Hello and welcome to L&D Done Right, presented to you by CD2 Learning, a Nelnet company. On this podcast we talk with some of the brightest minds in learning and development around the world to learn from their experiences and what worked, what didn't, how can we impact the lives of the people on our teams internally at our companies, the partners that help our organization grow, or even the end clients and communities we serve. Today we are joined by a very special guest. I'm really excited to
introduce this person. I recently met him and just have loved the conversations that we've had learning from how he got into this space, what his team is doing to impact professionals that help kids with autism and just to grow in their own lives and communities as well. And so without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Andrew Blomstrom with BlueSprig Pediatrics. Andrew, how are you? Hey, everyone. How are you guys doing? As you mentioned, my name is Andrew Blomstrom. I'm the Learning Tec
hnology Manager at BlueSprig Pediatrics and happy to join you guys for today's presentation. Yeah, Andrew, I've been really excited. I've been doing a little bit of research on you, continuing to deepen my understanding of you and how you got into this, but why don't you tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself? How did you, how did you find your way into learning? Yeah, so I guess my way into learning wasn't, it was kind of an accident. I initially got my degree in business and befor
e that got my degree in audio engineering, ended up starting to work in the audio industry and got the opportunity to go teach at a university down here in Orlando, Florida called Full Sail University. That was really my first experience with education. Eventually, I got the job working as a lab specialist, so working in the studios with the students, kind of helping them learn how to properly record and, you know, mix artists and kind of fell in love with the learning aspect of that and kind of
been involved in education ever since. After that brief experience, I moved into a professor role at the university, taught a class called Introduction to Media Arts, taught the history, technology and personnel related with all of our different entertainment industries and really, really fell in love just with the impact that education and learning and development can have on everyone across an organization as well as the learners. From that, I started to kind of really find interest in more c
orporate training programs, not just individual class. At the time I started at Full Sail University, it was a much smaller organization. When I started working there, we had six degree programs and a total of 500 staff. By the time I left, we had 36 degree programs and close to 2,500 staff members. And obviously, during that change, a lot of transitions needed to take place in the organization. One of those was with new student orientation. When I had started, there was a student orientation, b
ut it was a very quick one day, kind of get the information that they needed and then by day two, they were in classes. In overtime, as the university grew, we started to find some gaps on what students needed to be prepared to be successful. It wasn't your typical university, it was an accelerated school, so a student would be taking an equivalent of a semester's worth of content within four weeks, which is not an easy to adapt to for all students. We decided that there needed to be a kind of r
evamp to that whole process and that really kind of intrigued me. That was where I really started to move towards more of the corporate orientation, learning and performance development worlds. Started working with the organization to kind of look at where those skill gaps were, what issues they were kind of running into and what challenges instructors as well as the back end support services were running into when it came to kind of challenges students were facing when they're started. So we we
re able to, through those conversations, kind of develop a new student orientation program for both of our online and campus students. It went from a day to about a week with various live and e-learning components to kind of help better prepare them. And we definitely saw the attrition retention rates went the way we were hoping based on those. It even further cemented my love in L&D and really kind of started to look, based on that experience, what else can we do as organizations to have larger
impacts across different portions of our businesses? With that, I kind of really got interested into staff training. I moved over and ran the faculty development department for that university for around four years after the orientation. So took over and did all of the continuing education and programs for our new hire staff and existing staff. And then about four years ago, decided I wanted to branch off into more of corporate America and found BlueSprig Pediatrics and really fell in love with
their core values and mission and kind of moved over there into their learning and performance development team. And I have been a part of that organization ever since in various roles, but always in the learning and performance development department. And it's been it's been a fun ride. It's amazing when you're innovating, how you get pulled into a lot of different areas when you're when you're good at the site, right? First, before we continue like that, we want to get into BlueSprig, obvious
