L&D Spotlight Liz Stefan - Nifty Learning

In this episode, we go through the first 100 days as a newly appointed L&D Manager. We look at the process of getting to know the company, the business model, and the industry it operates in. We also talk about laying the foundation of a sustainable learning strategy and achieving quick wins in the early days on the job.

Guest: Karolina Roziewicz, a Learning Strategist helping individuals and organizations create and maintain a strong learning mindset. She focuses on aligning behavioral nudges, instructional design, and learning rules when people and companies embark on learning journeys, and she has recently joined LiveChat as Learning & Development Manager.

Highlights:
- Perform discovery interviews to learn as much as possible about the new company you are joining or to look at your current company without past biases influencing you.
- L&D is a support function, so the L&D person must improve their business acumen; this is a key factor in your future effectiveness in supporting this company.
- It's easier to start fresh, in a new organization, as opposed to growing internally into an L&D Management role because you don't have the same blindspots about the business. Another benefit is that outsiders tend to be perceived as having higher expertise in their domain, which makes it easier later to position L&D as a strategic partner to the business.
- Don't dive into the needs analysis first; it's far more important to understand the organization and what kind of strategic learning direction it can take.
- Map out your outcomes from the discovery interviews; you will start noticing patterns that will later inform your L&D strategy.
- Focus on your stakeholders' current workflows, tasks, challenges, and behaviors instead of telling them what L&D can help with. This way, you'll avoid biasing your conversation partners towards offering you L&D-focused answers (avoid the "I need training on time management" type of requests).
- Start defining your future L&D strategy and validate with the business if you are going in the right direction.
- Identify quick wins and take action in the first 100 days to show that you are not just asking questions but also providing results.
- Avoid creating expectations and over-promising early on. Don't take it personally if some of your ideas won't come to life or certain business stakeholders don't want L&D's help at this early stage; there will be opportunities to collaborate later.

A phrasing suggestion to avoid creating expectations during your discovery interviews:

*Disclaimer - this is not yet a need analysis - let’s get to know each other and see where we can cooperate.
My job is to create the underlying fundaments for learning and knowledge exchange to happen organically and support and drive any formalized learning initiatives with evidence-based solutions.

Questions to ask your organization during the first "reconnaissance mission":
1-sentence description - what’s your job:1-sentence description - what does your product/service do:Daily tasks:Difficulties:Intersection with other depts.:Which skills are crucial for your job/your team's job?One thing to change about the way the company operates that would improve the area?What does organizational learning mean for you?How do you learn?What do you think my role can help you with? (props to Donald Taylor for flipping this question around in a way that prevents creating expectations)To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io

In this episode, we take an in-depth look at what it means to build a data-driven learning ecosystem. We talk about learning design practices that enable the right tech stack to produce measurable results - both for the learner and the business.

Guest: Zsolt Olah, Senior Learning Technologist at Amazon, responsible for the effective and efficient data, measurement, and evaluation strategy for the team to create more impact and less content. Before Amazon, for 20+ years, Zsolt held various learning and technology positions in the corporate industry to analyze business problems and provide effective learning solutions. 

Highlights:
- Impact is the goal of L&D. Content creation and delivery are tools to reach this goal.
- As L&D professionals and teams, you should clearly understand why you choose a specific technology and learning design approach. You need to be intentional and purposeful in creating your learning ecosystem.
- Spending the learning budget on solving the right problem is more important than your first-order layer of issues. If you're looking for faster ways to create content, but you still don't know if your current content is measurably effective, then solve that problem first.
- Data literacy is a crucial skill for L&D professionals - not to the extent of becoming an expert, but to at least grasp how to measure and evaluate effectiveness.
- For example, to start implementing LTEM, you first need to understand the underlying data-related work:
How do you define effectiveness?What data do you plan to gather and measure?What are the data sources?How can you build data-measuring points in your learning design strategy?- What happens on the job after the learning is completed is the end goal of a learning intervention. This is the most important thing to focus on, and you should work back from that to build your L&D strategy, ecosystem, and, ultimately, your learning tech stack.
- The first thing to do is understand the jobs to be done and where people have difficulties executing the work.
- If you discover that a learning intervention is the needed solution, the minimum you can do in designing that learning experience (especially taking LTEM into account) is to implement productive breaks from learning.
- Allow learners to pause learning and practice, "do the task and come back," or at least build in knowledge checklists or quizzes throughout the content delivery.
- The more you give a learner opportunities to put the information into practice, the higher the learning effectiveness.
- Your learning tech stack should support the possibility of creating and delivering learning experiences, as well as the ability to capture data during both learning and practicing.
- Once you can capture this information (aka these data points), you can interpret the data obtained and use it to measure the effectiveness of learning and its impact on the business - essentially, you can measure the learning ROI.

