Transitioning To Corporate ID - The Promise and The Pitfalls with Rick Jacobs

Luis Malbas  
Well hello, everybody, welcome back to the training, learning and development communities event, transitioning to learning and development or virtual first virtual conference about this of the year. Well actually, we did do one earlier this year that was about teaching to instructional design. But this one has a little bit of a different flavor to it. And I hope you guys are enjoying everything yesterday was fantastic this morning with Kara was great. And I see the virtual tables have been busy all morning, Ricky Fisher was in there and Christina Archer. Hope you guys are jumping into those and enjoying them as well. This next session, we have Rick Jacobs, who was a first time speaker for TL DC. He's gonna be talking about transitioning to corporate ID, the promise and the pitfalls. And I have a little intro for Rick here. He's the principal of Jacobs at owl LLC started in the early 90s as a firearms instructor rangemaster, firearms salesman and worked as a law enforcement supply at at a law enforcement supply stores a second job while a freelance creative director. He was hired to teach graphic and web design and software applications at Utah, Utah career college based on his portfolio reputation and had a reputation of developing perfect files. And all of this LED Rick over to l&d. And that's where we are now. Rick also has like this incredible series of posts that he's been doing on LinkedIn. Was it? Is it unpopular posts or unpopular opinion?

Rick Jacobs  
What? Unpopular Position posts,

Luis Malbas  
okay, un popular position posts on LinkedIn? Follow Rick on LinkedIn and check those out. They're great. And it's actually I think, what led Kayleen Holt to recommending Rick for this particular event. He brings his experiences and techniques from different injuries industries and applies them to ollie does creating some very effective and successful training programs as well as helping organizations develop compelling hiring, training and training practices. So I'm gonna go ahead and hide myself from the screen. And I'll let Rick, Rick, take it away.

Rick Jacobs  
I appreciate you being here for my inaugural presentation for TTU LD. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to y'all. Real quick. I want to post a poll and have y'all respond to it. Would you rather get paid a lot for work you hate or paid little for cue? Love? I know that it's almost a loaded question for teachers. Because pretty much y'all love your work. And we all know that teachers aren't paid very well. So we'll let that go for a few minutes. It's kind of fun to watch these numbers change and move up

almost feel like we're watching a race. anybody. Anybody have a betting table on the side or start to fix move, it looks like a pretty solid at 10%. I can work through anything just pay me 70% Is I would rather rather love my work pays me. And then about 20% are I don't love or hate work just pay me. That's the reason I asked this question is because you're gonna run into all three of these kinds of situations when you work in corporate learning and development. And it was, it was kind of a surprising experience for me. And I will I figured that the way I would start this presentation is to give you my background, and what led me to where I am today. And first off my unpopular position posts are pretty much my way of venting, but also to create conversation and debate. I don't want to believe I don't claim to be an expert in anything. I don't claim to know everything. Matter of fact, I'm more afraid of what I don't know, than what I do know. And so I'm always seeking knowledge. I'm always seeking learning. I want to make sure that things are right and I'm doing things right. And I'm perfectly fine with being wrong as long as someone can tell me how I'm wrong and how I can be right. You don't find that a whole lot in the corporate world. But you find it pretty much the same in government roles. So I'm gonna go ahead and finish this poll. Looks like a final numbers. Are most people will rather love your work and the pay is met? Which is good because that is one of the things gonna be facing a lot of your work in corporate l&d. So real quick, I have a, I'm going to walk through my background, I'd rather spend a lot of time answering questions and talking about my experiences and share with you that and how I came up with my unpopular positions, and give you the opportunity to ask about specifics about anything involving the job. So first of all, who I am, I have been an I've, I've, I've done a lot of stuff. I learned very early on, when I graduated high school, I was supposed to ship out for Army basic training, and wasn't able to my family left, moved to another state, and I was left in New Hampshire. And for the next three years, I went between hunger and homelessness. And I learned very quickly that to eat, you should have multiple skill sets. So I always made sure that I had multiple skill sets, I could do multiple things. So I could make sure that I could eat more rain really, that I didn't realize that what that would do for me as far as getting me to where I am today in the work that I do. But it explains my disparate background. A lot of people when they look at my resumes, or look at my LinkedIn profile, they it looks like I've done a lot of things that are connected. But all the things I do, boils down to three things that motivate me in life. First off, I've been an entrepreneur longer than I've been an adult. I own my first company, I was 14, I had a company in Lubbock, Texas called wizard industries, and I clean offices at a strip mall. I've always been, I've always been very driven, and very eager to do my own thing. It helped with how I was raised, where I was expected to pretty much pay my way through high school, let alone pay my way through college. So I started out as an entrepreneur very quickly. And in order to be a successful entrepreneur, not claim that I have always been. But you have to really study you have to learn you have to research and you have to seek out the things that you don't know about in order to protect your life. So I've owned several businesses throughout my life. I've been a freelance photographer, professional photographer, freelance graphic artist and creative director. The picture you see on the screen is a rental photo studio that I built. With the goal of eventually that rental photos to you would be a server farm for some web technology and software programs. I was working on the I've also run a software company that was actually tracking training software for public safety. So I'm also a big kid, I don't sit still well. I'm a big goofball. goofball.

