Managing Training Requests w/Sarah Carroll
Episode Overview
Welcome back to "Making Better," the podcast where we explore strategies and insights for professional growth and development. In today's episode, we are joined by the talented Sarah Carroll, an expert in managing training requests. We delve into the fascinating world of L&D (learning and development) and discover how to effectively streamline the intake process to meet the demands of a fast-paced environment. Sarah shares her experiences at Coinbase, where she successfully implemented a new intake system and navigated the challenges of training requests within a growing team. Join us as we explore the importance of collaboration, communication, and innovation in managing training requests. Get ready to make better with Sarah Carroll on this episode of "Making Better."
About Sarah Carroll
Sarah Carroll is a seasoned L&D professional who brings over a decade of experience cultivated in 3 countries. Throughout her career, Sarah has continuously found herself in the building out stages of both organizations and teams. As such, she has gained valuable insights into how to optimize and scale procedures in order to best deliver impactful learning experiences.
Full Transcript
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Sarah Carroll [00:00:00]:
Here's. This learning and development team stakeholders have access to you. They don't know that training comes in, like, different shapes. Like, they don't know what exists. So they're like, hey, we want an e learning. It's our responsibility to course correct and guide them towards the correct training solution.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:19]:
Welcome to Making Better, a podcast from Better Everyday studios devoted to helping small learning teams have a big impact. Today we're talking to Sarah Carroll, a seasoned L d. Professional who brings over a decade of experience cultivated in three countries. Throughout her career, Sarah has continuously found herself in the building out stages of both organizations and teams. This means she has gained valuable insights into how to optimize and scale procedures in order to best deliver impactful learning experiences. Today, she will be sharing how some of these procedures can empower your learning team to proactively avoid lackluster courses while still effectively meeting business objectives. As a reminder, if you want to get these episodes early and go deeper on the topics covered, you can sign up for the Making Better newsletter in the episode description below. Let's dive in. Sarah. Welcome to the making. Better podcast. How are you doing today?
Sarah Carroll [00:01:09]:
Hey, Matt. Happy Friday. How's it going?
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:12]:
I am doing great. I'm so excited to get into this discussion today. So we had had a brief exchange on LinkedIn a while back where I had made a comment and then I had made a post and you had commented something on that post about making specific pipelines for content. And as soon as I read what you had said, I knew I was like, this is a thing that we got to dive into. But before we get there, if you could just give a quick rundown, know, introduce yourself to the people listening.
Sarah Carroll [00:01:42]:
Yeah. Hey, everyone. I'm Sarah. I am an LND leader and strategist. I have been in and around LND and education for over ten years now, working in a variety of countries. Actually. I've had the opportunity to work in the US in Spain in a small country called Andora, which a lot of people don't know about, but right there between Spain and France. And then I also had the opportunity to live in London. So I've got a lot of global experience under my just been I landed in L d. Organically. Like, a lot of my, you know, didn't go to school dreaming to be an L d. Professional, actually.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:24]:
Who does? People do.
Sarah Carroll [00:02:27]:
I know it's funny, but you just land in these training roles, which eventually led me to project management, which led me to program management, which led me to people management and yeah, just kind of stumbling through my career one opportunity at a time, but loving every minute of it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:47]:
Awesome. Yeah. I will admit I didn't know where Andorra was, so I recognize some of the other places, but I will admit that, yeah, and you have had quite the varied career more recently, you've been in the tech world, and I know from my experience, the tech world can be kind of an interesting place for learning. What was your experience like specifically doing L and D at a software company?
Sarah Carroll [00:03:13]:
Yeah, I will say I also landed there very by chance. I actually was reached out to on LinkedIn by the hiring manager and was like, hey, we have this role. And it was honestly one of the best decisions I ever made was to explore the tech space in L and D. Learning and development in tech right now is so exciting. I think companies were seeing a really big shift and an emphasis on learning.
Matt Gjertsen [00:03:37]:
Okay.
