Cultures of L&D: How Do We Do Things Here? with Matt Vosmik

Transitioning into a profession, organization, or even a team that is new to you means learning "How things are done around here." Transitioning into L&D is no different. We see differences in how people talk, interact, perceive time, and respond to change, to mention a few. We'll talk about the culture of L&D in different organizations and some questions you can ask that will help you find a great fit with your style and goals.

Luis Malbas  
Welcome back, everybody. Thanks again for joining us at this transitioning to learning in development virtual conference. So glad you're here. I'm just going to take a look here. Yep. And seeing that this room is populating nicely with, with everybody coming in. Thanks again for registering. I'm excited to have Matt Wozniak back again in a T LDC event. Matt has spoken before with us. Absolutely fantastic individual. Let me tell you a little bit about him. I have like a short bio. Matt is the director of growth training at Oak Street health. His background is in learning and organizational development, which is some of you transitioning teachers might want to get familiar with that term with organizational development. That's a good one to know about. Where he's led an internal talent development function Oh, where he has led internal talent development functions in a number of companies, including two in the Fortune 500. Matt has consulted externally on performance improvement across a wide variety of industries. And he's here today with us to talk about cultures of l&d. How do we do things here? And so with Matt, Matt, I'm gonna go ahead and hide myself and let you take over.

Matt Vosmik  
All right, that sounds great. Thanks, Luis. Appreciate it. Hello, everybody. Glad to be here. Glad to have the opportunity to to talk with you. So I'm gonna start a screen share. There we go. All right. So again, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. And I'm glad to be here talking with all of you. I've been sitting in on a couple of sessions and watching recordings of other sessions in the in the last couple of days, and it's great stuff. I mean, super interesting. I sat on Sara's presentation earlier today, and was so glad to see the enthusiasm around learning, development and people making changes and so on. So I'm excited to be here. Today. What I'm going to talk a bit about is what can you expect, if you are getting ready to move into this kind of corporate learning and development, I'm going to use a generic term, I'm just gonna say corporate l&d, even though I recognize there's loads of organizations out there that might be not for profits, or government agencies or whatever, that are not technically corporate. But when I think of that, I think of it kind of like it within a company. So I'm just going to use that kind of a shorthand, just to kind of introduce myself and give you a little bit of my background so you can understand kind of where I come from. I've done a little bit of this and a little bit of that, right. So my career has been entirely in learning and development, which I know for a lot of you is, is unusual, because while you're transitioning in Well, I came in to learning right after grad school. So went through undergrad and grad at The Ohio State University. And I had an opportunity to be in a large training and development organization right out of school. And I've been doing it ever since. So that's 35 years ago. So I've done a few things here. So in talking about the transition and thinking about how we want to talk about this, I talked with a bunch of colleagues and friends and said, you know, if you were making this transition, or when you made this transition, what are some things that you wish you had known or what you think other people would benefit from knowing. And so that's kind of what informed my conversation today. And also, I've been in a number of different roles, both as instructional designer, team member team lead, as Louisa and headed up learning functions in a couple of different companies. So I've kind of looked at it from different perspectives. And based on what my experience was working with team members, you know, what did people have difficulties with? What did they ask about what kind of helped them to succeed informs kind of my comments today. So coming out of undergrad, I went right into grad school, in the Department of Communication, and was a grad ta so talk for a couple years as a TA in higher ed. And then I've spent about 13 years as an adjunct professor at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois, which is just outside of Chicago, where I taught courses in performance management systems, or behavior, corporate culture and some other things and so had been doing that for a long time. That's just something I've always enjoyed and I always want in want to keep doing so I've had some exposure to teaching in those different kinds of settings now, this is secondhand but my wife has been involved in primary secondary education her For the last 1015 years, so I hear about that a lot too. So informs my perspective, right? That said, kind of my full time career work has been more in a private learning and development kind of setting, about half of that is in a external consultant role in about half of it as an internal person within a company doing learning and development. So half on the inside half on the outside, right. As an external consultant, I did a lot of freelance work. So just me doing instructional design projects or facilitating or teaching. And then did change management, like at ERP implementations in large company kinds of things. And have also, at certain points along the way, I kind of saw that as I'm focusing on performance, I thought, what are the things that are impacting performance apart from learning, and so I went and got my Lean Six Sigma Black Belt training, and was able to consult with a number of companies on performance improvement at a very tactical level, right, so on a factory floor, in a rail, yard, etc. So I'm kind of coming at learning from a lot of different directions.