meetings have always been interesting. My teammates, love my meetings. My managers always hated it when I was in meetings, because I would say the things that people were thinking, because I really don't have a filter. But I like to goof off a lot. And matter of fact, my first instructional design job, which was for which was with the federal government, I was working for the Department of Defense. I was in an interview. And I was partly stoned because I had just injured my shoulder and a training accident as a law enforcement. And I was on pain medications. And there are certain questions I don't like in interviews, and my biggest pet peeve is Tell me, tell me about your greatest weakness? I hate that question. Because to me that question is essentially saying lie to me and make it sound like it's true. Or how well can you spin something to make it sound true? And it's really BS? I'm not much for BS. So I was sitting there, the program manager, the government servant was sitting there and they said, Okay, Rick, tell us what your greatest weakness is. And I literally slumped, rolled my eyes and I said, I'm lazy. And they look shocked. And they were like, Why? explain more? And I realized I had said that out loud. And now I'm like, Okay, I'm just going to own this until the truth. I said, I'm lazy. I don't like working. I want to goof off. So I'm going to do all my work is quickly and as perfectly as possible so I can get back to goofing off. I realized I was telling the truth. I don't like to work. I want to play I want to play with my kids. That's my daughter by the way with the with the giraffe tongue. But I like playing I like goofing off like having fun. So Oh, they were surprised by that, and I got the job, I would not recommend trying that in your interviews. By the way, I was fortunate that these guys saw me for what I was. But I lived up to that standard. And I goofed off a lot. But my idea of goofing off was reading and studying and going into certain closets where they had books and files on on lessons learn, reading about that stuff, so I could be a better employee. But I also don't sit still well, so I would take on work that that people didn't know they needed. One of the final things I did for this job in the Department of Defense was I did an analysis of all the training material, I went through and analyze all their training material, all their learning objectives, and created this giant presentation where I took their 84 training objectives, reworked them into about 20 training objectives, and found gaps that were missing in the training programs. And in products we ended up developing for more training programs for the school house within the Department of Defense. But I finished my work as fast as possible, as perfectly as possible, so you could get back to goofing off. The way I introduce myself typically is I'm an artist, a philosopher, and a cop. And what I used to teach, I taught at a trade school, and I taught at and I've taught as adjunct faculty at several universities and community colleges, I find that I really enjoy working at the community colleges more than the four year universities, a seem to find people and trade schools were the best, absolute best, you have people who are earnest about wanting to learn, but I would introduce myself as artists, philosopher cop, and people are baffled by that. They're like, Well, I understand artists and philosopher, they're thinking, and they're creative, but cops don't think and cops aren't creative. And I would answer that with, well, you don't understand how creative a cop can be, until you're talking about six foot, four 400 pound drunk dude into losing his freedom, you become very creative. And you become very thinking at that point, because I'm only five foot nine. At the time I was pushing 160 I'm not going to win a fight with most people. So the thing that I found that and I alluded this earlier, the thing that I found that I really enjoy about all three of these roles, and what I love most about instructional design, is that all three of them, artists, philosopher cop, are also analysis, persuasion and creativity. The analysis part, a person with a bachelor's degree, and I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Utah. I tell people, I have a Bs and Bs, I actually told the department heads at the University of Utah that I was getting a Bs and Bs and, and my undergraduate advisor was good friend of mine laughed his butt off. But all the other stuff shirts, kind of like Harrumph. And it's like, oh, I don't know about that. But it also helps in that philosophy degrees are essentially training for critical thinking and persuasion.

