’m not comfortable doing that. And you hear all of these things, all of these stories that are actually really limiting ⁓ core beliefs that people have that stop them before they ever get started.
Jason Gorman (17:44)
Hmm.
Thank
Jeff Bergin (17:59)
and or shortly after they get started. And I’ve had those, many people had those. And I find that the most helpful thing is to address those core beliefs. And then from there, once they get started, they can always add learning strategies and additional supports and accommodations and those kinds of things. But they have to first get past those darker voices that they have.
Jason Gorman (18:04)
Thank
I Definitely hear that I’ve certainly had plenty of those myself language learning. It’s always been tough for me and I think for whatever reason I chose to take on Latin first. I don’t know that that was the best best first language I think that created a little bit of a phobia and then it just kind of like once I started believing Oh, I’m not good at this that became its own problem So I hear you I just have such a personal reaction to that
⁓ By the way, that’s the first part of your book, which we’re going to talk about ⁓ Already Smarter, which I have read. love both as a professional that does this work and also just as a human being who, ⁓ who wants to be able to, to be strong in my learning. It’s just an essential skill as a human being. And so I love that the book starts there ⁓ because
it kind of it kind of is this thing that stands in front of everything else, right? If you can’t get around those things, you’re not you’re never going to get there.
Jeff Bergin (19:34)
Yeah, and we, you the thing is we often think about learning in very traditional contexts. And we think about the way you learn as study skills that often are archaic or that are premised upon you already being in a program of some kind.
Jason Gorman (19:47)
Hmm.
Jeff Bergin (19:53)
And I think both of those things are kind of faulty premises. I think first of all, learning happens every single day in every single way. And so we need to expand our view on learning. And second of all, learning strategies really are only effective or more effective if you fundamentally believe you can learn something and that you have the mindset and the self-efficacy to go forward with that learning, to believe I’m capable of learning and I’m capable of completing a learning experience.
or opportunity. And once you’ve got those, you can play with a million different strategies and you can amp it up or improve it, but you have to start there. And that’s why I wanted the book to start.
Jason Gorman (20:36)
I love it. I would love to talk a little bit more about other jobs, other experiences you’ve had as a learning professional in the past that have also felt important to what you do now. You choose, what are a couple jobs, couple things that you have carried forward in those jobs?
Jeff Bergin (20:57)
Yeah, the second job that I had, I think it was probably the second job right after the tutoring experience, was working in leadership facilitation and it was in an experiential setting, outdoor education, involved a lot of collaborative work, a lot of problem solving and challenge based work, a little bit of ropes course work as was popular.
back in the 1900s in particular, but still continues today. And what I learned in that work, you’d think that I would say, ⁓ I walked away learning a lot about leadership, or I walked away learning a lot about collaboration or problem solving, kind of the content of the program. And I did learn those things, but what I remember the most is learning about human fear. Because what it brings up is,
Jason Gorman (21:49)
Hmm.
Jeff Bergin (21:52)
Fear on every level that a human can have fear. Fear of working in a group. Fear of not contributing to the group appropriately. Fear of, and you know, when it comes to ropes courses, fear of heights. Fear of physical ⁓ issues that you may face. I had a lot of people who were like, I can’t do this because I have a bad knee or I can’t do this. I can’t participate. I can’t contribute because I’m afraid of heights. So you spend a lot of time.
Jason Gorman (22:15)
Thank
Jeff Bergin (22:22)
both coaching and supporting people through fear and also supporting the team in helping someone who has something that is fear-based still be able to be an active contributor, still be able to be a leader. And that’s what so much of the work ended up being about was how do you actually help a group when fear is something that is affecting the group or the people in the group.
Jason Gorman (22:49)
When I did start going back to the gym a few years ago, I got a trainer and we worked together for, you know, first couple of sessions and he just kicked my butt. I was pretty exhausted at the end. And I remember before I was going to go and do my first workout on my own, I said, well, you know, I want to make sure that I’m not going to hurt myself, right? Exercising and ⁓ I kind of concerns about that. And he looked at me and he said,
you can probably go a lot farther than you realize. He said, you don’t want to hurt yourself. Don’t do anything that’s painful. He said, but you’ll be surprised at how far you can go. And that was an incredible bit of permission that I got from him to go and work myself a little harder than I might have. And it helped. It was really helpful. And…
It’s just, it’s very, very interesting, this sort of how all of these insidious little ways that fear can pop up. I, and that connects really so nicely with what you were saying before about just these blockers and very often those things are, right? Some, some form of fear. I love, I love that. Well, let’s talk about, let’s talk about the world and how it’s changing. And as I said, as you’ve described, you’re at, you’re at the top of this
big organization that is completely focused on helping people learn all kinds of things. ⁓
for you, but also for your team, what are the kinds of things that we have done as professionals ⁓ that you think are going to kind of endure in the next two years, five years, and beyond? ⁓ What have we been doing that you think we’ll keep doing? Not just tasks, but just how we go about our work, our mindsets, our processes, our skills.