I've headed up leadership and org development at to Fortune 500 companies. And the one I met now I joined four years ago when we were pretty startup B 2020. clinics where Oak Street health where a doctor's office for adults on Medicare. And so we have about 20 clinics when I joined, and now we're at about 160. So rapid growth, and we are going to accelerate the growth even faster going forward. So I'm kind of used to being in big and small inside and outside. And you can see on the slide, some of the different industries I've worked in, I mentioned, I work at Oak Street health, which is a primary care physicians practice. But also, I worked in an acute care hospital, Community Hospital with mental health, acute care, and a doctor's practice. I've worked in for class one railroads, in maintenance, repair and overhaul, I headed up leadership development at OfficeMax. So a lot of retail experience as well spent seven years in banking. And then with a number of clients in manufacturing. So all that to say, my, my perspective on cultures and learning and development comes from the inside the outside, large companies, small companies, not for profits, for profits, and so on. So all that said, you're going to see my biases, and what I think is important to think about in terms of culture within an organization. So what I would like you to do is think critically about what I say think about, you know, what you want to do, and take the information that I'm going to share and say, how can that help me make a decision, as I transition into this potentially transition into this into this new kind of profession? So that said, let's, let's talk about that a little bit. All right. So when I, I sent Luis an email, and I said, Hey, you know, I see you're doing this transition thing is anybody talking about what it's like inside a corporate l&d function, if you're going if people are thinking about transitioning into that kind of job, they should know about what they're getting into? Right? It's going to feel different, it's going to look different, it's going to sound different. And he said, That's great idea, why don't you do it. So if you're a, you know, so the as they say, the if you make this suggestion, you better be ready to deliver it. So, as I was thinking about this, I said, basically, what we're talking about is culture, right? And when I say culture, I'm thinking about like, corporate culture, right? And so that's, you know, very much thinking about kind of how we talk, how we interact with each other, how we get things done within the organization, where are the where are the rules, what are the expectations, and so on. So these things that are kind of pervasive, and everybody knows about it, but nobody really talks about, and it's just kind of understood, if you have been in any organization. And by that, I mean, anytime you have three or more people in a room, you got some kind of an organization, there are certain norms that emerge, right? This is how we do things here. And so at the end of the day, what we're talking about is organization culture, if you're a secondary teacher, schools have a very, very definite culture. It's might be different from corporate it might be similar, I couldn't say. But what I what I can do is talk a little bit about what my experience has been in corporate l&d, and hopefully that will help you inform your choice. I love this picture, because I thought it was a great metaphor for thinking about culture, right? Not surprisingly, it came from a website for a company that manufacturers glass office walls. But I thought that was an apt analogy. When you walk into any organization, and if you've been in consulting, you know what I'm talking about, you show up and you're like, huh, how do they do things here? Well, a lot of times what you're, you're going along doing your thing and all of a sudden, it's, you know, you're in a meeting and you say something, and everybody spins around and looks at you, like, I can't believe you just said that, you know, like, what, what just happened. And I think of that as like, wham, you walked into a glass wall, there's no way you could have seen it, you're not part of the culture, you don't know what's there, but everybody else in the room knows it's there. And so as a consultant, you try to accelerate that process of knowing the culture as much as possible, so that you don't walk into those walls. Similarly, if you're walking into a profession, you want to see where those walls are, as well.

So let me if I can just share an example of something that I did, I was working with a client, large, large professional services firm, they were, we were helping them roll out a new software platform for their entire organization doing change management work. And it turns out the name of the software Workbench was they call the Delta something. And so we're in a meeting with a bunch of very senior people. And I said, you know, here's, here's what we're talking about doing. And I had a slide presentation, you know, communications, all different kinds of things. And somebody raised their hand. He goes, Matt, now what's, what's this about delta? And I said, Well, that's the name of the you know, that's the name of the software workbench that we're going to be rolling out. And he goes, You can't be serious. Like, surely I'm serious. Otherwise, I wouldn't have put it on my slide. Any said well, you don't you don't understand. He said, We can we can call it delta. I said, Well, why can't we call it delta? He says, Well, you know, about the Delta, or the Delta project that happened seven years ago. And I'm like, No, I wasn't even here seven weeks ago. So tell me about the Delta project. Well, it was a fantastically embarrassing failure that cost them a lot of money. And so they said, There's no way we can we can have this called delta. And so there we are. And I was like, wham, right into a glass wall. And I'm like, okay, duly noted. We're gonna change the name of it. And so it's things like this where, you know, that was kind of overt thing. But oftentimes, it's a much more subtle thing where you kind of step in it. And it's not until afterwards that you realize you did, let me ask you this, if you can kind of throw in the chat, maybe, you know, what have you found to be particularly challenging when you join a new organization doesn't have to be corporate l&d, but any kind of an organization, right? You showed up at a new school, for instance. And there you are in the faculty break room. And in you're like, wow, what's going on here? So what are some things that you found to be most challenging when you are joining a new organization of any kind? This can even be joining like a volunteer board or something like that? Oh, yeah, adapting and letting go of things that you used to do. One of the hardest, especially if those things that you used to do have really served you well, and you've been very successful, right? Why would I get rid of that? Everybody loves it when I do this?

