L&D Must Change

What if there were tools available to everyone in our organizations that would answer our questions and guide us through complicated tasks exactly at our moment of need? What if we, as L&D pros, could intentionally design such tools to provide informal learning in the flow of work? We can! It's called a "digital coach" and it just might be a game changer. Join me and today's guest, Chris King, to talk about this concept, when it's best to use it, and how fancy (or not) it needs to be. You'll hear:

• The most important purpose of L&D = enabling and changing behavior in the workplace
• L&D's capability for formal and informal learning
• A clear definition of the "digital coach"
• The five moments of learning need
• What to do in classroom training vs. informal approaches
• The importance of methodology before technology
• Starting to incorporate a digital coach into your work

Chris King is in his third decade in L&D, creating learning that actually improves performance and changes workplace behaviors. Recently, as the Executive Director of the 5 Moments of Need® Academy, he was responsible for spreading the word about digital coaches, workflow learning, and optimizing how organizations learn and perform. He is a project manager, a culture transformation architect, and an innovation catalyst for inspired learning solutions. His passion is optimizing how organizations learn and perform. He leverages his credentials as a 5 Moments of Need® Designer, Project Management Professional, Certified ScrumMaster, and a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® certified facilitator to modernize learning and get [stuff] done. Find and connect with Chris King here:

• LinkedIn
• Five Moments of Need

Find and connect with Jess Almlie here:

• LinkedIn
• Subscribe to the L&D Must Change Newsletter
• Website

Additional Links from the Show:

• Book: Electronic Performance Support Systems by Gloria Gery

In the last year, Abigail Wheeler Charlu (Abby) interviewed 50 L&D professionals in a variety of roles to learn more about the L&D landscape. She was curious about what people do in this profession, the breadth and depth of different roles, the skills and knowledge in each. In this episode, she shares her key takeaways and insights as well as a bit about her subsequent thoughts on how L&D needs to change as a result.

Tune in to hear Abby and Jess discuss the results of Abby's informal research study including:

• Why study all these L&D roles?
• The breadth of the L&D profession
• The many opportunities for specialization within L&D
• The wide variance of L&D titles
• The critical need to clearly tie L&D to business objectives
• The emergence of internal talent marketplaces
• Common knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for success in L&D
• Advice for those looking to transition in L&D roles

Abigail Wheeler Charlu (Abby) is a program manager, learning strategist, and performance consultant with over 9 years of leading end-to-end learning and leadership development programs. She leverages strong skills in research methods, relationship building, project management, marketing, facilitation, and analytics to enable skills development, drive change, and uplevel performance. Abby holds a master's degree in industrial and organizational psychology and has deep experience supporting global teams. She is driven by curiosity, collaboration, and impact and is on a mission to equip individuals, teams, and organizations with the skills they need to thrive in this human era of work.

Currently, Abby is a Program Manager and Lead Learning Experience Designer at AROSE Group, a boutique leadership and organizational development consulting company where she designs and delivers custom leadership development programs and supports the creation and execution of thought leadership and industry knowledge.

Find and connect with Abby here:

• LinkedIn
• Listen to the 50 Interviews: Surveying the L&D Landscape (podcast)
• Website: AROSE Group

Find and connect with Jess Almlie here:

• LinkedIn
• Subscribe to the L&D Must Change Newsletter
• Website: Learning Business Advisor Consulting

Why do we try to navigate complex, ever-changing careers relying on only ourselves or a manager? Why do we tend to think that career development needs to be a program or process? According to Julie Winkle Giulioni, career development champion, thought leader, and guru, we are making it too complicated. We need to simplify career development down to quality conversations. Conversations that we have together with our peers, our managers, and more. Career development should be a team sport.

Tune into this episode and hear Julie and I discuss:

• Making career development a team sport
• How career development is different in our current day and age
• The beauty of hindsight, foresight, and insight
• Immobilizing myths that hold managers and L&D back from effective career development
• The power of asking great questions as a simple career development tool
• Key elements within Julie's new book, Help them Grow or Watch them Go with co-author Beverly Kaye

Julie Winkle Giulioni is a champion for workplace growth and development and helps executives and leaders optimize talent and potential within their organizations. One of Inc. Magazine's Top 100 speakers, she's the author of Promotions Are So Yesterday: Redefine Career Development. Help Employees Thrive and the co-author of the international bestseller, Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Organizations Need and Employees Still Want, translated into seven languages.

Julie is a regular columnist for Training Industry Magazine and SmartBrief and contributes articles on leadership, career development, and workplace trends to numerous publications including Fast Company and The Economist. You can keep up with Julie through her blog and LinkedIn.

