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….