So today we’re joined by Katie, Katie Ryan. She’s the founder of A Positive Adventure, which is a learning and development consulting firm. It built an award winning training program for companies like Instacart, GreenLayer, Bill. com, LivingSocial, and others. So she’ll be walking through building a learning and development program and unfolding impactful training sessions.

questions in advance to make sure that it’s a thoughtful conversation. So Katie, I will kick it over to you. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Kristen. Hello, everybody. It’s great to be here with you and see some of your faces. I know some folks might have their videos off and just be listening in in the background, which is great as well. This will be an interactive call and we have seen all the questions that you’ve shared. So we have, I think, a few questions that came in prior to the call.

So I want to let you know that I’ve read those and there is a space towards the end where I’ll address those questions specifically. And throughout the call today, if you have any questions, you can either raise your hand, come off mute, ask the question or please feel free to use the chat freely all throughout the chat today. Sound good? It’s good to see everyone. As we’re getting started here, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d love for you to drop in the chat where you are calling in from in the world. Where are you?

And I’m going to share my screen as you do that. All right.

We got some folks from different places.

Beautiful. Let’s see what we got here. Immaculate Grand Rapids. Oh, probably a little bit cold there. Kansas City. All right. Arkansas. Florida.

Miami.

That sounds nice. Kansas City. All right. Beautiful. So from all over, I am normally based. I was in the Bay Area for many years. And throughout the last couple of years, I have navigated to Colorado. So I bought a house in the Rockies. I’m a mountain gal. And right now I’m actually calling in from Australia, working from all the way over here right now.

We’ve got some clients over here.

So I am thrilled to be here with you today. And we are talking about setting up a learning and development program, which is something very near and dear to my heart. As Kristen said, this is who I am. This stranger sitting across from you. I’m Katie. I’ve worked in learning and development for a long time and specifically with startups for around 13 years.

I love organizing the chaos of the people function, especially with startups and specifically in learning and development, by creating programs that are interesting, fun, pack a punch for an organization and really help drive behavior in any way an organization wants to drive it. Outside of work, I am a climber, so I like to be outside a lot. Hence the Colorado thing. I love to read and I love board games. So if you could drop in the chat just one thing about you that’s not related to work, what’s something you like to do outside of work?

Interested to see.

All right.

Keep that coming.

Needlepoint. I’ve been wanting to get into something like that. Plant lady. There are the most beautiful plants here in Australia that I’ve ever seen.

Berry farm.

Thrift vintage clothing. Oh, gosh. After my own heart. Read. Resin dice. Pickleball. Beautiful. Keep it coming. Fun facts, because we are all a human coming into a work call. So I want to name that. We’re not just a face on this Brady Bunch square. We are whole humans. And I think when we think about learning and development, it’s really important to bring that element to what we do. So in the spirit of that, I’m interested in how you’re showing up today. So you can either drop the number in the chat or you can stamp using the annotation tool.

You should see view Katie Ryan screen. You can click annotate under view options and you can stamp which one you’re feeling coming in today. It can be anything. Doesn’t matter. Be honest. Either put the number or you can stamp.

Yesterday, I was probably a little bit more like three, but today I’m a bit more like six. Okay, we got another three. I’m with you, Cammie. Okay, all right. So we’ve got some massaging of the temples. That’s why I like to check on people. All right, we got relaxed, good. Eight, okay. We’re a little all over the board, but mostly I would say there’s probably a few things going on in the background and we’re all here today.

So I wanna say, A, thanks for showing up and B, my hope is at the end of this conversation, maybe you might take one step into another box that feels a bit more like five or six or four based on the conversation we have today. I hope you take away some things as we chat. So thanks for being honest on how you’re showing up. All right, so let’s talk about why learning and development programs are important.

You’re here, so you probably see the value in them in some capacity, but specifically why we even talk about this as it relates specifically to our startups. Well, the first thing is it is pivotal for talent retention that we focus on learning and development, that we develop skills for folks who are working for us and it helps us grow as an organization. When you think about it, we work really hard to recruit talent, right? We put in all this time, energy, resources, money that we put into bringing them into our organization, we want them to stay.

And so a way we can do that is by investing in their development and in their career through learning. The next thing is it creates this culture of continuous learning, right? Investing in L& D enhances performance, agility, it increases happiness at work. There’s all these studies that show that people who continually learn and grow their career at work stay and that’s a big thing that we wanna see, right? Is we wanna see our people stay, we wanna see them grow and develop over time.

And so we can do that through launching learning and development programs, which is why we’re here today to talk about what those look like and how we do that. So let’s see here. All right, so in the chat, I am curious what you currently do for learning and development. So do you facilitate trainings internally? Do you do nothing? That’s also okay by the way, you’re here for a reason. What does it look like? What are you doing today? You can come off mute or drop it in the chat. Facilitating internally, building courses, moderating, okay.