ly, there is, I think, so much to be learned from your experience with full sale, though. But, you know, not this is not a paid plug by any means. If you haven't heard of Full Sail University, that place is so cool. None of the college I love to go to the colleges I went to, you know, I'm not going to bash on them, but that place is awesome. If anyone's listening to this and you got a kid about to go to school at college, Google Full Sail University, that is a really cool looking place. Yes, it
is a one of a kind environment. It is you never know what you're going to see there, you know, based on the industries they teach and a lot of the relationships they have, you know, you never know what you're going to see with film programs. You could be walking to class one day and there's a horde of zombies walking towards you because they're filming some sort of movie. You know, they shoot. It's where the WWE NXT is filmed. So, you know, you're just walking down the hall and it's like, oh, th
ere there's John Cena. OK, you know, it's just it's a very interesting and creative environment. Definitely. Yeah, if you're interested in the arts, it's a it's a great place to take a look at. Well, I think that the way you were explaining how just learning happens, I mean, we talked about this in the first conversation we had, right, is I came out of school, I got good grades, I stunk at school, though, like actually learning. I was terrible at it. And so it kind of leads you into where in the
professional world is I what are the unique ways that we have to educate not only the kids in school, but then the professionals, because I had to learn how to learn as a professional. We chatted about that is like, what are these strategies to truly support these people? But to get back to to your experience there, I think there's a few really cool things that let's let's hit on. Right. You not only had to go in and assess where there's gaps here and how we're on giving orientation to these st
udents, but also then the faculty in that stage. So what what did you do? First question is, what did you do to kind of assess the baseline and then to project and pipeline out the execution of of enhancing that experience for both the students orientation and then the staff? I'd love to for the learners to learn that. Yeah, for the students, we did a couple of things we looked at retention rates across the the university to see, you know, OK, this is how many students are starting. When are the
y leaving? Why are they leaving? So we started to look at trends in data on our student retention, trying to figure out maybe what we could do on the front end to relieve some of the challenges that they were having on the back end, you know, whether that's making them aware of different support that they had, you know, some of the services that we had available that might not be things that they would normally think that they could utilize. So we looked at those types of trends. We did a lot of
interviews with current and new students. So with the orientation that was in place, you know, when they were finished after their first month of school, we kind of did some kind of exit interviews with them to ask them, you know, did you feel prepared for starting classes at Full Sail? If so, why? If not, why? We also talked to a lot of the instructors, especially in those first four months where you've got, you know, new students, they're still kind of adapting to life at the university to se
e what challenges they were facing and then also talk to a lot of our, you know, our executive team at the university, our student advising team, all of our support services, admissions departments, any of those types of departments to also kind of get a better understanding of what trends that they were seeing in the data, as well as what challenges they were still having, you know, from student advising, if they were, you know, commonly seeing the same kind of student issues or complaints comi
ng in, you know, what could we really do to kind of help enhance this so that when a student starts, they understand what supports are in place and then they also have the skill sets necessary to be successful. So that was really the the main part. Also, getting everyone on board, you know, you have really have to sell. The benefits of the program, which is not I think that is one of the hardest things that people in L&D sometimes will run into. It was probably the biggest challenge we ran into
when trying to launch the new orientation process because it completely changed not just the way that they orientation was run, but it changed everything from the way that the admissions department ran to enrollment because now we were needing students to be on campus for a full week prior to them starting classes, you know, which is a whole different process compared to them coming the day they would start classes, taking a one day orientation and then continuing on. So having the data also ava
ilable and being able to sell that to whoever you might need to to show the value that you can get out of this program. And that's another thing, I think, with this orientation program is you have to understand what you're going to measure before you build because, yes, we can do it, we might get by and initially, but once it's launched and it's up and running, you know, what do you have to look back on to show that it's being effective to allow you to continue or even, you know, get, you know,