Find out more and connect with Julie Winkle Giulioni here:

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Book: Promotions Are So Yesterday: Redefine Career Development. Help Employees Thrive
• New Book! Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Organizations Need and Employees Still Want
• Website: https://www.help-them-grow.com

Find out more and connect with Jess Almlie here:

• LinkedIn
• Subscribe to the L&D Must Change Newsletter
• Website: www.lbacllc.com

One note on pre-orders for Julie's new book!

Pre-order Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go and you will gain access to a specially curated library of microlearning videos from Julie Winkle Giulioni and Bev Kaye on a range of important topics that will enhance your leadership and help you get the most from the book – all provided by AthenaOnline. Just place your pre-order with your favorite bookseller, share your information here (https://www.help-them-grow.com/athena-online/), and jumpstart your career development efforts immediately. (Note: This offer will expire on September 24.)

Is a lack of strategic thinking holding us back? Today's guest, Mary Rapaport, believes that when we channel a more strategic mindset, the business culture thrives, teams become more creative, and employees lean in and engage more. The challenge is that we are up against a work culture that rewards execution over thinking, reflection, and strategy. Let's change that!

In this episode you'll hear:

• Upping the impact of L&D by thinking of ourselves as businesspeople first and L&D functional experts second.
• Strategic thinking as a mindset and a skillset.
• Turning data into insights.
• Maturing the L&D function to be more strategic.
• The importance of understanding your company's growth strategy.
• Understanding what executives really care about.
• Integrating strategic thinking into our day, instead of checking it off our list.
• The challenge of operating in a culture that rewards us for getting stuff done instead of thinking and reflection.
• One thing L&D can do today to start working more strategically.

Mary Rapaport is on a mission to democratize strategic thinking. She believes it's not just for the elite few, but for everyone in an organization. When everyone channels a strategic mindset, the business culture thrives, teams become more creative, and employees lean in and engage more. Cultivating this mindset helps leaders create a better (and more fun) place to work, fostering a stronger culture of creativity and innovation.

As a strategic thinking architect, Mary empowers leaders and teams across all functions and levels to think, act, and lead more strategically. As the founder of Xcelerate, she builds learning strategies, designing and delivering immersive learning experiences that ignite "aha moments" and drive tangible business results.

Mary also champions inclusive growth through the Minority Business Growth Alliance, a non-profit providing invaluable coaching and support to BIPOC entrepreneurs. She holds an MBA, a BA in International Business and French, and is a certified leadership and sales trainer. Mary has extensive experience in marketing, transformation, and strategic initiatives. She also serves as the current president of the Twin Cities chapter of the Association of Talent Development.

Find and connect with Mary Rapaport here:

• LinkedIn
• Website: Xcelerate
• Learning Experience: The Strategic Playground
• Strategic Thinking Resources

Find and connect with Jess Almlie here:

• LinkedIn
• L&D Must Change Newsletter
• Website: Learning Business Advisor Consulting

What if L&D showed up as an organizational contributor instead of a service provider? Today's guest, Robyn A. Defelice regularly models this approach and also partners with L&D leadership and teams to help them make the change. Turns out, it's about seeing the bigger picture and getting real curious. She asks why a lot. Oh, and it might have something to do with Captain Kirk from Star Trek. Listen in and hear about:

• L&D as a business function
• Shifting from complaining to contributing
• The mission statement as a rolled up version of capabilities in the organization
• The need for L&D to optimize our own function
• System thinking with DSRP: Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives
• Operating like Captain Kirk instead of Doc or Spock
• Running alongside our stakeholders
• Elevating challenges for business prioritization decisions
• Taking control to alter our own L&D reality
• Gathering data about L&D team capacity and then getting curious

Robyn A. Defelice, PhD is a learning intrapreneur, author, and presenter with over 20 years in the L&D field. She is the co-author of Microlearning: Short and Sweet and has been researching How Long it Takes to Develop Training for over a decade. Robyn is happiest when she is collaborating with L&D leadership and teams to get them to the decision-making table. Her mission is to empower her peers through unlocking their untapped capabilities and capacity for effective L&D. Her experience spans corporate to manufacturing, government to higher education, and non-profits to startups. She is currently serving as a board member of L&D Cares, the VP of Programming for Association for Talent Development of Central PA, and is a member of Learning Leaders Alliance through The Learning Guild. Find and connect with Robyn A. Defelice here:

• LinkedIn
• Book: Microlearning: Short and Sweet

Find and connect with Jess Almlie here:

• LinkedIn
• Subscribe to the L&D Must Change Newsletter
• Learning Business Advisor Consulting

There are a lot of different brains in the world and all of them are good. But they may process information in alternate ways that don't look "typical" from the outside. It doesn't mean learning isn't happening. The goal of designing for neurodiversity is to make learning accessible for all those brains.