Yeah, picking up the new norms. Right. So what what are the kind of the unspoken rules? Oh, acronyms. Right. I know, there's another session coming up on use of language and corporate l&d. So acronyms, I'm sure going to be there. Yeah, so that vocabulary language is going to be a huge thing. Right. Style leadership style, right. So how are you going to come across? I thought, Sara talked about that, like in terms of, you know, being t chi versus being kind of more collaborative. I think that's very much, you know, what are the norms around the organization? New management styles? Yeah, exactly. Oh, the chain of command. It's interesting, because I thought about this. And I thought, well, people in education, probably aren't used to the chain of command, like we are in corporate and I'm like, no, no, there's most certainly a chain of command in schools. It's just a matter of knowing it and knowing how to work it, right. So schools are not devoid of structure that is for certain. Okay. 100% know the audience. Right. Good. Okay. Let's keep moving. So I thought of a few things, right. So in thinking about this, I said, what, you know, if we're going to talk about culture, what I did is I talked to a bunch of colleagues who are in corporate l&d, or people who were late coming into corporate l&d from other places. And I said, I pulled them and I kind of say, hey, what do you what did you guys struggle with? Or what are some things that helped you succeed or helped you that you struggle with when you moved into this kind of organization? And then I thought about when I've been in like a team lead or you know, leadership role in an l&d organization, what are things that I have seen, help or hinder people on my teams as we were doing our work and so that That's kind of informed this list of five things that I'm going to talk about today. So velocity ownership, project management, org structure and applications and outcomes. So I'll talk about these a little bit. Now if anybody out there is a or corporate culture person, you're probably thinking, is he going to talk? Is he going to talk about Edgar shines model? Is he going to talk about Geert Hofstede? No, I'm going to talk about my experience and those of people that I've worked with, so that we have kind of a very pragmatic kind of model, although I love Edgar shines model, I'm just gonna say, Okay, so let's let's start by talking a little bit about velocity, and velocity, speed, right? How fast things move. And I kind of sequence these in the order in which I think popped into my mind and saying, what are the things that I've really seen people struggle with as they moved into corporate l&d. And speed is probably top of the list, right. And that speed of the work speed of change in which things happen. I'll talk about time and in a minute. But the deadlines are uniformly short, in my experience, right. And now think about this to everything that I say in my experience, somebody else could say, oh, but that I was in this company, and it was completely different. And I'd say great, exactly, we're all going to have our own experiences. But I'm going to do a share, you know, across the organizations I've seen where I've seen the friction and the in the flow happen. So

deadlines are uniformly short, you've never had as much time as you think you need, I found myself say there's more times than I can think of the deadline is when and then out loud, I say, No problem, boss, we can get it done. And so we know that the speed at which work happens, I think of this too, in terms of how long it takes to produce something. But there are some organizations to where you're like a factory churning out learnings, one right after another very quickly. And I know this colleague of mine, that has a, like an external website for their customers. And they are constantly putting new content up based on product releases, and so on and so on. So his in his team is more like a factory, right? Where they're just they got to crank them out fast. And mine have tended to be more like a workshop, right? Where we're making bespoke trainings for the organizations. But either way, you never have as much time as you think you need. And so like in a Carlos sign senior in the rally car down to the bottom, that's often how it feels right? You're, you're going up the one side of the sand dune. And you're just like, Man, I hope this goes all right, but you're hanging on to the steering wheel. And it always works out. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but it's always exciting. So that's kind of what keeps me coming back. Now, that said, we have also kind of the the speed of change, right? You got to be really good at cornering, you got to be able to say, You know what I know we're working on this very important initiative and something changes in the work environment in the marketplace, something I don't know, maybe a pandemic, and suddenly everything turns 90 degrees. And it's like, you know, what priorities shifted, we got to change. I had a management development workshop we had for two hour modules that we had put together, completely finished in the can ready to deliver. And something changed in the business, we said, well, we're going to now we're shifting our growth strategy, which will be more aggressive. And so we're going to penetrate this new market. We don't you know, we right now, we can't roll that out, we're moving to something else. And so we put it in the can and and I said I'm sure we'll use this, at some point, turned 90 degrees and started working on something completely different even though that finished product was sitting there never delivered. Frustrating. Yeah. But you know, you move on to the next thing and it's it's very exciting. But I can tell you, of course, then you have existing materials. Next time a management workshop request comes up or, or the curriculum calls for it. But if if you are somebody who likes to have very long visibility to what you're going to be working on for a long time, this was going to be challenging, in my experience, think things change and things really do. Move quickly. Oh, bespoke means custom made. So it's like if you went into Men's Wearhouse to get a suit, as opposed to going into a tailor shop and the tailor is going to measure you and make a suit exactly for you. Or make shoes that fit your fit your feet perfectly. So that's that's what I mean by bespoke is a custom made. Okay, so you get the idea. Now, our last one, so time is expensive. So I mentioned that my first job out of school was with a professional services firm. So I was there for about 10 years. And if you are in a law firm or in a consulting firm or someplace basically for certainly for the firm's I've been in we've charged time and materials, right so that means I Working for on this project, I worked six hours on it today, I'm going to record six hours in my timesheet, and that will be that time will be billed to that project. At the company I at the firm I worked at all of our time, even though we were internal in our customers were complete work internal people, we still had to bill back our time to different parts of the business. So if the audit advisory business said, Hey, we osmek, we want you to work on our project. I'm like, great, no problem, what's your charge number. So I would charge my time to their number. And they had budget set aside so that they could pay me. So in my mind, like for the first 10 years, and then for basically all the times I've been doing external consulting, I'm thinking about how much time am I going to spend on what? And that kind of mindset is super helpful. Because if I go to 15 people and say, Hey, let's, let's have a six hour brainstorming session, suddenly, the first question anybody would ask you is, oh, what's, what number am I charging? You're like, oh, maybe it'll be two hours instead of four hours. And you know, so that whole mindset in a corporate environment is time is expensive. And so I'll give you an example. When I was at OfficeMax, 40,000, people.

