A colleague and mentor remembered - Debbie Clark

 I knew Debbie over a period of 16 years. I was in my first role in a large organisation as the Training Manager, and she was recommended to me to deliver some of our management training. Over the years that followed I began working with Debbie more and more. In a time where I was bombarded by other consultants offering me their services, I found Debbie to always offer sensible, practical solutions backed up with real experience. She never tried a ‘hard-sell’ approach with me, and certainly never touted for business, but instead she responded to my questions of ‘do you have any suggestions of how I should go about this…’ by giving her advice. If it was something I could do myself without paying for any external help, she would say so. It was this impartiality and generosity that led me to trust Debbie and her judgement implicitly over the years, making her my first go-to person whenever I was faced with a new challenge.

Very quickly we got to know each other personally, both having a child at the same age. Our catch-up phone calls extended into catch-up lunches, where we would talk for ages about family and personal things, as well as discussing our joint work projects.

On a professional level I enjoyed working with Debbie as our skills complimented each other well. She was organised and practical, and would efficiently manage all the management development programmes she ran for me over the years. I could always trust her to be prepared, organised, and calm. She was also personal and engaging, and presented and delivered effective training, as well as introducing me to a great network of other professional trainers. She had great attention to detail, and extended her business to becoming an accredited centre for the Chartered Management Institute.

Debbie was an excellent listener, and used her listening skills to good effect as a consultant, listening to me describe the work-place issues I was trying to resolve, and she would easily pick out and identify what they key points were and suggest a way forward.

These attributes were all part of who Debbie was, and the times that we talked on a more personal level these same listening skills were employed. By now I had moved on to a new role in a larger organisation, but was still using Debbie for all of our management and leadership development training (Other providers I had tried just did not have the same attention to detail). She was growing and developing her business too, and over time our lunch meetings developed from considering solutions to work-place problems into peer to peer chats around our own career paths, as well as the usual personal and family stuff, plus now comparing notes on our recent shared interest of running (although Debbie was much more dedicated than me!)

Earlier this year I had some thoughts about my next career steps, and Debbie was the person I wanted to share these thoughts with. She had always been encouraging and instilled confidence in me. I hadn’t even realised it but all these years Debbie had been my unofficial mentor.

I have learnt so much from Debbie. She has been my role model of what a good consultant should be like, interested and empathetic, solution focused without being over-bearing, and always extremely professional, clearly stating what she would do and by when, and always meeting any commitment. I know these attributes come from who she was as a person. She was interested in others, and a genuine and warm person who had high standards.

Spending time with her was always a pleasure, and I will miss her immensely, but I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with and to know Debbie for all those years, and for all the personal support and encouragement she most generously gave to me.

My thoughts and prayers are with Debbie's close friends and family at this time.

Building a Team for Digital L&D - Part 2 - What Skills?

We're probably all aware that there's good and bad e-learning out there. We're also probably all aware that designing an e-learning course is not the same as designing a classroom course. Whilst up-skilling my L&D team, we recognised that to learn more we needed to bring in someone that knew more than us. We worked with a couple of consultants and they helped us to break-down and analyse the different roles that are needed in the design and build of effective e-learning content. We had begun to work this out for ourselves, sometimes the hard way by getting it wrong. Building e-learning content is more akin to a software development project than designing a classroom training course. A clear plan is needed with project mile-stones, and make sure you have it all signed off before you start to build. But that is getting into the detail. We identified there were key roles required. These include the below:

Leadership:

Project Manager

Content Development:

Subject Matter expert

Instructional designer/writer

Copy editor

Peer reviewer

E-learning developer

Media:

Script preparer

Photographer / videographer

Voice artist

Graphic Designer

QA:

Functional Tester

Customer reviewer

 Of course some of these overlap, or could be carried out by the same person, but assuming everyone had the skill or aptitude to do them effectively was wrong. My advice would be to get to know your team members and test them out gently on each area if you don't already know where there strengths lie. And I would play to their strengths. This isn't a time to worry about status, role or position power. If someone is creative and good with ideas get them involved at the outset with concepts or early story boarding as part of the Instructional design role. If someone is good with words have them work on the script. If someone else has a good logical brain they would be good at a detailed storyboard. More is better than less, and always having multiple people involved at each stage can ensure a better end product. Make sure the team are 'mature' eg stable enough in their relationships with each other that difficult conversations can be had. The team need to have moved through their forming phase, and although storming can be uncomfortable it is necessary.

The above role list can also be simplified, for example if you don’t need custom graphics or photography then the media stage can be reduced to someone to work on the script and some support from a graphic designer. If those extra specialist skills are needed, these elements can be outsourced.

When our team was at its busiest with producing e-learning content we would have a weekly meeting to review all of our projects, review any content together and collectively peer assess.

It is imperative that training is given to your traditional L&D team, as these are all fairly unique skills. Our team all had a day’s training in Instructional Design, as well as the Authorware users having training in their particular tools. It’s important to note that Authorware companies will focus their training on using their products, and not necessarily the science of good e-learning design itself. Some products have extensive on-line resources and communities (check out Articulate’s E-learning Heroes).

For me one of the areas I was quite passionate about was the actual scripting. Anyone that has spent anytime working with e-learning knows that when looking on a screen, less is more. There is an art to shrinking down the words used to key information. Here I was grateful for the many occasions I have attended and delivered training around effective writing skills, and from my team I acquired the nickname ‘Red-pen Rachel’…

So some really effective writing skills training will help hone the skills needed (I can recommend The Writer for good all-round writing training). It is interesting to note however that scripting for e-learning is not like writing for any other genre, so going to a traditional copy-writer may not yield the correct results.