Rebecca says, all done by me or leaders in the business, reimbursed for outside training, right? Building from the ground up, okay. Internal third party, got it. Thank you. We’ve stipend for individuals. Okay, we hear about that a lot. Stipends where folks can use the budget and go and get training outside, management training, get a bootcamp, okay. Leverage an LMS. What LMS are you leveraging? I’m curious about that. Beautiful. Yeah, thank you. Currently Sales Impact Academy and Coursera. Okay, great, thank you.

I know that was one of the questions that came through as folks were wondering about LMSs. So we’ll spend a little time in that in a second. All right, so the other, one second, let’s see if I can advance my screen here. Oh, one sec. All right, beautiful. So what are your L& D funds used for is the next question. And the third question is, who is eligible for L& D in your organization? Is it everybody? Is it certain levels? Feel free to come off mute too if you wanna share that way. Okay, everyone’s available to do it.

Everyone, I saw somebody mentioned focusing on managers. So that’s obviously a niche group that we’ll often focus on.

All employees, okay.

Yeah, I would say it’s gonna be everyone, but it’s gonna be very, very different for everyone.

Ooh, can you say a little bit more about that?

Yeah, I think, you know, for newbies coming in with no experience, it’s gonna be very basic training for managers, like someone else mentioned. It’s gonna be, you know, geared toward, you know, maybe new manager training or ongoing manager training. And then for executives, maybe we’ll look into doing, you know, a development program such as like a book club.

Great, thank you. Thanks for expanding on that. So it sounds like niche based on the level within the organization, their experience at work and kind of the needs, and sometimes it might be a little bit more hyper- focused one- on- one and it might even expand out to groups as needed.

I appreciate that, thanks for sharing. Seems like there’s a focus often on managers and leaders, which isn’t surprising for me to see at all, especially in startup land. We want to invest in our leaders, right? We hire all these people and then we promote the front line up and a lot of times they have no idea how to be a manager. And so it’s good, I like to see that. All right, let’s keep going. Thanks for being so participatory here, everybody.

So a question we often get is when should you start to spend on learning and development and what are good guidelines for an L& D budget? And the short answer is it depends, which is an annoying one. So I’m gonna expand on it, okay?

The first thing we wanna do is we wanna start spending on learning and development as soon as possible. We wanna be as proactive as we can versus reactive where we’re reading a lot of glass door reviews or in exit interviews we’re hearing that people don’t feel invested in, employee retention is bleak.

There’s these things that we’ll start to see that then people call people like us and they say help in all capital letters, right?

And so if you can be proactive, you wanna be proactive on this.

And the way that we see this, and I saw a couple of people who do this as stipends and things like that. One is organizations allocate a fixed dollar amount, a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per employee and role, tenure, responsibilities will sometimes determine what that budget is.

Entry level versus executive level sometimes unlock different allocations for a stipend or an allowance. And then another thing that we see often, and this is what you’ll see on your screen here is some organizations allocate a percentage of payroll to learning and development. And usually what that is, is between one and 3% of total payroll. So let’s say that a startup’s average annual payroll per employee is $ 60, 000. They might allocate somewhere between 600 and $ 1, 800 per employee.

I’m saying that, and it depends, right?

It depends on where you are in your growth trajectory. It depends on your industry, the size, the stage of your growth, all of those things. But this is something that a lot of companies are looking at, so I wanna share that. Any questions about this before we move on to the next slide about hiring an L& D person? Questions, thoughts, reflections? Going once, going twice.

All right, keep them coming in the chat if you have any. Okay, so the next question, and what we’re doing today is kind of going through some common questions that we hear from folks at startups. And this is another one. When should we hire somebody in learning and development? And what would they do once we hired them? What would be their key responsibilities And so what you’ll see here are some common responsibilities for an L& D function.

But before we get there, I wanna address the first question, which is when do you hire them?

Once again, it does depend, but most companies invest in an L& D person around series B, sometimes series C, but the first L& D hire is usually in the sales function.

So you might see that, right?

Like sales enablement.

That’s one that gets hired really quickly. The board is looking at how are we bringing in revenue? We gotta increase the ramp time for our sales team.

How do we do that?

We bring in a sales enablement person, which usually fits under an L& D umbrella, okay?

That doesn’t mean that the rest of the organization doesn’t need learning and development.

And so companies will look at maybe bringing someone in as a vendor part- time, which it sounds like a lot of you are doing, as well as there is a moment where there’s a need to bring someone in full- time.

And so usually series B, series C is when we see that.

This could be pushed up if you have high turnover or faster growth than that. And then what do they do? You’ll see here on the iPad, a list of things that an L& D person should be doing. And that includes doing a training needs analysis. So identifying the skill gaps and development needs within your organization, curriculum development and design, which probably doesn’t seem surprising, training facilitation. So leading presentations, workshops, things like that. Owning onboarding with HR function.

