Training Industry has named d’Vinci Interactive to its 2022 Top Training Companies™ Watch List for Custom Content Development.

d’Vinci develops learning experiences, educational websites and web and mobile applications for corporate, government, medical and K-12 educational content clients.

“We’re honored to be recognized for developing outstanding custom learning solutions. Our talented team is focused on creating extraordinary learning outcomes for our valued partners and clients,” said d’Vinci President Mason Scuderi.

“The emerging companies chosen for our Custom Content Development Watch List create a learning environment with their comprehensive solutions to align with business objectives,” said Tom Whelan, director of corporate research at Training Industry, Inc. “These companies create this learning environment through developing engaging content with the latest learning technologies in gamification, eLearning and virtual training.”

The Content Development Watch List includes two dozen companies that demonstrate excellence in innovation, impact and industry visibility, capability to develop and deliver multiple types of eLearning content, depth and breadth of subject matter expertise, company size and growth potential, quality of clients and geographic reach.

Training Industry, the leading research and information resource for corporate learning leaders, prepares the Training Industry Top 20 report on critical sectors of the corporate training marketplace to better inform professionals about the best and most innovative providers of training services and technologies.

 

About Training Industry, Inc.

Training Industry is the most trusted source of information on the business of learning. Our authority is built on deep ties with more than 450 expert contributors who share insights and actionable information with their peers. Training Industry’s courses, live events, articles, magazine, webinars, podcast, research and reports generate more than 10 million industry interactions each year, while the Top 20 Training Companies Lists help business leaders find the right training partners.

The Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs (DDAP) has selected d’Vinci Interactive’s ecoLearn® Learning Management System (LMS) to be its Integrated System for the Management and Administration of Requisite Training (iSMART).  The web-based system will be used to manage all aspects of DDAP’s robust training program for professionals in the field of gambling and substance use disorder.

Awarded to d’Vinci parent company, JPL, the contract will be implemented with a seamless team from JPL and d’Vinci along with diverse business Momentum and veteran-owned business SQN Systems. The customized solution will serve more than 14,000 students, faculty, county authorities, facility administrators, and DDAP fiscal, training, and administrative staff.  

The ecoLearn® LMS has been upgraded and used by the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police for over 10 years and has recently been implemented for the Northeast Counterdrug Training Center (NCTC) and the Western Regional Counterdrug Training Center (WRCTC).

Learn more about d'Vinci's ecoLearn® Learning Management System (LMS). 

Keeping the learner in mind when designing eLearning courses is key to engaging them and driving organizational success. Highmark Health's Learning Architect Angela Sample, Ph.D.  discusses best practices for using empathetic principles in instructional design.

Show Notes:

• Empathetic principles can be complementary to learning experience design principles 
• Focus on the importance of designing a solution that's human-centered to truly engage learners.
• Create learner profiles that consider the learner's feelings. Then, be willing to pivot your training approach to align with their cognitive and emotional states. 
• Communicate to management that creating training with the learner in mind will actually yield better ROI.

Powered by Learning earned an Award of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio category from The Communicator Awards and a Silver Davey Award for Educational Podcast. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts and Training Industry’s Ultimate L&D Podcast Guide. 

Learn more about Learning Experience Design referenced in this episode. 

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Transcript:

Voiceover: [00:00] This is Powered by Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

Voiceover: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at d'Vinci.com.

Susan Cort: Hello, and, and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host Susan Cort, and today I'm joined by d'Vinci Client Solutions Consultant, Angeline Evans, and our guest, Angela Sample. Angela is an award-winning instructional designer and works as a learning architect for Highmark Health, a large healthcare system based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. [01:00] Angela holds a PhD in Instructional Design and has a passion for enabling learners to be successful by applying research to educational trends. Today, we're going to talk to Angela about using empathetic principles in instructional design. Welcome, Angela.

Angeline Evans: Thanks for joining us, Angela.

Angela Sample: Welcome. Thank you so much for having me today.

Susan: Angela, let's start off by giving us a little background on you and your current role.

Angela: Sure. As you mentioned, I am a learning architect at Highmark Health. I have been there for close to eight years and in that role, I have played instructional designer, senior instructional designer, as well as, of course, moved into the learning architect role. Prior to that, I have always been in the design space in some way, shape, or form, working for small and large software companies, and always at the core of that is my love as instructional design. I always laugh and say I love it so much, but that's why I ended up with a PhD in design.

Susan: That's great.

Angeline: That is. [02:00] I'm so excited to chat with you today, Angela, but I feel like there's a lot to cover, so I'm really excited to hear what you have to say, but I thought for some listeners that might not be familiar with the empathetic principles, if you could just start us off and tell us a little bit more about the theory behind it and give us a little 101 that might help guide us tee things off.

Angela: Absolutely. I think what's really important is to level set what it is not and what it's. What it is not is it is not for us to go in and change a learner's entire world because we cannot change the fact that their systems change. We cannot change the fact that their org has changed multiple times or that they're working remotely. What we want to do is we want to make their world a little a bit better. Again, we can't change their entire world; it's just us making the world a little bit better.

The first step in doing that is to shift the focus from a client-centered approach to a learner-centered approach. [02:58] Instead of us always meeting those client needs, which of course we still do want to meet those client needs, we are going to make sure that we're partnering with them and become the trusted advisor to them, and we're actually placing the learner at the center of all that we do. When we do that and we shift the focus, we are actually going to be creating something that meeting the learners' cognitive and emotional needs, so it really is taking care of that learner as a whole.

How we're doing that is we are going to marry a couple of different principles together. We have our user design principles, which are taking care of the learner, learning about the learner. What are the learner's needs? What are the learner's emotional needs? What is their emotional state? Then we're taking that and we're marrying it to instructional design principles.

We're not throwing instructional design principles out the window; we are going to still do task-based analysis. We are going to still do all of our design work, but what doing is we're [04:00] taking what we learned in that user center design process, so again, how is the learner feeling? How do we want them to feel? How are their clients feeling? How do we want their clients to feel? We're taking that whole picture as part of our analysis and then continuing on with the design process.

A very critical point is to ensure that are using the correct design theory or the learning theory to apply to our learning solution. For example, if our learners are feeling very, very anxious and they're nervous, and they're worried about making mistakes, the last thing that we would want to do is make their world worse by creating something that is going to make them more anxious. Something like a conditioning type approach may make them more anxious and make them feel rushed. We would take a different type of learning theory, maybe something constructivist space, for example, that would allow them to take risks and to feel good and feel confidence rather than increase anxiety.

Again, that is the basic theory behind it is marrying, again, user design principles and our instructional design principles, putting the two together to make a learning solution that is going to really enhance the learner's experience. [05:03]

Angeline: Thanks. I really love it's truly holistic, which is really how my beliefs as an instructional designer are. I'm very grounded in this concept that it should be a holistic process. It's so often we hear people talk about content. We say it all the time, people say content is king, but it really should be about the learner at the center. The content, yes, you need to get it to them, but it in order to get it to them in the most effective way, you really should dissect their feelings and create a profile around them.

It's interesting how much you discuss their truly their feelings, their possible anxiety or worries related to a training where oftentimes, I think we see people just look at their demographics, consider maybe [06:00] what technology they use, those top-level traits, and really don't get down to the nitty-gritty of what is this person thinking or feeling or behaving, so thank you for sharing that.

Angela: You're very welcome. That's absolutely true is that when we look at that learner as a whole, especially in 2022, the way that it's progressing is we're wanting really to make it so that it's, again, the best possible experience for them while also, of course, making sure that our client is satisfied.

Angeline: That's going to get-- Ultimately you want to make learners feel empowered and have them be excited about what you're training them on because then that's going to be reinforced memory retention and get them excited to bring it into practice so it makes sense. We should all be doing it, right?

Angela: Yes

Angeline: How did you find yourself, I guess, immersed in this type of research and education around empathy and learning as a learning and development professional? Because I feel like it's a little niche and it's not something that everybody dives into when they're studying this. Tell us your origin story. [07:02]

Angela: I actually have a really good example to share that really sparked my interest. We all have to take those mandatory training, that's a given, and I found myself on a receiving end of a mandatory training that was describing a change. Now, prior to that change, the rumor mill is going, and me included, I'm hearing, as well as my coworkers, we're hearing bits and pieces, so you can imagine. We know a change is coming, we are hearing rumors. Some things are true, not true, not sure. The anxiety is building.

I am taking part of this mandatory online training that e-learning opportunity and I was finding myself getting even more amped up during the training because it was just throwing all these changes at me. I wasn't able to ask questions. I didn't quite understand what it meant for me. [08:00] Why is this happening? What is this really going to mean for me? Then what really, really took it over the edge is that, in order to complete the training remark that I took the training complete, is I had to pass a graded assessment.

It was just a knowledge assessment and it was a way for us to really just regurgitate that we had obtained the information about the changes. It wasn't system-related or anything like that. It was mostly organizational changes. I left that training, I closed out of that training thinking to myself, "Wow, I feel a whole lot worse, first of all, and also, let me reflect and say, well, I create training. I hope I'm not making my learners feel this way."

Angeline: Right?

Angela: Exactly, and what can I do to prevent that? Again you always-

Susan: I was getting anxious just listening to you explain it.

Angeline: I know.

[09:00]

Angela: Yes. It happened to be in my master's classes at the time that this happened. I started doing some research, just say, what are some other ways that we can incorporate? That research just kept snowballing and snowballing. Eventually, I committed myself to say, "I want to do this is my dissertation." I love this topic, I'm so passionate about it, and I'm building this up to say I wasn't able to do my dissertation on this topic.

It was for logistical reasons, not for lack of research or value or anything like that, but I think of it as a blessing because now that I have passed the dissertation process, passed school, passed graduation, and have been through multiple research projects, I can now confidently go in and start to do this type of research at my pace. Not at an academic level pace with professors [10:00] and timestamps and I can actually go and do that. Again, it's a blessing in disguise because now I have that freedom to go do the research the way I want to do it.

Angeline: That is very cool, and that is a good point. Now that we're up to speed on the theory behind everything, let's get tactical. For our listeners that are thinking how can I implement this? It's a great concept, but truly, what steps do we take? Let's consider a scenario. Say a client comes to you and they want to create a training on X, like truly, like on X, Y, Z, what are the first things you do with that client to start creating a training with empathy? Because you had mentioned you still follow the instructional design for process. What additional checkboxes or considerations do you weave in that our listeners could potentially apply tomorrow in the training that they're building?

Angela: Absolutely. That's a great question. The first thing that you have to consider is when working with your clients is that they're going to be a little more cognizant [11:00] of time, value and money. We have to make sure that we head them off, and we talk to them a little bit about the reasons why we are taking this type of approach, and to let them know that it's not going to drag the analysis out for weeks and weeks and weeks, but we do need to obtain this information as part of the analysis process.

As far as what steps would we take, just to reiterate what you said, is we do make sure that we're still doing our regular design duties. We would still do our task-based analysis and our regular learner analysis to find out the context and the situation, the environment. We are going to just add on the user center design principles, which is finding out what is going on with our learners and how can we construct our view to ensure that we are designing for them in mind and making sure that we're meeting those cognitive and emotional needs. [12:00]

As part of our analysis, we need to find out some very simple questions. They go from the for the manager level, the learner level, and of course, the client level. What we would start at with the learner level is how are the learners feeling and how do we want them to feel? Remember, we're not changing their entire world, we are just trying to make their world a little bit better.

If they're already coming in and they're feeling anxious, we know that they're anxious about a change or maybe they're already feeling confident. Then we need to make sure that we're either staying on the right track and making sure that we don't decrease their confidence, or if they're already anxious, how are we not piling on and amping them up and making them even more anxious at the end of that training. We have to make sure that we're understanding that viewpoint.

From the manager viewpoint, we need to understand how are their managers really feeling and how do they feel about their managers? With retention and all of those things [13:00] going on right now because of the pandemic, sometimes there's a disconnection feeling between managers and team members. Sometimes there's a feeling of no trust, especially with a lot of org changes. What can we do to make it feel less of something or more of something, and then finally, looking at the client, how are their clients feeling and how would we want them to feel?

A very easy example, of course, is healthcare. Of course, we want our clients to feel very cared for. We want them to feel like they're empowered and so it really trickles down. If our learners are very anxious and very uptight and they're not feeling cared for, it's going to eventually trickle down into the client level as well. We wouldn't in the healthcare setting, of course, want our clients to feel that way. We wouldn't want our patients to feel that way. We have to really take that into consideration.

When we have all that information, then we make sure that we're, again, constructing our point of view [14:00] from our learner perspective, what their world is, and then we're going to take it and then understand how we can make our world a little bit better. Again, that's really where the learning theories come in as well because we have to make sure that we're looking at the whole package so that we apply that correct learning to make the correct learning intervention. Because we've heard it a million times, training is not always the answer. What if it's just a peer pod-type thing? What if it's a huddle? What if it really is a new learning? We have to make sure that we're constructing the correct type of training intervention using the correct learning theory.

Angeline: When you're establishing, how these learners feel and how their managers feel, organizations come in all shapes and sizes, so what's the best way to go about gathering that data? Like, is it through truly one-on-one surveys with a subset of that population? Or is it through-- I'm sorry, one-on-one interviews I mean, or is it through surveys? If you're doing one-on-one interviews, [15:00] is it better to come from an external source? Do you feel that people are honest during the interviews? Because sometimes it can be uncomfortable when people share feedback. What has your experience been?

Angela: That is definitely a twofold question.

Angeline: Yes. I'm sorry. All my questions are always a little twofold, so I apologize. 

Angela: So are mine, so… There are many ways that you can conduct this type of analysis, and as you intuitively mentioned is that, when you're doing one-on-one interviews, it can feel like there's a trust issue, and so my solution to that is because it could go either way, either you coming in as a designer can be seen as a stranger, or you can be seen as an ally. It depends on the situation and what's going on at the time.

You may need to bring in an external party to conduct some one-on-one interviews, but if you have a group of 1,000 people, one-on-one interviews are not always going to be-- [16:00] That is when it would probably take a couple of weeks to get through that. You can do things like your group sessions, where you're really taking a subset or a set of the population who best represents the population themselves and do some group interviews.

You can host, I've done this before, I posted the sessions when you're really getting in there, and making everybody feel comfortable, and just plotting out your ideas so that everybody feels a little more natural than just having these types of Team or Zoom calls. You can also take a look at survey data. We have some surveys, we have annual employee surveys and data that we put out every single year. We would need to take a look at that because you can usually get a general picture of, how are people really feeling?

You can also ask for client data. Again, in the case of healthcare, for example, that type of data may be a little easier to obtain because we have certain surveys [17:00] and patient satisfaction surveys that we're sending out, so we can really get at a good look. Now, if it's an internal client that we would have to go to the internal client to take a look at how they're really interacting and how they really are feeling about a particular group.

There's multiple ways that you can do that, but again, the key with really, really large groups of populations, really large groups of learners, is you need to make sure that you are finding correct representatives or representatives that would represent the population as a whole.

Angeline: As you've done this, you had mentioned, it shouldn't take extra time. As you've been striving to implement this within your organization and throughout your work, what resistance have you received and how did you overcome that?

Angela: I'm very lucky, telling you the truth is that I have not encountered any resistance, but I do think that--

Angeline: That's awesome.

Angela: It is. Our group is really very, I feel very empowered to do what I need to do within my organization. [18:00] I have some really wonderful management directors that they love learning as much as I do, and so they always back me. The other key to that is that upfront, I am making sure that I let the client know that I'm partnering with them, that it's about the value time, money situation, and make sure that they're very aware of those things and then also letting them know, again, that value that this is going to bring.

We really talk through some of the issues that they might be noticing and saying, "Okay, well, if they're feeling disconnected, then I want to let you know that this training is not going to make them feel even more disconnected." To them, that's value. It's not setting off alarm bells. I would say for anyone who is listening and wants to implement this and thinking, "Oh, well, my clients would never let me do that." Just think of it the angle of time, money value, and how you can make sure [19:00] that you can proposition it as a value to the organization, especially when you're playing on retention. We're not being manipulative, we're being honest. If people are wanting to leave or they're feeling anxious and we're worried about them leaving, let's see what we can do to make them feel less disconnected and less anxious and less inclined to leave.

Susan: Certainly, that ROI has to be very compelling.

Angela: It does.

Angeline: Yes, and I know before we brought you on the podcast, we had asked you to just, because you have tons of examples I'm sure to pull from, to just think about one that would really resonate as we talk today about how you applied empathy to your instructional design approach and what difference you felt you made to the learner. Would you be able to share that before we wrap up today?