expanded even more moving forward. So I think not only show you're reaching out to the correct partners when trying to develop a part a program, but also more importantly, understanding before you even start building what you're going to evaluate and how you're going to evaluate it is essential. Yeah, right. I mean, so we have that conversation all the time and that's going to be so important for the people who are in the corporate space, right, who are trying to justify this investment of, hey,
we have to elevate this. There's always going to be someone saying, why? Yeah, exactly. What's in it for me or what are we going to get out of this? And so, but that is a real big challenge for a lot of people. So let's let's make sure we touch on that in our conversations with BlueSprig and how you did that there, too. So as you went into the then the faculty trainings, right, not only are you moving into building the faculty development, but you're seeing this massive growth of the organizati
on. So how do you not only figure out the foundation, but then support the scale of it as an organization, too? Yeah, and it was even more challenging as well with a lot of the instructors we had based on the type of industry it was, they were industry experts. Most of them, like myself, falling into the university were coming from jobs, working on film sets, working in recording studios, you know, working on animated films, not teaching in classrooms. So on top of having developed these faculty
development programs and get our new staff up and running and then also provide additional learning opportunities for current staff, we also had to basically create a boot camp to allow our new faculty to not only learn all the lovely policies and procedures and everything they need to do to do their job, but to teach teachers how to teach, which added another fun layer to that. But that was one of the things very similar to the orientation program. We kind of looked at each degree program indi
vidually to see what the needs of each degree program was taking a lot of the information we learned from the orientation when onboarding new faculty. We tried to kind of mirror the two to allow both the faculty and the students to have a better understanding of the resources available, what's available to students, really make sure that they understood that they were, you know, that first point of contact with students and they're going to be the ones that are going to help, you know, kind of p
romote some of those additional programs that we're working on. But when it came to the program development, it was very similar looking at staff retention rates instead of student retention rates, seeing where we're having drop off in our faculty, because very similar coming from a professional world to an education world, it's a big change. So seeing where those challenges were, what issues our instructors were having, what resources they needed. So a lot of it was also potentially working wit
h other departments to create new resources so that we could have these things available. And same similar, you know, working with our support services staff to see. Based on those trends, same issues usually with students, but what can we do from an instructor side to allow them the first line of defense to help those students before the crisis escalates into something to where they might be looking to leave the university or really start struggling with content and then looking across and tryi
ng to provide and give these new faculty members as much information as possible on best practices and learning and development and education while, you know, while we had our preferences on what we like to use, trying to give them a wide variety of opportunities to learn and seeing different models that have been successful so that they can adapt and take maybe a piece of this and a piece of that to kind of create what's going to work for them in their own classroom. We tried to be as flexible
as possible, just based on each individual having different learning styles as well as teaching styles. We tried to create a program that allowed everyone to gain the same information, but still with the flexibility to allow them to take that and utilize it in different ways within a certain set of parameters, which we have found a lot of success with. Interesting. So did you find that certain, you could find some commonalities between people and where they sat in the university and the types of
learners they were, or did you find that it was pretty sporadic? You could, you could start to play the game where you would kind of, there was always, you know, some exceptions to the rule, but, you know, our business programs tended to be a little bit more operational and logical in nature where they would, you know, those learners tended to like things more written down and, you know, S-O-P-E-T-A form where, you know, some of our more creative, like our animation film guys, they like the mor
e hands-on, like things more visual in the way that they learn. So trying to build programs that kind of met all of our different learning types, but also taught each of those different types, because their students also kind of fit into those realms as well, to allow them to have the skill set to reach all of these different types of students that they were going to be getting into their environments with, you know, in most cases, these guys not having much teaching experience was definitely so