And people don't understand that, that getting a degree in philosophy is really tedious. Because you have to do a lot of reading and a lot of analysis, you have to analyze arguments. And you have to break down your arguments into a succinct writing as I just saw someone comment. But you also have to get a wealth of information across very quickly and very accurately. And I found that that really helped in instructional design, because instructional design is should be a lot more about analysis than it is what it currently is in the corporate world. The artists part of it being a graphic artists really helped me prepare as instructional designer as well, because graphic art of if you're going to use the happy rainbow words, it's about communication. It's about about disseminating information in a way that people can understand in reality, and you know, in a world that I like to live in graphic design is nothing more than propaganda. It's an attempt to sway population to believe the way you want them to believe. So they're gonna buy your whole host of the combiner tied, or they're gonna buy your buy a Tesla. So, but I found that all three of these things were very complementary when it came to working in instructional design. The problem came when I discovered the difference between what I was doing in the real world and instructional design. I'm also experienced, I've, I've seen the dark side of the world. I've been in the ugly places. And so that kind of gives me a little bit of a sarcastic and dark humor, but it also means that I'm, I just don't have the energy or the time to put up With Bs, and I don't have the energy and time to blow smoke. So that doesn't make me very popular with people who are who are in management positions in a corporation. In businesses they want to be, it's kind of an aristocracy. So my my biggest challenges have been working for people who would rather believe their own fiction than actually listen to the reality of situations. So, you know, this image is is from, I was in New York City doing recovery efforts for 911. And it just really wakes you up, you start seeing the world in a different way, and you find out what's important. And that really influences my perception and instructional design, because it gives me a passion for wanting to see people succeed, to enjoy their best lives. But it also gives me a passion for wanting them to just get the facts, get the truth, and understand what it is that they it's expected of them. The thing is, is that one of the things that you're finding now, especially with being teachers moving into instructional design, it's very competitive. It's extremely competitive, and businesses don't make it any easier for you. The reason they don't make it easier for you is because they just they don't understand instructional design anymore than a lot of a lot of people who are trying to transition. And it's not just teachers.

There are there is a component of people I've had people actually tell me, they want to work less, so they want to get into training. And when I heard that, I was baffled that somebody could actually believe that training is working less, if anything, you're working a lot more, and you're working at times that you're not even getting paid for it. I can't and I know that y'all y'all can relate to this. But there were times where I was at home, planning and plotting how I was going to do things at work, but I had to punch the clock every day. So I only get paid for what I did at the office. I didn't get paid for all the work I did outside of work for two, because I wanted to serve. I see instructional design, learning to development, as we are advocates for the participants. I don't like using the word learner, by the way. So if I say it's an accident, but I don't see I see us as advocates for the participant, because businesses don't understand what they want from their people anymore than what businesses understand what they want from instructional design. So your competition is everyone. And unfortunately, the the bell curve of instructional design are people who don't understand the rules themselves. And so you have a lot of people, and you care. And I care north and I were talking about this yesterday, there are a lot of academies out there, who are people who don't know anything more than what you do. And in a lot of cases, they ABS they actually know less. Teachers, I absolutely love the idea of teachers coming in. But I've actually had a manager when I tried to hire a teacher friend of mine, who said, I don't want to hire teachers. I don't like hiring teachers. They think they know everything. And they think that and I was like do they have 80% 90% of what an actual instructional designer needs to have. But they're in the same position I was when I came into instructional design. overwhelmingly people who go into instructional design, go into it by accident. The way businesses promote people into instructional design is hey, you're really good at your job. Well, we I want you to train all the new people. Because like, oh, well, you do really well a training and you made a PowerPoint, you're now an instructional designer. That's overwhelmingly how people become instructional designers in business. So from my background, I started out in photography, and I want to but my first camera, I wanted to learn everything I could about it. So I spent hundreds of dollars on rolls of film and notebooks where I would take a picture record what was on the camera and write down what frame number it was. And I would do that so I could learn exactly the relationship of the three things between the camera on a camera, he has the F stop the shutter speed, and the ISA or the AASA of the film, the speed of the film. So I'm learning all these things, and keeping track of it. I didn't realize that I was already doing a task analysis. Then I became after a year of of working on this and building a portfolio I became a professional photographer, shooting model portfolios, shooting covers for magazines and I'm shooting for as a photo journalist, and I loved it. But then I moved from New Hampshire where I became a photographer to Utah, where anybody with a camera calls themselves a professional photographer. By the way,