Angela: Absolutely. I have an example that I'm very excited to share because it exemplifies how important it is to make sure you put the learner at the center and that you really are choosing the correct learning theory. [20:00] A few years ago, I was approached to create a training that would ensure that a population of learners would meet a certain metric, and so easy enough, right? We just create that training and our learners are going to take it and they're going to magically make that number soar. They're going to meet that metric.

Sounds great, but then, as I did a little more deep dive into the situation, what I learned is a couple of really interesting points is, first of all, the learners knew what the metric was. They knew the process on how to make sure that they met the metric, so what exactly would a training do for them? Not much. Instead, what I took a look at is how are they really feeling, what's really going on here? Now, at this point, some designers would just walk away, and they would say, "Well, it's a performance issue, walk away." I wasn't able to walk away. I said, "Okay, let's find a solution to this." [21:01]

What I found is that the learners were feeling demotivated. They were feeling like, "This is just all that mattered was this metric?" They just felt very amped up, very anxious, unconfident. You can imagine all the feelings that were going with this. They wanted to meet it but they felt so demotivated. "We can't do this. Again, we know the process, we know what we're supposed to do," but they're just shrinking back so much. I said, "Okay." What I did is I made a yearlong program that had really nothing to do with training, which is shocking.

Angeline: Wow. 

Angela: [unintelligible 00:21:39] had learning principles in it. What I did instead is I had, again, a year-long campaign, and it was themed. I ended up making large posters, which is, this is really crossing away from the design world, but again, I do what I have to do. I created posters and postcards that were all themed and would create [22:00] tips and tricks and have some huddle information that managers could pass on, some coaching tips because that's what they needed. They needed to be built up.

What was the foundation of that was social learning. They started to learn from each other but the coaches were their managers as coaches would not only model behavior, but also they were able to listen to exemplary phone calls so they could start to model that behavior. Again, we're not going to rehash all the steps, instead, we're going to try to get them to where they need to be.

I also implemented as part of social learning, implemented badges, and inputs that they could see the badges and they could say, "Look what everything I have," and of course giveaways. That's an example of something that we thought was a learning and that completely went in another direction, [23:00] and a completely different type of educational experience, but it really went well because of the theory that was selected.

Angeline: That is very cool and a great example. It sounds like it really brought a lot of positive energy to the topic as well, which is awesome. Before we close, can you share what's next at Highmark Health for you?

Angela: Absolutely. I am in the leadership space now, which is a very exciting space to be in. We can really empower our leaders to ensure that our team members are happy and to help with retention and make sure everybody feels valued. One of the projects that I'm working on now is really impacting our leadership as a whole. I am ensuring that as part of the design work that I'm putting forth all of the empathetic output, that impact we could say, that will be a [24:00] result of this particular project. It's really exciting to see the connection and show the connection to some of the upper management of when our leaders are feeling this way, this is how our team members are going to feel.

I'm really excited about that again because I think it's just going to make a huge difference in one particular part of the organization. I hope too, that it branches out and can also become a value in the rest of the leadership space.

Angeline: Absolutely. I think it's going to be really meaningful.

Susan: Thanks so much for joining us today, Angela. Really nice to listen to your talk. You're so passionate and I think your insights are inspirational but they're also really actionable. I think a lot of people will have some great takeaways listening to you today. Thank you.

Angela: Thank you.

Angeline: Thank you so much.

Angela: Thank you very, very much for having me. I really do appreciate it.

[24:58]

Susan: Angela definitely had some great practical approaches to using empathetic principles and learning to get better results. What are some of your key takeaways, Angeline?

Angeline: Yes. Oh, my gosh, I loved hearing from her today. I think my biggest takeaway is that it's just critical that we dig deeper when we're creating learner profiles and really just go beyond the characteristics that are just surface level and actually think how they feel, and then having that willingness to pivot our training approach so we're aligning with their cognitive and emotional states.

Susan: How do you use this kind of thinking at d'Vinci, Angeline?

Angeline: As she was talking, I was giggling to myself. The empathetic principles really feel complimentary to learning experience design principles. At d'Vinci, we've been providing more and more learning experience design services over just our content development services and learning experience design really recognizes the importance of designing a solution that's human-centered, so we're always striving to create a positive learning experience like Angela discussed with us today. To get there, that means hearing from your learners firsthand and getting their input so you're really [26:00] developing that holistic profile. I feel like they go hand-in-hand and it's really, I wouldn't say one and the same, but they're part--

Susan: Complimentary. Yes.

Angeline: Yes.

Susan: Thanks, Angeline. Many thanks to Angela Sample of Highmark Health for joining us today. If you have any questions about what we talked about, you can reach out to us on d'Vinci's social channels, through our website, d'Vinci.com, or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@d'Vinci.com.

[music]

Voiceover: Powered by learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We can collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at d'Vinci.com.

[26:52] 

Engaging adult learners can start with lessons learned years ago in the classroom. In this episode, teacher-turned L&D professional Maggie Layfield shares how to use K-12 teaching strategies to engage adult learners, create meaningful assessments, and increase retention.  

 

SHOW NOTES: 

Maggie Layfield of NetSupport shared her passion for using K12 learning approaches with adult learners. Her key takeaways include:

• All students will be in the workforce someday soon. It makes sense we should adopt successful K-12 classroom strategies in the corporate environment.
• Think back to the best teachers you ever had and some words for them such as caring, patience, passion. These traits connect back to engagement in the classroom and can translate into educating adults. 
• You can increase employee engagement and performance through modern instructional best practices built on foundations of K-12 learning. 
• Set the right expectations with learners so they understand what they are learning and why they are learning it. 

Read more:  Using K-12 Teaching Strategies to Boost Employee Engagement, featured on TrainingIndustry.com. 

Powered by Learning earned an Award of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio category from The Communicator Awards and a Silver Davey Award for Educational Podcast. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts and Training Industry’s Ultimate L&D Podcast Guide. 

 

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Transcript:

Susan Cort: [00:00] This is Powered by Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

Speaker 1: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan: Hello, and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host Susan Cort. Today I'm joined by d'Vinci president Mason Scuderi, and our guest Maggie Layfield, who is a VP of sales for NetSupport. Net Support is a leading producer of educational and corporate software solutions. Hello, Maggie.

Mason Scuderi: Thanks for joining us, Maggie.

Maggie Layfield: Thanks for having me. [01:00] I'm very excited to be here.

Susan: Maggie, let's start out by telling us a little bit about your role at NetSupport and also your career journey in the L&D Industry.

Maggie: Sure. I started at NetSupport in a sales role several years ago. Before taking what I like to call a little hiatus to work for an educational publishing company, I was asked to return to NetSupport a little over a year ago as the VP of sales and I am certainly very glad that I did. I spend most of my time training and supporting my sales team's efforts, developing content, and also onboarding new staff.

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how I ended up here. My career really began in the education field as a high school teacher, and I always imagined that's where I'd end up or where I'd die is just being a teacher in the classroom. Me, 10 years ago would not have believed where me 10 years forward was going to be. I really love what I do now because I get to use my experience from the classroom and from that traditional K-12 education sphere to support adult learners [02:00] in the corporate world. Of course, I work for a great company that focuses on ed tech and I incorporate training tools, so it really combines a lot of my experience into one unique thing.

Mason: Well, thanks for sharing more about your background, Maggie. It sounds like quite an amazing journey you've had. To start us off, as we've all navigated workplace implications of an ongoing pandemic, what are some parallels that we can draw between the impacts on K-12 education and the corporate adult learning space?

Maggie: Well, I think one thing to remember is that when the pandemic hit, the single largest industry that was impacted was the education industry. You're talking about over 50 million students, over 130 million employees who were all impacted by this and their day-to-day was instruction, training, all of these different aspects that they were used to in a face-to-face environment. Now they had to completely turn things over on their head and find new ways to be able to adapt to that.

Many of us in the corporate adult learning worlds, [03:00] although we do training and we do content development, we didn't do it at such a grand level as what our K-12 educators do. We saw similar impacts but they saw it on such a grander scale. I think it's important that we can look at what they did and how they transformed their learning experiences and do the same thing for the adult learning environments as well.

Mason: Easy to lose sight of the scale of all the education that's happening in local schools around us. That's great. Why do you think that the adult corporate L&D space should be open to learning from K-12 education?

Maggie: Oh gosh, for many reasons. I could go on about this for a long time, but I think all of us have a favorite teacher. You can all think back to that person who impacted us and it really comes down to their engagement with us. If they were passionate about the topic, it made us passionate. If they cared about us as a person, it made us care about what we were learning about. Knowing how impactful those educators can be, [04:00] makes sense for us to really pull from their bucket of skills and different methodologies and things they've learned and apply those to the corporate learning world.

Also for basically everyone entering the workforce, almost everyone grew up in a K-12 environment. They went through high school, middle school, elementary school, and they were trained as students on how to learn from teachers and how they taught. When you transition to a corporate world to go from all these great educational strategies to just sit in this room and learn something, it's not very effective. It makes more sense that we should adopt the really successful K-12 teaching strategies in the adult learning environment to help transition our former students, now employees and help them to connect with the content and actually get more out of the training experience and professional development we're trying to provide.

Mason: That's a great idea. I can remember the most engaging teacher I had in high school and I think I could get behind the idea of him leading a corporate [05:00] L&D training initiative.

Maggie: It’d be much more entertaining, and I think much more enthusiasm than you get from some other people who are leading those trainings. If you want to bring them in, I'm all behind that as well too.

Susan: All of our listeners, me included, are now thinking about the teachers we had in elementary school, junior high, and high school, and imagining them teaching us as adults; it would make for a good class.

Mason: Agreed. What do you think we have to learn from K-12 education that can improve our adult learning outcomes?

Maggie: There are a lot of best practices in K-12 education that you could really implement in an adult learning environment. One of my favorite ones, which seems very simple, has to do with objectives and outcomes. One of the big mandated things for K-12 teachers is, they have to make it very clear to students exactly what they're learning, why they're learning it, when they're going to be assessed on it. It seems silly, but by knowing that, it helps the students to then invest in the actual process, if they know what they're going to be learning and why they're going to be [06:00] learning it, and why it's going to be relevant or important, they're much more likely to buy into it. No student ever remembered anything from school just because a teacher said, "This is going to be on a test."

That's not very encouraging or motivating for a student. If a teacher can say, "Hey, we're going to be learning this, and as a result you're going to be able to do that and it's going to impact you because later on in the future it might come up in X, Y, and Z environment." Now I'm much more invested. As an adult learner, the same thing is true. Learning it just because it's part of my job, doesn't really motivate me, but if I realize that this training is going to help me be better at my job, which is going to result in maybe better sales or higher commissions or a better achievement of my objectives, then I'm suddenly going to more invest in the actual process. It's really important that anyone involved in training and learning try and outline those objectives and outcomes early, remind them often and be very clear about them so people know what to expect and what they should be getting out of the training so they can evaluate their progress with it. [07:00]

One of the other things, a next level that we don't see a lot, I don't think in the adult learning sphere, but I wish we did, is the collaborative learning. We see this so often in K-12 classrooms where teachers are incorporating different activities where the students are able to engage with one another and learn from one another, rather than just depending on the teacher, force-feeding them knowledge. In a lot of training environments for adults, that's exactly what it is. You sit down, someone lectures, walks through a PowerPoint, you take notes, training is over. We can learn so much from our peers and we can actually engage colleagues and get people more invested in the workplace if they have the opportunity to share what they know and actually be able to collaborate together.

Some really great examples of collaborative learning from the K-12 sphere are things like the jigsaw method, where essentially students are part of one group and that's their home group. They go to an expert group where everyone in that group learns about a specific topic, then they bring it back [08:00] to that home group and then they teach them. That way everyone's a piece of the puzzle. Everyone has an invested part in it, but they're all responsible for their own learning in certain ways. That's something that could work really well in a corporate environment when you're trying to do training on different topics, or if you're doing internal training, even on just things like product knowledge and being able to make individual experts on different aspects of products is very helpful for them owning and feeling more comfortable with the knowledge and then being able to use it to benefit themselves and the company and their role basically overall.

Susan: Maggie, do you see that jigsaw method and that whole collaboration working well virtually as well as in-person? Obviously, people are learning in all different kinds of environments. Do you see it working well in both ways?

Maggie: It does, thankfully, because there's some great tools that are out there. For being able to do this, we see things with Zoom and Teams where you can have breakout groups where you're able to facilitate that similar type of environment of grouping people together. Just not physically, they're just doing it obviously over chat [09:00] or over video versus having to do it together. At a bare minimum, you could even do it via email where the group works together, shares the Google doc, adds our knowledge to it, does a Google chat and comments on things, and then they bring that back together to that initial group and then transfer that knowledge to everybody.

You have to be creative when it comes to the virtual training, but it certainly is something you can facilitate and you actually then increase the engagement because people are working more with their colleagues; they're connecting with people they might not otherwise connect with. It helps to build those relationships, which we really lack in this more remote working environment that we've been in. They're desperate for those connections for knowing their colleagues or feeling that they're part of a team. This gives them the chance to do that.

Mason: Well, those are two great foundational ideas, Maggie, providing clear objectives and collaborative learning. I feel like those can reach the kid and the kid in all of us, right?

Maggie: I agree.

Mason: I know we talk a lot about the importance of continuous learning and providing opportunities to support learners [10:00] after the primary training is complete. What are your thoughts, and what are some insights from K-12 education that can support continuous learning?

Maggie: One of the big elements of K-12 is the idea of scaffolding. You take knowledge that you've learned, you build upon it, it grows over time. If you don't go back to those things you've previously learned and bring them up again, you're likely to forget them, and then when you need them for something bigger, you don't have that there. So you're missing that step and it makes it harder for you to move forward.

There are a lot of great tools that are available now that had been transformed to adult learning environments that help with that scaffolding. One of my favorite things is LMS platforms, which is a learning management system, something very common to K-12, where teachers are able to put their content, their lessons, other information into the LMS, and students can go back to it and go through it at their own pace. Now you have tools like that for adult learners and adult training environments. We see those being implemented, where then learners can go back through, and you could take [11:00] what was a training, transform it into an LMS learning objective, or a lesson. Then they are able to go back to it and go through it at their own pace, their own time, and relearn that information or reference it if they didn't quite grasp everything at the time.

Another great thing is, we get all the time, graphic organizers or even something as silly as informational scavenger hunts. We did those all the time as kids growing up, and it was a fun way to put the information together. How often do you see a training and development leader pass out a really nice graphic organizer? Usually, it's you bring your own note, but you take your own notes, and that's basically it. By providing those tools, you give that outline, you show how things are supposed to be organized. Again, is just another way to engage the learners and something they can reference later.

One of my favorite things that we do here is a scavenger hunt. We do it by products because I trained the sales team, and their job during the training process is to complete the scavenger hunt by going to different websites, internal [12:00] resources, documents, to find the information. At the time, it teaches them more about where those documents are located, and also what they can find in each document, but then they have this house sheet of information with key-selling points, features, benefits that they can refer back to when they're talking about the product as they're still developing their knowledge and their skills when they're getting started working with customers.

By far, it's one of my favorite things, because I get told all the time, people are still referencing the scavenger hunt sheet when they're having a conversation with a customer, because it has all the key little things on there that they're going to need to do their job successfully.

Susan: Oh, no, it's definitely something memorable for sure.

Maggie: It's certainly not your average training technique, but it goes over pretty well.

Mason: Reinforcing what you've learned across multiple touch points is so valuable to retention.

Maggie: 100%. I think we forget about that, we assume that adult learners are going to sit in on the training process, here with disseminate the information, "Okay, you're good." You can't do that [13:00] because there's so much for people to learn these days that you have to have opportunities to go back to it, to touch on it, to reiterate that knowledge, or else, it's just going to go in one ear and out the other and you've wasted both of your time being part of that training if there's not going to be continued learning afterwards to reinforce what you've been trying to get across to them.

Mason: There's no doubt we're all more interested than ever and measuring learning outcomes and the data that comes from that. What are some insights from K-12 education in this regard?

Maggie: Well, as you probably remember from being in school, K-12 educators are real big experts in assessing learning outcomes, because that's what their entire job depends on, is students successfully being able to obviously retain and transfer that knowledge and carry on. Too often, we tend to, as adult learners and adult trainers, we depend on formalized assessment and evaluation. You've got your annual reviews, you have performance evaluations, you have this very strict layout of measuring how someone is [14:00] doing, but if we wait until those things happen, we are missing out on really key opportunities to track our employees' progress along the way to help them and fill in those gaps before something becomes a problem, and obviously intervene and improve their performance and knowledge. As we do that, it improves the company as a whole. It helps us reach our mission or hit our goals or whatever our targets might be.