mething fun to do. Yeah, it's interesting that that's even seen in the university space. It's also one of the things that I try and preach to the market and to people I talk to every day is, you know, whether it's CD2 or any tool that's out there, you got to have this ecosystem of resources. You can't have a one-stop shop. You can't have one method that you're trying to just jam a square peg in a round hole. It's got to truly be like adaptive. You've got to figure out ways that you can reach eve
ryone and tie in learning into that individualized learning pathway and then tie it into an overall ecosystem of tool sets and resources to impact your teams. One hundred percent. I know we'll kind of transition to the BlueSprig side, but I think in learning and development as a whole, I think that is what I found with talking with some industry professionals when I've kind of worked with them or collaborated on things. A lot of times I'll see that they have challenges, but they try to get somet
imes a little bit too prescriptive in their training programs, which, you know, if you're going through a large group of people or a large organization like BlueSprig, we have a hundred and I think it's fifty four locations, each one run by a different individual. You know, yes, we have these things need to get done, but you have to allow the flexibility for the learners and for those implementing it to account for the variations that are occurring in those spaces, which I think sometimes can ge
t lost when building some programs. Absolutely right. It's it's consistency to a level that provides some adaptability based on - Exactly. Yep, one hundred percent. This is an awesome time to transition to BlueSprig. Tell us a little bit about the organization. Like what does BlueSprig do? I love — me — I know — I've done — we've been talking about it. I think what you do is fantastic and I love it. But tell the tell the listeners what you all do at BlueSprig Pediatrics. So at BlueSprig Pediatri
cs, we offer in-home and center based ABA (applied behavior analysis) care for children with autism. So we offer services, therapy environments for kiddos. We typically specialize in early intervention. So our younger kiddos and try to help caregivers and families kind of, you know, walk them through the process of helping, you know, adapt and gain skills that they might need to be successful in their lives. Yeah, I love that. I love that. So why when you were making the transition from academia
to corporate, why why did you choose BlueSprig at that organization? Like what drew you to it and the opportunity to impact them in learning? I've always been very big on wanting to make a difference in other individuals lives. I think that's what drew me to education in the first place. So when I started to look outside of the university, I was really trying to find organizations that were giving back to the community or would have an impact on the greatest amount of individuals I could hopefu
lly change, you know, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with BlueSprig. You know, their motto is changing the world for children with autism. And I truly believe we do that every day. And I was extraordinarily excited to be able to come on board to try to help provide resources and training opportunities for those clinicians in the field of ABA, which would allow them to provide even better service for our clients that we serve. Yeah, we have I just I think it's really important. We hav
e a client that does has a similar mission. And at the end of the day, what the work you do is you're impacting the lives of people who impact the lives of people. Exactly. So it's so important. Right. And so I think that it's it's so important. It's such a crazy mission to to be on that you're spreading the knowledge of what individuals and organizations do like this is so fun for for me myself. Right. And so I think it's amazing. But tell us when you're coming in, they had a need to elevate an
d enhance the way you're impacting those those professionals who are impacting the communities and lives of the of those kiddos. What was you know, what did you have in front of you? What was that day one? Did you see and then how did you start to evaluate? All right. Here's what the process to executing this next level is. Yeah. So it was a very interesting time to decide to change careers. So I left Full Sail University in early 2019, sorry, mid fall. 2019 is August of 2019 is when I started.
I actually initially left Full Sail University to work for an organization called the Florida Autism Center. So as we know, shortly after August 2019, we got hit with COVID. So there were some interesting challenges initially faced when I onboarded. So up until that point, they really didn't have a like a training department per se. The at that time, the chief clinical officer was also in charge of training and they had some e-learning courses they would have new hires take. But there was really
not a formalized like onboarding process. So when I came, it was really kind of a clean slate. There were some resources that had been developed to allow learners to be successful. But there was not really a set onboarding process, which was kind of nice. It allows kind of free rein to kind of figure out what we're going to do. So the first thing we did is we launched a new training for our center leadership. For what they at that time, they were called center directors and operations managers.