Lots and lots of stores, I don't remember exactly how many over 1000, stores, 35, distribution centers, and so on, we had a new point of sale software update that was going out, we had to do training on it. So that meant all all the retail store employees about 25,000 people. And I went to the head of store operations, and I said, Hey, Bob, we got the we got the training, you know, we're gonna have to roll out for this new thing. And I said, based on what our learning objectives are, and the functionality within the system, we're estimating two hours for that training. And this was early on in my, in my time at OfficeMax. And Bob sat me down, he said, man, let me let me ask you a question. He said, Do you know how many people we're dealing with is 25,000. And so he wrote this equation, I'm on the board. And he said, so 25,000 people were paying him somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 bucks an hour, you're asking for two hours? And he said, Is your program going to deliver $600,000 worth of benefit to the business? And I thought, well, of course, otherwise, I wouldn't have asked you. But it's a really good question. And it caused me to sit back a little bit. And he said, you said are you sure you need every single minute of that two hours, and I'm like, wow, let's let's let me go back and sharpen my pencil and see if we can get it done in less time. And so we took it down to about an hour and 15 minutes, and suddenly the number came way down. So that's in in like a school situation. You're like, you know, how much you've had time you have with, with your students, you know, you know what you're dealing with? In a company, you're always going to be pushing against that question of is this really going to be worth the time and the money and it's like cash dollars that is going to cost us in order to do this. So I often will say that to folks I work with I'm like, you know, is this you know, if every hour, they're in training, they're not out excelling and finding new patients and doing their thing. So let's make sure we make a good use of that. Okay. A corollary to that that is funny, though is how often will you get a request that says, Hey, Matt, we need a two hour training. On show rate, you know, how getting people to actually show up for appointments? In you go? Okay, what do you want me to fill it with? So sometimes, sometimes you're through the looking glass, you don't you know that? That's that's kind of how it is sometimes. All right. So that's velocity. Let's, let's talk a little bit about ownership and teamwork. I loved the phrase that Sarah had, what do you call it a murdering? darest? Never heard of it before? And I was like, Oh, that's really good. I'm going to use that. I also Googled it. Is that even a thing? I don't know. It was like, they said, We don't know what you're talking about. But I love that term. In by that what I'm talking about is oftentimes I've seen people come on a team. And they are very accomplished, right? They have been very successful in school. They are great writers. They are great. Designers, they come up with all kinds of interesting questions, and and interesting ideas on how to accomplish what we want to accomplish. So it's often one of the first conversations I'll have with people on the team, where I'll say just so you understand the way that we're going to do this, and I'll even do this in the interview is that we are very collaborative, right. So we're going to have a lot of hands on the products that we're creating. I put the Red Bull Racing Formula One pit crew up here, because it's, in my mind, it's a lot like this, right? If you're used to, you know, having the car rolling and you're the one person going around doing the four wheels, and then you know all the wing adjustments and so on. That's, that's something but that's a different game than Formula One in, in, in most organizations I've been in, it's more like this, you got 22 People who are going to descend upon whatever it is. And they're all they all want to have their their say, right. So that's why I put humility as number one, right? I think that when Sarah talked about this, she had said, something along the lines of You know, you're going to have a lot of people that are going to have their say, and are going to influence what you're doing. And I think that was 100% on spot on, I put humility because, you know, I can remember the first time I sat down and said, Here's, here's a sample of my writing, here's something I put together, you know, for this for this workshop. And my boss was, you know, got out the blue pencil. And there we went, right, we went, we went through it line by line. And I was like, holy