Sarah Carroll [00:03:38]:
Yeah. From my viewpoint and from colleagues and peers that I've discussed with. So you're seeing a lot right now of companies starting to weave learning into their culture right. With learning, stipends professional development, stipends accesses to LinkedIn learning and other various platforms. And in addition to that, they're starting to invest in their learning teams. Current economic climate aside, some are investing in it, some are scaling back, but I fully believe when things start to improve, they'll start to ramp it up again. So, yeah, it's just a really cool space to be in. One of the biggest reasons is I had previously come from the public sector, so I was at UC Berkeley, and when you move from that to tech, it's like, whoa, things move crazy fast.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:35]:
A, yeah. When I moved from the military into the private sector, it was the same thing of just like, oh, this is okay, we're moving now, we're doing things.
Sarah Carroll [00:04:44]:
You'Re moving, you're doing things. And then also the opportunity to contribute and have ideas and share ideas. And when you do that and you see something change from day to day versus over the course of a year of it going through all of the hoops it has to go through to get approved in the public committees. It's exciting in that aspect. It's also challenging because it moves so quickly. Yes. So I'm sure you've experienced that you're constantly building the plane while flying it. I hate that expression. It is used so frequently in tech with every initiative, like, all right, guys, you're constantly scrambling, so that can be challenging. But again, also exciting because you're never bored. So there's that. And then the other thing too is with this new emphasis on learning comes an organization of people who are excited to utilize their learning and development teams, which is great and so excited we're there to support. But also then, whoa, we're being inundated by requests and everybody wants a training for every little thing. And then it's like, okay, we need to get this organized and sorted out. So I hope that made sense. It's a lot of everything. A lot of fast moving things, a lot of moving parts, a lot of jack of all trades requirements for L and D professionals. Right. Now, but if you like that type of environment, I think that people would excel because for me, it was exciting and a great change of pace.
Matt Gjertsen [00:06:33]:
Yeah, absolutely. It's really exciting and really fun, but it's like, you have to almost know what you're getting into, kind of, if you're really going to succeed, because it's not for everybody. Not better or worse, it's just not for everybody. And I do think you're right. And we were actually talking before we started recording a little bit, where there's almost two sides of the coin of either. Nobody knows what LND does, and it's off to the side, and you're like having to fight for anybody to notice you. And then you get what you want. You get noticed. And then all of a sudden, everybody realizes, OOH, this is this resource. And you go all the way to the other side of the spectrum of just like, oh, jeez, now there's so many requests we can't keep up. I feel like a couple of times in my career that has happened, and I almost didn't realize what was happening, and it took me a minute to be like, oh, we need to stop asking people to do stuff for them because we can't do it. It was pretty crazy.
Sarah Carroll [00:07:33]:
Yeah, I know. It's funny because in the beginning, LND, I feel like, fought so hard to be like, hey, like you said, we're guys, you know, we're here to help. And then eventually it comes to the point where you have to start turning people away of like, hey, we're swamped. We can't tackle that. You guys can tackle that initiative internally, and we'll help you with this one. So it's funny how there's been that shift, but at least in my experience, we were getting requests daily, if not multiple times a day. It was wild, but again, fun. If you're looking for something that is exciting, join a tech company.
Matt Gjertsen [00:08:16]:
Yeah, for sure. And so before we get into kind of the specifics of how you solved that problem and brought some organization to it, give us a little sense of the situation you were in, like the team that you had, who was your customer, where were you situated? What kind of stuff were you making?
Sarah Carroll [00:08:33]:
Yeah, so I was on a domain specific L and D team, which means we supported a very specific group of employees within the company. So I was supporting our client onboarding analysts and team, which sat under customer operations. So they were client facing, and they were doing the internal process to approve or deny clients from our platform. And so we were training them. We did everything so they would join the company and they would go through their two day orientation with the people team, the L D team, for Coinbase as a whole. And then they would come over to us, and then we would run their role specific onboarding program and get them ramped and ready to do their jobs. So we owned and managed their onboarding program, but we also did change management initiatives, tooling rollouts upskilling, cross skilling, continued education, and we even helped with reorgs a few times. So anything learning for that group of employees we were doing, it sounds like.