They were the ones that were running our locations. So kind of bringing them all into corporate, introducing them to all of the different support services, departments that were going to be there to support them from billing and credentialing and compliance and the clinical team. And also, once again, looking at each center specifically to see what their needs were to make sure that they had the information necessary to be successful. Now, what we initially started to kind of develop all rather
changed rather quickly because initially we were doing everything in person, but shortly about six months after we had onboarded and we launched this program, a couple of things happened. One - Florida Autism Center was acquired by BlueSprig Pediatrics. So we joined the new organization of BlueSprig and also all of our centers shut down within a month of that because of COVID, which was a very interesting change. And we were still kind of developing all these programs, getting everything implem
ented and then had to go back to the drawing board to figure out how we could implement these virtually. So what did you do? Yeah, it was a interesting experience at the time. We did not have the technology to. Launch like that all virtually. Everything was kind of handled in centers or in corporate. We did have we utilize a online platform called Relias. However, we didn't have enough seats available in the system for all of our employees. It was really just meant for the initial certification
of our new hires. And then they would kind of lose access to the system. And then all the training was done in person. So it was a kind of leveraging what technology we did have, you know, putting what we could in there, putting what we could in our HRMS system. You know, YouTube was our best friend for some of the stuff we needed to get out. But it was definitely an adjustment. And on top of trying to rebuild some of the programs that we had already kind of started, it was also the process of n
ow we're part of a larger organization and we have to start streamlining the way that onboarding is occurring on one side of the organization to the other. Which we have effectively done much slower than we initially wanted. But, you know, COVID happened and kind of slowed down some of our processes. So that added some challenges to the the process as well. OK. So when I think of BlueSprig and you said one hundred and fifty four locations, right? So you're rolling out these trainings, you're try
ing to figure out what are the resources needed at each location. However, we talked a little bit about the importance for the consistencies, right? You mentioned that I'd love to understand how you implemented the uniqueness plus the consistencies to ultimately we talk, we chatted a little bit about some statistics on where your certification pass rates are. Why don't you share what the process was to evaluate, you know, what needed to be implemented into the learning experience to create that
from consistencies to individualized? I mean, you you name it, right? I mean, you were telling me a little bit about this. Would love to dig in there. Yeah. So that is one of the challenges we we found quite quite quickly is initially when we launched some of the programs we did, we launched them to be implemented at the center level. OK, they still are. But we kind of gave full like here's what you need to do. When we gave full ownership over to the centers, which, you know, as you know, 154 di
fferent locations, every different leadership at every location, there was some inconsistencies in the training process. Everyone kind of had their own ways to do it. There wasn't a lot of that consistent onboarding experience. What we did is we found, you know, we looked at the challenges that these centers were having. You know, we met with all of the center leadership from all the locations as well as regional leadership to see and then the executive team to see what challenges were taking we
re taking place. Looked at a lot of data. You know, what about what's our pass rate for our certifications for, you know, RVTs and our clinical supervisors? You know, what's the you know, how quickly are they joining the organization, getting certified and able to work with our kiddos? On other data points, we looked at, you know, what's the pass rates and things of that nature? And what we ended up settling on is kind of like the best of both worlds. So we started to take a lot of the the proce
sses off the plates of our centers. So we did adapt a learning platform that allowed us to host a lot of our e-learning so that we could kind of control some of the content going out. And then we created. So, for instance, for like our our brand new behavior therapists who are going to be certified as registered behavior technicians. It's really a effort of combined support to get them where they need to be. So the program we ended up based on the data we had and looking at, you know, challenges
and where we needed to be is we built a program that was kind of run by LPD while partnering with our centers. So now they have a combination of e-learning courses that are developed by us on the LPD side. We also offer a total of and like 11 live webinars that are all extraordinarily interactive, kind of going through modeling scenario based practices for things that they're going to have to do with clients. But on top of that, you know, they do need that hands on experience. So we have create
d what we call hands on training skills assessments guides, which each week of their training, they're also completing around 11 of hours that in the center, and they have kind of this competency assessment that they need to complete each week that's being signed off by center leadership. What this has allowed us to do is still allow for that flexibility to happen in the individualized learning for each learner to occur at the center level. But also also at the corporate level, we're also making
sure that there at least many meeting the requirements necessary to not only meet the certification board's requirements on what they need to meet, but also what our organization's requirements are, because we actually kind of exceed what the board wants to make sure that we're providing the best services possible. So we found kind of that flexibility to where there is the prescriptive nature. These are things you have to do. These are things you have to learn, but also allowing for that indivi
dualized learning experience to occur at the center. And with us not having, you know, we have a guideline on how long it should take for a learner to get through the training, but we make sure to communicate that while that is a guideline, like that's not going to be the case for all of your learners. Some might go quicker, some might have the ability to pick up and retain and master this information much quicker, while others might need more of those, you know, more support and more time with
that hands on or some of the terminology pieces. So on top of, you know, the the actual program itself, we also try to develop with, you know, center leadership and executive leadership, as many resources as we could to help the learner throughout the process, to help regardless of what type of learner they are from, you know, different study guides to course notes to additional learning videos or shadowing opportunities that they can take depending on the needs of that individual. And we've fou
nd really, really good success with the program. We, you know, the industry average for RBT testing rates currently is around 81 percent. We are sitting at about 97 percent is our first time pass rate for the exam. Yeah, so we are having a decent pretty good success. We're also with this program. We have seen major changes in our retention rate. Our employees seem to be better prepared and, you know, an understanding of their roles, our responsibilities are and what truly a day in life is going
to be once they are fully certified. So it's been overall, it's been very effective. We're seeing higher pass rates. You know, our employees are staying and it's been it's been great. So I love that where I what I'm pulling from this and it's similar to the similar to the conversations we have with whether the prospects, current clients and whatever it is for our for the strategies and the platform services that we provide at CD2. It's so important that the employee feels supported from day one.