Next time we’ll get more into the actual process and its various stages….

Building a team for digital L&D – part 1!

In one of my earlier blogs I mentioned the need for a ‘whole team’ approach when going digital. So this post is going to focus on the skills needed in the team to embrace e-learning. The first point to make is that the L&D function usually attracts a certain kind of person. Traditional training delivery has been standing up in front of a group of people with either a flip-chart or a PowerPoint presentation to hand. Skills that your average trainer required were presentation skills, facilitation skills to enable group discussion, and some design skills so that classroom training sessions could be designed. Obviously good one to one communication and negotiation skills were needed when working with internal customers in the business to scope out requirements.

So of these skills, which lend themselves to effective e-learning design and creation? Probably just the last one, the communication and negotiation skills that are needed to scope out requirements. Designing effective e-learning content is completely different to the creation of a classroom training session, because the medium itself is completely different. Therefore we should not assume that just because one is an excellent trainer, one would automatically be able to design e-learning.

The rise in the availability of authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline and Captivate have made it so that anyone can have a go at creating bespoke content, but we have learnt that it is best to break the process down into its different phases and draw on individuals that have skills in each area, with lots of peer review built in along the way.

In our team we have had great success in training up our administrators to use our authoring tools. The very nature of e-learning design projects is just that – they are projects – and sometimes you are waiting on your customer before you can proceed to the next phase, so using your administrators in this way is a great idea as they can fit the project work in and around other responsibilities. Of the 3 administrators in our team that use our author-ware they have all taken to it like a duck to water and really enjoy having something different to the usual reactive admin work to get their teeth into. Of course any content will have gone through a few stages before it reaches the ‘build’ stage, and that is where we have had our most challenges.

Assuming there is a clear brief and sign-off from the project sponsor on the outcomes required, there is an initial design phase. This requires a degree of creativity (which should be no problem for those with a training design background) – coupled with an understanding of the constraints and limitations of any authoring tools. Actually setting out and ‘scripting’ e-learning requires however more accurate and precise input than coming up with any creative concepts. The outcome of this stage is a detailed storyboard, something which provides the words, the visuals and any screen commands. This stage requires logical thinking. When my team was at its largest, with seven of us, I would say only 2 really were skilled at this stage. I’m always a believer in letting people try anything once, so it’s fair to say we had a few occasions where we learnt from our mistakes, that if the storyboard wasn’t right it would cause headaches and significant re-work if it was passed off to build too soon. It’s always tempting to rush jobs through when there’s a deadline, but it’s always a classic case of the more time you spend planning, the more smoothly the build stage is.

To be continued….

Autumn reflections - and goodbye annual appraisals!

As we are now officially in ‘Autumn’ it’s time to start reflecting. The first few months of the year go by so fast – so may projects on the go at once. Now it’s time to take stock and see what progress has been made before the final push of project completions by the end of the calendar year.

The first few months of the year were really hectic, with the launch of our new performance management software – signalling a big change from our once a year paper-based appraisal system to a more fluid, web-based system that strengthens monthly one to ones and has no annual scoring. Launched in April, early indications were that this was received well, reassuring after our extensive piloting. Now we’ve had time to survey users we’re about to make our first significant tweaks, luckily these are easy to make. The full benefit of reporting instantly on training needs, objectives (at team level for managers) and at a global level for us in HR are yet to be fully realised and promoted – but it is this that I am most excited about.

To coincide with this launch, we also pushed through new employee behaviours (3 tiers, employee, manager and executive) after a comprehensive consultation round. This meant the first few weeks of the year felt very frantic, and there is always more to do in terms of embedding, but I’ll say more about that over the coming weeks.

(Our new performance management software is called Appraisd for those that want to look it up! We’re really happy with it, and the customer service we’ve had has been amazing.)

Journey into digital: transitioning a traditional L&D function

Below are my slides and notes for a presentation I gave to fellow L&D professionals.

 We can now have instant information in front of our eyes so where does Learning & Development fit in?

There are surveys that talk about how people learn – the top tools for learning now are twitter, google and Youtube - therefore traditional L&D solutions of formal training are no longer as viable or needed as they once were.

We used this Ebook to help us think about our digital strategy

 

We started recognising all those things 4 years ago – the Ebook helped to clarify and focus our thinking

Moving from a classroom based model of training delivery to a more flexible model

Synchronous = group activities, asynchronous = a discussion board

We’ve been working on all of these – it is a journey, start small and work through, there are no short-cuts…

This was a helpful (if a little long) document. We summarised key points that emphasised our journey for our organisation

Taken from Charles Jennings ‘Next Generation Digital Learning Strategies’ – this model is helpful in understanding you can’t run before you can walk, and there are key items of infrastructure that are needed to get to each stage. Your organisation may not be ready for you to move on to your next stage. This is mirrored in our organisation where we are ready for social enabled learning but as yet have no platform for this. We are between Stage 3 and moving into Stage 4 with the introduction of online content.

The below diagram maps our journey:

Which is a whole topic for another day…..I hope you found the above helpful!

 

References:

Shepherd, C. (2013) Transforming learning and development published by Onlignment. Paperback or kindle version available here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Transforming-learning-development-Clive-Shepherd/dp/1291246797?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

 Jennings, C. (2012) Next Generation Digital Learning Strategies published by Ark Group Full paperback or digital executive summary available through:https://www.ark-group.com/product/next-generation-digital-learning-strategies#.V0B03Gc5DIV (Accessed 2015)