Jeff Bergin (24:57)
So many things, ⁓ so many things. ⁓ The two that are coming to mind ⁓ right now, one of them is, the job of the learning designer right now is changing significantly because of AI tools and because of the kinds of outputs that are needed to be created in this new ⁓ AI enabled world.
And I think that has caused a lot of fear and a lot of concern ⁓ for future career trajectories, for job security ⁓ in the L &D world and in the learning design world more broadly. And what I always like to remind people is that being able to diagnose the learner problem or the learner goal.
and get that right and get that right for a population and get that right for a person is something that yeah, AI is going to help with that, but that is still going to be a core and increasingly important part of the job to really understand who is the learner and what is the outcome that that learner needs to be able to achieve and how are we going to demonstrate that achievement, whether it’s through any other type of learning design or experience creation.
Having that ability to be diagnostic and precise and forensic is going to be increasingly important and it’s going to be increasingly enabled. And it actually, I think the beauty of AI is because AI can help us with the experience construction. It frees up time for that designer to be much more strategic around.
Jason Gorman (26:36)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Bergin (26:43)
Okay, how do I actually support this particular learner or this population of learners? That’s thing one. And then thing two is sort of the other side of that coin, which is how do we actually measure impact? And, you know, often in courses,
Impact ends up being measured in one of two ways, either through kind of a pre-assessment, post-assessment methodology. You you passed the final exam at a certain threshold or you achieved a mastery score at a certain threshold, or it’s achieved and or it’s achieved through some kind of student satisfaction measure. So, you know, we will call successful learning a letter grade and we will call successful teaching a number.
And that’s where we leave it. And now we have the ability to actually look at much more fine grain detail around, we actually could see a performance shift in a student population. And we can actually see the nuances of how individuals achieved a performance shift. And we can look at things like mindset. We can look at things like students’ ability to self-regulate. The impact that that learning has had not just on that curriculum or content.
but on their ⁓ learning aptitude in general and their ⁓ learning confidence. So we can gather a lot more of those types of things now that we’ve got access to AI. So I think the piece I’m highlighting is, the role is changing in the way that we construct programming in a way that actually is favorable.
Jason Gorman (28:03)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Jeff Bergin (28:19)
to our ability to be more precise in the design delivery and measurement of that training. So it’s really shifting the mindset of a designer from being a builder to being a strategist, in my opinion.
Yeah, I mean, think the thing that I’ve noticed is happening increasingly, and I think the data backs this up, ⁓ given how much learning is happening on the job, given the necessity for learning to happen on the job and employer responsibilities, there’s a real increase in…
coaching and mentoring and instructor-led training that happens on the job. And I think that that just opens up a lot of flexibility. And in a way, it’s a sort of like everything old is new again, because obviously these are training methods that have been used for centuries in terms of apprenticeships and in terms of students learning when they’re shadowing someone with deep expertise. It happened very intuitively for many, many years.
And now we’re almost like rediscovering that through formalized coaching and scalable coaching and mentoring programs that democratize these things that have been only provided to certain members of organizations. And so I think that’s really another way to look at learning is not only are we making it more forensic through the delivery and use of AI.
but also we’re returning to some methods that are the gold standard of how people learn, you know, one-to-one and in small groups. So that I think has a lot of promise for us.
Jason Gorman (29:59)
love all of that ⁓ so much because ⁓ we keep coming back to this notion of hope. I think you have a very hopeful outlook about the possibilities. I don’t know that either of us are ⁓ looking into a crystal ball and saying we know what is going to happen, but I appreciate the hope in your answers. And I am really interested in
these shifts that you see on our ability to focus on the learner and our ability to measure impact. These are things that I would say we’ve always valued as a profession.
I’m kind curious to hear your assessment pre-AI, if you were to give our industry a grade about how we were doing those things in the past, ⁓ and then talk about how we ⁓ can make sure we do the best job possible going forward. ⁓ These are sticking points, I think, for a lot of people across our industry. I’m curious to get your takes there.