One of the key strategies in K-12 education is informal assessment. This just basically means opportunities to gauge learning without it being threatening to the learners. You put a quiz in front of them, that's a little threatening. They feel like "Oh, if I do awful on this, I'm going to be judged, or I'm not going to get a raise next year." It starts to put a lot of stress on them. Something as simple as things like exit slips, it's predefined questions that you've written out as part of the training process, just to ask for their opinion, but you can also then glean knowledge about what they learned and what they didn't learn.

[15:00]

We like things like the 3-2-1 exit slips. You do things like, what are three things you learned today that you didn't know before? What are two things you think we should have gone in more depth on? What is one question you still have? It's very simple, but by doing that, you see, there are three key takeaways. You can start seeing trends between learners as to what they picked up on and what they didn't. If you ask them about two things you wish you'd done more on, now you know what you might need to do follow-up training on or more enhanced training.

The one question they still had is a very non-threatening way to find out, "Did I do a good enough job, or are there other things I should have covered, or should I have gone in more depth on something?" Again, they don't feel threatened, because they don't feel like this is somehow going to be an assessment of them, they're technically assessing you as a trainer. It's a lot easier to assess someone else than it is to have to deal with an assessment yourself.

Other things we can do are things like what we call demonstration stations. In an ideal world where we're all physically together, you would have little almost centers, that's what [16:00] they call them in my kids' preschool, centers where they get to do activities, and the teacher can monitor them, but from afar, so that there's no pressure of someone being watched.

From a corporate training perspective, if you have these opportunities for people to work on the skills that they've learned, again, without being assessed, or graded, or feeling like they're being evaluated, then you can observe quietly, monitor what's happening, and then obviously intervene or provide correction in a much gentler way to be able to help with that learning process.

In like a virtual environment, like a lot of us are in now, there are actually some really great classroom management tools that are out there. We happen to provide one of them, but there are lots of them that are out there, where it's an instructional tool that allows the teacher to see what's happening on the learners' screens, and can follow along with them. We have a lot of corporate customers who use that for their training; they actually will conduct external or even internal trainings.

As they're going through that, rather than just like with Zoom, [17:00] where you can see someone's faces, if they happen to share their camera with you, which is about 50/50 - shall I be honest here? - then you're actually seeing what they're doing, and you're silently watching and you can provide that feedback as if they were right there in front of you learning that skill, but it's done in a much more informal and less aggressive way. There's a lot of really awesome tools that teachers use that we can actually be integrating into our training with adult learners as well.

Mason: No doubt that assessments are a delicate subject for students and adult learners, but there's no denying the value of learning data within your organization to drive insights.

Maggie: Absolutely. We can't stave off a better kind of avoid it just because we're afraid of how people might respond to it. I think we do it more informally more often, then it becomes more natural, and people are less afraid of it, especially if we don't call it assessments. That's why things like exit slips, skills checklists are much less terrifying for an adult learner than quiz, [18:00] test, brutal evaluation, no one likes to hear any of those words first thing in the morning, and then they go, "Oh, this is a bad day."

Mason: Oh, great stuff. Before you leave us, Maggie, talk a little bit about what's next for you and your personal journey, and as an ed tech sales leader?

Maggie: Gosh. As I mentioned before, I never expected to really be where I am today. I'm very pleasantly surprised by where I am and happy that I ended up here. I think a lot of us say, you grow up with a very limited view of what is out there for you because you only have what was in front of you. For me, I was passionate about education. I'm passionate about training and seeing people, the aha moments when they discover and they understand something they didn't understand before. That always looked like to me K-12, or college, that learning environment.

Now that I'm in the corporate sphere, and I can see those same things happening, but with my employees and with my colleagues [19:00]  and being able to do that, it really just increases the passion in me in taking what I learned from my experience as an educator and bringing it to the L&D world for adult learners. I'm really excited to hopefully over the next couple of years, develop my skills, be able to do more for my team, but then possibly also help influence others with their L&D journeys and provide training and opportunities for them to understand that things don't have to be in the little box that we've always done them in and we can do things in a new and unique way that's going to challenge and engage people and make the learning and training experience much more fun.

We always forget about fun as adults, and fun is really important. Why are we not having fun as adults? Jobs should be fun, careers should be fun. I really want to focus on trying to do that, bringing those engaging elements into what normally is a more formalized experience and making it something people actually enjoy and can get more out of.

Susan: We certainly had fun talking [20:00] talking with you, Maggie. Thank you so much.

Mason: Yes, it all sounds great. Very inspired.

Maggie: Thanks guys. I appreciate the chance to talk about it. It's not too often I get to nerd out on my education background and all the wonderful things that you can do as a teacher. Any opportunity to chat is good.

Susan: It was great. Thank you for sharing your passion and those lessons learned from K-12 education, so important that we all think about that as we look to educate adults. Thank you, Maggie for joining us today. Mason, that was a really fun and inspirational chat with Maggie. What are your key takeaways?

Mason: Yes, that was an exciting interview, Susan. It's a refreshing thought to consider insights from K-12 education. Maggie took us back to basics with the K-12 instructional best practices of providing clear objectives and outcomes upfront, and looking for opportunities to provide collaborative learning in the workspace. I also liked how Maggie provided suggestions for making assessments less threatening and more engaging to users, [21:00]  taking some of the pressure off by providing informal assessments, such as knowledge checks and pretests. All in, it was a great reminder that successful adult learning technology should in some way be capable of reaching the kid and all of us. I think that's a great strategy to engage and educate any target audience.

Susan: That's great, Mason. Anything new at d'Vinci that you'd like to share?

Mason: Well, Susan, since we're talking about K-12, one of d'Vinci's K-12 focus clients is SAE International. We recently launched an award winning project for their World In Motion program, called Navigating the Digital Universe. Navigating the Digital Universe is an online digital curriculum to teach elementary school children about their rights and responsibilities of being a digital citizen. The program has a blend of hands-on and digital activities. Students learn how to engage with technology in the digital world in a positive and responsible way. There's even a trusted robot sidekick named Maze, who helps kids explore five planets to learn the importance of digital safety, [22:00] communication, literacy, and ethics.

Susan: I think as we learn today, we might learn something from Navigating the Digital Universe, that will help us as we educate adult learners too.

Mason: I like the blend.

Susan: Me too. Thanks, Mason. Many thanks to Maggie Layfield for joining us today. If you have any questions about what we talked about, you can reach out to us on d'Vinci social channels through our web site, dvinci.com, or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

Speaker 1: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

[22:55]

It’s not often that we talk to someone who invented a fresh approach to instructional design. In this Powered by Learning episode, Catherine Mattiske, managing director at Inner Genius, shares how her ID9 intelligent design approach delivers results. 

 

Show Notes:

In her interview, author, speaker and L&D professional Catherine Mattiske shares practical takeaways and inspirational ideas to shape your next learning solution. 

• If people don't apply their learning if they don't take action, if their learning transfer doesn't happen, then learning has not taken place.
   
• When you get the instructional design right and focus on the learner, you will see learning outcomes that improve performance. 
   
• Start with observable learning objectives based on Bloom's taxonomy and when you get those objectives right, make a plan to measure them.
   
• Remember that it’s not your course, it’s the learners’ course. Don’t rely on your personal preferences and always keep the learner top of mind. 

Learn about ID9® Intelligent Design 

Follow Catherine Mattiske:

• LinkedIn 
• Facebook 
• Instagram 
• Twitter 

Learn more about Inner Genius

Read: Unlock Inner Genius: Power Your Path to Extraordinary Success 

Read: ecoLearn® LMS Chosen for PA Department of Drug & Alcohol Programs

Powered by Learning earned an Award of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio category from The Communicator Awards and a Silver Davey Award for Educational Podcast. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts and Training Industry’s Ultimate L&D Podcast Guide. 

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VIEW TRANSCRIPT

Female Announcer: [00:00] This is Powered by Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

Male Announcer: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education, and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan Cort: Hello, and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host Susan Cort. Today, I'm joined by d'Vinci's CEO, Luke Kempski, and our guest Catherine Mattiske. Referred to as the maestro of changing behavior, Catherine is a globally recognized training expert, and the inventor of the acclaimed instructional design process, ID9 Intelligent Design, [01:00] an innovative research-based system, which has dynamically powered results for more than 5 million participants and global brands. She's also the author of the new book, Unlock Inner Genius: Power Your Path to Extraordinary Success. She joins us today from her office in Melbourne, Australia. Welcome, Catherine.

Luke Kempski: Glad you could join us, Catherine.

Catherine Mattiske: Thanks so much for having me.

Susan: Catherine, start out by telling us a little bit about you and your career in the L&D industry.

Catherine: I grew up in Australia. I'm still in Australia. Yet, most of my work is in the US and in Europe. I started in learning and development completely by accident in the days when computers were coming into the everyday realm of companies. I became a computer trainer in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, even before it was put into Microsoft Office. Even in those early days, I started to notice that [02:00] some people were really productive and efficient and excited about this new technology and other people were scared to death. They were just absolutely fearful to the core when they came into my classroom to learn whatever it was.

Actually, I started to think about, "Well, why are some people really successful and others just have this block?" I still see that exact paradigm today. All those years ago, nearly 30 years ago, it set me on the path to say, "What could I do in a learning capacity, in a training capacity, to unlock that productivity in people and to get some of that genius piece that these other people had and say, 'How do I bottle that and get that into those fearful people?' '' That's really been the driver of my entire career.

Luke: Oh, great. [03:00] Thanks for sharing a little more about your background, Catherine. I know with your books and your research, there's so much that we could cover today and that it would all be relevant to our listeners. I'm hoping to just provide a high-level view of your perspective. Then, the learning and development leaders that listen to the podcast can dive in further looking at your books and your research. To start us off, can you talk a little bit about what makes up a successful learning experience from your perspective? How should that really impact someone responsible for creating one?

Catherine: I think the first piece around it is there's three words that you use: successful, learning, and experience. When you put those three words together, it's a little bit like 1+1+1=4 because you can be successful as a learning and development professional. You can actually deliver learning, but to put the experience with it then makes the assumption that something will happen as a result of it.

[04:00] For me, what I believe is that if something doesn't happen, in other words, if people don't apply their learning if they don't take action if the learning transfer doesn't happen, then learning has not taken place. In effect, if people go to a training course, and it could be a course on compliance or a system or a process or some professional development, and nothing happens as a result, then that money, effort, time has been wasted. Therefore, we should put our big pants on and say, "Well, we failed." Often, we don't; we just check the box, the LMS updates to say, "These people have done the training too bad, so sad, they didn't get anything out of it, on we go."

We even have training and development metrics called scrap training. That's ridiculous. Why do we actually measure training that didn't work? That's not okay. [05:00] A lot of people are not ready for me in organizations because I come in and go, "Oh, let's lift the lid off this.” “Oh, hang on." I'm a bit of a truth-teller, and that sometimes hurts. Then, we get over that, and we go, "Okay, so let's look at what's working. Why did that work? Why did this not work?" That successful learning experience is like a magic potion to say, "How do we create them, not sometimes, but all the time?" That's where the magic happens.

Luke: That's really helpful and a good way to look at it. If you can drill down another level thinking about, again, those of us who create learning experiences or who are responsible for overseeing the creation of learning experiences, what's most important in terms of how we should approach the creation of those learning experiences? What can sometimes get us distracted where we end up creating something [06:00] that maybe is not as valuable as it should be?

Catherine: I think that the focus of the entire learning sequence, from strategic performance, consulting into instructional design, into the facilitation of the learning intervention or the delivery of it, and then back out the other side with more strategic performance consulting to say, "What actually happened, and did it work?" That whole loop, I think there's only one part that really truly matters, and that is the instructional design. That is often the part that is rushed, under budget, underfunded, undervalued, under, under, under everything add any word you want on the end of it.

What happens is the gap is established by the strategic performance consultant or that role even if it's one person, then, there seems to be this rush or haphazard design take place. People are still using ADDIE. That's ridiculous. That's 1960s. We're not using anything else from the 1960s. [07:00]  My phone is not from the 1960s. My computer's not from the 1960s, and yet we're using ADDIE. That's just ridiculous. When we think about that, let's just toss that out. Then, the instructional design process happens, and often, it's just a PowerPoint slide deck that someone's put together with maybe a bit of a knowledge check at the end, well, that's not learning design.

Then, it goes into the facilitation either/or the delivery of it by if it's eLearning or whatever it is. Then comes the problems because then it didn't work. Then we go, "Oh, why didn't it work? Well, we did the analysis. We've got the needs analysis here. The gap's been established. Oh, it must be the facilitator. Oh, it must be the graphics we used on the eLearning." No, the problem, the root cause of the problem, I see as 99% of the time, it's actually the instructional design. That's where I put [08:00] my effort to say, "If we do this right, the life of a trainer or a facilitator is easy. The life of the learner is talking about successful learning experience."

You were talking about Luke before that becomes easy. Everything becomes smooth waters. The most important thing in my mind is the instructional design to say, "What do we have to craft here to engage every adult learner regardless of their learning preference and take all personal preference out to say things like, "Oh, I don't like blue. I like purple. I like pink. I like green." It doesn't matter. Come back to a balanced approach that is highly engaging and motivational and gets participants saying things like, "Oh, my goodness, I wish I'd known this five years ago. Oh, my goodness, that was amazing. Is there another module? [09:00] Can we have a follow-up?"

All of that is participant language for that was a successful learning experience. It all comes down to the instructional design because that's where the magic happens. Then, for me, when I'm training in the old world, pre-COVID that I call the old world, I used to do that face-to-face. A long time ago, I used to do a lot of face-to-face, but everything's virtual now and has been for many years, but I just have a nice time. When I show up to training, I have a great time. It's relaxing. I'm with my participants. I'm fully on. I'm fully engaged. That's easy. That's a lovely day out, for me.

The hard part is the execution of that brilliant design and people go, "Oh, Catherine, we had such a great growth." "No, you didn't. I made that happen." "That training was amazing. I've got it instantly." "No, you didn't, [10:00] I made that happen. I've put that into practice. I've shared that with my team. That's great because I made that happen. I made that happen not as a trainer; I made that happen as an instructional designer. That's where the craft is."

Luke: I'm sure you just inspired every instructional designer in our audience to aspire to that for sure.

Catherine: Well, double their salary, I say.

Catherine: If they're using ADDIE half their salary immediately.

Luke: Yes, no doubt. I know you referred to it as magical and, of course, it's not magical. That's probably a really good transition to your model, that ID9 Intelligent Design approach. Can you tell us more about what makes that approach different, and why it's more effective than, as you put it, ADDIE?

Catherine: Well, ADDIE did its job. I think people say about ADDIE that it's the system that they use. "No, it's not; it's an acronym of five words." "It's a process." [11:00] "No, it's not; it's an acronym of five words." "It's a toolkit." "No, it's not; it's an acronym of five words." That annoyed the heck out of me because I went looking as a trainer when I started teaching people how to train, and people said, "Catherine, how do you do this?" I said, "I don't know. I just do it." Then I had to work out how I did it. I went looking and researching, and I thought, "Hang on; there's no system for people. There's no process. There's no tools. Everyone's making up themselves." I said, "Well, I can do this. How is it that I do it?"

I then started to put down and write the system and the process and the tools that I used. Then I thought, "Oh, I wonder if that works for other people." "Yes, it does." Now, of course, fast forward, 20 years, ID9 is the professional certification that thousands of instructional designers, trainers, strategic performance consultants have done around the world. They now have gone on to train probably [12:00] five million or more people, so it works. The first rule of the process is some basic foundation blocks. The first rule is, "It's not your course; it's their course." Let's come back and take that apart and say, "What would that look like if it wasn't your course if it was their course now?"

Now we actually say, "Well, what do about adult learning?" "Oh, I know a lot about adult learning." "Great. Are you using it?" "No." Let's put all that into play. All of that theoretical stuff around adult learning, I've done that for people. I've been from end-to-end of it and said, "Okay, let's now take the best of the best of that." Now not only say, "Yes, we know it, but we're going to put that and activate that into every learning intervention." From there, we now have some foundations. Then from there, it's really process, pre-course, during-course, post-course. [13:00] What are the elements to go in? Then I've created a structure of different tiers of ID9.

Silver, gold, platinum, and to say, "Okay, what is the quality level that is required for this particular learning intervention?" It might be silver or it might be gold or it might be platinum. That's to do with a lot of decisions around shelf life, number of people, exposure, budget, all of that. Some people say, "Oh, I want this to be platinum." I go, "Oh, no you don't. You only run it once. It's for a small group of people, not worth the effort, not worth the budget. When you want to do some big bang amazing thing that's going to rock the world of your organization, let's talk platinum. If you are doing the mainstay everyday stuff, you're going to go out with silver or gold and probably silver."

Silver, they think, "Oh no, it's not good enough. It's not good enough." "It's way better than what you're doing right now." [14:00] That's the way I approached it from a very practical lens where a lot of people today in L&D are not L&D professionals. They're something else's. They come into the L&D function, and they come in with that beautiful state of unconscious incompetence, they don't know what they don't know and it's beautiful.