They don’t own it completely, but they should be heavily involved in new hire training. Evaluation and assessment. This is a big one that people forget about. How do we measure this? So training can sometimes be viewed as soft. And so how do we align KPIs and learning outcomes to driving behaviors that we wanna see? And then how do we measure that? So make sure you’re adding that. Talking about learning technology, compliance stuff, budget management, vendor management, if you’re also working with training vendors and then continuous learning.

So as L& D, just like any people function, we need to view ourselves as a, we have internal clients, right? We have internal clients in marketing, we have internal clients in engineering. Like what do all of our internal clients need? And somebody who you hire as an L& D function, especially your first hire, should be someone who can be strategic with you and not just an executor. Like not just somebody who comes in and executes on all the things that they’re told to do. That can be valuable.

But also if you can get this sweet spot of somebody who can do a needs analysis and make a recommendation, that can be really healthy for a first hire. So let me pause there. I know that’s a lot of information and see what questions do you have about what you see on the iPad or in general. Does anybody already have a full- time L& D hire?

Okay.

I see, yeah, please.

So I was wondering, when we talk about a learning and development resource, the person you just described seemed like they were applying their trade across all the whole organization. Is that typically the case? So for example, one of the things that we’re contemplating is like, there’s a clear dearth and knowledge on how to utilize our product that we sell, right? And there’s no consistency across the departments for how we train on the product, et cetera, et cetera.

But it sounds like this learning development professional in your eyes would also be doing kind of professional development as well. Is that the case?

Yes, correct.

There are different roles within learning and development. And as the learning and development function expands, as the business expands, you might have people who are hyper niche in different areas. Like I mentioned, sales enablement is often one that gets hired early, even before a general L& D person. And sometimes that person will also work with customer service. And then sometimes that person can also stretch into customer facing training about the product, for example, and working with marketing.

And so those people can kind of spoke out in different avenues, but a general learning and development hire should spread across departments to be able to find themes of what people need. And to your point, so there’s not this duplication of effort. Everyone’s speaking about the product differently. Maybe the L& D person can come in and help figure out how is everyone speaking about the product? Or do we ideally want them speaking out about the product and then issue a training and check for understanding to make sure that that’s being done properly?

Does that answer your question?

Perfect, thank you. Yeah, you’re welcome.

Is it Abby? I think I saw you go off mute as well. Did you have a thought? I’m gonna stop sharing so I can see everybody.

Yeah.

Hello, everyone.

We are entering our 14th year. So we’re pretty far in. We have a lot of homegrown talent. So we have a lot of people that started with us right out of college.

They’re now in management.

I’m not even sure where to start because we’ve- last year was the first year- we even had funds set aside for the training development. So, as you’re talking about responsibilities of that world, like literally, what is step one other than set aside funds? Check, we’ve done that. What now?

Yeah, I would love to hear. If anybody has any ideas. Feel free to drop them in the chat, because I bet some of you have been in the same seat as is Abby, is that? How is that how I say your name? Okay, great, yeah. So any ideas, drop them in the chat and meanwhile I’ll share kind of my view on it. I think the main thing is is to figure out what. What needed that needs analysis piece, right, what is needed in the organization? What would success look like? You know what’s the goal, what’s the end goal that we’re trying to get to here, is it?

I heard you say first- time managers, so right away I’m flagging, like, okay, what it means to be a manager here at our company. What does that look like? Skills that we might need is one of the goals that we as a leadership team have put aside to say we want to invest in our management team. We want them to work together as a unit. We want to create a cohort where they can rely on each other and where we have a standard operating rhythm of managers.

Here people are holding one- on- one weekly like what are those things that we want and align them with your core values. You know, like how does that all work together? And so I think it’s- that’s when I just pulled out based on what you said quickly, but I think it’s getting together and thinking through: what does that look like? What does people development look like here, and what are we trying to accomplish? Do we need to invest in sales? Do we need to invest in engineering?

Is there data that’s showing us that we need to invest in a certain group more than another? And and so I would just look at what the needs are by asking people. I see somebody put here a survey. Survey is a great way to do that as well. Also, one- on- one chats, especially at the high function levels in the org, can be really helpful. Does anybody who’s written anything in the chat here want to come off mute and share a little bit of additional color? Yep, meet with the leadership team. Happy to leave?

I’m Allie. I’m the VP of people at single up. So hi mark, that’s. I see- oh, I’m glad you’re here. Okay, so what we started last year was we have we need to execute on, and that’s why I probably mark and I’re gonna ask questions about, as we’re looking at this role, what we can do with that. So we started with a few assessments, predominantly. I already commented that we were focusing on management: what skills and knowledge to our managers need to be successful? You can then look down a level to everybody else in the company, right?

So, specifically, we have a very technical product. So we started with some teams that are customer facing, like support people who are doing the technical service. What do they need to know about the product to be successful, regardless of where their current skill set is? What do you need? And then evaluate all the employees against that. You’ll then find your skill gaps and do training from there and then look one after you’ve said here’s what we need to do immediately. Then take it one further, look to the future. What’s the next role for them?