man, that was unpleasant. And so now when I have somebody new, come on my team, or somebody starts working with us, I say, alright, let's, let's talk about how we, as a team work very collaborative, you're gonna have a lot of people with hands on. And so get used to other people editing your work. And that's, you're gonna feel that a lot, you're gonna see that a lot. And kind of the, the next one, the flexibility is, there is no perfect solution here, there is no perfect training, there are systemic things that you can't impact. Like I said, maybe you had your writing a two hour workshop, and suddenly it's 90 minutes, find 30 minutes out of it somewhere, you know, so it's, it's not going to be my choice necessarily how long it's going to be or exactly what we're going to focus on. But by golly, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna get after it. iterations if any of you are familiar with Sam model of development, like succession, Successive Approximation Model, it's super fast iterations, we're going to write a thing we're going to, we're going to try it out, we're going to pilot test it, we're going to show it, you know, we're going to, we're going to run it up the flagpole and see who salutes right? And then we're going to make revisions, and so on, and so on. So it's not a it's not a critique of your ability, it is a fact of life. In a corporate training group, you're going to have a lot of people with their with their hands on your on your work. So if you know some, some folks feel a little stung, I get it. And then we you know, then they kind of realize, Oh, this isn't personal. This is just all of us trying to get it to be the best it can be. Make sense. All right. William Faulkner. Well, there you go. Okay, um, project management, this is something to that. I think somebody says, Oh, I got my degree in instructional design, right? I know all about storyline. And I know about Sam and Addie, and writing the thing and developing the stuff and the gamification and all that. And then I say, and then I will say, alright, let's talk about how we're going to manage this. And they're like, You don't understand I'm an instructional designer. I don't do that. We all do that. All right, everybody does project management, you know. And so actually, I'm not going to go into a ton of detail, because, but I was looking at the presentations from the January transition to learning and development. And there is a session that Helen or Heidi Kirby sorry. And Laura Hoyer did call, I'm a new instructional designer. Now what, they do a fantastic job of talking about this. So I'm not going to go into a lot of depth here, I'm going to refer you to that. Because they get into the nuts and the bolts of what does this mean? I will just say that, I think if folks are not expecting to do project management, they're gonna they're going to be surprised because I can almost guarantee you will end up doing project management as an instructional designer.

Also, who's a Bridgette Manley did a great presentation on working with smase. And I thought that one too, if if you think you know, when you're looking at at project management, all you're doing is Gantt charts, well, you're also herding cats, right? And that's, that's part of the challenge that you have with this, you have a lot of things that you need to get done and very little organizational authority to force people to do anything, you do it mostly through influence. You know, you engage people in your project, you motivate them to want to get it done. And you do this all by getting them excited about it and engage with it and you have to build a relationship with that person. And that's where Bridgette talks about, you know, managing your wrangling your sneeze as I as I think of it here. I'm going to add one thing to this though, that I think is something that I've experienced and actually drove kind of the direction of my career to some extent. And I call it the process crucible. And so by a crucible it like in the picture there if you think of like a dish, and you put stuff in there, so think of like you're in a mind and you get gold ore. Well, what you got to do is you got to separate that pure gold from the the rock and the dirt in the crud. So you put that in a crucible and either through like physically manipulating, like grinding it or whatever or is, as they're doing here, maybe a melted, you burn off the extraneous stuff, or you might do it through chemical stuff. But what I'm talking about is, say you are an instructional designer, and you are working with somebody from the business. Now, and I'll illustrate by way of an example. I was working with a client in their fight in their counting group, and their accounts receivable process was very slow. And that's where you build customers. So you send out invoices, they send you payment, and then you process those those payments. So that's accounts receivable. And so we're working with them to shorten that cycle time, right? Because you want because the company wants to get the cash in hand as fast as possible. So they said alright, Wozniak, here you go, here's your here's your force mes, you know, let us let us know what you need. And I said, All right, we're gonna get well, we'll get right in there, boss. And so we started, I started talking with these force me's. And I said, Tell me about what happens from invoice to check. And I got four completely different stories, different systems, they have their own spreadsheets, they're using pocket calculators, it was crazy. And so I went back to the business leader, and I said, I said, Man, you got four different ways of doing this. So you got to tell me, what's the right answer here. As an instructional designer, I don't know what the right way to process, accounts receivable is. But I can tell you this, I cannot write training to four different processes. And you sure as heck don't want me to write training for different processes. So that's what I mean by the process crucial. Now we have to make a decision, it kind of goes back to the business leader, and you say, you know, you gotta help me with this. I can't, I don't know what to teach to. So let's agree what the process is. And we'll teach that process. Yeah, so sometimes that's easy. Sometimes it's not that actually that exact example was what motivated me to go get my Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, that is a discipline of continuous improvement. And the black belt is a certification, where you work with business leaders to redesign the processes to get things done, we work with local motor repair facilities, we worked with flexible lithographic packaging, you know, steel girder builders, all kinds of different companies to improve their processes. And then my role on that team was then to teach those people how to do that new process. So exciting stuff, but daunting, if they're, you know, if they're not aware of the fact that they're functioning with a lot of different processes. Okay. All right. So this is what it looks like to be in the League of Nations in 1930. I guess it was great. So I

