Going from Teacher to Program Manager
Episode Overview
Welcome back to another episode of "Making Better"! In today's episode, we have a very special guest, Christy Oliva, a program manager at Amazon, who will be sharing her incredible journey of transitioning from teaching in formal education to corporate learning development. Christy's story highlights the power of scarcity as a driver for innovation and change, and the importance of finding motivation and support in making big life changes. Join us as we delve into Christy's successful transition, discussing the skills she built, the challenges she overcame, and the valuable insights she gained along the way. Plus, we'll explore the fascinating world of instructional design and the role it plays in improving organizations, teams, and individuals. So, grab your headphones and get ready to be inspired in this episode of "Making Better" with our guest, Christy Oliva! Don't forget to subscribe and share the show to help it grow. Let's dive in!
About Kristi Oliva
Kristi Oliva is a Learning Program Manager at Amazon who, like many in the L&D field, started as a teacher in formal education. She made the move over to corporate learning and development and is now a Program Manager at Amazon. Since many people in the talent development space come from education, I wanted to sit down and chat with her about how she made that transition and how she has been so successful. Kristi also has her own podcast called Leaving the Classroom that help other teachers make the jump from education into the profession of their dreams.
Full Transcript
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Kristi Oliva [00:00:00]:
I had a conversation with this about this just this morning with somebody on my team where I was just like I mean, without sharing the details, it was that same conversation of, well, that I don't own that though, so how can I be helping them with this? I don't own that. We have ownership of things, but then there are these fuzzy lines of like but we need you to cross over and show us this part.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:23]:
Hello and welcome to the Making Better podcast, where we talk about how to make organizations, teams and even individuals better. If you are a business owner, a learning and development professional, a manager, or even an individual contributor in your organization, this show will give you actionable insights to help improve your own performance and the performance of those around you. Our guest today is Christy Oliva. Christy, like many in the L D field, started as a teacher in formal education. She made the move over to corporate learning development and is now a program manager at Amazon. Since many people in the talent development space come from education, I wanted to sit down and chat with her about how she made that transition and what has been so successful. If you are new to the show, please make sure to hit subscribe so you never miss a future episode. If you are already subscribed, then I want to ask you to share this show with at least one other person because that, after all, is how we grow. I can't tell you how much it means to me with that. Let's get started. Christy, how are you doing today?
Kristi Oliva [00:01:32]:
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me today.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:36]:
Absolutely. I am super excited to have you on the show. Know, I think a lot of people make like I said, a lot of people have made that transition from formal education into learning and development. You did it a little early, as we'll describe in a little bit. But what's really great about your story, I think, is that it's not just that you've made that first step, you've made several steps along that journey from being first. You were where many people start of being kind of that outside consultant and then moved into a company as an instructional designer and then moved farther along and now acting as a manager. So I am really excited to have you here today. The first question I have for you is how lucky did you feel about the timing of you deciding to leave the formal education world into instructional design? Because you can share that. The timing was pretty amazing.
Kristi Oliva [00:02:32]:
Yeah. So I transitioned about three and a half years ago, I think it was. And obviously at the time I didn't know that that was probably a really great time to be doing it. I just was desperate to get out. But now, looking back, yes, I think teachers in that three years, I tell my mentees all the time that I mentor teachers and I tell them, I think it's exponentially gotten worse from when I left in the three years. So, yeah, I feel really lucky that I discovered instructional design when I did, because it is getting to be a lot more frantic for teachers wanting to leave. And so, yeah, I'm definitely blessed in the fact that I discovered it when I did.
Matt Gjertsen [00:03:18]:
Yeah, I just had a recent discussion on another podcast about I saw an article that said, so I live in La. And in La unified, I think there's currently 450 open positions for teachers California wide. There's something like 10,000. So it's gotten crazy. It was crazy before, as you said, it got crazier with the pandemic, and then for a variety of reasons, it continues to go on. Yeah, I think it's really and so I wasn't aware I don't come from formal education. I was a trainer in a sense, so I was teaching stuff, but I was not aware of how many people there were transitioning over until relatively recently. When you made that transition, what did you find initially? What made sense in your mind of what skills would move over and what were kind of the most important skills that you saw translate?
