Celebrating three years of the Josh Bersin Academy: How Nomadic is using learning to build the world’s largest HR community

May 03, 2022 by Nomadic Team

Three years ago, our team at Nomadic launched the Josh Bersin Academy with the mission to create a home for the global human resources community centered on learning. What we couldn’t have anticipated then was that thanks to a global pandemic, a racial reckoning, and the rapid rise of a newly empowered and untethered workforce, the role of that community – and their workplaces – would fundamentally transform over the next three years.

Now, we're celebrating the Josh Bersin Academy's third anniversary. And we never could have envisioned the way these past three years have unfolded!

We’re proud of the ways the broader global HR community has risen to the challenges that have emerged, and of the role the Josh Bersin Academy has played powering this community. In just three years, we’ve grown into the largest learning-based HR community in the world, with over 30,000 members across 146 countries and over 500 organizations represented. Each of these tens of thousands of learners is leading their organization through unprecedented uncertainty.

Using cohort-based learning to build a global community

For us at Nomadic, it’s been incredible to see how the same marriage of learning and community that we’ve used to transform some of the world’s largest companies to adapt to the new era of change can transform an entire industry during a time of crisis. Before starting the Josh Bersin Academy, our cohort-based approach to learning had already been put to the test in driving business transformation, but we hadn't yet launched a global academy focused on a single function.

The urgency of the HR community’s needs forced us to redefine our role in professional education. Part of the impetus for us launching a cohort-based capability academy focused on a single industry was the understanding that for the HR function, mere upskilling was no longer enough. We’ve worked with our partners at the Josh Bersin Company and beyond to get insights from the industry in real time that we then transform into timely, deeply relevant educational experiences that our community can immediately apply to their work before others even realize these topics need to be addressed.

In one example, we were able to release our entire Remote Work Bootcamp in April 2020, in just the first weeks of the global lockdown. Similarly, we released our Resilient HR course in August 2020 while the global community was reckoning with topics like racism, equality and resilience like never before. And in June 2021, we released our Hybrid Working Program just as HR leaders were designing entirely new ways of organizing their companies.

Over a third of those that participate in our digital academies are Director or VP level, showing that leaders in their companies need support in an environment where the workplace and relationships between employers and employees change fast. Our semi-synchronous approach has allowed us to cultivate a truly global community learning and sharing with one another in the flow of their work, with members hailing from 146 countries and over 2,490 cities, while our instructorless but expert-driven content has also enabled us to bring in the most relevant experts and practitioners on the front line of change in each subject area.

As the global re-imagining of work continues to accelerate, we’re excited for the future: to continue to partner even more closely with our community to demonstrate how learning can be the driving force for ambitiously transforming entire industries to our new era of accelerated change.

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Bringing together HR and L&D professionals from around in the world in our cohort-based academy also gives us great insight into trends, challenges, and what's next in the world of HR and learning. You can explore some of these insights in our new Talent Transformation Report, based on quantitative and qualitative data from 1,000 HR and L&D professionals. It covers topics like internal hiring, AI in talent acquisition, fostering internal mobility, and how L&D can help shape the future of talent (and business) strategy.

Interested to discover more about what Nomadic’s cohort-based Academy can do for your organization? Learn about our approach, or get in touch to request a demo.

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