I wanted to talk a little bit about org structure. And when I say organization structure, I mean that in a cup, mostly where you are in the organization, so you may be an individual contributor. So maybe you are the department you are the l&d function, you might be part of an l&d function, you might be one of many l&d functions throughout the organization. So if if you're coming into a company, know that most medium to large companies have multiple teams that are doing learning and development in different parts of the organization, and the area within the organization that you are, like reporting into makes a difference. It makes a difference in what kind of training and what kind of learning you're going to do, you're going to have your people doing. So it's a good thing to think about, what kind of what, you know, what would that feel like to me? So for instance, right now I'm in a sales enablement organization, and that's sales, right? Our people, we have people in our in our clinics that go into the neighborhood, have conversations with with Medicare patients in the neighborhood and, and talk to them about how Oak Street health can provide good care for them as a primary care physician. So it's a sales organization, basically, but we call it outreach. And so within that environment, it is very much focused on best practice, right? What's working, who's who's delivering the best results, and how can we take what they're doing, and replicate it in the different areas of the company. So it's like it's changing all the time. We are in a heavily regulated industry. So if you're in a heavily regulated industry, that's going to make a difference on the kinds of things you're going to be creating, if you're in production or an operations environment. I mentioned. Manufacturing, I mentioned heavy industry, transportation, heavily regulated environments, hospitals, same way, you know, a lot, a lot of things that need to be covered, safety wise, compliance wise, and so on. That are going to mean that you're going to cover those in a certain way. If you're in the l&d team that's working with it. You are probably going to be focused very much so on upskilling and rescaling folks in it. So folks that are our and technologists, the way that they develop their career is often learning the next thing, right? So if we were doing app development for the Apple platform, and we use App kit, for designing interfaces and stuff, well, you know what, now we got to use Swift UI. But you know what, nobody asked you, if you like it or not, that's how it is. That's where the market is going. If you're going to stay relevant as a technologist, you need to learn this new platform. So it is always wanting to learn the new things, so they can stay relevant, they can stay on the cutting edge, and so on. Also, certifications are huge. So in that environment, you're very much focused on what's the next thing and how can I upskill the people within within that group. You know, if you're I did leadership development for many years in organizations, I would I was in the leadership and org development. So we basically got people ready to become leaders within the organization, and then upskill them, getting them ready for executive roles and so on. It's, you know, we were housed within HR. So we did not report report into one of the lines of business, so that, you know, that's a very different environment and a very different expectation than if you're in sales enablement. My team and I now we are restructuring our incentive comp, so that our bonuses are tied to achievement of the sales goals that the organization has. And so we are very much aligned with with getting results. You've heard folks talk about this, and I've talked about this in the past where the the most important measure you're going to have in a corporate l&d team is, is how is the business performing? Are people doing things to the key performance indicators? That in Are you able to move the needle on those, so you may not necessarily be able to impact top line? So revenue and sales and so on. But if you are within I mentioned earlier, accounts receivable, can you reduce the cycle time and accounts receivable, so that we get payment more quickly? And that helps us with our cash flow? Right. So all of that that kind of focus is going to be where you will find yourself focusing depending on where you are in the organization. All right. Last one, last one.