Then they get shattered as they move into conscious incompetence and go, "What am I doing in this role?" They look for a process, and that's what I've designed. My philosophy now is, "If I can help people be more productive and better and get a better outcome, then that's what I'm about."

Luke: That's excellent. I know just through this podcast, you certainly can't instruct us on the process and on all aspects of ID9. When you think about traditional instructional design and focusing at the beginning on learning objectives and how are we going to measure those objectives, "Did the learner actually master what we laid out for them to learn [15:00]  and the comes we were looking for?" How does that play out in your model in terms of thinking about what are we setting up upfront and what are we going to measure at the end?

Catherine: That is the North Star. I think that is the single most skipped step of learning, and I am militant about it. I am the biggest fan of Bloom's taxonomy, his original one. No deviation, that's where I sit. If I could meet Benjamin Bloom, he's passed away many years ago now, I would be very happy. When people say, "Who do you want to have dinner with?" Well, mine is Benjamin Bloom.

Catherine: How boring is that? People say, "Rock stars, politicians, royalty." I go, "Benjamin Bloom." How boring am I? For me, if you set down the measurement in the beginning, you've got something to measure at the end. Learning objectives, in the beginning, are [16:00] one thing, Measurements and metrics is a whole different conversation for a different day. If we just start with learning objectives with my mate, Benjamin Bloom, very Australian mate. He's not my mate, by the way, I don't even know him. He said that most brilliant taxonomy and provided, not only the what, but the how in the how of use these action verbs to start your learning objectives.

There is a tool, and if you don't have it, send me a LinkedIn message and I'll send it to you. There is a tool to give you that as the beginning of the process. Yet, when we look at lists of learning objectives, we see words like understand, appreciate, and all of those things that I can't measure. I say to people, "Okay, right, understand. Let's get rid of the word, understand out of learning completely. From beginning to end, let's just not even use it." Then they say, "I want people to understand." I say, [17:00] "Well, how do I see that? How do I see that in action?" If people understand, what is the observable behavior that I see people when they have understand?

"Oh, well, they'd be able to use this. They'd be able to list that. They'd be able to define this. They'd be able to discuss that." "Great. Now we're on the track. Now we're cooking. Now we're on Bloom's. Just do that." Some basic things around any person listening to this podcast can dig up a course outline that they've done, open it up on their screen in the next 30 minutes, look at the list of learning objectives. If it's understand … you're contacting me on LinkedIn, and you're going to [unintelligible 17:40]. If you're using words like appreciate, you are having a coffee with me.

If there's three or four, you are saying to me, "Catherine, can we meet for a coffee because I need to talk?" I'll show up on LinkedIn, and I'll have a look at it, and I'll guide you through, and I won't charge you because that's how passionate I am about it. If you don't get [18:00] that from the beginning, and at the beginning of every topic, as you are training it or as it's going out in e-learning digital, whatever it is, you then restate that and say, "By the end of this, you should be able to do this. You should be able to use, blah, blah, blah; list, blah, blah, blah; define, blah, blah, blah."

It's easy. Get into the groove and if you're not in the groove, I'll help you get in the groove. Then together, when someone says to you, "Who's the five people you'd have to dinner? You'll be saying, Benjamin Bloom." That's what everyone will be saying.

Susan: And Catherine Mattiske.

Catherine: And Catherine Mattiske. Well, whatever, no I'm way off that. Come on, come on. That won't be; that's a pipe dream. I'll be well and gone by then.

Luke: Can you share an example of how this approach can be applied to a real performance problem or an opportunity? What would a model learning experience look like by following ID9?

Catherine: It will be in three parts. [19:00] It'll be what's happening pre-course, what's happening during the course, and what's happening after the course. Each of the three parts get attention and are part of the instructional design process. We don't start the process of ID9. There's a nine-step process for the during part, which starts at the welcome and ends with the close and there's nine steps.

We can start there but we also need to start to say, "Okay, how do we set up these learners to become high on a model that I created called the learning readiness model? How ready are they? Which is how supported are they, and how motivated they for this learning intervention. What can we be giving them to get them ready?" Now this goes way back to my computer training days in the '90s where what I found was people [20:00] walked into my training room cold. They had no idea what was coming up. That then increased their anxiety. They had moved already from unconscious incompetence, where they don't know what they don't know, to conscious incompetence.

They were consciously incompetent when they walked in. In ID9, we want to eliminate that coldness and start the learning process before. That looks like easy things. Sending out the course, outline the brochure to people before. Sending out things questionnaires, well, what we call pre-course measurement. For them, it's disguised questionnaires, assessments, or it might be reading, or it might be an activity, or it might be, "Hey, you're going to work in groups. Here's your group. Meet with them for coffee before," whatever it is. Something's happening pre. Then the during piece, and we follow that very balanced approach, [21:00] making sure hooked in all different types of adult learners.

That's not just across the intervention but in every topic. Every topic, it uses a tool called the Topic Rotation. That then hooks in every type of learner and their learning preference, that process. Then we don't get to the close of the training program and say, "Bye-bye. Good luck." Then the next part that's involved is the post-course, which is certainly any measurement that needs to take place and post-course support. What does that look? It could look like office hours, post-course case studies, regroups, integration sessions, whatever that is a whole lot of things. It's a three-part process.

Running parallel to that is, not only the support of the learning team but the support of the [22:00] learners manager. Pre-sending out a manager's briefing kit during, making sure that if there's anything bubbling to the surface, we're talking to managers, we're keeping them engaged. If they can attend, that would be great if it's a live session. Then post again, integrating back with the manager. At the end of the day, the responsibility for the learning lies with the manager, not with the training team. That baton is past when in the post. We need to set that opportunity to pass the baton way back in the pre because what we want to do is make managers look smart.

We want to make them look engaged. We want to make them look caring. We want to make them be asking all the right questions. We have to tell them the questions. We have to tell them what's in the course. We have to say, "Hey, your direct report is engaged in this course." [23:00] We support the manager all the way through. It's two tracks. One is a learner track, one is a manager track, and at the end of the day, we join those tracks up. That's pretty much how it works.

Luke: Yes, that makes perfect sense. We had a guest, our last guest, the one that a podcast that just went out regarding sales training. They're pretty much following the exact formula that you just mentioned and having the parallel manager track to keep the manager engaged in throughout the learning process. Then they're ultimately part of the evaluation as well because they're observing the performance, so really good stuff. It seems like if we want to pivot to your latest work, which is around unlocking your inner genius. It speaks to both the learning designer and the learner. Can you talk about that connection and how you would to see a learning leader apply these ideas to our work?

Catherine: I've been locked up in large corporate Fortune 500 companies globally for the last 27 years. That's how long I've had my business. [24:00] I was challenged at the beginning of 2021 to take ID9 to everyone because it's very much locked up in very large corporate L&D. My blink response was, "Ah, that's impossible. No, it's completely for L&D." Then I thought, "Oh, Catherine Mattiske, get over yourself. Using the word impossible, really?" I say to people don't use that.

I go, "Okay, I'll take a dose of my own medicine and thought, 'How can I do this?' " Fast forward to now, I wrote a book called Unlock Inner Genius and an online profile and a very complicated algorithm to work out and to tell someone, to inform someone of their learning preference. Now, for many people in the world, they don't know how they learn. They've never been taught to learn. I want to change that. If how you learn as an individual, the next thing that happens is, [25:00] "Oh my goodness, everyone around me is different. Oh, so that's the next step?" Then how do I then bridge that gap between myself and other people around me? That has gone absolutely gangbusters. It's gone nuts. I had no idea.

On the 1st of October, 2021, we started a Facebook page. On the 1st of November in 2021, we had 100,000 people following us. I'm going, "What on earth is going on here?" Because there's just this feeling about how do I communicate to people around me? How do I actually unlock other people around me, not in a formal learning capacity, but in every email? How do I communicate better in emails? How do I do that presentation so I'm hooking everybody in? How do I write that report that gets me approval for that next budget? Well, that's unlocking a genius because [26:00] then all the things I said about the balanced training in '99, that all goes into your email.

If how the recipient learns, you just write it in their language, not in your language, but in their language. That's then amazing because I've now seen what happens when non-learning and development professionals pick up this work. They say things in their participant language like, "Where's this been? This has changed." I just did a presentation. I've just doing a training course at the moment. The very first discovery of genius training course, we're just wrapping it up tomorrow, which has been the six-week program.

They're saying things senior leaders are saying, "I did a pitch to my leadership team for more budget. I got more than what I asked for. They never do that. I used your template and I couldn't-- fantastic." Now they're not learning and development folks. They have no interest in the mechanics [27:00]  of the algorithm. They couldn't care less who Benjamin Bloom was. Imagine that! But they just have unlocked. I believe that everyone has this inner genius within them. If you unlock that, then you can learn faster. You can communicate better. You can connect with other people, and you become way more influential. I'm seeing the productivity of that and it's just amazing.

Luke: Thanks so much for sharing all of your plans going forward. It is really exciting and inspiring and definitely look forward to how you're unlocking people's geniuses and their potential going forward. Thanks so much for joining us, Catherine.

Susan: Delightful conversation. I feel we've just scratched the surface on these topics, but I think coming back to just keeping the focus on the learner. I've just heard that coming loud and clear through everything you said. Thanks for the inspiration and the conversation today, Catherine.

Catherine: Thanks so much.

Susan: [28:00] Luke, what a fun conversation with Catherine. She had so many inspirational thoughts. What are your takeaways from the interview?

Luke: Yes, that was a great interview, Susan. First, it was fun to hear Catherine's passion for creating powerful learning solutions that deliver results. That's been her focus as a consultant for decades. Her key point, "If people don't apply their learning if they don't take action, if their learning transfer doesn't happen, then learning has not taken place. Money and time have been wasted. That should never happen when we do instructional design right." She had a big shout-out to the instructional designer, as long as they're not following the ADDIE model.

She made clear that when we get the instructional design, the ID right, will get learning outcomes that make a performance difference on the job in any organization. Catherine gave us a glimpse of her ID9 instructional design model. Most important to it, "Start with observable learning objectives based on Bloom's taxonomy, [29:00] get those objectives right, and have a plan to measure them."

Other key point, "It's not your course, it's their course. Don't rely on your personal preferences. Keep the learner top of mind." Finally, Catherine talked about out her new venture, "unlocking your inner genius," which takes her learning ideas beyond instructional designers, to everyone who wants to learn and succeed. Of course, there's more to learn from Catherine and good stuff in the show notes to take you there.

Susan: That's great, Luke. What's new with d'Vinci?

Luke: Well, we're about to kick off a project to implement our eco-learning management system for a large state government agency. We'll be customizing a lot of the features to meet their specific needs. For instance, this organization contracts with dozens of instructors from outside the agency within our eco-learn LMS. We'll not only schedule the instructors and their classes, but we'll also facilitate contracting with the instructors and [30:00] paying them within the LMS. It's really a good fit for eco-learn.

Susan: We'll look forward to hearing more about that, Luke, and we'll put some information about eco-learn in the show notes in case our listeners are interested. Thanks, Luke, and many thanks to Catherine Mattiske for joining us today. If you have questions about what we talked about, you can reach out to us on d'Vinci social channels, through our website, dvinci.com, or by emailing us @poweredbylearningatdvinci.com.

Male Announcer: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education, and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

[30:53]

After two years of almost exclusively online learning, L&D leaders are navigating the new normal in training and figuring out how to maximize the blend of online and in-person learning. According to Learning Consultant Ian Townley, the learning journey exists now in multiple locations. In this episode, we discuss where learning goes from here and how best to transfer learning to improved performance.

 

 
Show Notes:

Practical Training Transfer is a global company that helps translate learning into behavior and results. Co-founder Ian Townley shares his thoughts from years of research on learning transfer and retention. Some of his key takeaways include the following:

• Viewing learning as a journey and integrate learning experiences based on learning location and over time.
• To get the most value out of in-person experiences, include the types of activities that can be done best in-person, like role playing, and offer virtual learning experiences that can best be done remotely and asynchronously.
• Focus instructional design investments on the learning that drives business rather than “nice-to-know” training.

Additional Information:
Learn more about Practical Training Transfer

Read Learning Design Consideration for the Hybrid Working Environment, by Ian Townley

Connect with Ian Townley

Resources mentioned in this podcast:
Promoteint.com
Rehearsal.com

Learn more about PHRP Online Training, mentioned in this podcast. 

Powered by Learning earned an Award of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio category from The Communicator Awards and a Silver Davey Award for Educational Podcast. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts and Training Industry’s Ultimate L&D Podcast Guide. 

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VIEW TRANSCRIPT

[00:00] Speaker 1: This is Powered by Learning. A podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

Speaker 2: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan Cort: Hello, and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host, Susan Cort. Today I'm joined by d'Vinci CEO Luke Kempski, and our guest Ian Townley co-founder of Practical Training Transfer, a company that helps translate learning into behavior and results. He joins us from his office in London to talk about learning design for hybrid working environments. Welcome, Ian. [01:03]

Ian Townley: Hello everybody.

Luke Kempski: It's great to see you, Ian.

Susan: Ian, start out by telling us a little bit about your career journey, and how it led to where you are today.

Ian: Sure. I've been in the L&D space for about 20 years. I started out as an English teacher in Tokyo, Japan. After a while I was headhunted by a corporate training company. That's where I met the person who I developed all these ideas and concepts with. His name is Jason Durkee. He started his own company in Tokyo, and I switched to work with him there. Around 2008 I joined ATD just to get more immersed in the whole L&D scene, and to try to upgrade myself really, and to get better qualified. I learned a lot about HPI, and got an introduction to learning transfer from the '60s breakthrough learning guys.

That was helpful, because we'd run into people in the corridors of the clients' offices [02:01] months after we'd met them to do their training, and we'd say, "How is that training going?" They would say, "Oh, it was a great training session, but we're not doing anything with it." Which was very unsatisfying. We wanted what we could try to do to overcome the problem of training not getting used. Anyway, around 2012, I moved back to London and took that opportunity to take a year out to do a whole literature review of everything to do with Learning Transfer.

While that research itself was a little bit, let's say, underwhelming, it was useful to try to apply all of those techniques to the existing programs and really through a lot of trial and error and just perseverance, we eventually discovered how Learning Transfer can really work. We call that idea designing for application. Since that time, I've been working on creating learning journeys with Learning Transfer for companies in Europe, US, Asia, and still working with Jason even though he's based in Tokyo. [03:00]

That's a very short introduction about me, but there's a lot more information on our website which is practicaltrainingtransfer.com. You can find a lot more stuff about what we do there.

Luke: That's great. Thanks for sharing more about your background, Ian. As this is all being figured out as people who are responsible for designing learning experiences for hybrid employees, how do you think this should change our approach? What new considerations should we be thinking about these days?

Ian: Yes, I can think of a few things that people need to develop. The first is that, we don't really know yet how things are going to play out in the next two to three years regarding this whole hybrid working scheme, or whether some companies will say, "Okay, everybody comes back to the office now, or everybody stays at home. We don't want you here." Increasingly, most people are thinking about a mix and we're calling that hybrid working. I think one of the skills that we're going to have to develop as learning designers or key learning people, is to get into the conversations where companies are deciding what they're going to do. [04:01]

A lot of the time, learning people complain about not getting enough business experience, but this is a really good opportunity to do that. To get into those conversations, to make sure that you have a voice and make sure that you can explain your need for hybrid learning, and also to try and get the budget that you require for the changes that you need to make. The second thing is that, we talk a lot about learning transfer, but not all learning actually requires that. There's a lot of learning that is created in companies, which are basically just staff benefits. If you can think about a company that has a good wellness program, they might produce a lot of videos about things like mindfulness, which is great for the employee, but doesn't really change the direction of the company so to speak.

There's a lot of training that you already do that you won't need to change. If you think more about business critical things like improving talent pipelines or enabling current job performance changes, those are the areas where learning transfer is very important. [04:58] So I would say, the second step is to don't do anything with the learning that doesn't seem business critical, but focus on how to adapt learning transfer for the other stuff.

Finally, I think people are going to have to think about where learning happens. In other words, the location of that learning, and the really obvious thing is that there's some stuff that you can do at home by yourself or preparing for a flip classroom or something like that. Whereas other things are much better done collaboratively in an office with other people. I think that another design consideration will be, the when and the where of training as a big departure from we're just going to do it where we're at right now in our offices.