Jeff Bergin (31:05)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think it’s a good question. I think when it comes to supporting every learner and when it comes to
diagnosing where a learner is at in any particular area. I think we’ve done, you know, increasingly better job at that using a series of assessments and tools and diagnostics. ⁓ Many of them have challenges, but I think we’ve gotten better at that. I do think there’s a lot of learning that sits outside of those tools where those just, you know, those tools may not be available to many people or available kind of widely to people who are undertaking, let’s say,
Jason Gorman (31:46)
Hmm.
Jeff Bergin (31:53)
self-learning, for example. But I do think we’ve gotten better at it. So I’d give it, you know, if I look at the arc of my career, I would say, yeah, we’ve gone from a D.
you know, when I was in college to probably like a low B or a high C. And I think that AI tools can get us up into an A range. And I think that’s, you know, really exciting. That’s one of the most promising areas. So that I think is where I’d place that piece. The impact measurement, I think we’ve done a really
Jason Gorman (32:12)
Hmm.
Jeff Bergin (32:32)
poor job with by and large. think impact means very different things to different people. I think the measurement of it has been problematic. And one of the things that makes the measurement of it problematic is, ⁓ you know, what people learn and the way in which they learn and I’ll take AI as an example, is changing so quickly that it’s difficult to get.
Jason Gorman (32:51)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Bergin (32:53)
⁓ real-time assessments produced that are valid and reliable and that sustain that pace of change. So it’s very hard to do that in sort of real-time, so to speak. I do think AI is going to help with that significantly and allow for multiple models and multiple modes of measurement. So I think we’re also going to see a shift there. And I’d say, again, I’d say over the past maybe two decades, we’ve gone from
maybe like a C minus to a B minus and now we can maybe get up to a B plus. I’d like to see where that can take us to really like, you know.
Jason Gorman (33:29)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Bergin (33:32)
high fidelity impact measurements that is both robust and is varied and holistic and most importantly, that’s meaningful to the learner. It’s not just around making it meaningful to the company delivering that learning, but also to the learner themselves who can look at it and say, I’m gonna make some decisions based on this. And now we’ve empowered them to produce and continue their own learning path.
Jason Gorman (34:00)
I like that we’re, and I agree, I love this, that we’re on this upward trajectory. We seem to have this opportunity that has been kind of elusive in the past. Sometimes it has felt like it’s been about institutional willingness to do those things, right? ⁓ If your organization doesn’t really care about what the learners want or what their goals are, that’s a problem.
if there are no mechanisms to measure. Some of these things haven’t been our fault, I guess is what I’m saying, but I do think that there may be as more we could have done. And I do think we are going to have some new opportunities. But as we need to learn new things as professionals to get to that B plus range and better, hopefully, ⁓ and to advocate for what we do better within our organizations, what do you think are some
essential skills that we should be focused on that will help us keep marching towards better outcomes in those places.
Jeff Bergin (35:05)
The skill that I think we need to focus on is helping learners to be better self-regulated learners. Because at the end of the day, each of us now is entering a world of lifelong learning. If we’re not already in it, we’re entering it. And a big part of that includes
Jason Gorman (35:14)
Mm.
Jeff Bergin (35:27)
planning for a learning experience and then reflecting after it’s over and deciding, how did I do, where do I need to go next? And we can design all of the best impact research, which is valuable. It’s valuable for organizations to have and it’s valuable for learners to have and to be able to decipher. But the question that it ultimately needs to answer is, how did I do and therefore what do I do next?
And that analysis and that decision.
The end of the day sits with adult learners and it sits with all learners to some degree, but in particular with adult learners who need to decide things like, is this career the right one for me? Is there a skill gap I need to fill? Is this experience one that I want to continue? And if so, how, where do I go next? What do I do? And how do I spend my money? How do I spend my time? And being able to properly self-regulate where you have end,
to undertake a specific learning experience, monitor how well you’re doing that experience, and then going back and reflecting on what you could have done differently and where you should go next is the solution to being able to leverage any data that you’re getting, any impact data at all that you’re getting and making the right decision. And we need people like functional leaders to also understand how to help their teams.
make those assessments and inferences and we need teachers to be able to do that and advisors to be able to do that. So how do we use this learning data that we have access to to do that? So I would say we need to teach people to better self-regulate and to use those skills.
Jason Gorman (37:16)
It’s, I actually haven’t heard a lot of people use the term self-regulation in this context. A lot of times we’ll talk about metacognition. Do you see those as the same thing or related or not exactly? How would you, how would you parse that?