Kristi Oliva [00:04:17]:
Yeah, when I first started searching, I really thought I had to stay in education. So I really started looking at, do I get my doctorate to become a professor? That was really what I thought. I thought I'm going to have to either become a school administrator or a professor. But honestly, neither of those sounded good to me at all. I was not excited about either one of those, but I was like, I got to do what I got to do. There was nothing else I really wanted to do. I loved being a teacher, but it just got to be the way I was being treated was not ideal. It wasn't what I wanted for myself or my family. I really just started researching that. So I started researching what degrees I could get in school, and so what master's programs could I enter into because I didn't have a master's at the time. And obviously you have to have a master's to get a doctorate. And that was really the path I was going to start going on, was to become a professor. I was like, that's a long path. I know. Thank God I would still be on that path if that's what I went. Um, but then, thankfully, as I started researching and I honestly immediately started looking for new jobs, too, in the education sector. And I found a job for what was called an instructional technologist at a nearby university here in the Nashville area and got the interview. I applied for the job, got the interview, and did one of those inbox interviews. I don't know if you've ever heard of those. Basically, they give you this scenario of you're kind of like in the day of the life of that job, and you have to accomplish as much as possible of these tasks. And then afterwards they ask you like, how did you decide what order you did them? It was a really fun exercise, honestly, that's interesting. I encourage people who are hiring to put people through it because it was super fun. Anyway, I didn't get that job, but okay, because I didn't even really know what an Instructional Technologist was. Honestly. I was like, oh, I got an interview. But instructional Technologist is one step away from instructional designer. Sure, the Technologist is more the behind the scenes person, like running the technology. But then I started finding in my searches popping up with Instructional Designer on LinkedIn or wherever I was searching, which brought me to Facebook groups that I joined about Instructional Design, which brought me to Idle Courses Academy, which ultimately led me on the path I'm on.
Matt Gjertsen [00:06:56]:
And well. And that's great, because at least based on what my assumptions are, from my point of view of thinking about what I'm guessing an instructional technologist would be doing in a lot of organizations, I'm guessing the instructional designer was a straighter line from where you were. Because it's still about that translation of knowledge versus the system stuff. Is that right?
Kristi Oliva [00:07:22]:
For sure, yeah. So the Instructional Technologist on my team at Amazon kind of does all the LMS work and can help me as a program manager for assessments. I'll be, hey, can what's possible can we do this type of assessment? And can we set it up this way for the learners? And he'll go and figure that out for me and then we'll test it again. These roles can look so different from company to company with that title, like even Instructional Designer. But yes, the Instructional Design role was an immediate puzzle piece fit from a teacher. And I think that's why so many teachers are transitioning to this. Because it's a simple translation of terms. And I talk about this with my mentees as well. When we talk about our parents, the parents in schools, that's a stakeholder. When you talk about students, it's a learner. There's all these direct translations and teachers already know how to implement learning theory. They already know how to design curriculum, design lessons, write learning objectives, write assessments, really the job that a learning Instructional Designer does. So those are those skills that just make that immediate transfer. And really all I had to learn was the technology. I had to learn storyline the Articulate Suite, Adobe Suite, how to translate those terms. But honestly, the biggest thing was confidence. And I'm finding that that is the biggest thing that teachers are lacking is confidence. Not only to make the jump to leave the classroom, but to enter anything else. It gives me chills just now to even say it. They don't have the confidence. And I have some reasons behind that. I don't know if you want to get into that, but I go into it into my podcast. But I do believe that the education system today, as it stands, is a pretty abusive system towards teachers. And so that does get ingrained in the teachers sure that they don't have any other skill set, which is not true.
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:19]:
Yeah, it's one of the most anybody who had a child during the pandemic and got to watch Zoom classes happening knows firsthand just how dynamic that situation is and just how many things teachers need to deal with. So what steps did you take to kind of get over that? I mean, you mentioned idle courses. Was that kind of a big element in helping you get that confidence? Or then how did you build your confidence over time?
