Powered by Learning

L&D Leaders Share Views on Today's Training Industry

July 22, 2022 d'Vinci Interactive Season 2 Episode 38
Powered by Learning
L&D Leaders Share Views on Today's Training Industry
Show Notes Transcript

While learning leaders have different training goals and educate various audiences, they share common challenges to engage learners and get results. We spoke to attendees at the Training Industry Conference & Expo (TICE) to hear about their greatest challenges and successes. 

 

Show Notes: The L&D leaders featured in this episode shared issues and solutions related to understanding the ROI of training, finding enough time for training, and aligning training with business goals. Some of their key takeaways include the following:

  • Measurement should not be an afterthought in training. Think about how you’re going to measure results as you develop a course.
  • Set expectations with leadership. If you say the training will take a week, it should take a week and you should be able to identify results. The C-Suite wants to see return on investment and you want to be able to provide that.
  • Consider creating a learning toolkit to support managers so they can help team members continue the learning after the training is over.
  • Using training tools, such as a podcast, can help break through the clutter and engage learners to get results. 

Special thanks to the following learning leaders who appeared on our podcast:

Loren Sanders, Sr. Manager Enterprise Learning and Development, CVS Health

Matthew Mortensen, Instructional Designer, First Energy

Jennifer Recla, Director of Organizational Learning and Development, Colorado Access

Sherry Connor, Digital Learning Administrator, PGT Innovations

Pamela King, CPTM, Technical Training Specialist, Broward County

Yvette Francis, Director of Learning Design, Boys and Girls Clubs of America

Michelle Thill, Manager of Training and Development, DaVita Kidney Care

Coming up: We’ll hear from TICE attendees about training in a hybrid environment on our next episode!

Related podcast:  L&D Trends from TICE

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 d'Vinci at www.dvinci.com.

[00:00]

Voice-over 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.

Voice-over 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 President Mason Scuderi. Mason and I recently attended the Training Industry Conference and Expo in Raleigh, North Carolina, where we heard from many people in the industry about the key challenges they're facing. 

[01:00]

Some of the conference attendees stopped by our booth to share their insights for our podcast.

Mason, we're going to listen to some of their challenges and successes, and get your thoughts along the way.

Mason Scuderi: Sounds good, Susan. I'm looking forward to hearing what's on their minds.

Susan: Great. Let's first hear from Loren Sanders, Senior Manager, Enterprise Learning and Development at CVS Health.

Loren, as a learning leader, what are you seeing as some of the biggest challenges today?

Loren Sanders: To be honest, I think the biggest challenge in learning is the connection that learning leaders have to measurement and the understanding of the way that measurement works and how it impacts future learning, and the fact that we are not measuring the effectiveness of people, we're measuring the effectiveness of programs. There seems to be a disconnect because a lot of times it'll use it to say this trainer is effective or not effective. When in reality, the trainer is delivering the instructional design, which is the program, and it might tell us more about that than it is about the individual.

Susan: What do you do to try to shift that?

[02:00]

Loren: On our team we have created a learning series for our learning leaders to help them understand more about measurement and how it works and why we do it. What's interesting is we're getting not only our learning leaders to come to that; we've had a lot of our HR business partners join in, which is really good.

Susan: You've seen a good impact of that?

Loren: Definitely more impact and more understanding about the importance of measurement, and why it should not be an afterthought but should be thought about as we develop programs.

Susan: That's probably so important with anything you do in learning is to not make something the afterthought. How do you build in that measurement early in the game so that you know what it is going into the project?

Loren: We've really moved into a model where we have program owners, and the program owners should bring people on the measurement team and at the beginning of the conversation. And doing that in an impactful and strategic way really makes a difference in pulling that measurement all the way through.

Susan: Mason, this is a theme we heard at the conference, and we hear with clients as well, that they need to not only measure the success [03:00] of the learning, but the learning needs to inform future learning.

Mason: Yes, absolutely, Susan. This was a key takeaway from the conference. There's more learning data on the table now than ever, and that has to help shape the direction of organizational training programs. At the same time, we should encourage stakeholders to be patient with initial measures and allow time for full adoption.

Susan: Absolutely. I also talked with Matthew Mortensen, an instructional designer with FirstEnergy, an electric utility company. Let's hear what's on his mind.

Matthew Mortensen: I think some of the biggest challenges are identifying ways to provide training while balancing productivity. A lot of the industries that I've worked with are in manufacturing, and manufacturing is all about getting the product out the door. The less time that people are training, the better that the leadership thinks, but you end up with more mistakes. And the common adage is, [04:00] you had time to do it twice, but you didn't have time to do it right the first time. I think the biggest challenge that I've encountered is identifying ways to balance training with productivity.

Susan: You come to any conclusions on how to tackle that challenge?

Matthew: It all comes down to getting leadership buy-in from the start, explaining what the plan is, and how much time the plan will take, and then getting their buy-in from the beginning, and then you have to show results. If you said, ‘it's only going to take a week to train for this particular skill,’ it should take a week to train and you should be able to identify results. People want to see return on investments, and you want to be able to provide that.

Susan: Matt certainly makes a great point about setting expectations with leadership and striking that balance between time in training and time on the job.

Mason: Agreed, Susan. Any successful training program needs support from leadership, and to help gain leadership buy-in, [05:00] we should advocate a clear return on training investment that's backed by data. We can complement that rationale by creating increasingly efficient training programs that can be completed in the flow of work and make the most of employees' precious time. Consider on-demand micro learning, short video animations, and browsable work video-guides as formats.

Susan: Matt mentioned the role of leadership, and that's also a point that Jennifer Recla, director of organizational learning and development at Colorado Access, which is a nonprofit health plan that mainly serves Medicaid members made. Here's what Jennifer had to say.