Luke: Yes. That's great. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? I noticed you talk a lot about learning journeys which implies that there are learning touch points that happen over a period of time and space. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Ian: Sure. Yes. I think much like the idea of hybrid learning, which the definition for that is still up for grabs, [06:00]  is it some people in an office, some people online at the same time, or is it everybody in one location or everybody at home? I think people are still trying to figure out what that is. It's the same thing with a learning journey. For this discussion what I'd like to move away from, is the idea that learning journey is what we call lifelong learning, which just goes on basically until you retire from your employment. Instead, I'd like to define it as something that has a very definite start and end point. But people can see mapped out against not just the business needs, but also by personal basis as a learner to make sure that all those goals are visible throughout the journey.

Also of course, the idea that the journey itself doesn't exist in one location, it exists in multiple locations now. I think that the main benefit of a learning journey is that unlike standalone learning, it really does fit the way that we like to learn as humans, which is that you can stretch over time, [07:00] you can do it through different dimensions, et cetera. And so it really does match how we like to learn. I think they're useful, because you can embed learning transfer throughout the journey, and make sure that, like you said, the touch points really focus on the barriers where learning should be applied and doesn't get done, and learning transfer tries to solve those problems.

I think overall, if we think of a learning journey as having a start and endpoint that has goals mapped to the organization and the people, and has embedded in it those touch points that solve the problems that learners come up against, I think that's a good step in the right direction.

Luke: That's great. I know in your intro you mentioned that you and your colleague Jason Durkee have done research around learning transfer and retention. How do your research findings influence how you approach learning design?

Ian: Yes. I'm going to hang on that word retention for a moment, if that's okay, because I think that almost all learning, let's say, probably [08:00] 70% plus of learning done around the world in a corporate environment is about how to retain information, because there’s so much information fly around and stuff like this. People know from experience that if you repeat something again and again get reminded by that, there's more chance that you would remember it. That's the basis in what you would call a learning transfer strategy, but in fact what we've discovered was, and through our own experience is that, there's actually only five types of learning that you can do in the world.

One of those is trying to remember information, that's called knowledge. Then the others are honing a new skill. Like a specific skill that fits into only one situation such as giving a presentation, or creating efficiency in work through habits which you can apply to general situations. Another one would be changing people's mindset or perception about how to approach a particular piece of work. [09:00] The last one would be to plan for future application of learning when it's done through something like scaled learning which is not immediately applicable.

What we discovered was that, if you boil everything down to just those five pieces, you start by looking at what type of learning content you have, and then trying to think about or to experiment about where the barriers to those applications might be. The obvious one is, if you're trying to implement a new skill in your work, but you haven't had time to practice it with a trusted advisor and you just go live, you most likely fail, or the trial and error part will happen in real work, which was not very good for the business. So, you design something into your learning journey that overcomes the problem of not having the right practice level, but that's good for skills, but that's no good for knowledge at all. You have to have a different mechanism for knowledge retention and knowledge application.

That's why I say, if you can put your types of learning into those five different buckets [10:00] or a combination of them, it's a really good starting point for using all of the existing research about how to overcome learning transfer barriers when you start thinking about your design.

Susan: Ian, when you look at locations, you were mentioning about the importance of thinking of where the learning happens. How does that tie into what you were just speaking about? Give some examples of when that in-person learning would be more effective for retention versus learning in a home office for example.

Ian: I have an example, maybe I could talk about this a little while, but if we're thinking about just personal study, then that's much better done by myself at home using the computer. And I can deliver a lot of information to and from people using the internet, which is way better than before, where you'd go to a classroom and people would print off reams of paper and hand them to you and expect you to read them in the time when you're doing your training.

One of the main benefits of having remote locations is that, [11:00] I can take care of all of that knowledge-heavy stuff by myself, as long as I design it properly so that it does not overwhelm somebody. At the same time, if I want to know how to use that knowledge better in a situation, then I might want to talk to somebody about that. I might even want to, if I'm doing say, pitching or sales and stuff like this, I might want to role-play that. Again, that's much more likely to be done in a live environment, so I want to come and meet people to do those kinds of activities mainly in the space, somewhere like an office, I'd say.

Luke: When you were talking about the five methods or applications to help with retention, are there any experiences that you've had facing a real-world problem or an opportunity with a client that you're able to share with us, that show how you apply that?

Ian: Sure. Oh, I should caveat that by saying that I'm a vendor, so I can't talk about specific client or name them, but I can talk about an industry and a before and after example I hope illustrates that point forward.

Luke: That would be great. [12:00]

Ian: The example that I'm going to talk about is, about new product knowledge for salespeople in the pharmaceutical industry. This particular client had developed a groundbreaking cancer drug. It was a chemotherapy drug, and this could be widely used for many different applications in hospitals up and down the country, but what they didn't have at the time was enough people to explain the benefits and the efficacy of these drugs to the various different customers. So they decided that they needed to hire a bunch of new salespeople to promote their drug.

They did that. They hired a lot of people in a very short amount of time, and they said to themselves, "Okay, we need to produce some training that's going to get them up to speed very quickly, and then out into the communities and talking about our products." Anyway, what they did was they made a training that looks like this. It was some pre-work about 300 pages of texts and 10 hours of interviews with doctors, which was given to them 48 hours before [13:00] a two-day formal training, which included plus 400 slides of texts.

Within four days they were supposed to go from zero to hero, and then go out and sell this drug to various audiences. Of course, as you can imagine, it didn't work very well. The really obvious problem was that, people would forget the information, but other hidden problems that people hadn't thought about was that, if I'm a salesperson for a pharma company, I might have a completely different type of client base than another salesperson. I could be working with community doctors to tell them about the primary care and the efficacy of a particular drug and choices people could make, compared to say a manager of a large hospital running an oncology department.

How you speak to those customers is very, very different. The training was so generic and so general that people just didn't know how to handle it in their own situation. Of course, because there was so much information, the salespeople [14:00] are just very, very nervous about using it in the real world, ask themselves a question, is it even useful or relevant to what I'm doing?

Luke: I could see them like ruffling through papers trying to find…

Ian: Yes. It's a very typical example where somebody's sitting in a car with a couple of manuals. They're trying to cram information before they go and see somebody. It's not very useful, not a very nice way to work either. So what we did is, we tried to re-engineer it for them.

We said, okay, of course, people are going to forget information. You can't just dump it on them two days before the training. What we're going to do is, we're going to break it out into segments and to feed it to people at the right point and the right cadence before they actually meet anybody. This means that they can do as you were asking before, all that personal training at home, and then they could also have things embedded in that which helps retention like quizzes or little activities and et cetera, rather than just reading a manual.

Then what we did was to, of course, follow up the training with reminders, [15:00] interactive reminders rather than just pushing text. So that people could say, okay, here's a small situation as a video clipper, what happens between you and your customer? How would you change that? How would you evolve it, et cetera? Here's a sample answer for you. That's what I would call Learning Transfer 101, how to segment and distribute information of the time dimension.

Second thing we did was to have people take a pre-training survey, and this is really directed towards how you think you're going to use the information when you go back to your real work. This helped us a lot to create cohorts where we could say, okay, all of you, community doctors, salespeople in one group, and all the managers of the oncology departments in a different group, and we'll just tweak or tailor the information inside the training so that it's really much more beneficial for you. We'll talk about it from your angle only. People find that surprisingly very, very useful. I would say it's not rocket science, but it's really useful. [16:00]

Luke: I imagine too, you're removing a lot of extraneous content, so it can be just the applicable content that's being focused on.

Ian: Yes, that's a good point. A lot of the time it's messaging rather than information. Framing how to do some of this is really important for most people. Another thing we did was obviously, everybody had to create an action plan. That's again standard stuff. There's nothing really to be said there, but one thing that we found that we repeated in this program that we tried several times before, which is very useful is, that when you are a new person in a new company, what you want is nothing more than just success and quick success is better than anything else. So we created something called happy cards, where we asked people to tell us about their successes and write them down and share them.

This is a very, very unusual thing for salespeople to do because they're usually in competition with each other, but what they found was that sharing this information was invaluable to them. They would send these cards in, [17:00] we'd put them to different cohorts, walls, or rooms, and they could come in and read that, and really use that as a launch pad for their own success.

In the end, I think that the client was pretty happy with the changes, even though the information and the content itself was largely the same. That's a good example about how to re-engineer something, turn it into a journey, make sure you overcome the barriers that stop people from applying learning.

Luke: Excellent. Are there any new technologies that you think will help organizations improve the transfer of learning? Are there technologies that really support learning journeys that you're excited about in your work?

Ian: Yes. Everybody is now doing this online meeting. We're using one right now, aren't we? If I cut back five years and try to do the same thing or do a class online, it would just have been a disaster really. I've experienced that pain, I think. Just using these online meeting rooms has been a big game-changer, [18:00] especially during the time when nobody could meet each other, but I think it’s coming to the point now where it's a little bit too much, and people want different versions of learning that they can access themselves.

The two things I would advocate is first, learning experience platforms. There's a bunch of them out there. The one I like is called Promote, that's promoteint.com. The reason I like it is because you can build your own program in it. There's lots of interactivity, hosts resources, and stuff. There are other programs that do the same thing to be honest with you, it's just a question of taste. But I think moving away from learning management systems to learning experience platforms is how people will travel because it just feels a lot more immersive and connected and then a better exchange of ideas. That's one area I would really advocate.

Another one is that, a lot of the time people want to do practice [18:59] and they want to have it checked by other people. I said before, it's good to do that when you're in the same room, but that's not always possible, especially when you're doing very small hits of something like habit retention. Say, if you want to, like in the example I gave, you want to practice your sales pitch to a doctor, you should have some mechanism where you can record it, share it with your friends, have them comment, rank it and tell you what you should do to change that. There are a couple out there that are really good. The one I like is called Rehearsal, rehearsal.com, and they do a really great job of just using your phone to share content with your peers and have that checked.

I'd say, yes, learning experience platform, and some kind of rehearsal or practice software is really useful.

Luke: Yes. It's really that collaborative learning part, and as you were talking earlier about cohorts and recognizing successes and having those successes be shared to reinforce learning and the transfer of learning?

Ian: Yes.

Luke: Good stuff. [20:00] Before you leave us, Ian, talk about what's next for you in your personal journey as a learning designer and presenter.

Ian: Right now, I think that basically at the crossroads of a big change in how learning is done. We've talked today about learning journeys and hybrid learning and things like this, but it's still not fully defined and the road is not clearly laid out for us just yet. So I think there's a lot of work still to be done in this era of change that we're going through right now. I think for me, my challenges personally will be to try to figure out whether this hybrid work or hybrid learning will actually stick, or whether we'll just eventually creep back to the office that will fade off into the distance. I think personally, it's here to stay, if people have a willpower to enact the change that they're going through right now, hopefully they will.

It's also a good idea for us to think about the last two years. [21:00] What's been happening to us and to try to take all the positives from those experiences. At the very beginning, we were thrust into throwing everything online and creating content libraries and stuff like this. Now we're coming out the other end and we're thinking well, we kind of suffered through this, but is there anything positive that we can take from that?

I think making learning and the application of learning much more agile and responsive in almost like a business setting, is our challenge going forward now because we've learned that we have to adapt quickly to changing needs in this particular last two years of societal need, but that's impacted our business learning as well. So I think that for me personally, learning how to create that very fast agile change to learning is something I'm pretty excited about.

Luke: Yes, me as well. Exciting times ahead and we'll all keep evolving in how we're approaching learning in the environment that is also loaded with change in how people work, and the boundaries between [22:00] work and other parts of their lives. Thanks so much for joining us today, Ian.

Ian: Thank you for having me.

Susan: Thank you, Ian. Now I love focusing on the positive because change can be good. These are exciting times for L&D and if we look at it as a positive, maybe the way we learn and train will just continue to get better. Thank you for sharing your insights with us today.

Ian: My pleasure.

Susan: Luke, that was a really interesting conversation with Ian. I was really interested to learn about his focus on the location for learning, on the learning journey as what was the technology associated with learning. What were some of your takeaways?

Luke: Yes, Susan. It really was fun to hear Ian's global perspective on learning resulting from his experience in Japan, the UK and other parts of the world, as well as the research that he's done. He placed a lot of emphasis on viewing learning as a journey and integrating learning experiences based on learning location and across time. You want to get the most value out of in-person experiences by having [23:00] them include the types of activities that can be done best in-person and make it so other types of learning experiences can be done remotely and asynchronously.

While you're designing a learning journey, you're also thinking about aiding retention by giving learners the opportunity to apply the knowledge and practice the skills. I also like how Ian mentions that when designing learning that is not business critical, you don't need to invest in full blown learning journeys. It's okay to leave those courses as is in order to focus on the learning that drives business.

Susan: So what's new at d'Vinci, Luke?

Luke: Yes. Lots going on at d'Vinci here in 2022. I know we've developed a new Protecting Human Research Participants course, or phrptraining.com. PHRP as we call it, is a specialized training course and certification required for any person or organization who participates in research involving human subjects. I love this project because [24:00] it's a comprehensive solution including a website, learning management system, and e-learning course. There's a lot going on behind the scenes too because we have both individual and institutional customers. The site includes e-commerce, a scored assessment and certificate, and the ability for learners to earn and purchase continuing medical education credits. It's also available in different languages and we serve customers from all over the world. With thousands of learners taking the course, we're always upgrading the administrative backend, the data capture and reporting capabilities, as well as the website and learning experience. It may even be worth doing a podcast about PHRP sometime in the future.

Susan: I think we could make that happen. Thanks for sharing, Luke. For our listeners, we'll put a link in the show notes if you're interested in learning more.

Thanks for joining us today, Luke, and many thanks to Ian Townley of Practical Training Transfer for joining us. If you have any questions about what we talked about, [25:00] you can reach out to us on d'Vinci social channels through our website dvinci.com, or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

Speaker 1: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com. [25:31]

Even before the pandemic forced learning leaders to rethink their training programs, Constellation Brands, maker of many leading wine, beer, and spirits, was pivoting to ensure learners were set up for success. In this Powered by Learning episode, d'Vinci client Maggie Romanovich of Constellation Brands, talks with d’Vinci Client Solutions Consultant Angeline Evans about the changes they’ve made to impact learner engagement, retention, and the bottom line. 

Show Notes:

Director of Learning & Development, Wine & Spirits at Constellation Brands Maggie Romanovich shares how L&D continues to evolve and grow to make training relevant and impactful for every individual. Some of her key takeaways include: 

• Remember that confidence and competency should work together in lockstep. 
• Give people an opportunity to imagine how they’re going to use what they’re learning now in their actual job tomorrow. 
• Don’t put people through unnecessary learning. Seek out opportunities to use learning to set team members up for success. 
• Your learners are your most important stakeholders. Find champions to help gain buy in for learning. 

 

Read Level Set and Level Up: A Learner-Centric Approach to Training in a Virtual Environment by Angeline Evans with Maggie Romanovich, Constellation Brands

Learn more about d'Vinci's ecoLearn® LMS mentioned in the podcast. 

Powered by Learning earned an Award of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio category from The Communicator Awards and a Silver Davey Award for Educational Podcast. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts and Training Industry’s Ultimate L&D Podcast Guide.

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VIEW TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1: [00:00] This is Powered by Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

Speaker 2: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d’Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d’Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan: Hello, and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host Susan Cort. Today, I'm joined by d’Vinci Client Solutions consultant Angeline Evans, and our guest, Maggie Romanovich, Director of Learning and Development (Wine and Spirits) at Constellation Brands. Constellation Brands is a leading international producer and marketer of beer, wine, and spirits with operations in the US, Mexico, New Zealand, and Italy.

[01:04]

You may not know the name Constellation Brands, but you most certainly know their iconic brands, including Corona, Modelo, the Robert Mondavi brand family, Meiomi, SVEDKA Vodka, and High West Whiskey, to name a few. Welcome, Maggie. Great to see you.

Angeline: It's great to talk to you again, Maggie.

Maggie: Thanks for having me.

Susan: Maggie, you were recently promoted and took on a new role at Constellation. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing and the learning audience you're now serving?

Maggie: Yes, absolutely. I've been at Constellation for about 14 years and started in learning and development about halfway into that. I've had roles with beer learning and development, most recently with our TBA National Accounts Team. Then last year, we re-orged and now I lead learning and development for our sales team for our mainstream and super-premium portfolio within the wine and spirits business.

Now, my focus is on the main group [02:00] of sales folks that handle that portfolio, but I also work very closely with my counterpart in our newly formed premium and luxury division Aspira. 

It's really great. It's an opportunity to collaborate across those different groups. We've got a fantastic group of professionals who we all work with together, and of course, we collaborate very closely with our global and our beer counterparts as well.

Susan: That's great. Well, we're looking forward to hearing more from you today.

Angeline: We are. We recently kicked off the new year and this is often when we're developing, just finishing developing, or even beginning to roll out our plan of attack for the year, what are our organization's business goals? Where does training tie into that? Have we identified any skill gaps? What are our learners asking for? What do they need? For today, I was hoping we could talk about the considerations you like to keep in mind when you're developing your learning plan for the year. Maggie, where do you like to start, or what do you look at first?