I typically find myself passionate about creative jobs that eventually the industry wrecks, because there's so many people who don't know what they're doing, who claim to be what they are, and then just just crushing, crushing the industry. So in it with the advent of digital cameras, everyone with a digital cameras now professional, they put their camera on P and think that they're a professional. So I stopped, I started working for a printing company, and as a photographer, shooting wedding announcements, but when it was downtime, I've told you all I I'm very driven, and I seek to learn, I learned everything I could about the printing industry. And that's how I discovered graphic design. I learned how the hell color models work, I learned stripping, I learned pressed press systems. And I started learning how to do typesetting and Corp Express when it was 2.0. I was learning all this stuff. And I was like I really love this graphic design bit because it's a new challenge. It's answering riddles. And then graphic design got, I started job working at the University of Utah. I was working on my degree in the art lab. So I learned all the software Photoshop, Illustrator Quark Express. And I was then I started learning this new thing called the internet. And I taught myself HTML, I started doing web design in 1996. I remember when you could when tables came out in HTML, and we were like, holy, blue, green, this is amazing. I can stack stuff and move things. But then I then I would take and go into the JavaScript and and decide Can I break it and I learned things by breaking things. Well, learning how to break things actually led me into becoming a better graphic designer and becoming freelance where most of my all my clients were by recommendation. I worked for a couple international advertising agencies, and I worked for national print companies, where somebody would call a printing house and say I need a catalog. That company would like well, if you want perfect files, if you want an easy job, you're gonna call Rick Jacobs. And that was my reputation that led me into teaching at the trade school. And they asked me to teach graphic design. They had just, they just had a guy quit. Because he he was beat up by the by the people in the class. And they say, Can you handle it? And I said, Sure. And this is where I got the experience of the difference between education training, I had to develop courseware on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator Quark Express, and I was hired to design, teach web design and teach HTML. And it just seemed intuitive to me that the way I learned was by trying and building things and breaking things, and then fixing things. So that's how I developed my training. I thought I was just doing education, I was just being a teacher. But the way I structured my classes was, I would show them, I would walk them through how to do something. And then I would show them, I would show them an advertisement say this is what I built. And this is how I built it. And now I give them all the pieces and say I want you to build the same thing. And now I spend time with each person as they're going through it working with each person in their own speed of competency. So while I'm a graphic designer, I always had a second job to keep myself out of the basement. So I didn't start collecting cats and become that weirdo that everyone on the block is afraid of. And my secondary job was as a firearms instructor rangemaster law enforcement supply store that led me into law enforcement training in 2000. Because of y2k, everyone was a computer graphic artists and my ability to make a living as a graphic artist went down. So I went into law enforcement. I became a deputy sheriff in Virginia, and started working at the Academy. And even at the academy. This is where I got my first exposure with real training. With a firearms instruction. I was designed my own training, and people were seeking me out because I was hard as difficult. Not everyone can pass my classes. And people wanted that. And I saw that people actually want quality training. People want to be challenged and feel like they've learned something that got me into law enforcement training. And I worked at the Academy for a number of years designing programs and I started and it just seemed like there was a better way of developing training materials. Then in 2006. I crushed a discovery neck, and there's nothing wrong with cats. I love cats too. I'm just allergic to it. My sister my daughter is too and I traveled too much. So it's not nothing wrong with cats. I just didn't want to be a become a big cat collector.

So in 2006 I crushed a disc in my neck in a training accident. I couldn't work full I couldn't work full time at the sheriff's office. I was offered a job at the defense contractor. And this is the first time I ever heard the words instructional designer. I was already doing work for this, for this defense contractor doing counter interrogation and counter surveillance training for Defense Intelligence Agency. And they really loved my work because I was the secondary interrogator for people who are going over to foreign countries working at working at embassies, and I was training, we were training them on how to resist interrogation tactics. And I had a lot of fun in that. So when they approached me and said, Hey, we know that you're struggling with work. And we really love the work you do. Do you want to be an instructional designer? I'm like, I have no idea what that is. So they say, well, instructional design is essentially the science and process of developing training. I was like, Are you kidding me? There's a science to this. There's there's processes absolute freakin loosely. So I got the job. And they sent me to a land driven school called Lions event is the name of the company for instructional design. So I had a week course of how to be an instructional designer who's a firehose experience. But it completely opened and changed my world. And ever since then, finding out that there's a science and a process to it, I've been seeking and working at finding the perfect processes. So eventually, I left law enforcement, I was medically retired, I started working in the corporate world. And I'm super excited, like I love developing training, I love doing the training. And I started playing the corporate world. And I discovered that the corporate world does not, does not appreciate government employee backgrounds. So some of the problem that you're going to have as teachers seeking jobs in the corporate world, because they don't understand what it's like working government. They understand the hierarchy and the decision making. And they pretty much consider the view people who have worked for the government not capable of working in business. I find that that I actually had a vice president of Rackspace telling me that because I was a cop, I had been a cop, that I would not be able to take orders from other people. I'm like, Are you kidding me? If you ever watched Hill Street Blues, or any of the police shows we hit we're a paramilitary organization, everything we do is worse, well, then, then you wouldn't be able to work for us because you wouldn't be able to work independently. Seriously, for live in half hours, I'm the only person I'm one of five people in 420 square miles, taking calls and 400 690,000 people I'm capable of working independently. What it boiled down to is that he just perceived cops as donut eating ticket writers who are incapable of creative thought or being able to do the work. He never looked at my 16 years of great of self employment. As a creative director. He never looked at the businesses I've started. And the business background that I had, all he saw was my government role. And having experienced managers who have looked at teacher resumes, that's kind of the same idea. If you're the teachers just they just go, they they just go to a school that give kids a handout, say pass this, and then they drink coffee, eat doughnuts and complain about how nobody likes them.

