Author: Mark Aberdour

Case Study: Technology Leadership Mentoring

Helping Tech Leaders Grow Through Conversation When I announced my transition into independent work in Spring 2024, one of the first people to get in touch was Martin Baker, someone I’d first worked with back in the early 2000s during my days at Epic. At the time, Martin had brought my team in to build…
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Case Study: The Portal – reimagining learning

Founder Sally Burns has been running a content creation business for some years, helping female founders and experts to create beautifully crafted content for their own audiences via the LearnWorlds platform. Sally’s vision to scale this up required a learning platform that emphasises collaboration and connection over completion and content monetisation (which excludes most of…
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How community engagement platforms are moving in on the workplace learning market

Numerous research studies show that effective learning in organisations comes from three areas: experiential learning (real-world tasks) making up the bulk; social learning (interactions with others) following in second place; and structured, formal education in last place and making up just a small percentage of how we learn. This is why LMS products, traditionally focussed…
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Software End of Life Part 3: From Abandonment to Open Source Revival

In the world of software development, the topic of end-of-life scenarios often remains overlooked and there is a stark absence of guidance or case studies to help navigate such situations effectively. This series of blog posts aims to fill this gap, drawing from my own experiences across various companies. Software End of Life Part 1:…
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Software End of Life Part 2: Overcoming Tech Debt With a Complete Rebuild

In the world of software development, the topic of end-of-life scenarios often remains overlooked and there is a stark absence of guidance or case studies to help navigate such situations effectively. This series of blog posts aims to fill this gap, drawing from my own experiences across various companies. Software End of Life Part 1:…
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Software End of Life Part 1: The Journey to Closing Down a Legacy Product

In the world of software development, the topic of end-of-life scenarios often remains overlooked and there is a stark absence of guidance or case studies to help navigate such situations effectively. This series of blog posts aims to fill this gap, drawing from my own experiences across various companies. Software End of Life Part 1:…
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Our journey searching for the AI Team

My piece for Thrive’s AI newsletter about setting up a new AI team for the business and some of the innovations they’ll be working on through 2024. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-made-me-do-our-journey-searching-ai-team-thrivelearning-k0bpe

Breaking free: how a £100 RPA tool saved £150K in vendor fees

The final project at my last role involved extracting seven years of learner data for 80,000 learners from an LMS that was being decommissioned. The shock of our vendor’s £150,000 quote to both extract and host 3TB of learner data led me to explore a robotic process automation (RPA) solution using a low cost browser…
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Learning Unleashed: Exploring the Hidden Investment in Personal Growth

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn during May 2023. I’ve seen a lot of LinkedIn posts recently about professionals who do voluntary work, and then use those experiences to sell their services. You know what I mean: “Look at me coaching my baseball team, we do such a great job building resilience in our kids.…
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Using ChatGPT as a learning simulation tool

This article was originally posted to LinkedIn during April 2023. About five years ago at Brightwave, we worked on a chatbot prototype for The Samaritans. The chatbot was a learning simulation tool, with the chatbot acting out the part of Bella, a bullied teenager. The training was for listening volunteers who were increasingly supporting people…
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