Kristi Oliva [00:09:51]:
Yeah, that's a really good question. So Idle was a big piece of that. The way that it's set up. I joined in its earliest days. Honestly, it's grown so much since then, and we have a lot more one on one support with mentorship and stuff, which wasn't happening when I joined. But at the time, since it was so new, the owner, Dr. Robin Sargent, had a lot more bandwidth to provide one on one calls and things like that. So it's like when I expressed doubt, she would just get on a call with me and say, listen, I'm here for you. We got you now. The mentors do that in the academy, and so that's what we provide. I'm a mentor in the academy. But Robin was a big part of that just that support system of knowing, because it's mostly teachers, honestly. I mean, there are other people that come through idle courses academy, don't get me wrong people who are upskilling as instructional designers or other fields, but there was a lot of other teachers around me and teachers who had just transitioned, and so that really helped my confidence. But honestly, I'm just also the type of person that I don't mind taking risk. And so for me, it was one of the riskiest times I could possibly even take a risk. But at the same time, it felt like if I didn't do it, then I was stuck. My husband had just left me and my new daughter and my two year old. So I had two young kids. I was teaching online, so I got the taste of the online teaching before the pandemic. I was teaching at an online school, and it was terrible, and I was not making much money. And so when my husband left, I got that wake up call of, am I going to have to be asking him for money every month? Or what do I need to do? I need to figure something else out. And so I guess it lit that, like, I don't know that emergency fire that comes through any of us that fight or flight. And I chose to fight and fight for my family and fight for my own well being so that I did not have to be asking the girl's dad for money every month. I wanted to be able to provide for myself.
Matt Gjertsen [00:12:03]:
I think you're right. And something that I've observed in my own life is just and this is true in any business too, just how strong of a push scarcity brings. Scarcity is where innovation lives. And whether it's as unfortunate as I think that is sometimes, and whether that's forced upon you through life circumstances or something that you can kind of create artificially, it definitely provides a strong push. I would it's I'm just so excited to hear mean definitely. I know Robin as well, and you could have no better cheerleader in your corner. She is just pure fire and positivity. So that's really exciting. And so for anybody out there, whether you're a teacher looking to transition or anybody else in an organization, I would say two big takeaways really are if you're looking to change something, one, you have to find that motivation. Like, where is that motivation coming from? And then getting that support, whether that's from your manager or from some course that you take or a mentor group that you join, having that motivation and then having that support structure is really huge to making any big change in your skill set or change in your life. When you made that change, whether it's from idle courses you mentioned, the technology you mentioned kind of the confidence, were there any other big skills that stand out to you, especially now as you look back several years into your transition that have been important for you to build, that you didn't have when you were teaching formally?
Kristi Oliva [00:13:52]:
That I didn't have. And again, I don't know if it was just me, I talk about this with my mentor groups, but sometimes I'm like, why didn't I know this before as a teacher? But I think it's because we're so siloed as teachers. But one thing that I've gained a lot and I'm still learning is a lot of approaching things out of curiosity. So if I don't understand why something's happening or I don't understand why a group at work is not implementing the assessment that I made, the way that I instructed them to, or the way that it was intended to, what's going on? And so I immediately get this bucking up feeling. And again, I don't know if that came from my teaching or if it's just my personality, but I have learned to just sit back and then approach that person with curiosity. And not that I never knew that before, but not really. I don't want to say that teachers are like dictators, but we do have control over our little environment 100%.
Matt Gjertsen [00:14:55]:
Absolutely.
Kristi Oliva [00:14:57]:
Coming out of that, I had to learn how to collaborate better. We know how to collaborate as teachers, but we aren't allowed to. As much as we want to because we're stuck in our classroom with our kids and that's about it. And planning time gets taken away more and more and more as we get more and more duties added on as teachers. And so I think that was one of the biggest things was making sure that I kept an open mind to that curiosity mindset of like, I wonder why that's happening instead of assuming that I already know what's happening.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:31]:
Yeah, that really resonates with me coming out of the military. And when I went into the corporate world from the military, it is dictatorial in the military. Much, much more so and so. It took me a long time to really understand. I would always be looking for who's in charge of who can make this decision and say go. And then it happens. And in the corporate world very often that's just not how it works. There is no person that says yes or no or go or don't go. It's all a collaboration, it's all building buy in, working together, enneagram, do you.