It's stupid, it sucks. And I am sorry that you're gonna be faced with that. But nobody's ever gonna say that. So there is a bias against teachers. But I don't want this to be about doom and gloom. But I want it to be is there is a way to get in there by by showing and talking about the strengths that come with being being teachers, specifically, for what it takes for somebody to be a real instructional designer, y'all have any 80 to 90% of the skill set knowledge, you see all those job descriptions say, you know, must have must have an understanding of adult learning theory. Y'all are literally taught that in college, you probably had an entire course on on learning theory, whether pedagogy or andragogy. The thing is, and this is going to be a wake up call for y'all. Most businesses don't know what adult learning theory is. I have never once in any of my roles, sat down with a table of stakeholders and said to better prepare this training, should we do it through a concept of scaffolding or constructivism? Is there yep. Which so I've taken it to, you know, if somebody says Do you understand that all third learning theory, I like Well, which one of the 42 Are you concerned with? And it gives me the good eyes and they're like, Okay, so what about Kirkpatrick evaluation? Well, I understand the four levels of Kirkpatrick evaluation. Tell me about it. I'm in your company, where you actually, you actually went to a level three or level four valuation. They don't know these things. So all these job descriptions where they're talking about, you must know these things, they don't know those things, and they don't know how to know if you know those things. So you need to be, you need to be aware that a lot of the stuff that they have in those in those things you can speak to, and you need to speak to it in such a way that you can make it you can make it business oriented. Okay, so your competition is everyone else, but there is a path for everyone. All right, so there is a path for you to get these jobs. The path is, and I'm going to be blunt here. One of the things that that that frustrates me most is reading, LinkedIn profiles, and reading resumes, were used, teachers are making it sound like you're in a business, you're not, you're not at all your fourth grade kids are not customers, your school district is not a business is not your stakeholders are parents, your stakeholder in business are a bunch of people who've been promoted to their highest level of failure, and are putting on airs about thinking, you know, demonstrating to everybody that they know more than they actually do. So be honest, embrace the fact that you're teachers, you know how to one of the things that I found when I start talking to people there. If you read, if you read business magazines, one of the biggest things that businesses complain about is a lack of critical thinking skills, and the ability to make decisions based on policy procedure, the law and statutes, that's a cop, and that's a teacher, I would be willing to go out on a limb to say that teachers are held to a lot of policies are held to a lot of laws, and held to a lot of and having to make decisions. You have to make decisions every day, on the fact that you work in a school system. And you can show the transferable skills by saying, by talking about decision making about critical thinking about times that you were fake, I see people putting gap analysis, absolutely talk about your gap analysis, but on the fact that the gap analysis is that you had you had 15 kids in your classroom who couldn't write the letter A. So you looked at you spent time doing a task analysis on what they were doing wrong, or 15 kids and you found out is because the teacher that was left before was doing absolutely nothing. And you developed a program and you developed a path for them to catch up with the rest of the kids. That's valuable. That's gold. That's the kind of thing that businesses want to hear, and the kind of things that businesses want to see.

Don't try to BS your way into No, I'm really an instructional designer, because I'm a teacher, because people who are in business are going to look at that as naive. And they're looking at it as blowing smoke. They won't trust you say that, you know, on your resumes and your on your LinkedIn say that you're seeking an instructional design job. And here are the transferable skills that set me apart from the from the kid who spent three months on a computer. And now he's a trainer. Y'all are absolute trainers. And that is super key as well as being for instructional design. I believe the best instructional designers have been teachers and trainers before because they know how to create training and teaching strategies. They know how to create activities on the fly. They know how to read room to be able to see who it might be suffering who might be slowing down. And you have that skill set of looking at all these questions were answered wrong. Let's review the material and find out what's wrong. Did people get it wrong? Because it's the teacher? Is it the material? Or is it the classroom? Overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly people who became instructional designers only because they did one job in one place, became a trainer then became an instructional designer. If they don't have that thirst for knowledge, and learning how instructional design works, they don't get to that bit. I see a lot of people putting the resumes you designed, developed and implemented. That doesn't really mean as much talk about how you analyze the problem. Talk about how you solve the problem. Talk about how you cuz design, develop and implement. Everyone does that. trainers do that? content developers do that? It's the analysis bit is being able to go through 2500 lines of cancellation data and discovering why people were quitting a product and then change During the training based on what people were saying, I quit this product because I didn't feel I was getting this satisfaction. I can tell you stories about that it's one of my greatest accomplishments. But it's also one of the greatest hardships I found in business is that even though I had this, I was able to do one project, exactly through the instructional design process, they still didn't change the processes for the business. And that's one of the pitfalls. So that's my background, my history. I feel like I've talked way too much just about that. I want to hear more about y'all. And we'd rather have a conversation and answer some of your questions. I'm sure I've said things that, that might have some of you all up in arms at this point. But you know, one of the things I one of the things I loved in in, in some of my, so my interviews is like, Can you handle pressure? can I handle pressure, I was by myself keeping two rival gangs of 40 people from fighting for 30 minutes waiting for backup, unless somebody is going to die in the business office, I'm pretty comfortable with making decisions and handling stress. Teachers are very capable of handling stress too. And that's something that that you need to advertise, instead of trying to sound like an instructional designer sound like a teacher who understands the needs of business. And that's what's going to get you across the threshold. So I'm going to leave it open now for questions. And if people have questions, or if you just want to yell at me and tell me I'm wrong, that's fine, too.