Today's guest is neurodiversity expert, Jessica Michaels. After receiving her own diagnosis of autism and ADHD in her late 30's, Jessica started to use her own personal experiences combined with her knowledge of L&D to amp up learning design with options that make sense for all the different types of brains.

Listen in on my conversation with Jessica to learn more about:

• An explanation of neurodiversity
• A different type of "multi-modal" design
• Focusing more energy on the outcome than the process
• The fluctuation of learning preferences
• The importance of self awareness and humility when designing for and working with neurodiverse brains

Jessica Michaels is an award-winning speaker, former stand-up comic, and manager development specialist. In her 30s, she discovered she was autistic and had ADHD. She now combines her experience and knowledge of L&D to educate, advocate, and advise on neurodiversity in business. With humor and directness, she shows her audiences how every employee benefits from a neuroinclusive environment. As a coach, she works one-on-one with professionals, trying to build the toolbox to work with their brains, not against them. Through her YouTube channel, she provides free resources with content like The Procrastination Fairy and The Neurodiverse Workplace. Her latest venture is a new networking and coaching group for neurodivergent professionals, and anyone interested in a neuroinclusive work environment. Jessica, her wife Ellie, and their dog Detritus live in Denver. Together, the humans host the Gifted Kid Messy Adult podcast, while the dog supervises.

Find out more and connect with Jessica Michaels here:

LinkedIn Website: www.coachjessicamichaels.com YouTube Channel: Coach Jessica Michaels Podcast: Gifted Kid, Messy Adult Udemy Course: Supporting Neurodiversity in the Workplace: A Manager's Guide to Unlocking High Performance in Employees with ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, and Other Neurodivergencies

Find out more and connect with Jess Almlie here:

LinkedIn Newsletter: L&D Must Change Website: Learning Business Advisor Consulting

It's one thing to try and gather a few numbers, it's another to integrate measurement into every fragment of L&D. But yet, this is where measurement becomes most valuable. When integrated, measurement can provide the insights and actions needed to inform decisions. It doesn't just fade away, it endures as a valuable source of quality information.

This is why today's guest, Peggy Parskey, co-author of Measurement Demystified and other books, insists that measurement needs to be tied to a change effort. But she also insists that starting to measure is better than waiting to know everything. It's a nuanced and flexible necessity for L&D pros today.

Listen in on my conversation with Peggy to learn more about:

• Integrating measurement into every fragment of L&D
• The measurement ecosystem model
• Balancing measurement as you build it out
• The changing nature of measurement
• Considering the unintended consequences of measurement
• Determining current organizational capacity for measurement
• Sharing actionable data
• Getting started with measurement in L&D
• Career benefits of learning more about measurement

Peggy Parskey has over 25 years of experience driving strategic change to improve organizational and individual performance. She focuses on team and organizational performance improvement leveraging measurement, management of change and organizational design to ensure sustainable capability. Peggy owns her own consulting firm, Parskey Consulting, focused on organizational improvement initiatives. She is also a Principal Consultant and part-time staff member with Explorance. Her clients are large and midsized firms requiring performance measurement of core business processes including employee engagement, diversity, equity and inclusion, culture change, and talent programs such as training, mentoring, and performance management.

Peggy collaborates with her clients to build sustainable measurement capability to drive continuous improvement. She has co-authored three books on learning measurement as well as several book chapters and magazine articles on measurement strategy, learning analytics and visual storytelling.

Find out more and connect with Peggy Parskey here:

LinkedIn Book: Measurement Demystified: Creating Your L&D Measurement, Analytics, and Reporting Strategy Book: Measurement Demystified Field Guide Book: Learning Analytics: Using Talent Data to Improve Business Outcomes Find out more and connect with Jess Almlie here:

LinkedIn Newsletter: L&D Must Change Website: Learning Business Advisor Consulting

Online training can be better than in person training. Are you a believer? Or are you thinking that will never be true? Today's guest is none other than online learning pioneer and virtual training hero, Kassy LaBorie who is a firm believer that online training is equal to and can be better than in person training.

Of course, the trajectory of online and virtual training shot up after the COVID pandemic and associated lockdowns. We all realized that online learning can be engaging and efficient. It can help to scale and save us time and money. But many of us still think of it as "less than" in person training. Kassy wants us to shift our thinking. She shares how with some practical takeaways.

Listen in on my conversation with Kassy to learn more about:

• How Kassy got started as a virtual training pioneer
• Stopping ourselves from putting up blockers that online training is "less than" before we explore how it could be "better than" in person
• How tech is cool, but people are cooler
• The difficulties that come with learning something new
• Challenges that come with working remotely, even for a pro
• The story of a chocolate maker who adapted and created a "better than" offering online
• Practical steps to start creating your own "better than" online learning experience

Kassy LaBorie is the founder and principal consultant at Kassy LaBorie Consulting, LLC. She is a professional speaker, author, facilitator, and instructional designer who specializes in virtual engagement for learning and development professionals and business owners who get to use web conferencing technology to connect with people around the globe.