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io

In this episode, we look at how L&D can add value in a meaningful way to the organization and how it connects to the value chain.

Guest: Bülent Duagi, Senior Strategic Advisor and Organizational Designer for Platform Scale-ups in Europe. When working with L&D teams, he helps them to increase their strategic impact, to connect learning results with business results and contributes to developing organizational capabilities.

A breakdown of the episode’s topics has been graciously created by Bülent, and you can find it by following the link below:

https://www.bulentduagi.com/podcast-notes-links-between-l-d-strategy-and-value-creation/

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we look at imposter syndrome, a feeling that very many L&D professionals get from time to time, while working under the pressure of wearing many hats and expectations.

Guest: Ant Pugh, a performance consultant and learning designer who spends his days desperately trying to convince clients to avoid converting PowerPoint slides into eLearning. At night, he masquerades as a writer, bombarding unsuspecting learning designers with bite-sized, daily emails about creating high-value, high-impact training.

Follow Ant's journey by subscribing to his email newsletter below:
https://www.antpugh.com/email

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we talk about L&D's role and place in the organization, both in terms of org structure and purpose. We dive into L&D's internal customers, how to improve L&D's understanding of the business, the access to the company's strategy and how L&D can contribute, the multidisciplinary aspect of L&D work, whether the function should be rebranded, how to work together with the other People functions, and personal development for L&D professionals.

Guest: Deeksha Hegde, Talent Development Manager at GetYourGuide and part of 2023's Thirty under 30 in the field of Learning. You can follow Deeksha's work on LinkedIn.

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or send an email to liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we take an honest look at L&D: what does it mean today to be in L&D, what is the purpose of L&D, and how can L&D change its impact and perceived value in an organization to become a strategic contributor and get a seat at the table.

Guest: Clark Quinn, Ph.D., an internationally known consultant, speaker, and author of seven books. He thinks ‘out loud’ at learnlets.com, tweets as @quinnovator, and works on behalf of clients through Quinnovation.

Highlights:
* Learning experience design should consider that humans are driven by emotion rather than logical reasoning and incorporate ways to be impactful and effective (aka “sticky”). Reading recommendation: Motivational Design for Learning and Performance.
* To make learning meaningful, L&D needs to create a relatable story around a specific piece of organizational knowledge (a procedure, process, business rule, tool/functionality). This is the core of Dr. Quinn’s latest book: Make it meaningful.
* L&D should design impactful learning experiences regardless of company culture. Reading recommendation: Drive by Daniel Pink on purpose as a component of relatedness.
* L&D must internally practice the appropriate mechanisms that create a learning culture to improve its credibility in the business.
* L&D is crucial in an organization’s ability to tackle future innovation and competitiveness. Reading recommendation: Revolutionize Learning & Development.

Data sources to support L&D business cases:
- in-house experiments, run with the support of sponsors/champions
- anecdotal data or examples from other industries that show converging results
- academic research and books (for example, for the value of social media, you can read The New Social Learning)

Quick wins that L&D can start working on today:
A. Switch the approach of designing new learning experiences: instead of teaching the audience through a series of presentations, L&Ds could try other methods: problem investigation, collaboration, answering questions, and solving tasks that require the participant to apply the knowledge learned.
B. Change the indicators that L&D measures: instead of attendance rates, time spent learning, course reviews, and time to course delivery, L&D should focus on the business metrics it supports.
C. Find an enthusiastic adopter willing to work with L&D on designing a learning experience; present to management the improved business metrics.
D. A learning experience should offer ample practice context - currently, only 80% of the content is theoretical, and 20% is practical; L&D should switch the proportion.

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.