What are they going to develop into? Do they have those skills and abilities? If not, let’s build a training program or you know what you need. Currently we don’t have somebody- excuse me- specifically focused on delivering that. It’s more up to having a stipend, that managers are assigning individual training that they might suggest to those employees, but it’s something we’re looking at changing. But that’s kind of how we’ve evaluated skill sets so far.

Beautiful Ali, thank you.

I’m excited to hear from you.

Beautiful Ali, thank you. I couldn’t have said it better myself. I appreciate you sharing that and thanks for your question, abby.

It was a great one.

Okay, let’s keep it rolling. For the sake of time, I’m gonna share my screen again one seconds. All right, can you see my screen again? Yes, beautiful, okay, so keep on coming in the chat if you have any questions about that. But the next thing we are going to talk about as a group is when to build versus when to buy. The age- old question of startups always right and but the answer here is: it will depend on where you are and your growth. It will depend on your budget and all these things and your bandwidth.

Right in general, you’ll see a chart here of when to keep it in- house and when to reimburse. Now, keeping it in- house doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do it all yourself, right? Sometimes keeping it in- house means bringing in a vendor who can supplement what you have or do something like that. So when I say in- house, I also mean you could bring someone in to help.

And when that is is critical: company specific knowledge- that’s very specific to who you are: onboarding and orientation, team building, any sensitive or proprietary information- probably no shock there. And then when to reimburse is if it’s really specialized right, like if you want to send some folks through scrum, agile engineering training, you might want to send them to an external. That’s just a example. In engineering, any career development or individualized learning paths, if you have limited resources, space.

Time.

It’s a really good way to find external options and if the employee finds something really great- right a conference, they want to go to a certification that they want for their career, having a place even if the answer is no, but having a place where they can submit to you and to their manager to request what is that.

And usually that reimbursement range goes back to what we talked about before, that one to three percent or some type of stipends that companies are looking at and that usually is between five hundred and two thousand dollars for reimbursement. Something like management training is one that comes up a lot. Do we do that in- house? Do we build it? Do we bring somebody in? There is so much great management and leadership development training programs out there.

I usually recommend hiring somebody to do that for you and then you supplement and drive it internally so that you can unlock time for yourself to do other things, because management training- not saying management training- is management training, because it does. You do want it to look and feel like you and your org, but just make sure, if you’re working with a vendor, that they are tailoring it to your culture and who you are and what you do, so it feels almost like it was built internally.

Any vendor you ever work with, make sure they’re tailoring it to you and not just giving you some off- the- shelf thing that doesn’t work for who you are. We don’t just want to check a box, we want it to drive change in some way. Questions about this or any thoughts about this? Before we go to the next slide: okay, keep on coming in the chat if you need to. Okay, so there is on your screen here. You will see a QR code. I’m also going to drop a link in the chat.

I would like for you to answer here one word that you would use to describe your training that you have currently at your organization. One word: I’m gonna pull up the results here. Keep it coming. We got a few folks have already dropped them in. Should see a word cloud developing on the screen here. We see more than one. It’ll get bigger. So we’ve got startups: scrappy, minimal, okay.

Okay.

We got a few folks dropping in the chat here, which is completely fine. Triage- basic self- development centered- okay. Triage- I think somebody maybe put that. Both places- perfect. Any other ones, feel free to drop them in. I’m seeing a theme here which is minimal: trying to figure it out kind of thing: underfunded, not uncommon at the stage that I think a lot of you are at in your orgs, basic, under yep, okay, beautiful, thanks for being honest on where you are. Safe space. Oh, we got some more coming in here on unfunded again, organic, interesting.

Whoever put organic, I’m curious what that means. What does organic mean here? Random seems like maybe we’re lacking a bit of organization, a bit of structure, which, once again, is not uncommon from where folks are. Does anybody have any follow- up things that they want to say about why they chose the word that they chose? Oh, that’s okay, rebecca, no problem. Organic means it comes from what people need at the time. Okay, organic, that also sounds like maybe I could be wrong, but a little bit reactive to what’s being requested.

I think there’s something to be said for just- in- time training as well. You know it’s I’m really trying to focus on micro learnings. The way I work in the tech space and the way that people consume information seems to be. It’s more user- friendly. More people are tending to, you know, actually take it and finish it when it’s in small pieces, and so I think there’s something to be said for just- in- time and for micro learnings.

I love that. Can you say a little bit more about microlearning for folks who might not know what that is and how you use that?

Yeah, everybody’s definition is a little bit different, but something that can be consumed anywhere from five to eight minutes, sometimes it’s like 10 to 12. We just created a microlearning suite for Legal 101 for People Managers. And it’s really, you know, what do people need to know at minimum for us to not be sued is pretty much what it is, the basis for especially new people managers that you were talking about that don’t have those skills. We’re also an international team.