Luis Malbas  
This has been great, Rick, wow, I've just been completely engaged in everything you've been saying, what a wonderful story. I'm looking here in chat. I'm not saying there's definitely been a lot of conversation. So you're, you're gonna want to go back and take a look at some of this stuff. It's really wonderful. Feel free to post your questions in chat or in the q&a area of the interface, if you have any, would love to hear from anybody. It's a Jessica saying this is such a realistic point of view. But I sometimes feel as though people in the corporate industry don't really understand this point of view.

Rick Jacobs  
It You're right. And that's why I'm self employed. Now, I'm the one of the worst experiences I had in a corporate world is with somebody who has an ATDC LPL CLP l CD, I can't remember all the acronyms, but there's certified learning professional, whatever the L word is after that, they had the certificate and Cary north and I talked about this, and she said, It's changed a lot since this person got theirs. But it was one of the most toxic, narcissistic experiences I had, because she was so absolutely 100% certain that her way was the only way and that she knew everything. But she didn't even understand the instructional design process. She fought me on every line. And people in the business because I built relationships with people in operations. This was a this this company was a web hosting company, I worked at their call center, I would actually go on the floor and talk to people on the call center floor, I will talk to the supervisors, I'd find out their needs I was analyzing where, you know, I had frequently there, so they had that relationship with me. But upper management would stay in their offices and make determinations about what they needed on the floor. And so I was always butting heads with them saying no, that's not what they need, they need this thing. Um, matter of fact, I, I drew a lot of ire, but also a lot of praise, because there's this one manager is like, I want this trainee, do this, and this train should do this. And I should and these are the things we need to do. And his reputation. You never tell this guy No. Never tell this guy. No. So we're in this room full of stakeholders, none of which had been on the floor and yours. And he says all these things. And after I'd done my analysis, looked at all the cancellation data, did a task analysis by sitting with about 15 different employees watching what they did, watching how they handled a call, listening to what they were saying in the calls, taking notes, keeping spreadsheets, I'm a spreadsheet geek, I love that stuff. And then sitting in this room, so So this, this, this, this alert going straight in the eye and I said no.

That's all I said. And here's what it looked like, you know, he looked like he was, am I sitting in reality? Am I in the office? What is going on here? And finally, you know, people, the people who knew me started smirking because they're like, he's got more up his sleeve. He's the guy so finally waited for the guy to open his mind and say, Okay, you said no, tell me why you said no. And then I dropped the volume of information, the research the graphs, the reports I wrote on the analysis I've done I said training should be done this way, and should be done this way. Because of all these facts, because of all this data, because of all this information, you've been training people to do this thing, and turns out that nobody is doing that thing. And they're, and you're not setting expectations, you're not listening to that. So the training I'm going to develop is going to do this. So the result was, it would take prior and the previous form of the training for people to reach their key performance indicators, it would take them five to six weeks, when they got done with my training, people hitting their key performance indicators, within two days, there was a boom out of the water if people were made. And they found the data showed that if they weren't hitting their KPIs within a week, they were eventually going to quit, or get fired. And the result is, is that business unit went from 15 people to having a higher 15 people every three months, because of the massive expansion of customer usage, the cancellation data dropped significantly. And all it took was setting expectations with the customer. Now, you don't get that opportunity to do that with students so much. But those are the kinds of things that business owners or business people need to be aware of the times that they let me do it the right way. They've had huge success. But then they always want to just say, Well, that was you know, that was this is like no, this is a process. This is a system. If you accept the process in the system, it will result that way. Most of the time, there will always be an outlier. But a lot of people, there's such a lack of understanding and instructional design and learning development. And I'm an advocate for a clo I don't think learning and development should be in anybody else's department should not be an HR should not be an operations. It should be its own entity, because learning and development can be the third party, third party objective consultant to the business because they touch everything. And their job should be analyzing issues, finding gaps, analyzing data, that's things that teachers do a lot every year anyway. That's something that businesses are always saying, we need more data analysis, we'll hire the people who know how to do data analysis with human behavior, ie the teachers. They know how to do that. So if you build your resume to carry on that way, you're gonna be you'll you'll get through the threshold. But when you get the business when you get into the job, the likelihood of you doing is actually be very slim. All right.