Jennifer Recla: I'd say one of the biggest challenges that we are facing right now is the critical role that leaders play in their employees' growth and development. As a learning team, we can help support, guide, provide resources, do the training. At the end of the day, when that learner goes back to the workplace, their direct leader is that support system for them to continue applying and using the tools that we provide to them.

[06:02]

Continuing to provide those leaders with what they need to be successful in that competency of developing themselves and others, it's so critical, and we hear all the time, I don't have time for this. I'd say that that's one thing we've really focused on the last couple of years.

Susan: That seems to be a challenge for everybody is just not having enough time. Have you made any progress of fighting that challenge?

Jennifer: Yes. So some of the things that we have been doing are providing coaching guides for our leaders. When one of their employees participates in some learning experience, they receive a guide on how do I continue the conversation, what did my employee learn, and what are some tips and tools to help them apply what they learned back into the workplace. We also provide a toolkit for our leaders on how to create a learning culture within their teams. We provide training and coaching around that as well. Those are just a couple of the interventions we've done so far.

[07:00]

Susan: That's some great ideas from Jennifer on how managers can support their team members throughout the learning process.

Mason: Absolutely. Having managers and leaders that are not only bought into the training but familiar with the topics and able to support their employees is essential.

Susan: Mason, a comment I know both of us heard from people at TICE is that there isn't enough time for training, and Sherri Connor with PGT Innovations in Florida, stopped by our booth to talk about that.

Sherri Connor: Everyone is so busy in our space. We are a manufacturer, but we sell to the construction trades. And everyone is just so swamped and so buried, nobody has time to sit down in front of a computer to learn things. That's been our biggest challenge is just having the people that really need the content, sit down and take the content, convincing their managers, that they need it. The culture is shifting, and it's getting better, because as it turns out, we're probably one of the only manufacturers of windows and doors that actually provides training.

[08:00]

Susan: Mason, among other modalities, Sherri is actually using podcasts to train workers.

Mason: That's amazing, Susan. There's nothing better than a podcast for absorbing knowledge on the go. She reinforces what we heard over and over at the conference, that a majority of companies are increasing their training investments.

Susan: I also had a chance to speak to Pamela King, who is a technical training specialist for Broward County in Florida, about her need for training results.

Pamela King: I think the biggest challenge is the opportunity to use new tools and new ideas to make sure that people are engaged. The other big challenge that I find is that we're not really tracking to see how people feel about the training that they're taking. We create the courses, we put them out there, people take it. We have no way of getting feedback to figuring out, did we tell them the right thing? Do they understand? Did they have any problems? Do they have any additional questions? Is there anything that they need to know in addition? [09:00] We don't have any way to track any of that.

Susan: Right now you don't know what the ROI is at all?

Pamela: We don't even know what the I is, so how can you tell what the R is?

Susan: Mason, what advice would you give to someone in Pamela's position?

Mason: Well, utilizing short friendly surveys at the end of a training course would be a great way to get feedback on how the training is being received and how to make it better. Also, encouraging a culture of feedback between training leaders and management will foster and encourage constructive feedback across the organization.

Susan: Mason, I think you had a chance to meet our next guest, Yvette Francis. She's the new director of learning design at the Boys & Girls Club of America. For her, one of the challenges that she's facing is how to grow the value of learning at their organization. Let's hear what she had to say.

Yvette Francis: Some of the challenges in my short tenure of two months at the Boys & Girls Club of America is just really trying to understand the constraints that the organization has based on their business model, and how me as a long-term [10:00] L&D professional can bring my expertise to those constraints. What that actually means in real life is just understanding how to get to a place of learning transfer. I think that that's where any learning professional worth their salt is about and really just wanting to be able to validate the training, and show that it leads to learning transfer first, and then, of course, behavior change.

My organization understands the value, I think, of training, but sees it more so as a resource to grab and go, and not really all of the activities required for you to get to the outcome you're looking for.

Susan: Mason, how can someone like Yvette help evolve the role of training at an organization?

Mason: Working within constraints was a key theme at the conference and a challenge we all face I think now more than ever. A key takeaway was to think outside of the box and get a training program started that's more basic than maybe your original vision, focus on what's essential first, [11:00] simple work guides, shorter modules, and PDF downloads. If applicable, launch a beta version to get things off the ground, then you can begin measuring, adapting, and improving the program over time.

Susan: Another one of our podcast guests at TICE, Michelle Thill, is a manager of training and development at DaVita Kidney Care. She shared some comments that I think will put the role of L&D in perspective for a lot of our listeners.

Michelle Thill: Maybe this might be my own personality, my desire to conquer it all. There's so many opportunities in L&D. I think the real challenge, and it fits with what we learned through the CPTM program at TICE, the real challenge is to make sure that we're aligned strategically with our organization, and so that we're devoting all of our energy to those things that, not only are we going to get the business to support financially, but that will create the outcomes that we are hired to do. The biggest challenge for me is to not try to boil the ocean [12:00] but to really just go after those few things and go after it with fervor, and let the other stuff find its own solution.

Susan: Great advice.

Mason: Agreed, Susan. You just can't go wrong staying aligned strategically and focusing on the L&D initiatives that matter most within your organization.

Susan: Absolutely. In our next episode, we're going to hear from more TICE attendees, and talk about what they're doing regarding learning in the flow of work, and how they're meeting the demands of a hybrid workforce. Our thanks to Loren, Matthew, Jennifer, Yvette, Sherri, Michelle, and Pamela, for talking with us at the conference, and to you Mason for joining us today.

Mason: Thanks, Susan. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Susan: If you have any questions about what we talked about, you can reach out to us through our website, dvinci.com, on our social channels, or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

Voice-over 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, [13:00] 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.