Right. Walking them through and they're showing them that journey of success. Right.
So the story you're telling me is like, hey, we recognize we needed to provide more support. We needed to then give them an opportunity to learn asynchronously, get that information on their own time, not feel the pressure of being in front of someone asking me questions and really, you know, but how can I take this information? But let's just be let's I'm not too afraid to admit that you can't do everything on
line. You have to there's power in human interaction. And I think that not enough people are willing to admit that who are in the tech space. And I fully and firmly believe you have to tie in the online experience to in person to truly impact a learner's ability to one, retain and feel supported. And then at the end of the day, they're going to be fully committed into the mission of your organization. Right.
And so it's things like showing them what it means, you know, that orientation video fir
st time to here's some key definitions that we're going to learn and we're going to talk about these things in person, but review these key definitions before. And then the next stage in the activity on the platform or whatever the journey is, is here's where you're going to go in person or here's the virtual link that you're going to be a part of for Zoom or whatever it may be, just fully walking them through that full on experience and allowing for the collaboration, the human interaction alon
g the way. I think, yeah, 100%. Yeah.
We try to kind of build the whole program kind of like off of Blooms. You know, they're getting this level during the e-learning. And then during our live webinars, they're moving up. And then, you know, now they're doing some of that hands-on in the center. So we're just kind of slowly moving them up the ladder, but in a way that is comfortable for the new hire to gain that information, to allow them a little bit of everything, to encompass all the differen
t learning styles and still, like I said, allow that flexibility for them to kind of get the information at their own pace and have all that support and understand where the support is coming from and when it's going to come throughout that whole process. Yeah. And like you said, it's really important to put it into the experience of the technology of your choice, right? Whatever technology partner you choose is build the foresight and the vision for this success and so they can understand where
they're going. But also for you as a professional, so you can track and get the data analyzed and make actionable decisions so you're constantly evolving the way you're impacting those people. Because people change, organizations change, so should your learning strategies. They shouldn't be just, all right, cool, we did it. Check the box and we're gone. No, like it has to constantly evolve. And so that's exactly what you're doing and I love that. And it's so refreshing to hear and that's exactl
y what we look for and partners when we're going into those as well and we preach that every day. So that's refreshing for me to hear those things. And I think this is something that all L&D professionals are aware of, but just in case not, and you just hinted at this, like you have to be flexible in this role. Like we know when we launch a new program, even if we think it's perfect and flawless and nothing's going to go wrong, we are well aware that what launched is not going to look the same a
s at the end of the year. We'll learn new things, new challenges will arise. You know, we may get new things coming down from payers or government policies, procedures, but you have to be flexible and understand that things are going to change and adapt. Or the program will stop being successful pretty quickly. Yeah.