And so we have a lot of culture that comes into play there that, you know, people don’t intentionally mean to violate something, it’s just also very cultural. So when it’s easily consumable and something that’s large and daunting is broken down into smaller pieces, people are more apt to retain it, take it, finish it, that’s a huge thing, right? You’re providing training, but you want people to finish it. So microlearnings for us have been very successful.

Beautiful, thank you so much for sharing that. Microlearning for those not in the L& D space is incredibly important. It’s exactly as Cammie described it. You know, we want, our attention span is decreasing as a species aggressively. I think it’s every seven seconds we ask ourselves, is this a good use of our time? And so we wanna try to take learnings and break them down. So I love to hear that you all are already doing that.

I think one thing here is that people will just record the board meeting or they’ll record the all hands and just drop it in a intranet somewhere. If you can chunk out like what questions are being answered just in the video and just break the video up into five videos that are shorter rather than one 40 minute video, that right there will increase the likelihood that people watch it. That is micro consumption, not necessarily learning.

Learning, we have to make sure we’re checking for understanding and things like that, but that is better than just posting a 60 minute Zoom, for example. Okay, let’s keep going here. Someone asked, Abby asked what platforms do you use to administer your microlearnings? I believe that was Cammie just talking about that.

Yep.

Yeah, so I’m lucky to have a LMS now, but when I first started with the company, we are very small, we did not have an LMS. So we had a knowledge base and we literally could post, it could be a three minute video, it could be, I post them on sales for sales department, like great phrases to close the deal or what to say instead of I’m just following up. These are good examples of microlearnings.

And some of them do have an assessment, like a two or three quick question at the end, and some of them don’t, it really depends on the content and what our intention is with it. So now we’re putting them in the learning management system, but we can also post them as articles in a knowledge base or a series. So it really can be consumed either way, you can send it via Slack. So there’s lots of things that you could do with it.

And I think people like podcasts as well, even if it’s quick five or seven minutes, even if maybe like a little fireside chat, something like that, not just an article. So we try to offer it in a lot of different mediums.

Yeah, thank you for that. And it looks like there’s another comment down here about a tool that’s used, which is great. Microlearnings in Slack is a big one. Also, if you use something like, if you don’t have an LMS and you use something like Notion or Confluence or any of those common ones that we’re using in startup world, wherever you store your information intranet wise, you can create, the analogy I like to use for folks is when you go to look up a recipe, okay?

So you go to look up a recipe and sometimes people wanna read the whole spiel about the tomatoes in Italy and the grandma and everything, but most people wanna know like, what is the checklist that I need? And they scroll to the bottom, right? So include your paragraph context that you need to in the recipe, in the learning. And then like, where can they get what they need? Like, if I haven’t minced a garlic in a year and a half, I wanna click on the video quickly to learn how to mince garlic.

And then I wanna get back to know what to do with the garlic. So think about microlearning like that. And if you can use whatever tool you currently have, if you don’t have a budget for a full blown LMS or something like that, you can. And then you can check for understanding by having a little quiz or something like that, like Kimmy mentioned as well.

Okay, beautiful. Such a rich conversation. I’m loving this. All right, let me share my screen. One second. Let’s keep going because we got some more stuff we want to cover. Okay. Should be able to see my screen here now. And what we’re talking about on this slide is how to execute those company- owned trainings when you’re doing it internally. Step one that is often missed is make sure that the leadership function that is managing humans at your organization is on board with what you’re rolling out. Okay.

This often happens in sales where we’ll push out a sales training and the sales managers try to untrain their people and train them the right way to do something, right? We see that all the time, especially in startups where moving really fast and things are constantly changing. But this happens outside of the sales function as well.

If we’re rolling out to the question from earlier, product changes, if we’re rolling out anything in the organization training- wise, we want to make sure that it can be driven by the managers and the leadership team in some capacity and we want them to be on board. So have an alignment meeting. Invest that time to make sure that it’s happening cohesively. What does that look like? Involve them in the training creation. Let them review the slides or at least the tone of it.

Like if we’re thinking about onboarding, a new hire training program and your company’s never had one or you’re doing something fundamentally different than you’ve ever done before, it’s important that the leadership management, all the functions above and around know why you’re making these changes and what they can do when their people leave the training room or when they leave the learning environment, whatever that is. And then we want to make sure that we are tailoring that message to the audience. We want to narrow cast, not broadcast.

And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute and how to do that. But this is just sort of like four things that you should be considering when you’re executing internally and the main one is alignment. Any questions or thoughts about this before we pivot just a touch?

I do have a quick question. I guess, and maybe this is for the group is how have you, I guess, built your case against or for LMS or learning and development when you have some managers who don’t necessarily want to be on board? Especially in the startup space where everyone has an overflowing plate and bandwidth is not something that comes through very often. Usually people are over the bandwidth.

Yeah, I appreciate that question so much. I’ve been in a seat internally before working at companies where I’m like, do they see the value in this? What are we doing? And what I’ve found is that it’s really unpacking the why they’re not on board. What is it? Are they worried about it’s not worth their time? Are they worried to take their people off the floor of doing what they need to do? Is it too much of a time investment? Do they think the trainings aren’t good? Do they think it’s a waste of time?

