To be with you that he's talking about your lessons learned from this amazing year that we've had. Thank you for joining me.
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Oh, you are number six out of seven people who I've had the pleasure of chatting with all day today. It is truly a marathon of insights, lessons and just really great conversations. And you and I have had an amazing conversation once already on this platform in this format. So let's rock and roll. So my first question for you in case there are folks tuning in who don't know you or don't know your work, in a few words, how would you describe like who you are in the world of learning and development
so in a few words, I would say that as far as learning and development, I try to be useful, good and kind. I've been here for several years now. And in leadership positions for a few years and my own thing always on the side. And so those are really kind of the values that I look for in full time, part time, project, work, whatever
it may be, and not surprising as I looked at your tagline on LinkedIn like of course good and useful would have to be at the heart of your description of yourself. Totally. So it's been a big year for you following you on LinkedIn. I've seen you share quite a few impressive milestones with regard to your podcast, a new business venture, being a fraction of chief learning officer and probably mentoring other fractional learning professionals. You've had a lot going on. So tell us in whatever way you would like to whether you share some big projects and lessons learned from those or just reflections on the year, but what are some of those big lessons that you got out of all the amazing work you've done this year?
Yeah, so I've had some really pivotal career change moments this year. You know, last year, my partner and I started the website useful stuff and so that's been kind of going on in the background as has been my podcast, and those have kind of always been constant. But the first half of the year, I was working in a full time position as a customer education manager in the tech sector. And had a whole team reporting to me. And in the middle of July, on the same days that I got the keys to my brand new house, I found out I was being laid off and so it was my entire team. And so that kind of set the tone for the rest of the year where it's mostly been thinking about whether I'm going to do another full time opportunity, whether I'm going to just pour my heart and soul into useful stuff and do that or whether I'm going to do other things and that's when I joined by my dear friend Sarah Kunis Dre with her good learning agency that she launched as a fractional chief learning officer and picked up some product work here and there, but a lot of the reflection I did on this past year has been kind of around like that. What the heck happened at all like and not just for me and my team at the company that we're at, but like what the heck is happening across the tech industry, especially but just across the economy, and there are some incredibly talented l&d people that I've seen, laid off this year and be out of a job after some of them have had their same job for years. And so that's been a really big point of reflection for me this year. And one of the biggest takeaways from that is that we have a limited time, show our value to the organizations that we work for, especially in this economy. But also that the organ I kept hearing this year that well, the organization doesn't care about my metrics. Or leadership doesn't care about my projects, or senior leaders don't care about the evaluation part of Addie or what I'm measuring or what I'm doing. And I found that that's just simply not true. Like, it's not that they don't care about metrics or evaluation or, or no, the projects that we're working on, it's that they don't care about what we're doing with those. The metrics we're collecting. They don't care about course completions. They don't care about biology. It's like they have other priorities. And if we don't get more keyed into those, we're gonna find that a lot more people in our field continue to lose their jobs.
Yeah, that's not surprising. And literally the last conversation that we had in this series of lessons learned was all about alignment, and how the alignment among the learning team, the learning team and the stakeholders, the learning team stakeholders and learners or participants or whomever you're serving that alignment is incredibly important and without that our everything is at stake, our jobs, our value, our enjoyment even of the work that we do.
Yeah, for sure. And I think that brings up another good lesson learned to is that and it came from our conversation that we had earlier this year, as I was putting together my own evaluation framework, being just totally frustrated with what exists out there, measure learning projects, and that's our audience. When we create learning projects. Our audience isn't just our learners. It's also subject matter experts. And the stakeholders who, whoever is owning the project at either our business that we work in, or for our clients, right and like those people share their opinion of our work and you know, the accuracy of our work and the impact of our work. matters to those people as well. And as much as I love the learner centered focus and how we've shifted away from kind of like the focus on the instructor or the trainer that was there decades ago. I think, still really important for job security, for success for moving the needle on performance to pay attention to the full audience.
Yeah, yeah. And I really enjoyed our conversation that was a few months ago now but that you're your expert. In some It's so strange, right? When I first got into the learning and development world, I was the subject matter expert. I was the trainer. I was the curriculum developer, I was the evaluator. I was the one that went on the road and did training. Of course, you can imagine I worked for a nonprofit. And so I was all the things and it wasn't until I wanted to leave that role. And I went into corporate I realized that every single hat that I played was actually a completely separate job description, and I was like, wow, I was underpaid. But, you know, in some, in some ways, I think the separation was actually really problematic that our stakeholders our subject matter experts, our trainers, our instructional designers are evaluators, but they are all independent functions is really a disservice and an ideal world. I don't think we could ever have somebody wear all those hats, but to not, not allow the interconnection and evaluation of how SMEs are feeling about the progress of our programs and how their experience was working with us as instructional designers or trainers or however they're participating. Yeah, that's a huge perspective that I think is overlooked, especially in evaluation. And I still haven't read your framework. But dang, Heidi, when I read it, it's gonna probably blow my mind and I can't wait to share my thoughts with the rest of the world on that.
