Getting Started

For months I've been considering the development of this blog as a method to collect and expand on my learning, my personal development, as I continue down this road of my new career. Having a background in education, instructional systems design and instructional technology prepared me well for making the switch to a pseudo-corporate position in a training and development role. What I've learned since making the career jump was that most training and development professionals in the corporate world don't have a background in learning or education. Although I don't have hard evidence at hand, I would feel safe in assuming most people in a T&D role come from business roles with the majority having human resources backgrounds.

So where do I fit into this picture. For the past two and a half years I believe I've brought a different perspective to my role than most. When entering into conversations with training vendors my initial reaction is to investigate the content and delivery for potential impact on the participants from a teaching and learning perspective. While most in my industry probably share that same goal I've found that they aren't coming to the conversation with the same understanding of the basics of instruction. I believe that puts me in a different position to design and evaluate training and learning opportunities for my organization.

What I find frustrating about the community that has been built around the training and development role is that there's a certain expectation that all T&D pros work within a similar set of circumstances - more in line with a corporate model than not. I'm not in a typical corporate training position where I design then deliver a single learning event to many people on a recurring basis - the industrial take on corporate training. I don't develop compliance courses, for instance, and role them out to 78,000 employees spread across the globe. I've met folks who are in those positions and I don't know how they handle all of those variables. My role is, sometimes unfortunately, more of an administrator of learning. Although I attempt to impact the delivery of our mostly vendor-delivered training I find myself often not able to make enough of an impact on the front end. The trainings we provide are often one-and-done events to small groups of highly educated and highly technical professionals with many degrees already. They are used to, and have sat through already, sometimes 25 years of school where they sit and absorb rather than learn and do. It is against this tide that I strive to make changes. And it is difficult.

As a result of this inability to impact the learning offered by our vendors on the front end what I've been trying to do, from a T&D perspective, is increase the value of these learning events by infusing them with a taste of continual learning. I've been striving to integrate our organization's e-Learning courses into our instructor-led training (ILT) in order to provide opportunities for pre/during/post course additional learning. I've been working with our participant's leadership to consider funding communities of practice connection sessions where participants from these courses can come back together some time after the course is over and discuss what they learned, how that learning impacted them and the work they do and how they've integrated that learning into their daily activities. That has been a hard sell.

Enough about my background, I'm sure more will spill out as I move forward. It is with this concentration on continual learning though that I move into the development of this blog.

The purpose of this space is for me to be able to write about my development as a professional in the field of learning, training and development. As I've hinted at, I often criticize my/our own training department's lack of continual learning opportunities and I've come to be quite tired of suffering through that myself. I, like most people, would benefit from not allowing discrete learning event stay discrete. My intention is to use this space to write about what I learn, to learn and develop more through that process, and to share my learning with the interwebs so that maybe someone else can share in that with me. And if I end up delivering my monologue to an empty theater at least I will have enjoyed the process and I will hopefully be better for it.