Pluralsight Navigate day one recap: Create tech talent

Pluralsight Navigate is an invite-only, in-person conference for over 300 tech and L&D/HR leaders who are spearheading digital transformation initiatives and building connections between teams across organizational lines. 

Throughout the opening session of Navigate, Pluralsight announced several exciting new solutions and product advancements designed to help you do more with less and get the most out of your workforce and your budget.

Pluralsight Co-founder and CEO, Aaron Skonnard, kicked off Navigate by emphasizing the critical importance of your organization’s people, because innovative technologies don’t build and run themselves—people do. As the ongoing workforce and skills crisis continue to impact top-priority business goals, it’s essential to maximize your investments in your technology workforce.

He championed a concept that resonates throughout the tech world: organizations must be creators, not just consumers, of talent. However, dumping a bunch of generic content on your teams and telling them to go learn doesn’t work. The idea of learning isn’t enough. You need a plan and a culture of continuous learning. And we need to approach it with an engineering, data-driven mindset—solving our top tech workforce challenges like an engineer would: using data to inform the best, most effective solutions.

Easier said than done, right?

Pluralsight solutions

We know you don’t need more tools. You need better tools. You need fit-for-purpose solutions. So, to better ensure your employees are receiving the training and content they need to succeed, Pluralsight is excited to announce a shift in strategy with the launch of solutions. These intentional programs—ranging from turn-key and enterprise-ready to fully customized—are aligned to individual needs, specific tech stacks, specific operating models, and future technology roadmaps.

With solutions, Pluralsight is focused on providing your organization with an operating system built around the science of learning. This means focusing on three key components:

• Purpose-built content that’s designed to deliver an outcome

• Technology that measures and guides both individuals and team progress with a focus on ROI

• Immersive learning experiences that accelerate the path to productivity

In an overview of the solution offerings, Aaron shared the idea of Pluralsight as an operating system for tech skills, combining our analytics, purpose-built curriculum, immersive learning experiences, expert consultants, and more. With these fundamental operating system capabilities, you hold the power to advance your technology workforce. 

Aaron closed out his keynote by emphasizing how all of our competitive advantage, operational excellence, and resiliency relies on continuous investments in our tech workforces. With the help of Pluralsight, you can achieve this by:

• Elevating tech fluency across your entire organization

• Upskilling your teams to deliver on mission-critical projects

• Driving complex cloud transformations and building cloud talent from within

• Onboarding engineers faster and more effectively 

• And diversifying your tech workforce to better represent the customers you serve

Our top challenges will continue to evolve. Developing your technology teams needs to be an ongoing continuous practice, too. And we're your tech workforce partner to help you build tech teams that can truly navigate the future, whatever it holds.

Pluralsight Skills announces Tech Foundations and Custom Cloud Sandboxes

Following Aaron’s speech, several members of the Pluralsight Skills leadership team shared the latest product advancements available today on the Pluralsight Skills platform. All of these announcements support organizations on their path to creating critical talent. These fit-for-purpose tech learning experiences include Custom Cloud Sandboxes and Tech Foundations. 

The recently released State of Cloud report noted that when it comes to cloud learning, the biggest necessity is access to immersive, hands-on experiences. To effectively develop teams who can operate in their environment and processes, organizations need access not just to sandbox environments, but sandbox environments customized to your data sets. You can use these Custom Cloud Sandboxes to: 

• Target specific skills for your learners to build
• Quickly onboard employees
• Create a space where your learners can discover new services to utilize
• And offer a place for your learners to safely experiment

Want to know what’s in store for cloud trends in 2023 and beyond? Register for Pluralsight’s Cloud Transformation Day.

Tech foundations

Following an update about the ongoing integration of A Cloud Guru and Pluralsight’s platforms, Pluralsight author Simon Allardice took the stage to discuss Tech Foundations. This exciting new learning program is designed to increase tech fluency across your entire organization. 

Tech Foundations will ensure every team within your organization can comfortably discuss the technology your development teams are using to build your products and services. This increases collaboration across teams, provides deeper understanding for non-tech teams about how tech relates to their roles, and opens the door to potential future talent mobility. 

Only 33% of companies report having upskilling programs in place, giving those who do a significant advantage to innovate and disrupt at a faster pace. Tech Foundations can help your organization establish a culture of learning for all employees, follow trends in technology, understand how the tools and applications they use every day help the business, and confidently engage in technical conversations that can drive the business forward. 

Pluralsight Flow’s new features and Insights Lab

Next, Greg Ceccarelli, General Manager of Pluralsight Flow, and Cat Hicks, Vice President of Research Insights for Flow, took the stage. They narrowed in on the need for engineering teams to prioritize two key things:

• Eliminating developer friction

• Eliminating wasted efforts

In keeping with Aaron Skonnard’s theme about using technology as a “deflationary force” and having an engineering mindset, Greg focused his discussion on why this moment in time can and should be an opportunity for your organization. Downturns drive the need for explicit change.

Cat Hicks took the stage next to discuss the research behind Flow and how Pluralsight’s Insights Lab is working to advance understanding of how developers work, learn, and thrive. The quantitative and qualitative work being done by Cat and her team is dedicated to creating deeper understanding of how organizations can radically progress the developer experience, from idea to production. This research is vital not only from a leader standpoint but also for individual contributors to better understand how the work they do contributes to organizational goals and to reduce imposter syndrome. 

In order for organizations to accomplish the two pivotal tasks of eliminating friction and wasted efforts to achieve more with less, Flow has released two new product capabilities: Investment Profile and DORA analytics.

The implementation of DORA metrics within Flow’s reporting tools provides your engineering teams the ability to reduce friction by offering greater context into the how and why behind your DORA metrics data. You can now instantly determine what’s driving potential lags in your development cycles—which is a critical piece to that competitive advantage, operational excellence, and resiliency that Aaron mentioned. These metrics enable you to remove bottlenecks and blockers in order to keep things moving.

If we need to be creators of talent to drive the business forward, then we need to see our engineering teams as our biggest investment and empower them to work on what matters most. In that vein, the Flow team announced the release of Investment Profile, which provides greater context into the time and money being spent on the various aspects of your delivery cycle. These insights reduce non-essential engineering efforts while ensuring the investments you’re making actually propel your strategic roadmap.

Getting these two aspects of your software delivery process right is pivotal to driving improved revenue and increasing overall developer satisfaction, especially as many leaders continue to face challenges around time to market, developer retention, and constant disruption. 

Our strategic shifts from products and content to cutting-edge solutions, alongside the innovations to our products and services, are designed to advance your technology workforce, maximize your budget, and increase revenue. These solutions and innovations will also empower you to create environments that build talent—and where your employees not only thrive in their work, but seek to grow within the organization.