I mean, think about where, I mean, like we said earlier, we're a school, you're sitting in a classroom on your tush for three out of two hours in a classroom watching videos or watc
hing someone talk. I remember my first job, my first compliance course I had to take was just me sitting in a room watching a video to thinking where we're at today. It's just, it's constantly evolving. You know what's crazy, Andrew, is how people still train that way in certain spaces. It blows my mind. And so it just is wild to me and it's important. And I'd love, this is where I'd like to transition. I think this is a good leeway, but it's important for me when we're, when I'm talking with my
team and going out and we're talking to the field is like, Hey, understand that some of these people, this may be brand new for what they're doing. They've never implemented this before. And so we're a partner in helping them succeed and understand why online learning is impactful and what they're going to, what it's going to do for their team, right? It's going to make them decrease those attrition rates of their employees. It's going to increase productivity. But at the end of the day, you're
just supporting the person. And so I'd love to transition to, as we're wrapping things up here, the listeners that are out there, if they're new to their role or they're looking at, okay, I understand we need to elevate this. What are three, you know, key influential areas that you'd recommend for these learning and development professionals to, to really hone in on, right? To identify gaps or, you know, technology, like what are those areas that you think are the three most important spaces to
start at? And I kind of mentioned this earlier. I think understanding what, once you know what you're trying to do, or, you know, you know, you want to create something related to, you know, this program or this, whatever it might be first, understanding what you're going to evaluate, because one of the biggest things that you're going to have to do in any L and D organization is, you know, all these new programs, they require resources, they require manpower, they require money and time. So be
ing able to understand what you're going to evaluate, have the data that you need ahead of time and understand what you're going to measure and share and be able to communicate with like senior management or where the stakeholders are is key. You know, if you can't adequately communicate the reasoning and how it's going to benefit an organization, you are going to have a very hard time to get the resources you need to be successful. I think that is one way we have been extraordinarily successful
over in our learning and performance development team. You know, we went from a team of four to 13. All in the past, I want to say year, year and a half. And all of that was done by understanding when we're building what we're going to be measuring, how we're going to be measuring it and how that is going to show the organization the impact that that program is having. And because we've been able to do that, we have been able to show how beneficial these programs are, whether they're full on pr
ograms or just additional resources available, you know, with being able to show the impact you're having on an organization to the executive team or senior management, stakeholders, whatever it might be, depending on how the organization is set up is number one. I think that's something that they all, you definitely have to think of going into anything because you can have the best plan in the world, but if you're not going to have the resources available to implement it the way you need to, th
en, you know, it might not be as effective. So it's definitely personnel and technology resources? Everything. Yeah, because same thing like for us initially when, you know, like I am on the FAC, we didn't have some of those technology pieces to implement a, you know, the products that the way we wanted it. So that's part of it. And as you know, like, you know, technology is going to cost, you know, to get those, you know, where you're going to host the content, where you're going to create the
content, then you may need to bring on new people to be able to present the content or travel to train, whatever it might be. You know, all those programs are going to have some back end costs. So understanding how you can sell the benefit of those to the organization, I think is extraordinarily important so that you can make an impact to the most amount of people. Partner, partner, partner, partner. You know, we in learning and performance development are not masters of all. So understanding an
d building those relationships with all of the departments across the organization has been key to our success. None of our programs would be as successful if we did not have the buy-in from all of our support services teams. So not only is that, you know, understanding what you're going to be measuring to kind of help get some buy-in from maybe the executive team, but also partnering with, you know, the different centers and support service teams on how they can help provide a making sure you'r
e presenting the right information, but also how you can partner together because that's the other thing. You know, if you, I can have the best program in the world, but if I don't have buy-in from those going to be taking the program or those managing those who are going to be taking the program, you also are going to run into some challenges with the program being effective. I'm sure we've all run into times in our life where, you know, maybe your manager or somebody was like, oh great, we got
to, you know, everyone go take that course. It's just this to do it, whatever. And it's like, that doesn't set up the best experience for the learner. You're like, oh great, now I got to take XYZ. So, you know, partnering with, you know, the different departments as well as your leadership to kind of really get buy-in and similar to like the senior management, be able to pitch them how this is going to impact and improve their day-to-day lives is extraordinarily important. And then, you know, g
oing into that technology gap, what technology do you have and how can you make it work for you? You know, there are a ton of tools out there that are extraordinarily useful. And, you know, I don't think that a lot of people leverage the technology they have as most effective as they could. Like you said, some still, they may have a great technology, but they're still posting, you know, a four-hour compliance video on, you know, HIPAA. Is that the most effective way to utilize that technology? P