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:45]:
Almost you could almost upscale a little bit of all things talent almost for that particular team in some ways.
Sarah Carroll [00:09:51]:
Yeah, exactly. So that's really what we owned. But in addition to kind of like, supporting them in the spirit of building the plane while flying it, our team was growing like crazy. So when I started at Coinbase, L D team in that specific area was only a couple months old, and I was on a team of me and one other senior specialist. He was actually promoted and moved over to support another line of business. So it was me. And then I grew from me to five of us to support just this one group of employees because it was the most demanding line of business to support under customer operations. So not only are we supporting the employees, but then we're trying to figure out our own operations. How are we going to operate like a well oiled machine and lay that foundation for our team? We were migrating to a new LMS. We were onboarding our own teammates. We were just doing everything to get established ourselves, while simultaneously, I think I onboarded over, like 800 people in my time there.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:10]:
Yeah. Part of that going across the spectrum, too, can really be where you are in the business and what part of the business you're supporting. And definitely when you're supporting those customer facing sides of the business, whether it's customer success or sales installation, folks, if you're in a hardware kind of environment, that can be very tricky because it's so demanding. So it's great because there's a lot of demand, but it's like, oh, well, now we got to keep up because if we're not fulfilling our role, we are truly impacting the business. And as much as learning development professionals say we want to impact the business, I think we all believe it, but it's different to want it and then be faced with that reality of, like, we need to step up, which is awesome, and I think we all should be striving for that. But it's a different responsibility if you're used to being more of a back end player or a support player.
Sarah Carroll [00:12:07]:
Yes. I think hit the nail on the head is, like, the level of responsibility on your LND teams in those domain specific, what I call them, L and D teams is so much greater. I mean, I was in charge of leading an initiative that literally was like, we had compliance regulators, like, breathing down our neck to fill something by a certain deadline, and we had to onboard I think it was 390 people wow. In six weeks.
Matt Gjertsen [00:12:37]:
Wow.
Sarah Carroll [00:12:38]:
And build it from scratch.
Matt Gjertsen [00:12:40]:
Yeah.
Sarah Carroll [00:12:41]:
They're like, hey, L and D. And so it's like, again, having that ability to make the impact was amazing and exciting, but I think it's a totally different ballgame than the L and D teams who might just be creating professional development material for people to access as they want, as needed. It's definitely a different ballgame.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:07]:
Yeah, for sure. So I think we've been teasing the main subject of what I wanted to talk about enough, where we talked about, okay, so there's this big need, this big demand. Everybody always all of a sudden wants your help with everything. And then the comment that you made on LinkedIn was about creating that process to intake those requests, prioritize requests, scope, everything. I got the opportunity to do this at a previous company, and I felt it was like the greatest impact that I had at that company over four years. And building this thing was like, this is what I am proud of. So I'd love for you to kind of take us through, I guess, to start. Where did it start? I think you've already said it was just like, you're kind of being overwhelmed, so you had to do something. What were the first steps that you made towards building this process?
Sarah Carroll [00:13:59]:
Yeah, also, I love to hear you say that that was like, your greatest accomplishment, because it was truly I continued to beat a dead horse until it got done. Sorry, let me clarify. I was on the one team for most of my time at Coinbase, and then I was actually promoted and reorganed over to a new team who didn't have this set up. Got you. And so that's where I had taken all of the innovation that was created on my previous team and started. I was like, Guys, we got to get this going. We got to get this going. Which, let me add, is another insanely important reason to streamline and standardize your procedures across the organization. Sure. For L and D. If you are listening and you're at a company with a lot of micro L and D teams, the biggest recommendation I could make is to get those L and D leaders together and start streamlining those processes that know the backbone of L D that every L D team is using. Intake scoping, report polling uploading to LMS. Delivery, deployment, whatever, and make sure that they're the same across. Because when you have those reorgs and we know in today's climate that we do, that's going to make it so much better. So that's my little tangent on that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:27]:
Well, and even more than that, I would say, no matter how distributed or broken apart your learning team, quote unquote, is to the company, to the employees, you're all learning people. Right? And so if you're a technical trainer out in production, or you're an instructional designer in HR, or you're a program manager inside of customer success to the employee, you're all training people. And they're going to expect you to even if you're not on the same team, they're going to kind of expect that you would act as if you were on the same team.