Luis Malbas  
Well, Rick, so sensible, you know, we're, we're, we have got three questions in the q&a. And we're, we're hitting our time here, but let me let me let me get these questions over to you. Sure. So this one from Laura Bradley incorporations. What is more common for lnd working arrangements? Is it a lot of independent work with SMEs? Are there large l&d teams, from looking at job descriptions? There seem to be multiple levels of LED and I'm not sure where to start?

Rick Jacobs  
A lot of it depends on the size of your organization. But it also depends on the savviness of the organization. I worked for a mortgage company that had about 10,000 employees, and I was hired to build their first l&d team. Eight months later, I was laid off because they didn't see it as a revenue generating organization. Now they've laid off their entire l&d company, why'd they did that three months ago? Typically, there's a there's a term we use in learning and development called the unicorn companies want to hire somebody who's a speed, who's an instructional designer, who's a trainer, who's an elearning developer, who's a data analyst, they want to hire somebody does everything they want you to, but it's an entry level position with 10 years of experience that pays 50,000 a year. That's a very common experience in l&d. So, that's that's why I lead off with that poll. Do you want to love what you do and get paid a little because that's teachers already used to that. So l&d is a very easy thing to move into. I have someone on mentoring, who has an instructional design position. Now she's making 80,000 a year. I've been in the she's been doing it for since I started. I started her and her role in 2018. Now 2017. So she's been doing this for four years. She's making 80,000. I have yet to make 80,000 as an instructional designer ever, in any company. So it's a really, and what she's doing is she's writing scripts about software for a company who sells software. So she's not even really doing instructional design either. Because her benefits are great. She's getting paid well She's sucking up the work. She's absolutely bored with us completely below her skill sets for the money and for the income. And the benefits.

Luis Malbas  
Oh, you know what I just want to say, these are the kinds of conversations we have regularly on TL DC, because there is a lot of this that because the industry itself is just so varied in so many different ways. And, and so it's great that you're addressing that. Next question, what is the most challenging fact about your transition to ID?

Rick Jacobs  
Um, I think the most that the most challenging is discovering how it should be done, and not having a company that cares. Its training objectives that train objectives are, there's a lot of conversation, Alex Salas posted something just recently, having spoke with the guy who wrote the Bloom's Taxonomy revision. And when they were talking, I was like, Okay, what do I not know, I watched the whole thing. And after watching, I was, like he's been, he's saying exactly the one I've been saying for years is that performance outcome, I call it performance, outcome, performance objectives. Now, instead of training objectives or learning objectives, because a lot of people in business, and you might see this happening in teaching as well, where people are writing training objectives, or learning objectives or performance objectives for what they want them to do in class. And that's not what an objective should be. An objective is what you want them to be able to do once they've left. That's what they're performing in business, I'm not going to train somebody to discuss something, because nobody discusses this stuff. Once they leave the training room, they're actually doing it. It's worse, I it drives me through the ceiling, when I see people use discussing elearning unless you're gonna measure discuss, which is you have people actually discussing it, and having a conversation about it, and you have a rubric of their performance showing their proficiency have discussed that don't use discuss as a training objective, you bring that back to the business, they don't care, they just want the training done. It's like, well, there's a way of doing this, if you let me do it the right way. Well, that we're not gonna allow you to do the right way. We can get people better Kate, we can get every design the new hire training, and I added a middle step, which is my my safe, safe place to fail lab, where they would go through scripted phone calls, and have to get through the script of phone calls and perform correctly before they were put on the phones the way they did it. And the way they do it. Now, two weeks of fire hose, you're on the phones taking calls, if you can't do it, you're fired. What does that teach people? Imagine if you were teaching if you were doing that to kids in school, I think that the government's making you do that to a degree. But the most challenging fact about my transit for transition was that a business business decision makers, I don't like calling them leaders because I didn't elect them. And a lot of them don't lead. A lot of decision makers don't understand and don't care enough to want to do things the right way. They just want to check boxes, they just want to check boxes. And that's a very frustrating thing.

Luis Malbas  
Definitely got a couple more questions here. This one from Andrea, when you were in a junk, an adjunct professor going into it, did you find that at times you had to explain to interviewers that you can develop a module training course, quickly, I've had some interviewers assume that I had months and months to prepare my course.