Kristi Oliva [00:16:16]:
Know what you are? Are you an eight?
Matt Gjertsen [00:16:19]:
I think I might be, actually.
Kristi Oliva [00:16:20]:
I have taken very important to them is to know the hierarchy. That's very important to me too.
Matt Gjertsen [00:16:26]:
Yes, exactly. I do think any bureaucracy, bureaucratic system, which education certainly is, that has a strong element of that. There's the person who's in charge of the district, there's the person who's in charge of the school and you can just kind of identify that. And at least in the organizations that I've worked at, it just doesn't exist.
Kristi Oliva [00:16:52]:
Or even if it does, lines get crossed. And I had a conversation about this just this morning with somebody on my team where I was just like without sharing the details. It was that same conversation of, well, I don't own that though, so how can I be helping them with this? I don't own that. We have ownership of things, but then there are these fuzzy lines of like but we need you to cross over and show us this part. And it's like, I struggle with that a little bit of like, how can I own this? And you own that, but yet I'm still supposed to help you with this piece of it. And it's not out of hesitancy to help, it's about that ownership and that like, who's the boss of this that I struggle with.
Matt Gjertsen [00:17:37]:
Yeah, and it's such a big thing with kind of all support functions, but certainly learning and development. And I think for any listeners who aren't in learning and development who are out in the business and are struggling to work with learning and development, I think this is really important to understand as well, because out in the business, there is often still a lot of ownership and there can be clear lines. But whether it's L and D, broader HR, we cross over everything. We're not a part of the business units, we're somewhere else. We're having to collaborate across business units. Even something like you mentioned, the learning management system, even things like our tools very often aren't owned by us, they're owned by It or software.
Kristi Oliva [00:18:21]:
We're training on those operations is part of it. You're right. HR is a huge part of it. Even though we have nothing, we do have something to do with it. But my assessments may at some point drive hiring decisions or firing decisions, although I have no say in that, but my assessments will. Yeah, you're so right everywhere.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:45]:
Yeah. And so learning to, as a learning professional, learning the ability to do that, of cross over those lines, and I think for me, this is a constant work in progress. That's such an important skill. And then for somebody out in the business trying to work with LND, have a little empathy for us. It's tricky. It's tricky to cross all those lines, all the and I'm assuming that need has only grown as you have grown in your career, now that you're a program manager, kind of, how has your role changed from being that instructional designer to now being a program manager?
Kristi Oliva [00:19:27]:
Yeah, so as the instructional designer before, it was more of a creative role. Not that I'm not creative now, but I was creating designs, and now I'm more in the process management and the business side of it. So I've had such a strong learning curve. It fit me really well. And that's why they put me in this position, is because when I got hired on at Amazon, I immediately started pointing out, oh, I think we can improve this, this and this. And they were all process type of things. Like, we can expedite this process. This isn't very efficient. Let's change this. And thankfully, and one thing I love about corporate that's very different than public education, is they were like, oh, cool, show us and we'll try it, right? It wasn't like, no, that's not how we're doing it this year. We're doing it this way, which is very public education. Right? So I very much appreciated that, and I think it encouraged me to build that skill. And so, as a program manager, now, instead of creating courses, obviously I'm the assessment program manager. I'm not even creating the assessments necessarily. I'm designing, how are we going to do this in a different way, and what's that going to do for showing a correlation between assessment scores and performance? Because otherwise, what is the point of assessments? And when I came on, to be honest, to be quite frank about my team, there was no point to the assessments. They were just there, right? They weren't proving anything. They were showing no correlation. They were just there to say that they had an assessment, I guess, check the box, right? And so I've come in and now am working to show that correlation, because what that's going to do, obviously, is show the success of our coursework and be able to make like we were talking about HR decisions. Possibly, if we can show a direct correlation between an assessment and a performance. Well, if somebody performs poorly on an assessment, we can say, do we want to continue with this person? Because correlation shows they're not going to do well afterwards. So why would we continue training them? Or we put A, B, and C in place and we can improve that, which will then show a correlation to good performance. Right? Like, how can we remediate