All right. expected outcomes. So in thinking about primary secondary education, and it's a little more mixed with higher, right, but certainly with primary and secondary, a lot of the learning is around building information or sharing information, building very foundational skills about thinking and living and being and so on. And so you're getting folks ready to, to learn and to become good citizens, and you're teaching them very specific skills. But the measure on those skills is very different than it's going to be in the corporate l&d world. You know, you heard me mentioned before that really the metric that matters is what's driving the business. So if you're in a corporate l&d group, you're very much aware of your KPIs, right, your key key performance indicators, what are the things we need to move the needle on? So that's that, that's very practical, it's very short term. And it's in basically, what you want to do is you want to get people better at what they need to do on their job. So for me, that's very gratifying, right? Because I think most people come into their job wanting to do do well, they want to do their job the right way they want to excel, I can help them do that. But you know, but But again, what that is, is that's focused on them being in their job, and feel good about it. And their boss feeling good about it. So let me just kind of talk a little bit about the example here, you see on the left hand side, obviously classroom, but on the right hand side, this is actually was one of my clients. And what they did is they manufactured British Steel. So you know, like when you drive under an underpass on an interstate, and you see those big giant metal beams underneath the road on the overpass, they made those beams. And so it was, you know, very industrial kind of environment you can see here, you know, everybody was in and hats and boots, and, and so on. This is in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. So we we always wore heavy coats. But there it is. So the kind of the thing that we're focused on here was some of the key performance indicators for that facility. And so when you think about what are we developing for them, you might say, Oh, well, what is what is the instructional thing look like? Are they using something from storyline? I don't know. Well, we built was this, right? So you can see the five things across the top safety, quality, delivery, productivity, and asset utilization. Those are their five key performance indicators for this facility. And so the client said, hey, you know, what, VAs MC, you got to move the needle on this. And and that's, that's how we're going to measure success of your engagement with us. So I said great, no problem at all. And so we started working with ICT as a set of instruction of industrial engineers with me, we were changing the layout and of the plant the process, the way that they did things, the tooling, and so on, I worked with the managers to help them get focused on the KPIs and learn how to have conversations with their people so that they can stay focused and get results, and so on and so on. You can see along the bottom, you know, there's a place for people to write down, you know, I have a complaint or whatever, my machine is constantly broken, or, you know, I have to walk 60 feet to get the next blank to insert into my machine. And it takes a long time, can we move the bin over closer to my machine? So they would write that in the spaces down below? And this was our this was our deliverable right now, kind of, but then, you know, but then the deliverable was really these guys using that tool in order to improve the performance in that facility. So it's interesting to talk about, oh, we want to learn about stuff. But really, at the end of the day, it's like, are you able to change the rate at which those beams were produced, the quality of them the utilization of the assets and the machines and so on? So it's, it's an interesting question, and one that I think some folks it's not hard to understand. But it's sometimes it's a you have a very visceral feeling of, we're not that interested in like, really beautiful ideas, what we are interested in, is having people be more successful in their jobs, you know? And so if you are, if you did, I mentioned this, there was a

really good presentation, that was by who was it? Kim Lindsay, writing for ideas shopfloor training, and boy, that's, that's another great one, it's on TL DC, when you have a little time to get an idea of what it's like, what you can't see in this picture is that I'm the one taking the picture. And I would walk around, I would sit on, I would be on the floor with these folks. 10 hours a day, right, doing all the things we were on three shifts, it was some of the most exciting work I've done. It was very different, you know, very practical, very pragmatic. And you want to talk about folks who want to have time to waste on on unnecessary things. It was a great discipline. And again, but if somebody's very academic, if somebody is very theoretical or abstract, this is not going to be the environment for them. Right, because it's very tactical. So I think that's something that as somebody transitioning into l&d, you want to think about, what's that going to look like? Right? If you're in leadership development, much more abstract, right, much more about ideas and self development, and so on. But if you're in a operations environment, it's going to be very much about what are we going to what are we going to deliver today? Okay, that is kind of the core of what I've got here. I guess we can open it up to conversation, if you want, what would be a good way to do that I saw there was a question in the q&a. How would you recommend for someone transitioning into the field to estimate the time it will take to complete a project? That is, that is one of the struggles that I think everybody has, and I am 35 years into it. And I still often will be sitting staring at a spreadsheet, tapping my chin going, huh? How long do I think that's going to take? It's more art than science? I think a lot of that has to do with something that I would suggest you did do, which I did, which made it so makes it easier is tracking actuals versus plant. So if I think it's going to take six hours to create this, these guides within rise, how much did it actually take and record scheduled versus act or plan versus actuals. And that will inform you over time, if all you ever do is say I think that'll take three hours. And then you go and do it and God knows how long it actually took. But if you record the actuals, I think that will help inform that. And then that'll help you get the baseline that the session that I talked about earlier that was from the January session is they also have this conversation and I think they struggled equally, I don't there's no magic bullet here. This is also something very helpful to talk to people that you know, in the industry, or people who've been doing it for a while and just kind of say, Hey, here's what I'm trying to build. Some of it is you do the best you can. And you say I'm going to estimate, you know, 15 hours and maybe five hours into it you go man i It's more like 30 You know, now that I'm into it, and you don't wait till you're at 15 hours to say oh, by the way, it's going to be 30 You say it as early as you can and and say you know what, based on how this work is going it's going to take longer or whatever. I would always always manage expectations and communicate as early as possible. If you think something is gonna go over or if it's gonna go wander. I've had that too where I'm like, we thought this was gonna take 15 hours, man it took two like sex. Beautiful, great. We got a whole day. It's available to us now what can we do with that? So good question. Yeah, that's a really good question. Okay, but I don't know what else

last one, so the webinars I think I've mentioned I mentioned the the one on project management. So the project management with the two, I mentioned the writing for ID on the shop floor, and the command people get fixed. Expect to remember what I said.