Are we not hitting the marks that they want them to hit? And so I think unpacking their disdain for it is a really good place to start and then have a conversation with them about if you could wave a magic wand and budget wasn’t an issue and resources weren’t an issue, what would you want your people to learn? And see if you can find themes and commonalities and then report that back to everybody and say, we spoke to 30 managers and 45 to 50% of you said that you want your employees to do this.

This many said this, and then report back the data that you have from those conversations and then see what they need in order to drive it with you. So try to make it as collaborative as possible is what we’ve seen work well. Yeah. Yeah, and other folks have things that they’ve tried. Please drop it in the chat and share as well.

Thank you for that question.

It’s a great question.

One thing I found success is just with the micro learnings that we just talked about. Cause like people were pushing back and I said, well, it’s eight minutes. Like it’s a manager training that was like broken into like eight minute segments per week. And I’m like, if your managers can’t find eight minutes per week to like get a little bit better than like we should talk about their time management skills. And so that was like a really kind of like easy workaround I think for exactly what you’re saying, right? Like somebody’s like, oh, they’re so busy.

They have like too much on their plate already. But I think the micro learning was like an easy way to like combat that.

Yeah, thank you for that position. Yeah, and it sounds like you were able to determine to combat that because you unpacked the why they were, they just didn’t have time, right?

They’re like, we don’t have time. Okay, well, what can we do?

And or can we help manage that in some way?

Well, we’re gonna offer micro learning in this way. And then you might also offer and after the micro learning once a month, you do like a leadership round table where everyone joins and you talk about what you learned in your micro learning, right?

Maybe it’s optional, maybe it’s mandatory.

I’m not sure.

But there’s some ways that you can also check for understanding and check for engagement in those ways as well.

It sounds like you’re specifically having issues with sales. I do find them to be the most resistant and especially in the startup space, definitely can’t emphasize more like finding out what their objection is. I find with sales leaders in particular, it’s usually that they don’t like HR because they’ve had bad experiences. And they equate training from HR with compliance training. And that’s all they think that we’re capable of is like, I hire, I fire and I do compliance and make you do stuff you don’t wanna do.

That’s usually what they equate with us versus now we’re more into people ops and we do actual get better at your job stuff. So usually what I say is, hey, I totally understand. Maybe you’ve had a bad experience in the past. Let’s make sure this training is really relevant. What if I can guarantee it’s gonna be something you’ll love and really bring them into the process and say, I promise not to spend more than X amount of your time in the review process, but I’d like you to see it first. I wanna show you some really good options that will have value.

Specifically, if you’re looking at content that has proven ROI in other organizations, you’re gonna sell it back to them, right? Like you’re gonna like sell it back to them. Let me show you the same thing and make them feel a part of it. And that they have a say versus HR told me I have to do this is a big roadblock I get with sales leaders. So making them be a part of it, showing them the value, promise them it’s not gonna be what they think it is. Usually you’ll get a lot fewer objections. If you still have objections, I would go above their head.

Like, hey, we got a bigger problem, but that should be where you can start.

That’s incredible advice and I agree with that.

And one of the things I hear kind of a resounding theme here is tailor the message for who’s receiving it, right? And in sales, they’re like, what’s in it for me, right?

Is it worth getting my sales team off the phones, off email, whatever they’re doing to come to a training?

Most of the time they associate it with no. And so how can we help them start to associate it with yes, this is worth their time.

And so thinking through what are their goals?

And this goes across not just sales too, customer success, engineering, anything.

Like what are their OKRs for the quarter? What are their goals for the year? How can you align what you’re doing with what they’re trying to accomplish?

And if you can naturally make that distinction and align it with what they care about and speak their language, like the sales team, you know their OKRs, they’re trying to close as many deals, increase net revenue, sell this new product that just got out, whatever it is. Like, okay, how can learning and the people team help support that in some way?

The sales team is always waiting for the what’s in it for me slide. It’s like slide two, you have to capture them. I was in sales, I started my career in sales and then I was sales training for many years before I pivoted to general L& D. So I know that world well.

Okay, so I want to shift here just a bit. And I’m curious because training and learning can sometimes be boring. I hate to say it, but it’s true.

And the bar is kind of low, unfortunately slash fortunately. And I’m curious of the programs that you all are doing right now, what do you do to make training fun and engaging?

Drop some things in the chat or come off mute.

I just want to know what you’re doing.

I heard micro learning that can be engaging based on time commitment, what else?

What tools are you using? Polls, beautiful. We love a poll.

What else?

Also, if you don’t know, that’s also OK. Rewards. That’s fun.

Test your knowledge. Great. Gamifying.

Love that.

Yep. We love a good gamification moment with prizes. Yes.

Our logo includes a tie. And so we would do Tie Talk Tuesdays. And we would do trivia at the end. It’s kind of like, were you really paying attention? And also, we bribed people with food if they would come. So that helped.

