Insights

The occasional insight into learning and development and whatever sparks our fancy.

L&D Lessons Learned from Being a Parent (Part 5 of 5)

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Try Something New

During the 2020-2021 school year, my oldest was in third grade, and in our state, school was remote for six months of the year and an optional remote for the last three months. Which meant, we got to do third grade virtually from home. (And yes, there is an emphasis on the “we”. I would like to give a shout-out to all of you parents who did the exact same thing. We ALL earn a gold star for virtual school!) 

Here’s the thing that amazed me. She got up everyday, got ready, and made it a priority to log-in and participate. But why? What was it that engaged her so?

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L&D Lessons Learned from Being a Parent (Part 3 of 5)

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Poop

I am not sure I can write a mini blog series on lessons I’ve learned in parenting without including a poop story, can I? But don’t worry, thankfully, this blog comes sans smells, and I will leave out most of the gory details.

When our youngest was two months old, we traveled as a family to Southern California for vacation. The trip unfortunately coincided with some constipation for our little one. With little babies, this isn’t necessarily uncommon. However, most caregivers know that after a poop hiatus, when it comes, it’s likely to be EPIC… so we were on high alert.

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Who do you lean on for L&D support?

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A year or so ago, my friend and colleague, Kassy LaBorie, invited me to join a group of fellow trainers and training designers for their monthly, virtual chit chats. Over the past year, as part of this group, I’ve met an incredible group of people, passionate about their craft and always willing to lend a helping hand.

Some of us work in larger training teams, some of us are “teams of one”, but we all need support, advice and a helping hand from time to time. In today’s podcast, I brought in some different voices from our monthly, virtual training group to share what they find valuable about our meet-ups, and what you might want to consider if you’re thinking of pulling a group of people together.

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When was the last time you had a first time?

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On Monday, my kids finally had a chance to enjoy their final Christmas present: ski lessons. Since we were on the mountain anyway, I joined in the ski lessons. It was the first time any of us tried skiing. While the kids seemed to pick it up quickly, I began to reflect how odd it was to be 46 years old and to be trying something totally new to me for the first time.

It was uncomfortable. And beyond the fact it was my first time trying to ski, I was even more self-conscious because my fiancée (who has skied plenty) decided to join my ski lesson.

What does this experience have to do with training and instructional design? Plenty.

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8 Highly Successful L&D Professionals Share Their Trainers’ Holiday Wishlist Items and New Years Resolutions

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A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in ATD’s Core 4 conference in Nashville, TN. I used the opportunity to pull together a handful of conference speakers to just have a fun conversation about what is on their holiday wishlist as well as what their 2022 New Year’s Resolution would be if they were only allowed to use one word to set their resolution.

Today’s podcast is a little less traditional than the 1:1 interviews you may have grown accustomed to on the Train Like You Listen podcast, but I hope you’ll indulge us as we begin to experiment with new formats. Enjoy listening to some wisdom from Sharon Wingron, Cindy Huggett, Kassy LaBorie, Cara North, Tim Slade, Shannon Tipton, Myra Roldan and Betty Dannewitz.

This will be our final podcast in 2021, and we hope you’ll join us in 2022 as we bring a bunch of new ideas and continue to experiment with new formats!!

Happy holidays!!

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How can we help new managers transition from their individual contributor mindset?

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One of the most difficult transitions in the working world is going from an individual contributor to a people manager for the first time. Where once you were told what to do and were friends with your colleagues, now you’re asked to supervise those friends and you’re responsible for their success, growth and development.

Too many organizations don’t adequately prepare new managers to make this transition, promoting their employees into positions of higher responsibility and authority because they were good at their job (not usually because they were good at managing people).

Nancy and Mike Komola, the principals at FitwellHR, spent some time talking about why they think this is such a tough transition, and how we can better support new people managers.

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Making a career pivot toward corporate training?

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Asha Aravindakshan is the best-selling author of Skills: The Common Denominator. We had a 16-minute conversation about her research that focused on how people have successfully used their skills and experience to land the job they truly want to be doing.

During our conversation, we spoke about whether people should apply for a job they’re interested in even if they don’t have all the skills that are required in the job description, how to brand oneself to be best positioned to land their dream job and how to transition from someone’s current role to a role in learning and development.

We also talked from a hiring manager’s perspective and where hiring managers should be looking for higher quality talent.

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Participants should get some of your assessment questions wrong

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As I was driving my kids to school on Tuesday morning, a local radio station asked for a contestant to call in to be part of the Puget Sound Showdown. Basically, it’s a lightning round-style radio quiz competition in which two listeners (one from the north Puget Sound area near Seattle, one from the south Puget Sound area) compete to answer random trivia questions correctly. The first contestant to answer five questions correctly is the winner. So I called in (on a hands-free device, of course, because I was driving).

“What was Peter Parker’s day job?” was one of the questions.

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