robably not. So also, you know, finding the right technology partner and then on top of finding the right technology partner, leveraging the technology in a way that can make the most successful learning outcomes for your learners, I think would be the big three. I love that. No, I would, I couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. All right. Final two questions. We made it, Andrew. So first of the final two, where do you see L&D in the next five years? Obviously, we've changed from video to, yo
u know, now people are starting to understand they got to do more. What do you think the next big change in learning is going to be? That's a very good question. I think, you know, we've started to make the change now. I think we'll see more of a drive towards that hybrid L&D experience, kind of like you're talking about. I think we've now found that, you know, not that all in-person is not effective, but I think that we have found that there is that lovely relationship between the combination o
f in-person and some of those e-learning. I think we'll see a little bit move, a move towards a little bit more of that across organizations. And we've also already seen it coming, but I think micro learning is going to be kind of the way of the future instead of, you know, long-form courses, not even four hours in length, but just your typical structure of a course. I think you're going to see a move more towards those short micro lessons that are available on demand when you need and when you
need it. Very similar to, I mean, how I kind of utilize YouTube. You know, I'm not a mechanic, but I can quickly search really fast to find how to change XYZ, watch a three-minute clip, and do it really quick. I think you're going to see a lot of organizations move towards that type of training. You know, they may still have their initial onboardings where they are kind of your program, but I can see a lot of your continuing ed move to more of those when you need it, how you need it, micro type
learning activities. I think we'll probably see a little bit more. And you're starting to see a lot of these learning technology pieces also start to implement a lot of that as well. I know a couple that we use recently have now offered a lot more of the templates and backend capability to quickly implement those as well. Yeah, definitely important to have those tool sets to be able to go in and customize those micro learning experiences that you're looking for, right? Feel accomplished as you'r
e going through. You've got to make sure you're finding things along the way, right? Yeah, and for like a lot of our field staff, you know, they don't have the time sometimes to fully sit through an entire course to get the information. Even if they've taken it in the past and I need to go back and refresh, I know the content's there, but I may not have the time to go through something like that. Whereas those like micro lessons are a little bit more accessible, you know, and more time-friendly
for those kind of just ad hoc as needed, you know, training experiences. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Last and final question. We talked about this briefly before. I looked into the recommendation you gave me, but I'd love for you to share it with the listeners. What learning and development book do you recommend to the people that are out there that are looking to just enhance their knowledge and experience here? So it is at a print. So if you want to find one, like thrift books or somethi
ng like that would be the best place to go because they can get a little expensive new. But the book is called Performance-Based Evaluation. Let me turn off my thing for a second. Look at those tabs. Yeah, exactly. As you can see, I use this quite often, but it is called Performance-Based Evaluation Tools and Techniques to Measure the Impact of Training. The author is Judith Hale. She's got a couple of books out there as well about like certification, performance-based certification. But the eva
luation book has been extraordinarily useful, especially I kind of reread it or at least some thumb through it any time that I'm setting out to build a new program. I'm actually rereading it right now. We're getting ready to launch a new program here in the next couple of weeks, but it is a great book that covers a lot of the thought process of kind of when you're setting out to build a program, as I've talked about a few times, that evaluation, those metric pieces, it really kind of breaks down
the different ways that you can look to evaluate your programs once they're running, but also tools, techniques, and tips and tricks on how to partner with those external partners to get the information you need in order to build the most successful program. So it's just got a lot of useful resources and tools. And some of it is stuff that we kind of already know, but kind of shown in a different way. But it is a great little book, especially, like I said, I kind of go through it every time I'm
building a new program, just to make sure that I'm still getting the information I need and making sure that I'm building in those checkpoints throughout a program to get also the information I need out to continue to evaluate whether a program is being effective or not. Oh, that's perfect. Yeah, I mean, that's the big thing at the end of the day, is what we're doing working, is it impacting people? And so that's a fantastic recommendation. There you have it. Andrew, thank you so much for your
time today. I really enjoyed it. I hope that everyone listening learned a little bit along the way as well. So thank you so much for spending some time today. I think we had initially budgeted to say, Hey, you know, it'd be about 30 minutes, but look at this. We just could chat it away. Oh, nice. There we go. You and I both, my wife's listening. She's probably telling me, all right, Gill, wrap it up. That's the common theme around here. But Andrew, really appreciate your time today. For those of
you listening, if you liked what you heard, give us a like, share our content out there. You've been listening to L&D Done Right by CD2 Learning, a Nelnet Company. Andrew, thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you.
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