Maggie: Sure. It's always got to be a combination of our learners. They have to be at the center of everything we do, but so does our strategy. [03:00] As we think about what we want to accomplish with our goals from a business standpoint, we've got a couple of things that we look at. We've got a capability scorecard. We also have our actual sales goals, and then the global goals, how they all ladder together. In my mind, it becomes this three-dimensional view of where all of those things intersect in a way that allows our learners to spend as much time in the field as possible.

Then I start thinking about our audience and who they are, what it comprises of. There's essentially four personas that I look at. There's people who are new to the organization and new to role, someone who just graduated from college or an intern perhaps, or someone who maybe has moved over from one of our distributors and is taking on a new sales role. Then there are people who are new to the organization but might be experienced in that role. They don't necessarily need to learn how to do the work, but how Constellation approaches it. Then people who have been in the organization for a while, but want to level up.

What do those folks need? [04:00] Because they're going to need something a little bit different and probably a little bit deeper or even a refresh. People who have been around for six, seven years and took a really fantastic foundational course at the beginning of their career may need a refresher, and we should refresh that too because business has changed quite a bit, especially over the last couple of years. Then explorers. This can take a lot of different forms. It could be someone who maybe is in supply chain and is looking into getting into sales operations or someone who is in HR and is interested in category management. Or someone who's in sales but wants to hone in on some of their more analytical skills.

What sorts of things do we have available for them to level set? I also take the approach-- I've got a philosophy around how we want to go about our learning. We look at our strategy for our organization, we look at our audience, but then I want to make sure that our learning is sustainable. How do we take it beyond the classroom or beyond the learning intervention? I want to make sure that it's relevant to their job. I like to say about 80% of it should be things that you're doing it now [05:00] and 20% of it should be thinking into the future unless we're tackling that future view intentionally.

I want it to be actionable. I want to make sure that they can do something with the information that we gave them and that they discovered immediately after the event, and I want it to be inclusive. A good example - we only launched our e-commerce curriculum last year and it wasn't just about sales. It was also about our marketing teams, our category teams, how our e-commerce sales folks that sat within our omnichannel business, interacted with those that sit within our e-commerce focus business.

Those are the three things that I look at. It's our corporate strategy, our sales strategy, what kind of learners we're talking about, and then what kind of learning we want to approach.

Angeline: Thank you. In working with you, I've always loved the way you've really tackled the different learner personas. I think that's not an angle that everyone always approaches. I love the concept of explorers because that's not something [06:00] I hear people talk about often, but might possibly want a job switch. When you've developed these learner personas, was it just practical experience and you came up with them yourself as you spoke with people at the organization? Did you do a survey? How did you establish that?

Maggie: I came up with it on my own while we were developing our category in space camp because that's an area that it can take a really long time to become a specialist in the software that we use to really become an expert in it. As we were thinking about how we wanted to approach it in the different levels, that's where it started to bloom, I guess, where it started to grow. Then I started thinking about my own experience at Constellation. I have a radio degree and I started off as a media planner here at Constellation.

I got to benefit from the culture. I put into it when I got out of it. At Constellation, we really pride ourselves in people being able to find work they love at work. Our philosophy is worth reaching for, people worth reaching for, careers worth reaching for, products worth reaching for. [07:00] I wanted to make sure that we had some space for people who wanted to understand it a little bit better without having to take the full plunge into the deep end of a new role or to prepare themselves for a new role.

We had somebody who was exploring category management who was in customer management before which is on the supply chain side. Because we had that explorer space for her, I'm like, "Take these three things, see if this is something that you want to pursue." She took them and she loved it. She interviewed fantastically. I just was talking to the woman who leads her team and she's like, "She has gotten up to speed faster than anybody that I've hired before. I really appreciate her enthusiasm."

Creating that space allowed her to gain some momentum before even going into that role and really succeeding in bringing her full value. It's hard when you start a new job and you don't bring your full value. I wanted to make sure that we had some space for that as well, but also not taking for granted the people who've been around for a long time. We were in the middle of a great resignation. Let's make sure that we're [00:08:00] supporting people who have chosen to stay, who find fulfillment in the work they do. They also deserve to be developed and supported as they grow their career here and look for new opportunities to level up.

Angeline: That's an awesome story about her using that training to get up to speed on a completely different career path. Thank you for sharing that. Still looking at the learners and considering the different training approaches and modalities you use. In LD we’re often asked, what's their special formulas? What's the perfect formula for the way you want to deliver training? Is it e-learning followed by this? What do you consider? Especially with sales because that's a unique audience when you're deciding on a training modality.

Maggie: I wish I knew what the secret formula was. I think the secret formula is there is no secret formula. You have to take…

Angeline: Yes, right answer.

Maggie: Surprise! spoiler alert! That's the secret formula! The potion is you have to consider all of those things from scratch, to begin with.

[09:00]

One of the things that I was-- We were moving towards this before the pandemic happened and we all got grounded essentially. Looking for ways to optimize our time in the field. There's a really great guy out in my area. His name's Ken Phillips, and he really digs into evaluation, predictive analytics on how learning's going to be effective and how to minimize scrap learning.

That's where the relevance part of my learning philosophy comes into play. I want to make sure that the things that we provide are relevant and actionable. I take that approach ahead of time and then match it up with the strategies. You can see it surface of what the right modality is.

A really good example is, prior to everything shutting down, pretend the world goes back to normal. We looked into some software training for a really seemingly intense analytical tool. We had put some of our people through our teams through a four-day training. It was live and in-person, it's very difficult for [10:00] people to step away from the business that long to be able to put in there out of office, especially when they're not on PTO - their boss knows where they are. Our business moves very quickly, everybody's does these days. People got into that classroom and really, ideally, would have been able to focus very clearly, have one thing to focus on, but you're getting calls from your boss, you've got your clients calling you and it was very difficult for people to absorb the whole thing. Some people told me that they were lost in the first hour because they got pulled away into a quick meeting with someone important.

When we look to reignite our interest in that software, we looked at different options for how could we flip the classroom, so to speak. My husband's a math teacher, and he flips his classroom. He does videos, and he sends his kids home and says, "Your homework is to watch this video and take notes. We're going to do our homework together tomorrow." I had heard of the flip classroom and developed my own personal development, [11:00] and thought we'd try that. I found-- it was a seven-hour course on a syndicated learning platform and we gave them eight weeks to go through it.

I said, what you're going to do is you're going to do about an hour a week, pace yourself, give yourself-- we gave them a little bit of a buffer so that if they got behind, they could catch up. I said, "Once we're done with that, we're all going to come together, and we're going to create the tools that we intended to have based on that software." Because of that, in the live session, you're learning all of the clicks and all of the navigation and then you're sent home to do the work on your own. We've flipped that, we put them through an opportunity to learn an hour, digest it, try some things out, learn.

You're giving them a nutritious meal spread out over time, as opposed to cramming their faces and gluttonous roundedness classroom. Previously, when we were in the live session, 10 people out of the 50 that went through it were actually [12:00] using the tool afterwards like it's a company-wide thing. I'm not saying that my program led to that, but it certainly drove adoption. Now we're using that as the baseline. We have a sustainment piece to it too, we've got a weekly check-in, we have new courses that are available.

I would say, long story long, that for a sales team, having that flipped classroom piece has really helped people feel like they could be developed, and not take a lot of very important time out of the marketplace. That's really going to be important when things start opening up again. People aren't going to want to go and spend five days in a workshop. What they're going to want to do is go spend time with our customers, they're going to want to go and get into the field, they're going to want to go into the stores and check the shelves. We need to be prepared to provide them with learning opportunities that give them development that they need, without risking their business.

[13:00]

Angeline: Right. It sounds like that approach really mitigates the forgetting curve because if you're in a workshop for four days, how much of that are you taking back with you, especially with something that's like technology training where you really need to be doing hands-on and have it work for you when you need it?

Maggie: Absolutely. Give them the space to imagine. One of the things that I think we forget about, we talk about the kinesthetic audio and visual learning, but there's also imagination. How do you imagine yourself using these things in the future? That can be really powerful to give yourself some space to think about that. We don't take a lot of time to have thinking time. I got a half an hour free today, how do I create that space? Giving your learners time to think about how they're going to use that instead of having a page of notes they never go back to, they're actually taking notes and trying a couple of things before they go on to that next course, that next chapter that they're trying to learn.

Susan: Do you think that the changing business world and the hybrid world that we're living in now has really encouraged [14:00] you at Constellation to rethink how you do learning? It sounds like you've pivoted in all the right directions because of how things have changed lately.

Maggie: I think so. I think we were leaning towards that to begin with because our sales force is home-field based. I think what it did, like it did with a lot of other things, it just accelerated it quite a bit. I think that there is still a lot of value in coming together and learning from each other. I want to make sure that that time means something. I do think that this hybrid world outside of field-based sales organization, I've never been busier.

When COVID hit and we shut down, I know that there were people who were like, "I don't know what to do because I'm out in the field all the time." You know what they did? They wanted to learn. We hit the gas on a lot of those things and we were able to accelerate the development of-- like Angeline and I worked on our space planning software training because people couldn't come together to do a workshop. We certainly aren't going to put people in front of a computer for an eight-hour webinar and how to make that work. [15:00] We were able to make an even stronger case for going into that blended learning approach as opposed to flying everybody everywhere for workshops.

Angeline: Absolutely. Just anecdotally, what feedback have you received?

Maggie: Well, I mentioned before that we've got people who are exploring new careers, and now they have those learning opportunities to be able to explore that a little bit. I think that people are very enthusiastic about everything they have available to them, but it can also be overwhelming. Now that we have created this huge buffet of learning, we need to put some order to it to figure out where people can start.

Angeline, you and I are working on that curriculum mapping, where it's like, how do we create an organized buffet if people need to go and choose what they want, or how do we create a prefix menu where somebody needs to go through an organized course in order to get the full experience? [16:00] I think that's the direction that we're headed in in this environment.

Angeline: I love that analogy. That's exactly what curriculum mapping is, everybody, a buffet and a menu. Before we wrap up, let's talk a little bit about evaluation. You touched on it a few minutes ago. Measuring success with training can be really tricky. Sometimes it's based on feedback from your learner. Sometimes you have clear-cut data that says, "Yes, we deliver to seller training, and we improve performance. Here's how you can see that." What are some different ways that you've been able to measure success at Constellation?

Maggie: Obviously, as a learning professional, you'd love to get that level one evaluation, where it's like, "Oh, yes, the facilitator knew exactly what she was talking about and the WebEx worked perfectly." That's really just first impressions. I like to get a benchmark ahead of time. Give me your pre-course thoughts. Do you feel confident in the space? Because, as we know, confidence means the world to a lot of people. [17:00] If I'm confident that I can do it, I can do it, but we want to make sure that their confidence and their competence are on equal footing.

We don't want somebody who's really good at what they do, but they're not very confident; and we definitely don't want to have somebody who's very confident and not competent at all. We want to make sure that we're matching those two metrics up.

I like to measure people's confidence before and after. We did that with the space planning software. How are you feeling ahead of time? How are you feeling after? It's an easier way to share back, like, "Hey, we had 50% of the people we invited attend. We can say we have 20% increase in confidence based on first impressions of the course."

It's harder as time goes on and as priorities shift and change to check in with that knowledge check, the behavior change, seeing if it actually moves the needle with the business. We're working towards that. One of the things that I think is really important is, number one, evaluating for growth and not evaluating for punitive repercussions. We're not going to [18:00] fire anybody for failing. We have to make sure that we're putting all of those things in place to make sure that people were given the full opportunity to succeed.

I think that's really important. I think, positive reinforcement, being able to say, like, "Hey this person got to the advanced level of this, or this person got a 90% score on this particular benchmarking test, here's a badge." Being able to prove your worth. Excuse me, being able to prove your knowledge performance, certainly not tied to worth, but being able to prove your performance and how you're applying that knowledge, I think, is really critical.

Being able to look to your neighbor, look to your colleagues and say like, "Wow, Angeline did a really great job with that, I'd like to get that badge in my signature." Or, "Because I went through all of this, and I demonstrated my expertise, I've gotten recognition from our leaders. I was invited to a special one on one with our Chief Sales Officer."

[19:00]

I think being able to provide positive reinforcement through success in that area, but also provide visibility because that's something that a field-based team doesn't always get. A lot of times proximity can be an indicator of success and we don't necessarily want that. It doesn't speak to that diversity, equity, and inclusion tenets that are so important to make sure that we've got a well-rounded salesforce. We want to make sure that that visibility is brought to life. Being able to publish and broadcast success, I think, is really critical.

Then being able to identify gaps. When you benchmark and then you reassess, what are those gaps that we're seeing? Because we have created this buffet-style capabilities-focused menu of things to choose from, we're not putting people through unnecessary learning, we're identifying those opportunities where we can really target what they need to be successful.

Angeline: Thank you, Maggie. To the point with badges, having them there to [20:00] increase visibility also lets folks if they have a good report with someone and they say, "Oh, I see you're an advanced user at this," they might be more likely to ask that person a silly question that they have been hesitant on than their manager or whomever else might be.

Maggie: That's a really important piece. We do that with our onboarding as we put together buddies. To your point, being able to have a mentor, being able to have somebody who was in your class with you, we want to make sure that people get the answers.

We don't necessarily care who they get them from as long as they're the right one. Some people won't ask, to your point, if you have to ask your manager why is it like this, or what button was I supposed to click, or where do I find that information? You don't want to expose yourself that way. We do a lot of foundational learning too so that we can-- E-commerce is a really good example of that. People are at a different place in their journey. How do we bring them up to speed?

I use the analogy of that emperor's new clothes. Nobody wants to say they don't know about something, especially leaders. If a new initiative is coming into play, let's just, you know what? We're just going to assume that nobody knows anything. [21:00] If you know this stuff, cool, take what you want and leave the rest. Let's get everybody up to the same level of knowledge that we expect them to be at. Then people can discreetly take the learning and then fully participate in the workshop. That's actually another benefit of having that flipped classroom because you get a lot more participation in the short time that you do have because you brought everybody up to speed.

Angeline: Thank you. You shared some awesome stories and advice for this session. Before you leave, do you have any advice for listeners who are developing a learning plan? Parting words of wisdom.

Maggie: Sure. I would say that your learners are your most important stakeholder. Sometimes people are going to be resistant, they think they're going to know everything. It's going to be difficult for them to realize that they might get some benefit out of the learning. My recommendation, again, with your learners, is bring them along. Bring in the people like you, who they are. You know who your people are, who are going to be like, 'Oh, I don't need this." Bring them in. Say, "Great, [22:00] help me create this. Be a subject matter expert for me."

Then they become a champion for you. I think that those people hold a lot of weight in the mood that they place on a lot of the learning interventions that you create.

Also, look for new voices. Don't go to the same pool of people every single time. Tend to have like your go-to buddies that you know what they're doing, but meet a couple new folks and bring them into the fold as well. Then of course gain leadership alignment because if your leaders aren't enthusiastic about your learning, their people, they're not going to be given space to take that. Bring your leaders along, bring your champions along, bring your detractors along. Collaboration is critical in this. That would be my biggest piece of wisdom.

Angeline: That's great. Thank you so much.

Susan: Great advice, Maggie. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. It's always great to see you, and we always love to learn what's going on in your world at Constellation Brands.

Maggie: Thank you so much for having me. This is great.

[23:00]

Susan: Angeline, always so great to talk with Maggie.

Angeline: I know. I always enjoy talking with her and I really loved hearing her approach to developing training strategy today, especially the concept of creating a space for your learners to explore and imagine. Too often we put learners in boxes and we really dictate the experience, which is totally needed because, to some extent, we need to make sure we're meeting our learning objectives. We need to do that. She makes a really good point that we also need to give them time to dive deeper into content and what interests them and also give them that opportunity to imagine how they're going to use what they're learning now tomorrow in their actual job.

She's totally right also when it comes to measuring success and impact. We're not just trying to increase competency, we're also trying to increase confidence and empower our learners. Confidence and competency should really improve in lockstep. It was a great conversation today. I really enjoyed it.

Susan: Thanks, Angeline. That was a great wrap-up. Before we head out today, anything new at d'Vinci that you'd like to share?

Angeline: There's a lot going on at d'Vinci but recently our ecoLearn Team-- [00:24:00] For listeners who don't know what ecoLearn is, ecoLearn is d'Vinci's learning management system or LMS. Our team just kicked off the discovery phase for a new client who will be getting installation of our LMS. The discovery phase is always really exciting.

ecoLearn is a custom LMS. The team works with them upfront to really outline their unique requirements, identify features they'll need on their site, because each client is different and you don't really necessarily need every bell and whistle on your site, you just need what's going to be relevant and meaningful to your learning audience and administrators that are tracking the performance. It's been fun to see this project and site take shape.

