27: Creating Value as an L&D Department

value as an l&d department. If you are lucky enough to work for a company, where you get to directly contribute to the bottom line, whether that's a customer education role, or whether you're creating say elearning courses for someone who's whose company is selling elearning courses a vendor, then you're probably able to pretty easily prove your worth and to show how improvements in training or different approaches and training or adding more deliverables is adding to your

company's profits. However, if you are not lucky enough to work in one of those roles, and that has really been more often than not my experience in the workplace, you really can have a hard time proving and l&d departments worth. And that comes into play when things like projects are due or layoffs are happening. And you may have seen this in some organizations, if you've been in l&d long enough, but you see that l&d departments

start to dwindle. And you know, when people leave positions, they don't necessarily get filled again. And so the question is, why is l&d viewed as such a cost center? And what can we do to really change that and impact that? And from my experience, I think that l&d has been kind of considered a cost center, because it takes a long time to create elearning. It takes a long time to create in

person training programs. And if you kind of think about time spent, there are all these different articles that you find online, right? How long does it take to develop one hour of elearning? And depending on what website you end up on, or what statistic you ended up looking at, I believe there was a study done some number of years ago.

So the data is probably pretty inaccurate by this point, but by a group called the Chapman Alliance, and they interviewed a lot of different instructional designers, and they asked them, you know, how long does it take you to create one hour of elearning? If it's minimal interaction, mid level interaction, and super interactive. And the numbers were probably a lot higher than you would imagine. Or maybe not, if you've been in the field for

a long time. But someone who doesn't have a intermediate or expert level of experience in the tool, or doesn't have a helpful Smee that isn't able to provide a content outline, or just, you know, good information without getting into the weeds a lot. Or, you know, if you are using a tool that doesn't play well with your computer, or slows it down is glitchy, things like that, then you're just compounding all of this time on

these projects. And when people outside of l&d Look at that, and I've I've heard this more than once as a response they go, What the heck is taking so long to make this training course? Because here's the thing, as many layers as you put on it as many buttons as many drag and drops as there are e learnings tend to resemble anime animated PowerPoints. I've actually had people before ask me for the slide deck that I use for my elearning Hey, um, you know, Sanzo doesn't have access to our

LMS. This has happened to me more than once, by the way, so and so doesn't have access to our LMS but they need the material that's contained in X elearning course. Can we just send them the slide deck? You know, I'm going to Do you mean a slide deck? I mean, that's that's not how this is made. But that's what it resembles. Right? So in the mind of the people who aren't creating the training, why is it

taking so long? What takes so long about, you know, think of any insert over oversimplification of our role here, right? So why is it taking so long, you know, all you're doing is making it pretty, or it's just some slides, or you already had the content, what's so hard about putting it all together? And so the problem is twofold, right? It's not just on the designers, you know, not being able to produce things

quickly. Because, you know, these things take time, right, there's not a whole lot we can do to, you know, shave off 75% of the time that this takes, we have to be willing to educate the people we work with on how, what our process is why it takes so long. And a great way to do that is to keep communication open and be constantly collaborating with your Smeets. And with your stakeholders, send them updates. What are you working on? What piece of the piece of the puzzle? Are you

working on? What are you doing? Oh, hey, you know, I'm working on this interactive exercise, right. And I'd really love you to take a look. And let me know what you think. That way, you're not only providing them an update, but you're also showing them the amount of work that's involved in what you're doing. And so you're creating a sense of collaboration, you're creating a sense of buy in as

well. Because then you're going to be able to tell if they're liking the direction you're going, or if they want to, to keep it simple, right? Hey, if you simplify this, you're gonna save us 10 hours of your time, right? So it gives you kind of an idea in that sense. And, you know, that's, that's step one is getting the people that you work with, to better understand why these things take time. The other piece of it is finding tools that help you be faster,

right. And I'm a big fan of consuming information in small bits, keeping it short, or you know, before it was called micro learning. Those of us who come from the education field might know it as chunking, or, you know, things like that, where these smaller bits help us to retain more information, right. And that's really similar to how I like to learn in the workplace. I like short bursts of information overload that I like to just walk away from it