Jeff Bergin (37:31)
Yeah, mean, self-regulated learning is based on meta
cognition. It is all about thinking about your learning and you’re thinking about your learning, you know, in the very earliest moments when you’re beginning to think, I should learn this new thing. A lot of people right now are thinking, how do I better learn AI? Do we do it through through self practice or through a course or through ⁓ employer sponsored training? And then when you’re doing the learning, when you’ve actually committed and you’re starting, so to speak, it’s that self check that you’re doing and that’s
self-assessment and the strategy implementation, know, it’s, use Pilates as the analogy, but you’re not just sitting down and doing Pilates. You’re constantly checking on the location and the way in which you’re using muscles and how you’re going about completing an activity. And you’re getting some feedback from the instructor, but some of it’s also self-feedback and self-evaluation. And then you conclude and you begin thinking, how did I do that time? Where do
need more help? Where do I need more assistance? What kind of a class do I want to go to next? And all of that, that entire process is a metacognitive process from beginning to end. yeah, teaching people metacognitive skills enables self-regulation, which enables people to be strategy implementers and therefore to achieve higher impact and to be able to analyze the impact that they’ve had and make decisions going forward.
Jason Gorman (39:02)
This is a really good time to shift to talking about your book because I think we’ve really been talking all along about what Already Smarter, your book, is all about. ⁓ You have, without us talking about it, you have talked about a lot of things that are in the book and I have found it a really refreshing ⁓ read in a lot of ways because it is ⁓
Just for me personally, I would say reconnected me with a lot of things that I maybe believe but don’t think about consciously or maybe believe and think I’m doing, but perhaps I haven’t been doing. So it’s been helpful for me as a rubric, right, to kind of scan myself as a learner. I’m curious, what inspired you to write it? Why did you go and write this book?
Jeff Bergin (39:58)
I wrote it, ⁓ well, for a couple of reasons. One, I was naive. And I ⁓ thought, you know, during the pandemic, when, you know, we were going into lockdowns and quarantines, I thought, what a great opportunity this is to write a book that I probably… ⁓
you know, will under use just watching television. And so I thought this is a great time. This is a great moment to do that. And I was naive about how long it would actually take and the journey that something goes on when it’s being written and how it changes. But the closer I got into the research and into the ideation and in looking at other books that I had access to, I realized that I wanted a book that was heavily research based.
that also was holistic and that also was actionable. And so what I mean by that is there’s many, research-based books about learning, but they tend to be written in a lot of academic language. They’re not necessarily something you can quickly skim and pick up a few learning strategies from. So I wanted it to be research-based, but simplified. I wanted it to expand our notion of learning.
Jason Gorman (40:50)
Hmm. Hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Bergin (41:13)
to the things that we can do that affect learning. The way we think about our learning we talked about, but also how do our habits affect learning? How do we remodel our habits? ⁓ How does our social network affect learning? How does ⁓ the way we actually eat and exercise affect learning? Those sorts of things. Like let’s talk about learning well-defined and holistically defined. And most importantly, I wanted it to be actionable.
I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but it’s very easy to sit down and sort of read something about learning or cognitive psychology or self-help or improvement, and you learn it and you understand it, but you don’t actually apply it. Application is hard, and I wanted to simplify application with the goal being, look, there’s lots of things we can do to improve our learning. We’re not going to implement all those things. I think the book has over 100 or maybe 125 unique things.
Jason Gorman (41:55)
Uh-huh.
Jeff Bergin (42:10)
No one’s going to implement 125 things, but if you can scan through and you pick 10 things that really resonate for you, or even just the idea, wow, I have more agency than I thought, and I have more potential because of that agency than I thought, then it’s already worked for you. So I wanted something that was really easy for people to pick up, skim through, pick a few things and go forward.
Jason Gorman (42:24)
Yeah.
It is very concrete, it’s extremely actionable. You are definitely modeling some best practices in that book. I was actually interesting, right at the beginning of the book, the first time you are asking the reader to check in with ourselves to kind of do an inventory or to kind of think about an experience.
I liked that, I took it really seriously. I actually did, you know, kind of close the book, stare at the ceiling, kind of go through it in my head, you know, jotted a few things down, and I found that to be really incredibly useful. And it is really accessible. I mean, I’ve read a lot of, you know, academic papers and even books that are meant to be more accessible about learning.
and they’re usually still pretty jargon ⁓ heavy. And I would say generally probably not that interesting or useful for people who don’t do this for a living. This is this is not that your book is is absolutely it’s just a handbook. I could give it to anybody at any level, including I would say a young teenager. I think they could get quite a lot out of out of this book, a seasoned professional. I think it’s it’s very universal in the way that it’s
it’s written and I love that about it. ⁓
What are the things that you see most frequently that are the blockers that people are most likely to have? ⁓ Are there ones that you see more often than others? And what are the strategies that you find yourself recommending the most or that people use and find the most success with in terms of improving their ability to learn?