Sarah Carroll [00:16:05]:
Yes. I always say that the benefit of getting things streamlined. It's not only for ourselves, right, because it makes our lives a lot easier, but our stakeholders then know how to interact with us. If they're interacting with full learning teams, then the learners start to have a cohesive experience. And not really I've talked about like a disjointed experience that learners can have when learning teams are doing things differently. But then again, the bottom line for the company, which is money. Time is money in all aspects, just so important. But I promise I will rein it back in and come back to this intake process.
Matt Gjertsen [00:16:50]:
Awesome.
Sarah Carroll [00:16:54]:
The intake process. This is what was happening, truly was I would be in a meeting and you'd get a request for a training. I would be in a Slack channel and you'd get a request for a training. I worked with a lot of vendor sites and you would get an email with a request for a training. I one time discovered a request for a training just by having an honest conversation with a colleague who sat on a different team. And he's like, yeah, this is what I'm working on. And I'm like, oh shoot, you need a training for that. That literally was what was happening. And I'm like, okay, no, we need to start to funnel this because it's creating so much work and stress that needs to be there was already an intake that semi existed, but getting buy in and getting that behavioral change of our stakeholders to start using it, that was another step. So that's something that it takes work and consistency. And if you do build one of these intake request systems or processes, make sure that it's accessible and in the right places, like pinning it to your Slack channel, putting it on your team's Confluence page, wherever people are visiting to find your team. Make sure it's in big, bold use this because a tool is only as useful as people know about it and can access it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:32]:
I do think that's interesting because I 100% agree with everything you said. But then I would add that you cannot make it visible enough that it's more visible than Slack or more visible than email. And so to the first point that you mentioned, no matter what you do, there's going to be that constant push of change management and behavior management of like, thank you for sending me this Slack, please go over here. Yes, it's inevitable and it will realistically never go away. But I don't know if you've had this experience, but in my experience, I think I was much more afraid of pushing back than I needed to be. Early on, I thought if I pushed back, everybody would be really mad. And they weren't. They were just like, oh, okay. And they would go put in an intake request.
Sarah Carroll [00:19:23]:
Yeah. So I unfortunately don't have that problem.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:28]:
Great.
Sarah Carroll [00:19:30]:
No, I'm very nice, but I am kind of like a stickler. I would have my team coming to me and being like, hey, they sent me this request. And I would say, hey, just send them this message. Let them know they need to submit the request. I think it's fine. I always chalk everything up to its business. They would do the same.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:55]:
One quick note. So the intake system was kind of already there. What was it? Just if you can was it a home baked thing or was it Jira?
Sarah Carroll [00:20:05]:
Yeah, we were using Jira. I also have seen this work in Coda. Another team had built it out in Coda and it also could work in Google forms. So again, for any teams listening, you can build this anywhere you want. Just make sure that it's again visible and easy to use Jira. If, if you are in a company that's already using Jira for It and tooling and HR and all the things, it makes sense to put it there because the company is familiar with it. You don't need to add extra more learning to get the learning request. Just make it as easy for everyone to use as possible.
Matt Gjertsen [00:20:44]:
Can't footstop that point enough of how important that is. This is not the time to go find a new learning tool to solve these things exist. Chances are, especially if you're in a customer facing company, there's already some system that exists for opening customer tickets, sport tickets. Find out how you can piggyback on something that already exists.