I love that.

Yes, people love a food bribe. Offering sessions in similar groups, feeling more comfortable sharing.

Yes, breaking up groups. So the sweet spot for engagement is 8 to 25.

That’s the real sweet spot.

Beyond that, people start to become a number, and they hide behind the screen. So breaking it up into multiple sessions can be really valuable.

And if you are unable to do that, start leveraging breakout rooms in your Zoom or whatever tool you’re using. Let me share my screen, because I have some other comments here.

You’ll see, including surprises, I think the key is training is not just by PowerPoint. Training should be fun and engaging. If it was really easy to put together a training, take a minute and try to make it better. Or talk to somebody who can help you make it better. We want to try to align anything we’re doing with the outcomes we’re trying to achieve in the training.

What is the goal here?

One time, I went to a really fun training. We played Name That Tune.

And it was fun, but I still don’t remember why we played Name That Tune. It was nothing to do with what we were learning.

So if you’re going to gamify it and make it interesting, make sure you align it somehow with what you’re trying to accomplish. And interactivity, like quizzes, like Mentimeter, you’ve seen we’ve used Mentimeter today.

I’ve asked questions in chat. We use the SAMP tool.

Getting people to come off mute in smaller groups is really great.

There’s a whiteboard tool in Zoom you can use.

Annotations are really great in Zoom. If you know who’s going to be in there, you can create a slide that has everyone’s name in a box on a slide and allow them to annotate in their box. That can be a fun virtual way to get people engaged.

You can use MiroBoards, which is like a whiteboard brainstorming tool.

Twine is a really cool add- on in Zoom now that creates visual breakouts. And you can do those by topic.

You can do speed networking, where there’s a certain amount of time, and then it sends them to someone else, and then it sends them. So there’s a lot of really cool Zoom add- ons if you use Zoom. Breakout rooms, chats, polls, play music when people join.

Share your audio and play some music and get them pumped up.

Try to ask a question really quickly when people join.

You may have noticed I did that today.

Where are you all joining in from?

Then I asked how you’re vibing today.

We’re all a little low.

And so, yeah, I think just checking in on people and keeping it engaging throughout, allowing other people in your virtual room or actual room to share their expertise, prompting other people to join in, what that does is it aligns with the adult learning theory, which is in the middle here. Adult learning theory is the way that we talk about learning design that makes it different from teaching kids.

Adults are different than kids.

And so we’re not just teaching kids. We don’t want to make people feel like we’re talking down to them or being condescending. And there are some really great ways to drive engagement and drive retention using adult learning.

And one of those is to allow adults to learn from each other, also to allow them to create their own scenarios.

So rather than me say, here’s the scenario you should work with, I could give you an idea. I could say, here’s a scenario that you might like, but create one that applies to you. And now you’re working with a scenario that aligns with what you are working on. And so invite tailorization on the fly and making sure that you’re aligning everything, once again, with those learning outcomes or objectives that you set up. Let’s keep going here.

I mentioned this before, but rolling out to managers is pivotal, making sure you align with them, give them action steps or a one sheet or something, especially if you’re rolling out a big organizational change or a new performance management system or something like that. Give managers something that they can take away at the end of it.

In your next one- on- ones with your people, here are three questions you can ask.

In your next team meeting, here’s two slides you should include in your meeting. Give them something that they can take in immediately and create space for them to ask questions of you and of whatever it is we’re rolling out.

It’s been very engaging, but we’re getting, I wanna make sure I get to the measurement component and the question component. So we talked about the 80- 20 rule earlier, and I wanna emphasize this again, like in a new hire training, for example, you can bring everyone together and 80% of the content is relevant for everyone.

That’s what we want.

And then 20% should be tailored for their role.

So what do they do after the general onboarding week, for example? It’s the same in product training. If we’re rolling out a product change, hey everyone, here’s the product change.

Now, sales, here’s what you need to do. Engineering, here’s what you need to know. And then you can break it out.

But in general, to help with duplication of efforts, and especially with a lean team, like most of you have, it sounds like, try to figure out what that 80% is that everyone can know, and then what the 20 is that the departments need to help lead. And that goes into measuring for success, which is kind of a big thing in training. We’re always wondering, is what does this look like?

And I gave an example here for engineering. There’s another example for sales.

But what we really want to do is we want to look at some data.

We wanna look at baseline data.

We wanna look at qualitative, but definitely quantitative data points, whatever those are, before we launch something. How will we know, engineering lead, that this works?

When will you call me and tell me it didn’t?

What does it look like if it works well?

And then you set outcomes for the learning environment that make sure that happens. And so these are examples for engineering. It would be technical proficiency in whatever it is, measuring the improvements of a technical skill that they’re learning, problem solving, assessing the ability to apply the new information to real engineering scenarios, error reduction. Can we track a decrease in errors and defects and rework based on this change that we’ve rolled out to them and now they know how to do it?