Susan: That sounds great. If our listeners are interested, they can learn more about ecoLearn on our website. Thanks, Angeline.

Angeline: Thanks.

Susan: Many thanks to our guest, Maggie Romanovich, of Constellation Brands, for joining us today. If you have any questions about what we talked about, you can reach out to us on d'Vinci's social channels, through our website, dvinci.com, or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

Speaker 2: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

[00:25:21]

 

When it was time to transform the learning and development culture at The Giant Company, learning leaders knew they had to focus on the learner journey. In this episode, Anthony Amadure, Manager Learning Organizational Development at The GIANT Company, talks about the innovative changes they made.

View Transcript:

Show Notes:
Anthony Amadure transformed their learning and development culture by building a framework that focused on ensuring employees could access the training they needed to learn and grow at The GIANT Company.

• The journey model assesses each team member to determine what level they are at and what skills are needed to take them to the next level.
• The GIANT Company focused on learning labs with classes they built within Giant University.
• The company prepares team members for the future through a talent development program that prepares employees for what’s next in their career.

Listen to our interview with Constellation Brands, which was mentioned in this podcast:

"Building Competence and Confidence through Learning" 

Powered by Learning earned an Award of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio category from The Communicator Awards and a Silver Davey Award for Educational Podcast. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts and Training Industry’s Ultimate L&D Podcast Guide. 

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VIEW TRANSCRIPT

[00:00] Susan Cort: This is Powered By Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

Voiceover: Powered By Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

[00:40] Susan: Hello, and welcome to Powered By Learning. I'm your host Susan Cort. Today I'm joined by d'Vinci Learning Experience Director Jenny Fedullo, and our guest Anthony Amadure, Manager Learning Organizational Development at Giant/Martin's. The Giant Company is a supermarket chain that operates full-scale stores in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, under the Giant and Martin's banners along with small-scale urban stores under the Giant Heirloom market banner. Welcome, Anthony.

Jenny Fedullo: Hey, Anthony, good to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Anthony Amadure: Good morning, everybody. Pleasure to be here and excited to talk to everybody today.

Susan: Well, great. Thanks. Let's start out, Anthony, by telling us a little bit about your career in the L&D industry.

[01:24] Anthony: It's been a great journey. I started out working in a large ice cream company, got to work all the positions and really cut my teeth with learning and development by redesigning a lot of their programs. From there, I went to economic development and took my knowledge of how a large privately owned company works, and did it to attract businesses, US and international to Pennsylvania. Then did a small stint with teaching in order to use those connections, get students hired, get them prepared for the workforce. Finally comes full circle and started working with Ahold USA and now was pulled into the Giant Company with this learning position back to where my passions really lie.

Jenny: Thanks, Anthony. That's a really interesting journey. I always love to connect with learning professionals and hear their story, because so many of them don't necessarily start out in the training and development field, but it really is a journey or a story. Thanks for sharing that. Tell us a bit about your role at Giant/Martin's and about the company in general.

[02:29] Anthony: I'm going to start with the company. I see it as really the foundation of our growth ideas. David Javitch opened a two-man butcher shop in 1923. Then he immediately started innovating the industry by opening a Giant Food Shopping Center in 1937. This was a totally new concept at the time, as it offered dry and perishable items. We like to think we're following in his footsteps as we've never really stopped thinking of new ways to innovate for our customers and our team members.

Bonus buys, choice rewards, online ordering, you had mentioned urban formats like our Heirloom stores in Philly, and more was just for our customers. The role of learning comes in with what we're doing to develop and present standardized and custom workshops for our new to role leadership sessions, and really a whole new era of personal development where our team members take hold of it themselves.

[03:29]

We also administer our LMS system, help the creation of the online content and manage compliance courses. Then we cover everything from analyzing and recommending ways of working, executing various developmental academies. More recently, we're really moving into the realm of championing change management practices for projects and various initiatives and rollouts.

But I think the most exciting development is the launch of our largest Learning Initiative, which we decided to call Giant University.

Jenny: Sounds exciting. What breadth and depth, a responsibility that you have in your role. Tell me a little bit about the variety of other roles within Giant. You've got cashiers to customer facing team members, to supervisors, managers, executives, I'm sure. What are some of the training needs they have and how do they support your company goals?

[04:25] Anthony: We're really looking to put personal development into the hands of our team members. They're going to get the standardized requirements automatically. Those normal things you need to produce, be effective and successful at your position, identification of high potential for advance programs. Again, taking that one step forward with GU, because we want team members do feel they have more control over customizing their development.

We're going to achieve more, and really learn where the needs can be more focused by what they're going after, what they're looking for. It's a balance of, here's the baseline things that you need, but everybody's unique and everybody's individual. Your skill set at a certain position, after you get the fundamentals is going to be different. It's tough. Over 35,000 people in the organization, we're using that personal touch to really identify where those areas are.

[05:25]

If we see patterns, trends, et cetera, maybe we can institute and create something a little more standard that they get, but help that person advance and grow in their career by giving them the framework for them to target and identify those skills to be successful in their current position, as well as kind of peeking over the wall to see what they need to do for that next move.

Susan: Anthony, you mentioned Giant University or GU, as you called it. We know our parent company JPL has created some training videos for Giant University. Talk a little bit about those training videos and how that really pulls into the overall training and the initiative with Giant University.

Anthony: Great question. The videos are fantastic. We've done a number of different things. Beginning of last year, we had our Promises and Action event where we discussed our three team promises. We wanted to teach people about them, and give them an activity so they can go and use them and apply them directly. We did a series of videos with you, and we wrapped it into a contest, we had some grand prizes, we had rewards and things given out and the greatest thing that came out of that was, at the end, after people went out and applied the skills, we got ideas on innovation from them.

[06:44]

Where are their pain points? What was going on? Where did they need help or assistance? We got to teach them through a really great interactive series of videos, and we also got to hear from them. It's always a two-way street. They say two birds, one stone, as you say. We never want to do anything with just a singular result. What can we do to get more from our team members, and for our team members? Most recently, we did a series of animated videos, which I'll talk about a little later, I think, to help identify and teach people about our leadership journey matrix, which is a really nice framework that we want our team members to use to help guide their personal development plans.

Jenny: All right, over the last few years, it sounds like you've really helped transform learning. You've already given us quite a few examples. What was the catalyst? What was it that made you want to create this, or the organization to create this high impact learning organization?

[07:46] Anthony: I’ll say… I think it's a number of things, but probably competition is a main one. It's ever-growing. Technologies are evolving, and so the needs and learning styles of our team members are continually growing, changing, adapting. You go back to the '90s, computer-based training, that was the big rage, and everybody wanted to do that. Now, as I call it, the butts in seats, it's not as effective as it used to be.

Really, in current times, I think retention, or we feel retention, is as important if not more than recruitment. We knew we had to grow our employee value proposition. We wanted to add more reasons and benefits for team members to stay, to avoid that brain drain. We asked how we can do more, how we can reach more team members, have it be more efficient, and more exciting.

[08:43]

We knew we really just had to evolve to do these things differently, and make us stand out to have people want to stay here, so they don't feel like they come in and, oh, I take this training and then it's done. It's a big blank space moving forward. We wanted to have a continuous journey that kept people engaged throughout their entire career. What we did was we looked at who's receiving training? At what level? Is that training really helping with succession planning? Are we building the right people at the right time to prevent that brain drain?

Just how deep was our bench? With the move towards becoming a true omni-channel organization, we are constantly growing different areas. Those areas have different new and unique skill sets where we may not have had them before. We wanted to be able to place people with the needed skills and experiences into positions to prevent that gap that would slow down our projects, growth and overall innovation.

[09:51]

I think if more organizations, or if most organizations looked at their learning and development offerings, they're going to find it's clustered around certain groups, while others may not be getting as well rounded of an experience.

I think a reason for this is that the populations that fall outside of some of those focus groups are often larger, need a larger amount and a wider variety of resources, which can be costly, could be difficult to get that personal level attention that's so critical. Let's face it. A lot of training teams just aren't super large and the larger the organization, it limits what you're doing. We took all those items into consideration on how can we change? How can we be different? How can we get more learning to more people, in a more effective way.

Jenny: It sounds like, Anthony, you took a typical approach of mapping out the customer lifecycle and put it to the mapping out the employee lifecycle. What are those touch points along the way, their journey, what learning development do they need? It's a technique that we've used a few times as well, and it's so effective. Part of the training program you do icertainly involves instructor-led training. Explain how that has evolved.

[11:08]

Anthony: I said before our training team isn't super large, so we had limited facilitation resources, which in turn lessens the variety of courses that you can effectively offer. I'll give you an example, and what really jumped out at me. We had an original ‘Leading Others’ program for managers. It was a four-day course. We used to offer two full sessions across 12 different areas. Just with that, we're spending 96 days for just one program for one specific group. There is no way you can develop a deep level of offerings to address all the needs of your organization with that type of setup. The first thing that we decided to do is we needed to be more efficient, but still keep that level of personal interaction.

The solution was the development of our learning lab.

[12:05]

We designed a room with writeable walls, electric in the tables, two giant TVs, tracking cameras, directional mics, and this really allowed us to do less classes with more participants and still keep things interactive. We can put 32 people in that room and have an unlimited number of people participating virtually, which lessens the number of sessions we had to do and gives us the opportunity to increase the time we have to do more different necessary trainings that we've identified. We put it all together and that was step one. Then we looked at the length and composition of our programs.

We decided they needed to be shorter, more focused, more interactive, and also broken up, so team members had the ability to go out and apply what they've learned from, again, working in other organizations. You see that most people aren't designed to internalize a ton of info from multiple 4 to 8 hour days.

[13:15] How much do you really retain, and how much of that retention does someone actually apply? I think those are two of the main things that continue to evolve and really helped us set the groundwork to set the parameters, to change the way we do learning to make it more effective. From other organizations, someone would come, "I need an 8-hour program. I need a two-day program."

Well, do you really need that? To really start to challenge, I like to call it, the nice to know versus need to know. How do we get it with the need to know, have that be actionable, give time for knowledge to set in, and then all the need to know stuff starts to develop that excellent journey of things people can come back to and keep that excitement for their learning path during their career.

Jenny: Anthony, I'm sure for those listening, that is something that all training professionals face, is the, "I need an 8-hour class. I need a four-hour class." Whereas we then have to turn into consultants and say, "Well, what do you need the learner, your audience, to learn and know? What is critical?" Let's start there as opposed to what the time constraint is, how long you need the course to be.

[14:31]

Anthony: Yes. I challenge them immediately. Why 8 hours? Where'd you come up with that number? "Oh, well, because it's just a go-to thing. I need an 8-hour day." I said, "Let's focus on the need to know, let's build it. Let's make it interactive with follow up, application, and then we'll calculate out how much time it is, and you might be surprised we can maybe do it in two hours, three hours, or, if we do need all that, let's not do it in one day. Let's break it up a little bit, so that way you get the knowledge, it sets, and then you build on it."

Susan: It sounds, too, then you're more focused on training in the flow of work versus just focusing on that training event, more of an experience and integrating it into what they need and when they need it.

[15:20]

Anthony: Yes. Here's what you're going to learn. Here's where it's going to apply. Now here's your exercise to go out and do it, and when we do the follow up, they're being held accountable. Hey, look, let's talk about what you did and how you did it and what the effects were. Oh, it didn't work? Okay, let's go and analyze and take a look at that. The consecutive trainings aren't just, okay, here's a new skill. That first part is time spent to talk about what they learned previously, questions, answers, review, et cetera.

Jenny: Anthony, how do you use whether it's Giant University or what processor or what do you do to make sure team members get the right training when they need it? What is a technique or process that you're using or that you've built in?

Anthony: I think it's a number of items. What was generated was our leadership journey model, which gives you a base of where am I in my career, and puts you on a specific level.

[16:20]

What are the needed skills, capabilities that you need to be successful there? Then we cross-sectioned that with five different qualities of people growth, change, performance, and purpose. They're good concepts. We have them defined, but what that allows you to do is to sit down with a mentor, coach, et cetera, and say, "Okay, where are my strengths? What do I need to get that personal aspect?"

We have set programs at each of those levels, that base knowledge skill that I talked about before that people will go through that's now broken up. But within that, they're going to use the matrix as a guide to identify what their specific skills are. When they sit down, have those conversations, they'll be able to put those on their plans, and that's where Giant University comes in, which is a central hub and repository that connects all of our learning that's out there, that we give people the resources, they can find what they need, simply, easily with recommendations and do it on their own time.

[17:30]

I think a lot of times companies look at training as a one size fits all, and it's not absolutely…that. I think it's really that blend between those two things, that Giant University, that hub covers a number of areas - on demand is one area. It's everything that connects to external business partners, websites, blogs. We're bringing in a new learning management system that has about 3 million different learnings. You can do skill assessments and it allows us to connect everything. We'll be able to take those career paths that we've developed for those individual levels of our matrix and put them in there so people can see them, take them. It directs you to register for or a class. It tells you, "Okay, do these online learnings," and they can do it whenever they want, because it's going to be mobile.

[18:28]

We've integrated that with our learning lab. Learning lab is the section of all live classes, and we developed a course scheduler. This is where that reach to all people we couldn't get to in a year comes in. We plug in all of our live classes by quarter, the first three quarters of the year, and people can go search by business area or other topic and find a live class they need in one click register and then they can attend virtually, and we've linked all the materials for it. Linking the GU mobile with the course scheduler, aligning that with the leadership matrix, really brings everything together and integrates it into one homogenized package. Is that the right word?

[19:17]

The learning lab also has another area for managers or supervisors. Hey, learning, we have a need for this team, this area, this department, what do you got? Well, with the learning paths that we're creating in our GU mobile for the different levels, it's modular. You don't have to sit through. If you sat through it all, it'd be three quarters of a day, maybe, but you can pull out, oh, we need these two modules, so they can come in and request specific sections to meet the needs of their team members, so we can just grab and go and give them exactly what they need as identified by the supervisor.

Now, of course, you do the consult with them and talk about, work through, well, what do you mean by communication? What exactly is that? That really helps allow people to self-serve and then gives that other outreach to those departments to give them focus on looking for something.

[20:19]

Finally, the third pillar of GU is our development programs, which we have a host of secondary education business partners.

Team members can go in, use our tuition assistance, et cetera, and scholarship programs to get everything from a certificate, associate's, BA, BS, graduate degree. And then we have other partnerships with educational institutions, where we have designed custom programs for certificates that cover some core skills in a specific area.

Again, we don't have time to teach all of those things. Let's let those professionals take care of it, and they can put that towards an advanced degree if they want, but it's one of those items on those pathways that we line up for the matrix that automatically come down. "Hey, look, here's this big path of these recommendations, here's all these classes you should take, here's some online learnings, et cetera." If you're interested, "Hey, here's some of these other educational programs that maybe you want to jump in and take as well."

[21:28]

Jenny: Anthony, tell me for everyone listening right now, there might be some in the same situation where they're ready to begin the journey of transformation within their company. What’s the one piece of advice you could give those learning leaders who might be in the situation you were a few years ago, or when you started this?

Anthony: I have to go to Socrates. I think he said it best with “Know thyself.”

How well do you know the structure of your learning initiatives? Are your programs clustered on certain areas? Are they info dumps? Are you providing an ongoing journey that keeps people excited and involved? Is it manageable bites? Are you giving them something to look forward to? The more you can understand your current structure and why you're doing that, you can evaluate if it's effective, and if not, don't be afraid to start kicking over rocks.

[22:24]

Don't take no for an answer. You say, "That's the way we've always done it." No. If you have to say that, then it's probably time for a change, time to update, try all these new things and I think you'll see, like we have, a more engaged set of team members, people coming to us for learning because they've said, "That was what I needed. It didn't waste my time. It was spot on. I got to apply it. I get to share my ideas." To make it interactive as well, know thyself.

Once you understand how your learning is developed and what the needs are, then you can start to put the pieces together little by little, but map it out, make that frame, what those ultimate things that you want to achieve with your team members. We said we want to retain. We want to increase the employee value proposition. That was our looking at the horizon there in order to follow it and that was our guiding light.

[23:24]

Jenny: Yes. That's a great piece of advice. I know we work with clients, we’ve coined or we use is, exploring their learning ecosystem. So we look, we explore with them what, look internal, look at yourself. What is your organization structure? How is learning viewed? What are the needs of the learner? Who is your learner? That really is important and a great piece of advice, so thank you.