Sarah Carroll [00:21:13]:
Yes. Do not reinvent the wheel. That's in learning and development in general is like, you don't always have to create new. Just take something that's working and make it work for you. So we were using Jira. There was one that was like the intake form was it just didn't have the information that we needed anymore. It was outdated. So it was revamped to be separated out into categories. And I think we had one. Like you could click on New Hire onboarding. You could click on change management, net new training and maybe I think other if I'm recalling correctly, but then the Stakeholder could click on one of those and then it would take you to the form for that, which was awesome, because then you're getting the data. Of which types of these requests are we getting the most of? But then you're going to need different information for different trainings. So like a New hire request is going to be different than a net new training. And then it allowed us to customize those fields to get the information that we needed. And that is where the net new is, where that next step of that scoping process. Which is what the comment was, I think my comment was like the meeting that should have been an email, but like, the training that should have been a Slack message. That's what we want to avoid.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:43]:
Yeah.
Sarah Carroll [00:22:44]:
And so that's where the Scoping process came, was everybody wants a training. Everybody wants an e learning. And I don't know about you, Matt, but I hate e learnings. I hate taking them.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:59]:
Yeah. I make e learning for a living, and I still say don't make e learning.
Sarah Carroll [00:23:06]:
Yeah. I'm like, there's a time and a place.
Matt Gjertsen [00:23:09]:
Yes.
Sarah Carroll [00:23:10]:
And if what you want to do is burn out your employees and make them hate learning and hate the learning and development team, continue to just bust out Elearnings that employees have to take every week. I think that it's. Just, again, when you're here's, this learning and development team stakeholders have access to you. They don't know that training comes in different shapes. They don't know what exists. So they're like, hey, we want Elearning. It's our responsibility to course correct and guide them towards the correct training solution.
Matt Gjertsen [00:23:49]:
That's it right there. I'm always looking for what's going to be the line that's like the intro to a podcast, and that's the line right there. Right? That's the takeaway. It's like they don't know. They're not in this space. It's our job to help them with this. Figuring out what the right solution is. 100%.
Sarah Carroll [00:24:07]:
Yes. It's so true. And I think to do that, make it easy on your L and D team and have a process that already exists, they grab it. They can use this template that exists of, okay, what information do I need to gather before I can make that decision? And that's what the Scoping process was that we created was. So if you've ever used Jira, you know, okay, you kind of get tired. You're not going to input every last detail about what you need. You want it quick, and you want to get in and get out because you got a lot of other stuff.
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:48]:
Going on, which is why people are going to go to Slack. If you make too much friction, they're just going to forget about it. I'm going to send a Slack message. So super important point of is what's the right level of input? Because you can't make it too much.
Sarah Carroll [00:25:00]:
Exactly. And so for something like a net new where they're like, we want an Elearning. Sorry, I said that a little bit snarky. Feel free to cut that or leave it in. We want an elearning. Excitedly. You want, like, a summary? You want a brief description, perhaps a date of when they're looking for this. You can add in more if they're checkboxes. Add in checkboxes. That's fine. People don't mind those or drop downs. Okay. Is it for BPOs? Is it for full time employees? Is it for client onboarding professionals? Or is it for people supporting another line of business?
Matt Gjertsen [00:25:44]:
Yeah, I think one that I've used in the past to try to help with this is kind of like try to had a drop down of size of audience.
Sarah Carroll [00:25:52]:
Yes.
Matt Gjertsen [00:25:53]:
Which maybe they don't know, but that was one that I liked. It was like, is this your pet project for the three people on your team or is this like 300?
Sarah Carroll [00:26:03]:
Yeah. And that brings me to another point, which is like, the roster, which I don't know about your experience, is the hardest thing to get. I mean, getting a learning roster is like asking someone for a million dollars they somehow cannot produce it until it's absolutely time. They can give you a general idea. But we had a box in Jira that was like, put the link to the roster never got filled. So take it out, put it on this scoping process, and we'll ask them in a meeting so we can be on the same page. But, yeah, that learning roster is like gold.
Matt Gjertsen [00:26:46]:
The number of times I have had somebody just tell me, all engineers need to take this. I don't think you know what that term means.