I'm so excited and so excited for you to read it. Yeah. I'm excited to hear your thoughts and feedback. Yeah.
Fantastic. Well, so we've got the importance of, you know, whether it's alignment or the importance of showing our value. We've got, you know, evaluating from the perspective of our entire audience, not just learners, not just instructors, but stakeholders and SMEs. Those are big lessons is there any other lesson that you'd like to share before we move into what you're focusing on next year?
Yeah, the last one that I'll just say is that based on that, that kind of reflection and those first two I released a solo podcast episode. Gosh, I don't even remember a few months ago now. And it was all about like, why is there bad training? And it was, we needed to own our part in the bad training that we create and we need to have a little bit more self reflection and a little bit more of that. To take a little bit more accountability, because I feel like a lot of people, especially when we're new and we're still so passionate and a little bit defensive and it's still a little bit hard to take feedback. I know this was true for me, that it's a lot easier to just go with the flow and not fight back and, you know, not assert ourselves as the experts that we are and then we end up creating this bad training and we want to blame our subject matter experts. We want to blame the stakeholders. We want to blame our company when we want to blame company culture. But at the same time, it's like but did we really try everything we could to make a great experience? Because there are times where like we we just simply can't right? We're unable to move within our organization, but isn't always the case. And it hasn't always been the case for me like I've made that training because I haven't felt confident enough or had the right relationships or whatever. And I think the ability to admit that and get better is really important. Even more so after I published that podcast episode, because a lot of people were very upset and wanted to double down and say no, it wasn't my fault, you know, and, and just kind of that like defensiveness that came out of that episode. I said, Man, we really need like l&d leadership really needs the ability to self reflect and admit where we're wrong. We're going to move forward in a productive way.
Yeah, I agree with that. And you're using the language self reflection. And I think that's an important process. But I think another equally important word is accountability. And that whether you are the instructional designer, but then the other is facilitating the program and somebody else is evaluating and somebody else is the subject matter expert who informed your content Yes, there are many moving pieces and many times our environment isn't aligned. Ideally, to even support the training that we design. There's so many pieces that can get in our way. But if we aren't accountable for that, doing our very best to try and make everything align and everything worked to the best of our ability, then we aren't going to be effective, and that we do have a big, huge role to play in the successes, but also the failures. And one thing that came up in an earlier conversation today, from Matt Dirksen he said, we need to say no, and I've heard countless times from learning professionals but they feel that they don't have the authority or like you said, the relationship with stakeholders or anybody to say, hey, this training solution or this program or this idea, and here's why. And just that's part of accountability. It's part of the self reflection, it's part of owning, when things don't go right. What could we have done differently?
For sure, and I think there's some accountability to that. I realize comes with some serious privilege, like I understand that, leaving a job without anything lined up. Like that's a very privileged thing to do as someone who's been out of work for five months like, I get it, but we need to stop taking these jobs in the first place. Where we asked good questions in the interview a lot of red flags and we still end up taking the job anyway. And then we're met with just continuous opposition. And we're not able to say no, and, you know, if we really kind of look at it, we probably could have avoided that with some questions in the interview or listening to our gut during the interview process. You know, I think there's also a point where we have to just kind of throw up our hands and say, We're not going to win this one. Maybe it's time to move on to another role.
I can say that I've had a lot of success when I told that I wasn't. It wasn't what I expected. It would be the interview completely led me to believe one thing and I got into the role and it was something else. And if you're not in a position, like you said to leave or to have a gap in employment, I think one thing we can do is find little ways to improve where we don't have to ask for permission. And I'm a really big fan of not asking, Can I do this? Should I do that but just doing it because what happens then is I either get positive feedback, I get data or I fail, and I get data that tells me that wasn't going to work and I can improve. Sure. So if you're in a position where you aren't in an ideal patient, for making learning be the most effective it can be. You don't take the accountability and say, Okay, what's one thing that I can do differently where I can get good feedback, maybe it will work? Maybe it won't, but the feedback is so valuable that will help us with our processes and just like one step one thing at a time, because I think that'll improve to like our experience of work versus feeling like we're pigeon holed and
powerless. Yeah. Absolutely, for sure. And those are great things that to add to your resume as well, when it's time to move on to that next role.