things like that? So it's just a different mindset. And I'm working cross teams a lot more, which is something really new and something that teachers I didn't get as a teacher, again, as an elementary school teacher, I just planned my curriculum and that was about it. And then you stick with maybe with your little second grade team. And I don't mean little like belittling that team, but you have a team of four teachers you're just sticking to that, right? You probably aren't even talking to the fourth, 5th, 6th grade teachers, whereas I'm working worldwide with all these teams. And sometimes I'm like, I don't even know what you're doing. But I'm having to work with you on this because I know that you own this little piece of what I'm working on, right. Which is super fun. It's super fun. I love that part of it. But that was brand new for me, for sure.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:42]:
Yeah. Well, I got to dive into this more because I think I read a stat yesterday that was something like, said 8% of CEOs see a performance impact or a business impact from their learning and development programs. It's just some vanishingly small number, which honestly doesn't surprise me that much. It's great that you're focusing on that as the goal. You mentioned it was a very different mindset as you shifted from being the instructional designer into your role. Now, how would you describe that mindset shift to kind of push it to instructional designers to think about, be more outcome oriented, be more performance oriented. How do we make that shift? Because I feel like it's a really big part of the conversation, at least on LinkedIn, that is the conversation of that lack of connection between the training and the outcome from your experience. What do we need to do there to move that, to have that shift happen faster?
Kristi Oliva [00:23:49]:
Well, I think we're going in the wrong order. I mean, especially as the assessment program manager. Now I'm seeing the importance of assessments and I see when they're written and when they're even talked about, and it's not until after the training is already built. Well, why are we not talking about as soon as we see a problem? Well, how are we going to know if we've changed this problem? That's the assessment right there. How do we know if we've changed this problem? That should be the beginning when instead it's, shoot, we have this problem, we have to build this training to educate them on this or change their behavior. And then it's like, oh shoot, we have to have a quiz to have them pass, right?
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:28]:
Yeah.
Kristi Oliva [00:24:29]:
And that's how the order goes. And then we wonder why there's no correlation. Well, because were you even asking the right questions on the quiz? Did they correlate to learning objectives? Are the learning objectives even the right learning objectives? And so again, when I came on this team, those were the things I pointed out. I said, look, we're not even assessing all the learning objectives. I don't even know if these are the right learning objectives. And I think those are problems that are all across. This was not just a my team issue at Amazon. I see this everywhere. I even see it in how sometimes we train our IDs. We start with look at this cool tool you get to use instead of like, well, how do you even know that this course is going to change behavior? We have to start there, write your assessment first and then work backwards from there. I don't think hardly anybody's doing that. And that's why there's no correlation. That's why there's only a 4% or 3%. Whatever you stated that it was is because they can't show it. Because they're not assessing correctly or at all.
Matt Gjertsen [00:25:38]:
Yeah, that's why I always love I remember I forget where I heard this, but most people in the learning profession are familiar with the Kirpatrick levels of analysis. And I remember reading years ago and it just changed my whole way of thinking about this, of don't use Kirkpatrick as a post fact evaluation tool where there's these levels of evaluation. It should be a design tool that you just do in reverse. You start with the performance outcome that you're trying to achieve and figure out how you're going to get that. Then you figure out, okay, what behaviors do you need in order to get that performance outcome? Then what learning do you need to get that behavior? Then what engagement style do you need in order to get that learning? That backwards design is just I think you're totally right. It's so huge from your position because I often find that when I'm talking to subject matter experts and folks out in the business, one of the challenges that we're having to push against is this idea that when people think training, they think education because that's where they came from. Everybody has had the experience of sitting in a classroom with a teacher talking to them and so that's like their default. And so from your perspective and we could kind of use this to close out maybe since you've lived in both worlds, how do we help non learning people, the stakeholders out in the business make in many ways the same transition that you've made, not in the things they're doing, but in the way they think about training. How can we help people make that transition?