Jeff Bergin (44:31)
We’ve talked about a few of these already. ⁓ The blocker of fear, the blocker of misperceptions and misconceptions about one’s learning and the way one goes about learning and what one is good at and what one’s limitations are. Those are obviously the biggest ones. We talked about, you know,
Jason Gorman (44:33)
Mm.
Jeff Bergin (44:48)
just the human sense of fear that can come up. And I talk in the book about anxiety and how you manage anxiety and fear and stress and anxiety being so closely related. So those are all things we’ve kind of touched on. The one that we haven’t touched on, and this came up as I was working on the book, and it didn’t necessarily come out of the research. It came out of research I was conducting.
which was, you know, I’d have casual conversations with people and they’d ask me for a learning strategy. And I would give them a few examples of things that were going to be included in the book. And the response I often received was, ⁓ I already do that. And it actually made me wonder, like, well, am I writing a book of things that everyone is already doing? And, you know, I began doing some interview and polling research.
to see and what I learned is that people have heard of many of these things. Doesn’t mean that they heard about the correct definition or application of those and
Jason Gorman (45:51)
Hmm.
Jeff Bergin (45:57)
almost always it didn’t mean that they were using those things, that they were actually doing it. I’ll give you a very concrete example. Most people when you tell them what’s one of the best ways to learn and you say, well developing a practice strategy, they’ll say, I know that. And then when you ask them and they say, hey, I’m actually learning something new. I’m learning how to kayak. I’m learning how to paddleboard. And you say, what’s your practice strategy? They’re like, well, I just kind of practice here and there.
Jason Gorman (46:02)
Yeah.
Jeff Bergin (46:23)
And so they know that they’re actually not putting forward like a very strong ⁓ assumption of how they should be practicing. And that happens across the board. So what I learned is that we can know something without actually doing that something.
Jason Gorman (46:23)
Thank you. ⁓
And it sounds like you’re also saying we can delude ourselves into thinking we are using a strategy when in fact we are not using that strategy.
Jeff Bergin (46:49)
That’s
right. That’s That’s right.
Jason Gorman (46:51)
Hmm.
Jeff Bergin (46:52)
And that change is something that, you you can have the very best insight in the world about yourself, but unless you’re actually changing yourself based on that insight, and if that change doesn’t include habit formation and changing or a practice schedule of changing or getting the right social support for that change, you’re unlikely to take, to make a lot of progress in it, at least not quickly.
Jason Gorman (47:19)
I really have appreciated this conversation. I just have one more question. Sort of from our last guest. Last guest was Diane Weaver. here’s Diane’s question. What is holding L &D back in this moment? And actually, I’m just going to say, we can just talk about learning professionals in general. It doesn’t have to be specific to L &D. So what’s holding learning professionals back in this moment?
Jeff Bergin (47:24)
Okay. Ooh, okay.
Jason Gorman (47:44)
either looking back on 2025 or looking forward to next year. This is gonna come out in 2026, so this question will make a little less sense then, but people will get it. What is going to push us or leapfrog us forward? So what’s holding us back? What could push us forward?
Jeff Bergin (48:08)
what is holding us back? I think what’s holding people back is ⁓ fear of how the industry itself is gonna be shaped and changed by AI.
Jason Gorman (48:20)
Hmm.
Jeff Bergin (48:21)
rather than getting ahead of actually using AI in the right and most powerful ways. And again, that’s not everyone, but I hear it enough in the industry where people are like, there’s no jobs and it’s really going to remove jobs ⁓ rather than working to redefine those jobs to be much more strategic. ⁓ And what’s going to move us forward, I think, is so many different modes of learning delivery, meaning
learning platforms, coaching platforms, a modified approach to what’s happening in employer learning and in higher ed and the ability to provide mentorship. mean, we are entering a moment now where lifelong learning is going to be a necessity, where learning is being accepted as a critical human skill, as an important durable skill.
And having people, know, having employees, for example, who have powerful, durable skills is going to take and require training. And so I think this is the moment for learning and development and those folks who work in it to really shine. And now is not the moment to kind of freeze up in fear of change. It’s the moment to think about what’s the work I really can do and how can AI help me to do that work.
Jason Gorman (49:41)
Marvelous. Jeff Bergen, thank you so much for coming on the Learning Experience Operations Show. So good to talk to you today.
Jeff Bergin (49:48)
Thank you so much, really appreciate it being here.