Rick Jacobs  
Yeah, that's a yeah, there's a lot of explanation you have to make. So one of the things about hiring in a corporation is that the first person the first you have to get through your resume has to get past the wall, for somebody to look at it and decide that you're somebody they want to talk to. The first interview is typically with somebody who's in HR that has zero experience they're just looking for is what your resume equal what's on the job description, they're going to ask you job, they're going to ask you questions, and they're not going to really understand your answers, you're not going to until you get to a training manager or training director, will they be able to understand that your paradigm and that's that's essentially what the wall is, is getting your paradigm through it. So and that's why a lot of, of of teachers think that by writing the resume and their LinkedIn profile that my my job as a teacher was really instructional design can really hurt you because the people the hiring managers that know enough, are just think your BS your way through it. But if you can get if you write it to, I understand how this translates into business needs, then they're gonna be more willing as like, well, you know, that's actually interesting. I understand the things in your job description because I'm educated in that but this is how it applied to business. Now you've got it now you can get through those first two walls, and then explain to the training manager who may or may not understand either. Most of the training managers I've had, most of the directors I've had had no experience, as trainers had no experience in instructional design, there was somebody who did really well in sales. And because they're very good at sales, they could train other people how to be sales. So you need to be able to find that balance between using big words that people in the industry would understand and small words for people who have no idea what you're talking about. Did I answer your question? I don't know if I answered it well enough.

Luis Malbas  
I did. Rick, that no, that's good. One last question. This was from Susan, you might have mentioned this, have you been in a corporate or entrepreneurial situation where you were the only person there knowledgeable and how to create training? It can be challenging to be the only one rather than being part of an l&d team.

Rick Jacobs  
Yes, absolutely, unequivocally. I, the last job. So I was laid off twice in a year, once because of COVID. And second time, because the mortgage industry tank, but partly, I think the second one was is that I was too much of a thorn, in the side of the people I was working with with this mortgage company. I was hired to be the training manager and build a training team for a division of a large national mortgage company that had multiple divisions. The the corporate headquarters hired a VP of learning and development, and he had missed any had a had a director of learning development under him. Both of them would constantly talk about their 30 years of experience. And finally just said, adding 30 years of experience of being wrong is not three years of experience. It's just three years of experience being wrong. They were using. It's a big thing right now, if you're teaching style, buying the learning styles, abandon that now because people who are in learning and development, we have research, we have evidence that shows that learning styles Not a thing. But this director and this VP they're hiring was based on on learning styles. And they would they didn't have a process, I would ask him, What is your process? Oh, well, you know, you know, things and stuff, and yarn and glue. And you know, we have 30 years of experience, we know how to do this. No, you don't? Do you have a strategic plan? Or we're working on one? Well, here's mine. I wrote it in three. I wrote it in three days. Do you have any data to support your strategy? Well, no, it's like, Okay, here's all the data I've already accomplished in the last week. So if you do it, it's not uncommon, especially if you're constantly seeking knowledge. But hopefully you have better skills of diplomacy and politic politicking than I have. Because I tend to just frustrate anger people. But I'd rather people be angry because I'm telling the truth than blow smoke, and have them think I'm a yes man and willing to do things the wrong way. I make people tell me no, I say this is the right way. Here's all the evidence that is the right way. Here's the processes, this shows the right way. This is what I'd like to do. And they say, No, we want it done this way. I'm currently working on a project that's exactly like that. I said, you know, this project would be much better served if we set it up. And we did it this way where we're telling a story. And as we're telling the story, we're breaking out the whys, but doing it this way in the story. And then we have people go through this like, Nope, just make it a click. And we're just, we're just adapting someone else's training. Just make it a click through. Okay. And then I get, I get criticism from other people saying, well, it's just a click through. Yeah, because that's what you told me to do.

Luis Malbas  
Love it, Rick, thank you so much. I'm gonna post your LinkedIn URL, once again. Oops, I posted in the wrong spot in the chat area. There you go, everybody, hopefully, Rick, I'm sure you're gonna go to LinkedIn, and you're just going to have like a bunch of people that want to connect. So um, that's Rick, that was great. I loved it. Thank you so much for you know, I really appreciate your perspective on this. It's something that that I think that everyone that's in the audience needs to hear. And I'm really grateful for you taking the time to share with us.

Rick Jacobs  
Sure thing, I don't know if I don't know if you can do this. But if you want, I could go into I could create a table and people want to have one on one conversations or one on eight conversations. I'd be happy to do that.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, yeah. If you want to I mean, I'm it. I'm not sure on the participant side. Yeah, I think you can create a table if that option is available for you. Feel free to Yeah, feel free to do that. Do you recall otherwise I can create it for you.

Rick Jacobs  
I have no idea. I actually stumbled into chat rooms with Karen north and Ricky Fisher and you Yesterday,

Luis Malbas  
let me make it right now make it right after this and actually we have what three starting? I saw thing. Yeah baileigh has taken over K liens. That's going to be happening in a few minutes. And then Christina Archer is in there and Alison Sollers. And then now we're going to have Rick in one as well. So let me do that. And then don't forget 2pm Pacific 5pm. Eastern. Kim Scott is going to be with us talking about life after teaching. There's more to l&d than then Id than instructional design. I think that's going to be fun. Fantastic. Kim is great. So please come back for that. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and close out the session. Thanks for being here, everybody.

Rick Jacobs  
Thank you for joining y'all.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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