Candace Thille - Transforming Corporate Learning
Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management, Ed.D., 2013
As director of learning science and engineering for Amazon, Candace Thille, GRD’13, puts her research into practice for a company of 1.6 million employees, offering a powerful glimpse of how the future of workforce development could look.
“The knowledge and capabilities people need to develop are changing rapidly,” says the learning science pioneer, who lives in Seattle, Washington. “The old mechanisms are not up to the task.” Leading a team of eighty that includes engineers, product managers, data scientists, learning scientists, and user experience designers, Dr. Thille collaborates with in-house business units such as Amazon Web Services to transform how workers learn.
How does it work? The approach relies on adaptive learning software that customizes the learning experience. Throughout the workday, employees’ devices collect data that are analyzed with algorithms based on Thille’s research. The system makes inferences about the employees’ current knowledge and capabilities relative to their desired knowledge and capabilities and provides guidance and experiences to address each individual’s needs. “The system is constantly monitoring to help the employee decide ‘where I am’ relative to ‘where I’m trying to be,’” says Thille, who has spent two decades working to make education more effective through the learning sciences and technology.
As founder of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University, Thille established courseware to supplement classroom instruction across a variety of subjects and provide ongoing feedback to students, instructors, and course designers. The approach has been shown to help students achieve equal or better learning outcomes in half the time of traditional courses. At Penn GSE, Thille’s thesis for the Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management program explored aspects of OLI, an effort she continued to lead as a faculty member at Stanford University prior to taking a leave of absence to work for Amazon in 2018.
“The knowledge and capabilities people need to develop are changing rapidly. The old mechanisms are not up to the task.” —Candace Thille, GRD’13
At Amazon, Thille notes, the learning system she built has replaced many traditional classes in both technical and non-technical fields such as a boot camp for software engineers and courses on interviewing, management, and coaching. In addition, she says, it helps employees who want to shift jobs within the company develop the necessary skills.
Some might find it all a bit “Big Brother,” but Thille emphasizes that the system operates under clear responsible-use policies.
“We’re collecting learners’ actions not to judge them, but to better support them,” she says, adding that worker agency is at the center of her work.
“How do you frame learning technology so that people see it as supporting them and not replacing them?” asks Thille. “The way I work is not about, ‘If I build this, they will come.’ It’s about collaborating with the business units to co-build so they feel ownership and it’s actually solving their problem.”
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