Kristi Oliva [00:27:17]:
Well, I have an answer that goes with public education. And just it's learning in general. Honestly, I think we're doing it all wrong. We're doing public education wrong. We're doing corporate learning wrong. Because it's all about front loading. It's not about this dynamic. Learning is supposed to be dynamic. I saw a post the other day on Instagram or something that said that kids inherently want to learn. They just want to. And they can teach themselves through play. That's what play is designed for. Same with adults. We play with things to figure them out, right? Sometimes we don't even read the directions. I can figure that out. It's not that hard. And we play with it until we can try to figure it out. Sorry, go ahead.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:07]:
At a basic level, it's what you see in animals too, right? It's like, how do animals learn how to hunt? Right? They play. They play with each other of play fighting. And then the parent brings them something that's dead. That's how you learn.
Kristi Oliva [00:28:26]:
Everybody learns in the academy, at idle courses. Academy. It's how we teach people. Like storyline, for instance. I always tell them, you got to go play in it first. I'm not going to tell you, here's how to make a trigger. Here's how to add an image. Just go play. Just go figure it out. And instead, we've turned public education, corporate education, into, we know what you need to know. So let me just front load you with a ton of stuff. We'll give you a quiz afterwards to see if you retained hours and hours and hours of information. Then we're going to immediately just put you to work to see if you can implement it instead of this. I think learning is supposed to be dynamic and playful. And so why couldn't public education be more about all these stations? And it's just like, go figure it out. See if you can make this balance work using these different weights with numbers on them, which is then teaching math. Go see if you can figure out how to make blue with this paint. Like, I'm not going to tell you not make blue, but make purple, right? And then they go and play. And same with corporate education. My team, we train people who answer the phones for Amazon. Why not just have them try? Like, not with the real customer, obviously, but why not just have them pick up a call and let's see what they already think is supposed to be said on the call and go from there? What the trouble with that is that destandardizes everything. And as Americans, we want everything to be standardized and the same. And that's the problem. I mean, it's even what I'm supposed to be doing with my assessments. I'm supposed to be standardizing them as much as possible, which isn't dynamic, is it?
Matt Gjertsen [00:30:17]:
Yeah, that's. True. And I think that is exactly where, hopefully, we're at the beginning of a revolution, because AI can truly enable that when used correct. Talk about having a conversation, the hardest part forever has been, well, how do you do that? How do you scale the ability to have those initial conversations and adjust where the conversations go? Well, hey, we're basically there, or we're going to be there in the next couple of years. That's going to be easy to do.
Kristi Oliva [00:30:49]:
That word scale is a big one.
Matt Gjertsen [00:30:51]:
Yeah. Well, I think that's totally spot on. I love that idea of really shifting to this idea of training as play and exploration as such a hopeful way to think about the mentioned. So you do coaching and you have a podcast as well, right?
Kristi Oliva [00:31:10]:
Yes. Thank you for have it's through the idle courses academy. So Idle Courses Academy is where I transitioned and where I mentor and coach anyone, not just teachers, but obviously, I know more about how to help teachers transition. And through Idle Courses Academy, I have a podcast called Leaving the Classroom, where, um, it's a really short podcast, five to ten minutes each episode. And I'm just giving tips and confidence builders exactly what I know I was missing as a teacher to leave the classroom. And just my goal is to help as many teachers safely and effectively transition out of the classroom into, hopefully, instructional design, because that's what I love and what I think is a great transition for them. But just to give them the courage to leave. They can leave. You can leave.
Matt Gjertsen [00:32:03]:
Awesome. Well, Christy, thank you so much for being here today. I think this has been a great conversation, and I'm sure we will have many more. So thank you so much.
Kristi Oliva [00:32:12]:
Yes. Thank you, Matt. This is fun.
Matt Gjertsen [00:32:13]:
Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you liked the discussion, make sure to hit like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. As a reminder, if your team is struggling keeping up with the training development demands of your organization, we want to help. Better Everyday Studios is a full service and structural design team that can help you with everything from ideation to actual content creation and delivery. Please reach out to us using the link in the episode notes below. Have a great day.
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