In her previous role at Dale Carnegie & Associates, she was the director of virtual training services, a corporate consultancy that partnered with organizations to help them develop, design, and deliver successful online training strategies. Kassy also served as the product design architect responsible for developing the company's live online training product and experience, leading a team that built a $4 million dollar business in 4 years.

Kassy is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and the co-author of two books about engaging online (see links below).

Find out more and connect with Kassy Laborie here:

• LinkedIn
• Website: kassyconsulting.com
• Website: kassyspeaks.com
• Book: Interact and Engage! 75+ Activities for Virtual Training, Meetings, and Webinars
• Book: Producing Virtual Training, Meetings, and Webinars

Find out more and connect with Jess Almlie here:

• LinkedIn
• Website: Learning Business Advisor Consulting

One more fun link from this episode:

• Laughing Gull Chocolates

It's time to ditch the way we view onboarding. In most companies, onboarding is a formal time period that ends when the L&D team walks out, and the manager walks in. But new employees aren't ready to work autonomously after onboarding and far too many managers aren't set up to continue developing them to get there. This often results in anxiety, confusion, and even regression on the part of the new employee. It's time to stop onboarding and start everboarding, a systems approach that swaps a defined training time period for a continuous development cycle focuses on longevity and success over time.

After discovering that onboarding was a poor predictor of future performance, Amber Watts started asking why. That led her to dive in and design an employee's training experience differently. The concept of everboarding, focusing on the systems and people who support performance, was born.

Listen in on my conversation with Amber to learn more about:

• The components of everboarding that make it different than onboarding
• Equipping and supporting managers as part of the new employee experience
• Establishing a mentor program in addition to a buddy program
• L&D's role in aligning employee targets/KPIs in everboarding
• Measuring effectiveness in an employee's ramp up
• Questions to ask frontline managers when learning about their needs
• The importance of partnership with the talent acquisition team

Amber Watts has over a decade of expertise in Talent Development and Sales Enablement, and deeply cares about fostering performance science wherever she goes. Throughout her career, she has left a significant impact on various industries. Currently serving as the Chief Revenue Officer at Magnet Medical. She holds a B.S. in Business Management & Leadership and a certification in Virtual Training Design. She was an Emerging Training Leader from Training Magazine in 2019, earned a Stevie Award for Sales Training/Coaching Program in 2020, and an award for Excellence in Learning Leadership with ATD Nebraska in 2023.

Find out more and connect with Amber Watts here:

LinkedIn Website: makelearningrad.com

Find out more and connect with Jess Almlie here:

LinkedIn Subscribe to the L&D Must Change Newsletter Website: Learning Business Advisor Consulting

Stories have the power to hold us in anticipation, motivate us to learn more, and connect with others on a human level. Rance Greene discovered this by accident when he made the move from directing actors on the stage to directing the creation of compliance training in business. Suddenly, ethics and compliance jumped to the top line item in the company culture survey. People knew what to do, listened to the stories, and reported that they were looking forward to the next round of compliance training. Can you imagine this happening in your company?

Rance achieved this seemingly impossible feat using powerful stories in the compliance training. Stories that humanized the learners, provided a strong conflict, and motivated them to resolution.

Listen in on my conversation with Rance to learn more about:

• Working with stakeholders and SMEs as humans first and sources of information second.
• The disrespect shown by not including observable actions in training.
• The importance of defining relatable characters, strong conflict, and a desire for resolution in a story designed for learning.
• Three questions to ask when starting any design project.

Rance Greene is often known as the "Story Man," but he prefers the title "Story Designer." He formed needastory.com and the School of Story Design (schoolofstorydesign.com) for those who struggle with storytelling at work. His methodology—Story Design—gives leaders and talent development professionals a systematic and creative way for discovering who their audience is and how to persuade them to act on new ideas. He helps leadership teams, entrepreneurs and instructional designers discover that they are uniquely equipped to tell the best story for their audiences. Rance is the author of Instructional Story Design, a practical guide for developing stories that train. He coaches, teaches, speaks, and writes often on the benefits of stories to connect people to one another. Find out more and connect with Rance Greene here:

• LinkedIn
• Website: www.needastory.com
• School: www.schoolofstorydesign.com
• "Story Zone" Blog: https://www.schoolofstorydesign.com/blog
• Book: Instructional Story Design: Develop Stories That Train
• Email: [email protected]

Find out more and connect with Jess Almlie here:

• LinkedIn
• Subscribe to the L&D Must Change Newsletter
• Learning Business Advisor Consulting