Right? That's right. So I'm curious with all the things that you've learned and the things that you've taken on and like you've got a lot of things in your pipeline for next year and the years to come. What will you be focusing on that you believe will specifically improve whether its outcomes efficiency, your value or just your enjoyment of work? What are some of those things you'll be focusing on in the new year?
Yeah, so I think that being on the industry and learning and development in general has always just been like my passion project and area of hands and I really, really want to and I have been behind the scenes I know that useful stuff has been super quiet for the last six or so months. But I've have been working behind the scenes as we've been kind of quiet. Both Matt and I have been working on some stuff and so I really want to focus on creating useful stuff. For people who are already l&d Pros. So you mentioned earlier the evaluation framework that I've been working on. I did some interviews I just wrapped those up a couple of weeks ago with current instructional designers on working with sneeze and there's gonna be some I gotta have going through the transcripts. Now I'm putting together some data on that so that we can share that out on the useful stuff website. And then also continuing to help people who are aspiring l&d professionals as well. So one of the things that we're going to launch in 2024 that I'm super excited about for useful stuff is a cohort based course on instructional design fundamentals. And it really, it's different than what is out there because what is out there is either like very academic from colleges, or it's like a get rich quick boot camp type deal where it's like, you know, do you want to make six figures as an ID and do you want to, you know, have a bangin portfolio and this is not about any of those things. It's really taking my experience from My academic background, the research I've done, the places and different sectors I've worked in, plus my partner's amazing experience. He has over 30 years he has more experience than me. In the training and learning space, he owned his own elearning agency. So we're bringing together all of our experience all of the academic backgrounds that that we have all of that both the theory and all of the practice right into something that we're really excited about and we're really proud out of so really bringing back to like those that foundational knowledge and kind of like this whole idea of like Back to Basics almost. And then the last thing is just helping organizations so whether that's through project work or consulting or if I decide to take on another full time role to just helping organizations create good learning and helping them you know, improve communication and improve their processes and things like that. Well, you clearly
have a goal in all the areas that you're focused on next year and that is to elevate our industry. And doing that. Multiple perspectives for the experienced professional, the new, professional and at the level of the organization. And as most of us know, that takes a different set of skills, a different set of thinking to make that kind of impact from all those perspectives and you've got it what sounds like the right team of people to help you and I just underscore to that. I've heard in circles that there's sort of this competition of, you know, experience Trump's theory or theory is missing and it's too much of like this is how things are in the real world. And theory doesn't apply. And I call BS on that competition, because at the end of the day theory comes from experience infinitely, you know, right, and that if we can merge those two things where we have people with hands and their deep understanding of theory and the practice applying that theory, there's so much to be learned from that. And I think back to your point about how things are failures. Sometimes we don't listen or lean on theory we forget about it, but there's there's so many things that have been well documented that if we just leaned on those best practices, we'd avoid a lot of potholes and obstacles. But then sometimes, you know, experience tells us that like for example, you know, the Kirkpatrick model is brilliant, but everybody's using it as like the only model in which you think they can learn and that is putting us we're overusing one theory or one idea when there's a myriad of others, including your upcoming one and my upcoming book, but I don't have a framework. I'm just sharing best practices on how to use varieties of frameworks for whatever your goals and challenges are. In any way. There's so much thinking, theoretically that we overlook, and the two together are so incredibly powerful. So kudos to you for making all that happen.
Thank you and yeah, back to the metrics, you know, as someone who also got their doctorate I'm sure you know, this status and feel this. It's almost like having theory without practice or practice without theory, like you're missing that triangulation of data. That's kind of the mental model I always use is like, this is how we triangulate our data. This is how we inform our practices by the theory and the practice and previous experience of not just people who've been in the field for 20 3040 years. But for people who are brand new to like let's not forget about their experience because that's also important to the whole story of what are in this whole. Yeah,
I love that. Well thank you for sharing your lessons learned and the areas you'll be focusing on. Before we wrap up. I wanted to just turn it over to our listeners. Thank you for being with us. If you have a question for Heidi or myself Heidi's expertise is incredibly deep and rich. And now is the time to ask something and get her feedback, her guidance. So if you do have a question, please raise your hand and I can bring you on stage and you can share your comment or your question. And you can get that important feedback. There's not often that we just have an open forum for questions. And so now is the time if you do have something you're burning to ask us, please raise your hand and let us know. And while you're out that, Heidi, I have a question for you. That is to all these endeavors. I'll ask my question, you can think about it and then we'll go to the toilet. My question for you to ponder and we'll come back to it is what are the indicators? Speaking of metrics, what are those things that you're going to be looking at in the new year to tell yourself am I on the right track because that's something I'm asking every one of our guests today to share. So we can all figure out what metrics we should be using personally and professionally. To know that we're on the right track. And Latoya please do raise your hand again. I will bring you back on stage. There you are. I'm going to make you live now. Go ahead and unmute. And let us know your comment or questions.