Susan: Sounds like a lot of exciting things ahead for the Giant Company, and I love the focus on learning and the focus on the learner and the learner experience. It sounds like you're really, really dedicated to that. We look forward to hearing more about what's in store for your efforts, so thanks for joining us today, Anthony.

Jenny: Yes. Thank you, Anthony. Good luck on the full rollout. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks.

Anthony: Well, thank you very much. It was exciting to come out and talk and I enjoyed this very, very much to get to share all the great things we're doing for our team members.

[24:17]

Susan: Jenny, love lots of exciting things going on in learning and development at Giant. What are some of your takeaways from the interview with Anthony?

Jenny: Yes, agreed, Susan. What I took away was, I think Anthony summarized it at the end in the three pillars, but really it was the crux of the whole conversation.

But the three pillars they built in their transformation of the learning function was first, that journey model that he talked about and the matrix. It's really assessing each individual to determine what level they're at, and what skills that they're going to need to get to the next level.

Then that second pillar were the learning labs, the classes that they built within Giant University.

Then, finally, the development programs, which is more career oriented, the next job. What are we preparing for in the future? It was secondary education, tuition, reimbursement programs, things like that. Having those three pillars really laid that framework and the foundation for them to create the entire program.

 

[25:24]

Susan: It does really sound like a holistic approach they're taking, and I think they're going to have great success with it. What's new at d'Vinci? What are you working on?

Jenny: We just kicked off a project with a Fortune 500 company that's an American producer and marketer of beer, wine and spirits. This project actually, I think I can equate to the discussion we just had with Anthony, and I'd say that we're working with them to shape the framework, the foundation for their overall learning plan. This plan similar to Giant's journey model is going to shape and inform their course curriculum. And then at the same time, we're also working with them to build learning labs, which connects to a Giant second pillar, what Anthony talked about.

[26:04]

These learning labs are instructor-led and are going to be delivered either synchronously or asynchronously, and then, finally, we're also creating some eLearning modules using a mix of Articulate Rise or 360, depending on the content. There's definitely that hook with what Anthony said, so we're excited to work on this project.

Susan: Well, I look forward to hearing more about it. Thanks, Jenny.

Jenny: You're welcome.

Susan: Many thanks to Anthony Amadure of Giant/Martin's for joining us today. If you have any questions about what we talked about today, you could reach out to us on d'Vinci social channels, through our website dvinci.com or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

[music]

Voiceover: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

[00:27:09]

d’Vinci Interactive announced today that its COO Mason Scuderi has acquired an equity stake in the company and has been named its president. In this role, he will be responsible for further growing d’Vinci as a leading learning solutions and educational technology provider.

Scuderi began his career at d’Vinci in 1997, developing interactive training programs for corporations, government agencies and educational institutions. In 2011, he took on a leadership role after d’Vinci founder Vince Hellane passed away. Also at that time, he started providing creative and technology consulting to clients and expanded d’Vinci into developing educational websites and applications. In 2013, d’Vinci was acquired by JPL, an integrated marketing agency, and Scuderi took on the role of chief operating officer.

Under Scuderi’s leadership, d’Vinci has grown to twenty employees working with leading organizations including PBS LearningMedia, the National Institutes of Health, and Constellation Brands. The company has recently won awards for its educational work for SAE International and the National Conference of State Legislatures. d’Vinci was also just awarded a contract to implement a learning management system for the Western Regional Counterdrug Training Center.

“In promoting Mason, we are committing to an experienced and proven leader in the learning solutions and technology industry. He has a deep understanding of and passion for the power that learning can have on an individual’s and organization’s performance,” said Luke Kempski, d’Vinci’s CEO.

With Scuderi as president, d’Vinci CEO and JPL President, Luke Kempski will take a step back from direct involvement with the company and focus on special projects and long-term strategies.

“Now more than ever, d’Vinci brings value to our clients by developing solutions that deliver extraordinary learning outcomes. I’m excited to lead our passionate and experienced team to a new level of success,” said Scuderi.

d’Vinci Interactive is an award-winning comprehensive learning solutions provider for corporate, government, medical, non-profit, and K-12 target markets. The company expands its capabilities and capacity by partnering with its parent company, JPL.

When you move beyond designing a learning event to creating a learning experience, you can amplify your performance outcomes. This is how Marybeth (MB) Weiss, VP of People and Culture approaches her work at FORME, an at-home fitness technology company. 

View Transcript

 

Show Notes: 
Combining her experiences as a learning designer and personal trainer, MB Weiss recommends putting the learner at the center of a comprehensive learning solution. Here are some key points from her interview.

• Build brand and company loyalty by delivering a learning experience through multiple learning touchpoints not just a single learning event.
• Consider the learner's social and environmental factors, as well as the latest news and social trends, to inform your themes and delivery methods.
• Make social learning part of the experience in order to increase engagement and improve results. 

Read more about d'Vinci's work for POZ

Learn more about FORME

Powered by Learning earned an Award of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio category from The Communicator Awards and a Silver Davey Award for Educational Podcast. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts.

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Susan Cort VO: [00:00:00] This is Powered by Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

Voiceover: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan Cort: Hello, and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host, Susan Cort. Today I'm joined by d'Vinci's CEO, Luke Kempski, and our guest, Marybeth or MB Weiss, the Vice President of People and Culture at Forme, an at-home fitness technology company. Welcome to Powered by Learning, Marybeth.

Luke Kempski: I'm so glad you could join us, MB.

Marybeth Weiss: I'm excited to be here, thank you for having me.

[00:01:03]

Susan: First, start off by telling us a little bit about your background and also about your team of personal trainers who provide the on-demand classes on a home smart gym. What a great business to be in.

Marybeth: Yes, sure. I have a background in learning, design, and technology. That's what my education is in but I really started as a personal trainer in the industry, and I just grew to love helping people and helping people learn how to move and how to just learn about themselves through that process. That really got me into the education space and the learning space and grew to love everything people and culture, and that helped me elevate myself at that Forme and into the role of people and culture, so here I am today. I'm really excited to talk about everything we're going to talk about today around learning experiences.

Luke: Great, thanks for sharing that background, MB. I know you speak about learning experiences. To get us started, tell us how you view the difference between a learning event and a learning experience.

Marybeth: I think this is a really great question because you [00:02:00] can really think of them as like the same thing, but they're really not. I view a learning event as a single instance of learning. It can be a training or a course or even a curriculum sometimes, to me, it can be an event. Whereas a learning experience really puts the learner at the center of an ecosystem in my mind.

Rather than thinking about it linerally, where learning is straight from the teacher to the learners, you really have to put the learner at the center of their world, and then facilitate all the activities around the learner. Whether that's the activities, the materials, the information, emails, infographics, classes, discussions, presentations, when there's anything that affects the learner becomes a part of that ecosystem. It's not just the teacher or the facilitator to the learner, it's everything that surrounds them, that affects the learner's experience and that all encompasses that world.

Luke: Why do you think that there's a lot more talk about looking at learning from an experience standpoint rather than an event? Why do you think it's evolving right now?

[00:03:01]

Marybeth: I think we have to look at not just the learners in their context of learning. We need to look at the whole person. I think that the same is true for personal training, which is the world that I come from. You can't just think of their world as they move or the learner in their context of learning. You can't just isolate that anymore. We have our phones in our pockets, we have the computer at our fingertips; information is everywhere. We're also seeing this shift in purchasing. We're seeing this shift from possessions to experiences.

We have to actually consider the learner outside of just learning.

They're placing more value on buying experiences, going out, especially after COVID, we want to go out and do things. The same is true for learning. We want to experience learning versus just attending and being passive in our learning. We have to really take what they're doing now into the learning context as well. If we're making that shift in other areas, in purchasing, in what's happening in the world around us, we have to also apply [00:04:00] that to learning as well.

Susan: MB, I have a question. I'm curious, you mentioned what you learn from the business that you do in training people as personal trainers, how does that relate to your world of training your trainers? We talk about training the trainers in L&D, but you're actually training the personal trainers. Talk about some of the lessons learned from your business and how it impacts what you do from an L&D standpoint.

Marybeth: Oh, it's a great question. There's so much overlap besides the confusion between training and training, but the human connection piece and the personalization piece, I think personal training, it's really about taking what does this person need for their journey and really making that connection to them personally. The same is true for our learners - what do they need? How do we make that human connection to them and design the experience for them specifically?

There's obviously things that are consistent across all humans, across all movement, across all learners, [00:05:00] but we have all unique differences that we'll need to take into account. I think that's true whether that's personal training or that's learning and development. That really is something that has carried over for me in both of the worlds that I live in right now.

Luke: That's excellent. When you think about creating learning experiences and the people who are responsible for creating them, which are a lot of our listeners are, in helping them look at learning design differently and designing learning experiences and also how they work with the subject matter experts they work with, how do you think that framing of learning experiences really helps them?

Marybeth: I think it helps them because you really have to understand and know your learner really well. I think it goes beyond a little bit of learner analysis and really get on a deeper level. Think design thinking. Think user persona, something that we learned from the UX, UI world. You have to go a little bit deeper and actually take the time to really empathize and understand your learner just a little bit more. [00:06:00]

I think for subject matter experts, for your clients, for whomever, they may have a broad understanding, but for the instructional design to really understand them on a deeper level, it'll help really connect to that personal connection, that personalization piece that you really need to create that learning experience.

Luke: I agree. Do you have an example of a learning experience that you've created? One that can really be a model for our listeners in terms of thinking about this approach to design.

Marybeth: We're still in the process of building out and piloting our curriculum process at Forme, but what I am happy to share is our thinking and our approach, which I think may be a little bit more helpful, is how you go about conceptualizing the learning experience. We started with how we wanted the team to feel as they came on board to Forme and what they were going to feel throughout the process, so what they felt as soon as they stepped into our doors, which is a remote team, so it's a little bit metaphorical. What were they going to feel day one?

[00:06:59]

We really wanted them to feel this sense of community, this sense of support, and this sense of autonomy at the same time because they're adult learners and they're on their own. How do they shape their own path in this sense? When we were designing the curriculum for them, we knew we wanted to have a lot of social learning opportunities through seasoned trainers supporting them, through smaller groups because we had a bigger cohort coming in.

Even with a remote team, a big cohort can be overwhelming, so we knew we wanted to add in social learning so that was part of the experience. We knew we wanted to give them an opportunity to give input because we're a startup too, so we've input at every aspect of the curriculum, feedback. We knew we wanted to implement that along the way. That was part of our design.

Then we knew we want it to be an experience, and I emphasize the word experience. I know we're talking about that. We knew from day one from the minute they got their equipment, it was branded. It's hello, it's hi. Then the minute they have their first class with us, it's everyone's there, [00:08:00] they're saying hello. It's a social event. Their email's branded. It's a whole thing. We knew that's how we wanted them to feel from the beginning, and then we designed the curriculum around that, objectives, and goals, et cetera. That still exists. The instructional design process doesn't go away because we shifted our thinking, but we really started with what we wanted them to feel and what we wanted them to experience as they went through and then designed the objectives from there.

Luke: How, as an organization, do you think that that would improve your performance to have that kind of an experience? What metrics or what things would you be trying to take to another level?

Marybeth: I think we're seeing a lot of organizational research around business drivers and business impact around learning culture and innovation and how more engaged employees are always learning, and there's a growth mindset there too. You can look at productivity, you can look at how fast your company is evolving, you can look at turnover. All the same business impact and drivers that you're looking at already, [00:09:02]  but also look at employee experience, employee engagement, and then retention.

Then look at employee NPS as well because the more engaged your employees are, the more excited they are to be there. Then also look at when employees go. You want word-of-mouth referrals from people who worked at your company and then refer back to your company. It's an even greater acknowledgment of how great the culture is at your company as well. You want to look at those things too.

I think it's important to know that if your employees are always learning and they're always engaged in the experience, the more value they're bringing into your company. We are also seeing the trend of people wanting more on-the-job training and more coaching, and that's more of an experience than going to a single event. We're seeing those trends as well.

Luke: It's really hitting them from all those different directions and making it so that it's not separated from the work that they're doing, it's really all integrated into their jobs.

Marybeth: Right, and that goes back to that personalization piece [00:10:00] and meeting the learner where they're at, which is what we're trying to do. We're going to see a lot of that trend toward mobile, basically meeting the learner in their every day and not taking them away from their job, but actually working upstream versus against the stream. It's going to help keep your learners engaged in their productivity and their job on day-to-day basis.

Luke: Yes, no doubt. Now let's look ahead a little bit what changes in technology and say changes in the economy and social environment and what would you expect in terms of how learning experiences will evolve in the coming years?

Marybeth: I think we're still going to see this trend toward a hybrid, blended learning model, where we're going to see a lot of e-learning blended with live events, live online learning, definitely more remote teams, but we're still going to have that need for social interaction and finding creative ways for us to come together. Zoom fatigue is real, video conferencing fatigue is real. The tool is not the problem, it's just being on the screen is the problem.

[00:11:01]

That need for social interaction, that need for personal connection. We're going to see more tools that bring people together in that way, but also more mobile learning. We're going to see a lot of tools that allow people to be on the train on their commute or on their way home from vacation, just learning something really quick, that microlearning. We're going to see a lot of that quick, not like you said, not taking them away from their job, but actually blending in with their every day.

Luke: At that point of performance, right?

Marybeth: Right, when they need it.

Luke: Yes, exactly. Before you leave us, MB, are you able to share something that you're working on now and something that has you excited in your position?

Marybeth: Yes, like I said, we're still piloting our curriculum process. We're about to launch some stuff in Q1, really that social learning piece. We're designing a really exciting mentorship process that I'm really jazzed for. We're bringing in a lot of personal trainers to lead it and it's going to be really exciting for them, but bringing them into small cohorts where they're allowed to work together, share feedback, and also [00:12:00] learn from each other. People learn more from each other than they do from the facilitator sometimes, or actually a lot of the time. Giving them an opportunity to do that, but design that in a way where we build the frame, but they paint the picture, I think is the most rewarding thing as a facilitator. Design that experience for them, I think is the most exciting thing I'm working on right now.

Luke: It all sounds good. We'll certainly like to have you come back and tell us how it's going after a year or so.

Susan: I think it'd be exciting too, thinking about you training your trainers and all those lessons that they learn, how that impacts the training that they then give to your end-user, your consumer. I would think your trainers can carry a lot of those lessons onto the end-user as well.

[00:12:41]

Marybeth: Absolutely. In a way, personal trainers are teachers and facilitators of movement, nutrition, recovery, and all these other things about lifestyle modification. I absolutely agree with that. I think they do a lot more than just count reps and I want to give them a lot more credit than- they deserve a lot more credit than they get usually.

Luke: Yes, no doubt. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.

Marybeth: Of course, I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much.

Susan: Bye-bye.

Marybeth: Bye.

Susan: Wow, Luke, lots of exciting things going on at Form under MB Weiss's leadership.

Luke: That's for sure. Thanks, Susan. It really was a fun conversation with MB. I like how her background as a personal trainer impacts how she designs learning experiences. [00:13:25] She considers the learner at the center of an ecosystem. She wants to have multiple touchpoints that impact the learner, not just an event, and she not only wants to make them knowledgeable, she also wants them to be engaged and be proud to be part of Forme.

She also talked about having the learning experience consider the social and environmental factors currently influencing the learner. The more the learning touchpoints take into account the time of year or recent news or social trends in both the themes and the delivery, the more engaged the learner will be, and the better they will feel about the experience. [00:14:00]

As an example, she talked about the onboarding curriculum they're about to launch. They've designed it with defined learning objectives, of course, but beyond that, they've added objectives for how the learner should feel about each part of the experience. They're really considering social and learning experiences together with the outcome being knowledgeable team members who are brand champions too and fostering culture and referrals.

In summary, MB is following a fresh and hybrid approach and a blended learning model that integrates e-learning, live events, email, mobile messaging, and a lot of other tactics, and importantly also addresses a learner's need for social interaction. Just what you'd expect from a personal trainer.

Susan: Great summary, Luke. What's new at d'Vinci? Anything you want to share with our listeners?

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Luke: Oh, yes, Susan. I wanted to mention the new learning module we recently developed with POZ. A print and online brand for people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. The new module educates this audience about potential causes of HIV-related weight gain so they can manage their treatment and improve their quality of life. I know we've also developed other e-learning courses and assessment tools for POZ so their audience can learn more from testing and prevention to responding to a diagnosis and how to cope with aging. It's always rewarding to use our talents, to provide this kind of health education.

Susan: Absolutely great to see the work that we're doing really help educate people and make people's lives better. Thanks for sharing Luke. Thanks, Luke, and many thanks to MB Weiss of Forme for joining us today. If you have any questions about what we talked about, you can reach out to us on d'Vinci's social channels, through our website, dvinci.com, or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

Susan Cort VO: Powered by learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, [00:16:00] corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

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