Luis Malbas  
Was you mentioned Heidi and Laura's you mentioned Kim Lindsay's I posted the links in there. Thanks for Thanks for mentioning those actually. I wasn't expecting that.

Unknown Speaker  
Bridget Bridget Natalie. Yeah.

Luis Malbas  
Which I think it was just last week or the week before? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Matt Vosmik  
That was I think that one was particularly good for for wrangling sneeze. If you want to hear about Louise's adventures with safety and the glass factory. The shop floor. Did you have to fill out an incident report on that, Louise? I hope you did.

Luis Malbas  
Actually, no, I didn't. But I do remember getting I was I was in the hospital with my boss's wife, and she was like, just freaking out. I just, yeah, that was bad. Anyway, guys can hear about that story on the episode, I used to work in a glass shop. Yeah. I'm not seeing any other questions. Let's see. As he said, he just posted it in a really nice resource there from elearning art. And and let's see just reading ceresco here.

Matt Vosmik  
So um, something that I think Luis, you had said, you were thinking about doing graphic design in in ID, I think that's helpful. I am not a graphic designer, although some of my favorite people are. But it's, that's something that I think, you know, really does impact polish and perception of the work that you do. So if you don't have access to an in house, even just the basic stuff around, you know, justifying text and spacing and kerning. And all that kind of thing makes a big difference. So I think that's going to be a great, helpful thing.

Luis Malbas  
Definitely, yeah, I think just knowing the basics can go a long way. Because even if you're using tools like say Canva, or any other type of sort of design tool, a simple design tool that is web based, just knowing how to frame things is it can can make a huge difference. Absolutely. Yeah, Cindy saying Kathy Ellis and Tim Slater. great resources for graphic design tips. Absolutely. Thanks for for mentioning that. Oops. And let me see. I do see another did another question pop up. Okay, here we go. Danielle is asking do you recommend upskilling? in project management as well?

Matt Vosmik  
Yes. Yes, I do. And part of that, my my bias, I will tell you and I told this to my, my last three bosses, I said, I 100% recognize the value and the necessity of project management. But that is my Achilles heel. So I am going to rely on people on my team to be better at that we have I'm fortunate to have some folks that are in the Project Management Office, the PMO, which is like a central project management thing for large initiatives. And so Shawn has been my savior in this current role. I think this is something that is something you really want to get on top of now, I don't mean you don't have to be doing all kinds of crazy pert charting and all this kind of thing. But I do think if you're, you know, if you've been in like Trello, or Asana or, you know, these kinds of tools, smart sheets or whatever, they all have templates, you don't you don't have to reinvent the wheel, use the templates. And, you know, again, if a lot of times it's intimidating at first, but basically you're like, alright, what are all the things I got to do? And how long do I think they're gonna take? And then you start putting dates to it, and there you go. But I do think it's, it's helpful. I would tell you, when I'm interviewing somebody, I don't have to have like a world class project management person, but if they look at me and say, What do you mean about a critical path? I'm gonna say, okay, that's, that's worrisome, because I want you to think about, you know, even the very basic project management stuff, and we'll you know, it's like anything if you're not great at it, that's fine. I'm not great at it. But you know, we'll want to figure out a way to make sure that we can kind of build some scaffolding and help that

Luis Malbas  
definitely, I feel like how Having a project manager around is sort of like having someone around that is really good at Excel. Like every once in a while you need to meet that person. And it's the same thing with project managers. You're like, whew, so glad that project manager is on at the table right now. Because yeah, it's

Matt Vosmik  
that's I think that's, it's I always every job I've been in. I'm like, people talk about oh, accounting, this and this. I'm like, Man accounts, accounts are my favorite people, because they make all of that money stuff go away. So that same thing with project management, folks, I'm like you. God bless you.

Luis Malbas  
All right, well, um, man, I think I'm gonna wrap this one up. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with with the community. And, and thanks for even mentioning some of our DL DC episodes. It's always nice to hear that people are watching

Matt Vosmik  
this. Yeah, it's worth going through the back catalogue and telling you, oh, look at all this great stuff. Thank you very much, please. And thanks to those folks who, you know, who have done that before me and shared their, you know, shared their experience that I even, you know, I'm learning from it's great. Great to be here. Yeah,

Luis Malbas  
absolutely. All right, Matt, I'm sure we're gonna see you again. Thanks so much for this and everybody. Don't forget Devin Torres is coming up. I guess in a couple hours. She is talking about impostor syndrome. And I know that's that is a big one. So feel free to come back then. I think Devin is going to really hit it out of the park because she is absolutely marvelous. And with that closing out the session. Thanks again, Matt. We'll see everybody later. See y'all

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