These are made up examples, but you get the idea here, right?

And so once we know what these things are that we wanna measure, we can make sure that in the learning design, it will do that for them, and that we can check for it during, after, and beyond.

And here’s an example for sales, okay? So in sales, what we are looking for is often revenue, conversion rates, customer satisfaction, right? Sometimes it might be they’re selling a new tool, so are they adopting, are they weaving in the pitching of this new tool that we’ve rolled out or the product change? And you can do that via a call recordings, listening in, having somebody coach with them and take note of what they’re doing, what they’re not doing.

But yeah, it’s really, at the end of the day, in measuring for success in learning, it’s taking time at the beginning to know what success looks like.

Why are we doing this in the first place? Why are we investing resources, money, people to do this?

And what will success look like? And then you make sure that the learning lines up to help you achieve that.

And then you measure it. And if you can measure it before and after, that’s when you can create a really great infographic that the board loves to see.

Okay?

All right. And I’m gonna go to some common pitfalls and then I wanna open it up for questions for you after I share some resources. So what we see the most common things that go sideways when launching an L& D program, number one, lack of alignment.

Probably no surprise there. I’ve been chirping about that all call.

We wanna make sure everybody understands why we’re doing it, the importance of it, has a safe space to pull calls, ask questions, so they’re not doing that in a public setting.

We want to make sure that we’re not doing a one- size- fits- all approach, whether you’re doing it internally or hiring a vendor. One- size- fits- all is like never gonna work. It’s just never gonna work for organizations that are growing fast and innovative and adapting and culture- rich. Have to make sure that it aligns with the team you’re working with and with your culture. What does that mean?

How can you make it apply to your company and to the teams? And the last one is make sure that you’re evaluating it properly. So we wanna measure the impact of this.

What does that look like?

And how at the end will we plan to share the outcomes and the evaluations with the team? You can do it through surveys, but also think about those quantitative and qualitative output that you’ll take a look at and that you’ll use.

Okay, so that was a lot. I wanna open it up right now to if there are any questions about anything that’s been shared so far or thoughts or things you’d like to add in.

I appreciate the ideas for engagement during the session. I feel like that’s definitely a place of opportunity for myself using, you know, outside technologies and such. We do polls and, you know, things like that but I definitely like some of the ideas. So thank you for that. Yeah, of course, of course.

Any other questions or?

I wanna take, we have a couple minutes here. So I wanna take a minute and respond to the two questions that were submitted. We’ve touched on a couple of them throughout but I, or one of them. Let me just share my screen again. I wanna show you, I have a resources slide here and we’ll share this with you on the output.

I think Mary’s setting up to share this with you all but one of the questions was how to set up an onboarding new hire experience and another one was about how to select an LMS. And so there’s two resources in here that you can take a look at. One is a guide that I authored with one guide previously on how to design your new hire experience based on where you are.

Are you at seed? Are you at series A, series B? What commonly people do in the new hire experience?

And then the other one is an LMS. Depending on where you are in your company’s growth, an LMS can be great. It can also be a time drain. So I wanna name that because there’s no perfect LMS, unfortunately. I wish I could come up with what it is because I’d be a billionaire but there’s no perfect LMS. And thinking through, do we have the resources to keep it updated? Because the worst thing that can happen is you invest in an LMS and then you launch it and it goes stale. So what does it look like to keep it up?

Do you have a resource by department that’s gonna help keep it updated? Do you have an internal resource that will update it full time?

What does that look like? Especially if you’re creating your own content.

If you are working with an LMS that creates content for you, I would always recommend think about growth and make sure that you, like if they have off the shelf things, make sure that there is eventually an opportunity for you to be able to author your own modules as well because you will need that.

So think about scale. And I’ve included here a template that we’ve created for our clients when they’re thinking about working with an LMS. And it’s a selection, it’s in Google Sheets. You can make a copy of it and take it. It’s just some questions to ask, a rubric.

There’s even kind of a ticker, like does this vendor meet all the requirements? And you can, it like creates a grid like score for you. So as you’re talking to folks, you can use that for any vendor, but it’s just a fun resource for you.

There is another, there’s a guide about setting up a program, which is what we’ve talked about today. And it goes into a little bit more in depth. And then the bottom one here is a no pressure, pick my brain chat. So if you want to grab time with me, 30 minutes, just to chat, I am always open to giving advice, asking questions, looking at what you’re doing.

And there’s, it’s a gift. If you ever want to chat with me, I’m happy to do that.

So those are some resources. And I just want to stop sharing here and see what other questions we have. And if you, yeah, it doesn’t matter what it is. You can ask anything. Yes, Allie, we’re going to share those with you.

Yes, that’ll just be my quick follow- up here. We’ll send around those resources, but also in the same event page that you registered for these events, you can always find a recap on the session, both the recording and any of the resources offered. So you can access those additional links that Katie shared, revisit anything that we talked about today, or also share it externally with others in your organization is always welcome