and reflect. And what I found as an instructional designer is the way that we consume our information. In our normal lives, the way that we learn in our normal lives, it is a good way for us to learn academically or in the

workplace. And this actually stems back prior to instructional design for me is to when I was a college professor, I found that if I got my students to look up an article or something on their phones, they were way more engaged in the discussion than if I had printed out copies of the article and handed it out, because that was the way that they're used to consuming information when they wanted it, right. So if we meet our learners where their wants are, then you know, we can really,

really reach them. And so if you think of the example that my friend Jacob gave me, who actually inspired the topic for this podcast episode, he said that he likes to watch Tik Tok videos. And, you know, they're very low production value. Tik Tok videos are, you know, people like you and I just out there, creating things and throwing some texts on it during some music on it and putting it out

in the world. And, you know, some of the kids these days get a little bit fancier with all the camera tricks and whatnot. But you don't need all that to get like these quick bursts of informative things, you know, life hacks, fashion advice, just, you know, finding a community where you can have camaraderie. These are all things where you can just flip through these very short videos and Jacob said, you know, that's how I like to Learn stuff, it doesn't have to be fancy, it

doesn't have to be expensive. It just has to be informative and quick, and get to the point. Now, here's where I go to my unpopular opinion. And if you've ever heard any of my other podcast than you're aware of my unpopular opinion, and that's that traditionally developed elearning not going to name any names of any tools used for those things. But traditionally

developed elearning. Like, an hour long, elearning course, that looks like a PowerPoint, but has some fancy features and buttons and narration that is not a quick burst of information that I can quickly consume and move on. It's not so why would I try to give my learners that at work? If that's not how they like to consume information.

Now, there are tools out there that will give you that that similar vibe of quick information, right, you know, any of the tools that were promoted when we called the Trend Micro learning, right. But also, I had my wonderful friend Kate you to live a come on the podcast and talk about seven taps. Seven taps has gotten crazy popular in the l&d community in a very short period

of time. Because it's quick, it's easy learning and it's straight to the point, you only get a certain amount of space, you only get a certain amount of slides, you only have a certain amount of options of things to put on the page. So you've got to make it to the point, I would know I created one. And it was sometimes difficult to fit everything in or plan it out. I actually when I was putting mine together had like too many pages in one row or something like

that. And I had to really kind of rethink the structure. Because it's meant to be short, it's meant to be quick. It's meant to just be those small bursts of information. And so it really challenges you to think differently and to only include the important information. And what a great tool that is. Because I can't tell you how many times I've taken a training that was created by a Smee that got way too far in the weeds way

too fast. And so having those limitations like seven taps does, forces us a designer to only focus on the most important information. Here's the other great part, though, about these tools that are just creating these really short little bursts of learning. I've done a bunch of seven tabs courses just on while browsing LinkedIn. I can't think of a time other than being asked for feedback from a new instructional designer that I've voluntarily watched an ecourse

someone created. But here I am voluntarily, you know, swiping through the seven tabs courses. If I see one that looks cool, or is on a topic that I'm interested in, like Yeah, sure. I've got a couple minutes. Let me scroll through this. Because it's that same vibe like your tic tac, your Instagram story, your Facebook story, where, okay, I'm used to consuming information this way. So to recap, how do we create value as an l&d department? It's twofold,

right? We have to make sure that the people we're working with understand why good learning experiences take time. But we also have to maximize our value by innovating and using the tools that are best for our learners, where they're at and giving them the information they

need when they need it. We can do this in a number of different ways and with a number of different tools, but I really just encourage you to start thinking outside the box, finding tools that are outside of the norm that can create smaller pieces to a whole course, a short video and infographic, you can mix and match all of these different pieces and come up with a fully

integrated course. Don't forget to that you can curate why reinvent the wheel for certain things if the information already exists out there, and it's good, why not use that information that's out there that's good and quality so that you have a little bit more time to spend on the things that are unique to your organization. It's really up to you, how you decide to do it and what you decide to do. But just remember to keep your finger on the pulse

of what's out there. And always be willing to collaborate with others so that you can show the value of l&d at your organization. Thanks again for joining me on the blog. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and review us on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you'll tune in again soon.