Nerd Out Interviews

Alyn Kinney

I interview readers of the Nerd Out newsletter. We talk about Corporate Education, Design, Philosophy and whatever we want to talk about. alyn.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 04/13/2023

    Nerd Out with Marcus Miers

    Alternatively watch it on Youtube In this interview, Marcus and I talk about how he got into corporate L&D, comparing and contrasting academia and corporate ID, improving accessibility in learning and how to measure the success of a learning program in such a way that the business cares. Here’s my favorite bit from the interview: I've grew up with deaf parents and so that's always been front of mind for me. But when I actually went through the process of going to meetings with the accessibility team and then I went to a committee meeting with an accessibility council, it was very humbling. I heard how a screen reader actually reads out the content and it was just such a gating awful experience, and that was not in line with what I wanted the learners to experience. I wanted to create a very positive easy to use aesthetic experience that communicated the learning objectives and the goals of the program. Then going to the committee meeting, I just saw firsthand how people with like very different types of physical and cognitive limitations had to like pick up pieces of paper or to get to a podium to present on their next topic, and I I just remember sitting in the back of the room just like tears in my eyes because I had just been so off base and I was just so wrong about it. So I think that was something that just stuck with me and those are very easy things that you can build into an employee's development. Nerd Out is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Nerd Out at alyn.substack.com/subscribe

    26 min
  2. 03/16/2023

    Nerd Out with Angel Carrillo Podcast

    Listen to the podcast or watch my interview with Angel Carrillo on YouTube. We discuss how he got into L&D, what were some of the cooler projects he's worked on and why we end up picking the same solutions over and over. I think we get into the habit of reusing things because all you have to do is go on the internet Google something right and then you'll see the same program recycled. It might make sense there's very good things there's no need to reinvent the wheel every time I always go to Google and see whenever I get stuck I'm like why am I stuck? I go but then you have to think about okay where is this coming from what is it this actually trying to achieve what are the learning objectives of that program and are they the same as mine? The reason why I approached that program differently was because I was designing it but I was not by myself and I had a project team of HR business partners and some representation of our employees that were all women and it was really about sitting down and discussing and opening myself up to their experiences. One of them said well it's not like women can't communicate so why do we always have to do that training over and over again right and that just opened it up for me and made it very clear that yes you're right a program for women in leadership shouldn't be about what they lack. It should be more about what they need to navigate the system that might at times be against them and that goes for any underrepresented groups. Get full access to Nerd Out at alyn.substack.com/subscribe

    26 min

About

I interview readers of the Nerd Out newsletter. We talk about Corporate Education, Design, Philosophy and whatever we want to talk about. alyn.substack.com