Sarah Carroll [00:26:57]:
That's fantastic. Could I just buy the list of their names, emails, something for me, just anything to help me through this. But, yeah, we weren't getting that, so kept that like, intake form fairly short so we could get a basic understanding. And then in the scoping, that's where you can get more detailed. Because you'll set a meeting, right? You'll set this 30 minutes meeting with the stakeholders, stakeholders leading this initiative, where you can go deeper into like, okay, tell me the challenge. What are we trying to solve here? What are the KPIs you're looking at? What are the results you're trying to get? What's your timeline? Who needs to take this? Who really needs to take this? Who needs to take this? When? Because, again, I don't know about you, but we've had trainings where they're like, okay, well, actually, we just need ten people trained this week and then we can roll it out slowly to more so you're able to get those kind of more important details face to face. And I think it's so much more efficient. I kind of want to put an Asterisk next to timeline and come back to that because that's another thing. But once you get all the information you need, like who the SMEs are that you're going to be working with and links to existing documentation that they might have, then that's when your team can go and review that. You set another follow up meeting, shorten it if you want, if people are busy. And that's when you can say, hey, after taking this into consideration, after assessing the risks, after looking at your timeline, after looking at XYZ, we think we don't need an elearning course. We actually need a quick 1 hour live session or a slack message or a one pager that they can reference back to. And that's when you can make your proposal of the appropriate learning solution. But I will say timeline going all the way back to how exciting it is to work in tech. People will ask you for a training for next week.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:11]:
Yes.
Sarah Carroll [00:29:11]:
With zero understanding that it actually takes time to build them. So within reason. Again, I have no problem just communicating clearly expectations. And so I have pushed back on timeline a time or two on like, hey, that's really unrealistic for my team. I did so much one time as to collect the actual data of how long it took my team to build something and then did a whole presentation for my stakeholders, which was fantastic because it really helped them. They were like, whoa. So if you need to get buy in, that's a way to do it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:48]:
I like that. That's interesting. I don't think I've ever heard that before, especially if you have a clear set of stakeholders. That makes a lot of sense.
Sarah Carroll [00:29:56]:
Yeah. So we did. Again, we were very domain specific. I was engaging a time or two. You're engaging with cross functional folks from other teams, but mostly I was supporting the same team of I think there were like five or six managers that we were working with and hundreds and hundreds of employees. Timeline. Don't be afraid to be realistic because here's the bottom line, is you want learners to have a good experience with learning at the company. You don't want them looking at it as like a punishment or here's another crappy elearning. You want them to have quality so that way they're excited to do it and you want them to feel like it's helping them do their job. So if you're going to push out something next week, that's not very great, but if you get a couple of extra days, it can reduce the risk of retraining advocate for that with the understanding that they may just flat out say no, like, we need it by here, but at least you tried.
Matt Gjertsen [00:31:00]:
Yeah. So I really love this because it's like you're starting off with a tool that people ideally already use. So you have this system for intake. So they put it in, you make that initial interaction relatively low friction, right? So just to get it in there gives you a chance to look at it. You set up an initial meeting to go through stuff. Then they send you all their stuff that you read through. Then you set up a follow up meeting. And so by the time you are giving them your proposal, where you maybe agree, maybe disagree, you're kind of like three or four touch points into the relationship. And those early relationship points were like pretty low stress, like, tried to be pretty friendly and frictionless. So there's a base there where when you're not the the point I'm getting at is it's not like they send you an email and you're like, this doesn't need to be training. You're. Kind of having a conversation first and you're like, after careful review, which I think is great, I think that's awesome.
Sarah Carroll [00:32:08]:
There are people you're working with relatively regularly, probably, and you want to have a good relationship with them. None of this is to say, I realize I'm like, oh, maybe I'm coming off like, no, this is how it has to be. Definitely not. It's a conversation, right? It's a two way street and it's a relationship. And we had very good relationships with our stakeholders. And you want to make an informed, strategic decision that's best for the business, not that's necessarily best for L and D. It's not about being the best for L and D, but it's about efficiency and effectiveness and using our expertise to make the best proposal and coming to a compromise if needed. Because sometimes people are like, we really need the E learning because they have to check it off, right? We need that in the LMS and it's like, OK, that's understandable. So it's definitely not meant to be like a dictatorship. What LMD says goes, it has to be a partnership to have the best results again, because you're going to continue working with everyone and eventually you'll get into a groove and they may start to learn, oh, this might not be any learning. Hey, can we get a live training? Or hey, what do you think is a good idea for this solution? Definitely make it a friendly encounter.