Well, it's no Heidi, I love you. I'm not I don't mean to put you on the spot but something you know I'm working with working as a nonprofit working with the disabled community. I guess I put this to everyone here, including listeners, how can we make it so that our learning and development methodologies are reaching those with disabilities? Heidi knows that I'm going into 2024 with a big project where we're helping people who are visually impaired and developing that virtual training program is very interesting. But any thoughts on that like things that are happening or things that people are doing because we always forget about the disabled community when we're talking about learning and development and it just want to put this out there for the group? Question.
Let's Taya is a dear dear dear friend of mine and former manager actually as well. And so I'm super familiar with her nonprofit work and Latoya I think the amount of times I've been asked to comment on or be an expert in or include my, my thoughts on accessibility and inclusion in this last year has been like on the uptick so I feel good about like, yeah, it's like trendy and there's something like very unsexy about that, but at the same time, like, we'll take it, like whatever the awareness comes from, like we'll take it right. And so I think as the Awareness continues to be there as we can kind of lean into it as a trend, I think, really, we're in like the Infancy you know, this Latoya, we're in the infancy of being able to really serve the population with disabilities and actually my time as in customer education, made it even better because when we're talking customers versus internal employees, there's like, there's less control over who our customers are. So we have no choice but to be more accessible and and so gave me a bit more awareness. But I think we're still at the phase where we really just need to make people aware of the different types of people who are in our audience and not just the people with permanent severe disabilities. But also like the people who are a new mother and are breastfeeding or are like had carpal tunnel surgery and are going to not be able to use a mouse for the next three weeks, you know?
I, I love that call out of something being in its infancy and like there was a time where Diversity Equity and Inclusion was something that was new and something that was being introduced to corporations when it should have been considered just like any other thing from the moment corporations were born. And I think in some ways, the opportunity just like any good learning designer is to do a needs analysis. And, and Heidi, you've talked about, like, who our audience is, isn't just our learners. But in this case, when we are working with people who have disabilities, that doesn't look one way. And so maybe there's a standard and and there's Ada, and there's things that can give us some guidance, but we don't want to assume who we're serving and what their challenges are and any good learning designer will do a needs analysis to understand what is it that is happening in our learners or participants or students lives, which isn't just, you know, what do they need to know? But it's like, how are they going to use the information and what is their environment look like? And what are the ways in which they learn in the best ways? And so I think, the needs analysis opportunity, but I also think because of the Infancy Heidi, like you said that there is a place for trial and error and that sounds horrible. And what I'm suggesting is that we use like a success case method to the point like Kirkpatrick isn't going to be the most appropriate evaluation model for working in this sector when we need to understand what works really well and what doesn't. And so, a little bit of trial and error with some evaluation on like, hey, what worked really well and what was really awful and looking at those extremes to inform how do we continually incrementally improve our service to those variety of any you know, whether it's someone with disabilities, or global population or whatever your context is.
I definitely have the trial. And error. I will put out there when people say needs analysis, they need to look at the full process of needs analysis, not just areas of assessment and needs analysis that they're used to. And so when we talk about the disabilities I work with people with visual with hearing with mobility with neuro diverse challenges, all of the above a different assessment for each of them. I tell you this, it is very difficult to find other learning professionals to bounce ideas off of or go over our findings after the initial trials because many are avoiding the topic altogether. Because the common excuse how to you know, this is a we don't have people like that taking this course. Yeah.
You know, one suggestion I can make and this may be something you've already attempted. The good news is that there's an evolution happening every couple of years and that would be your local ATD association of talent development chapter. Many of them have evolving communities of practice where they are focusing on things that are good for the community or important for members and that that looks all kinds of ways and it changes constantly. So you might look to your local ATD chapter and talk to people on the board who are in charge of professional development or Member Services and propose like what if we had a monthly community of practice or a quarterly community of practice where people who are in this sector are people who are interested in this can get together and just mastermind share ideas share when they're in the weeds and support each other that might be an option that's accessible in terms of cost effective and meeting with people in your local community.
I love that idea. Thank you.
So we are at the middle of the hour, but I did see that James was constantly raising his hand and lowering it to James, if you're still with us, I'm happy to stay on Heidi, if you can as well and take one more question. But maybe James popped off and that's okay, too. People scheduled? You did. people's schedules are very tight these days. But as we are at the middle of the hour, thank you all for tuning in. And thank you, Latoya for asking your question and opening this to our awareness and also to our masterminding here just really, really quickly. So thank you, Heidi. Thank you listeners. This has been an awesome 30 minutes and I hope that you'll enjoy the rest of your day and the rest of your year. Thanks, everyone. Take care