Matt Gjertsen [00:33:37]:
Yeah, absolutely. I know we're running up on time, but the one last question I want to make sure to ask is, when you're delivering that, how often were you giving a different solution than they originally thought they needed? How often were you just saying like, no, we can't help you? And then in both of those situations, how much pushback was there and how did you deal with that?
Sarah Carroll [00:34:08]:
That's a big question. Yes. So I would say I'm going to chunk that out for my brain. How often did we give an alternative solution? I can think of I can think of a handful of times, maybe. Okay. Often it was met with approval, like excitement, like, cool, that sounds great. Because we would come up with a way, for example, the LMS thing where we needed in the LMS to have this checked off. We would come up with a way of like, okay, this doesn't need to be a training. It might be. I can think of a time I built a one pager, which is know, a PDF with a chart on it that people could literally just look at as they were doing their job, uploaded that to the LMS, told them to download it and they hit complete. So yeah, we would always come up with ways to make sure we were meeting their needs. So it wasn't met with too much resistance. I think the more thing that was met with resistance versus the type of training was more the timeline, which again, when I would start to collect data, you have to speak the language of the business and people like numbers and people respect numbers, so you collect that data. And that started to help with the timeline thing of like either they weren't giving us enough time and we could get a little more, or you're looking at examples of when you were asked to roll out a training prematurely and then we had to literally retrain people again like two, three weeks later. And so you're showing them that like, hey, if we can reduce this risk, if we add a little bit more time on in the beginning, it's going to save us time in the long run. But making sure to come again, respectfully and presenting them with numbers. That makes more sense than just like well, I think this is going to be the better way, which gives you a little bit more work.
Matt Gjertsen [00:36:24]:
Yeah. And which is all one of the more great reasons why you want to have why a ticketing system or some kind of structure can help. Because now you have that ticket and that ticket can live on and you can put information in it and you can say, this is how information. Yeah, this is how long it took, this is when it was published. This is whatever you want to do. It's super helpful and so speaking the language of the business. Yeah, I mean, if you are at basically any company that has a significant number of software engineers, I can almost guarantee you they have Jira Asana, like something Monday, whatever it is, something like that. And it is really easy to repurpose that. And now you are going to be seen as a part of the business because you're using the business's tools, which.
Sarah Carroll [00:37:06]:
Is like the end goal is. On another podcast I was on. I literally kept saying the same thing over and over, which was like, LND is working to get that seat at the table to be viewed as a strategic business partner so we can be there proactively and eventually avoid timeline issues or whatever. Because we would be there from day one, being like, hey, oh, you need this learning. Hey, how how about this proactively instead of reactively, but little by little, we'll get there.
Matt Gjertsen [00:37:42]:
We'll get a long it's a long journey for sure. Well, I know I've taken up a lot of your time, Sarah, so thank you so much. Any last words that you want? Anything else really important you want to make sure to bring up?
Sarah Carroll [00:37:58]:
No. I would say again, if you're listening and you don't have an intake start there, start to think about training lifecycle as a whole. Start to think about your intake, then scoping. Start to think about what processes your team might need to review their courses and content they create. Think about how they're uploading to the LMS. Think about deployment. I know I'm saying a lot of things, but the whole bottom line is start to think about that backbone of logistics and just slowly, one by one, tackle you. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will this, especially as you're supporting employees while you do this. But eventually, that will help your team run more effectively, efficiently, and free up time for what we love, which is creating innovative learning solutions.
Matt Gjertsen [00:38:49]:
Exactly. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I think people will definitely find some value in this, especially at smaller teams or teams that are just getting started. So thanks again for being on, and I look forward to talking to you more in the future.
Sarah Carroll [00:39:03]:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Matt. This was fun.
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