Educational Technology in Corporate Learning and Development
I started my professional career path in Automotive Technology and continued to attend school on new mechanical advances while working on vehicles. Taking the leap to work in a corporate setting was huge and it provided me the opportunity to be where I am today. I decided to earn my undergrad degree in Business Administration, but it was not until I was promoted to the trainer role where I found my true calling. I loved helping others and took great pride in seeing them learn and thrive in their positions. However, I knew there was a gap in our learning and development program. After much research, I decided to apply to Michigan State University’s Masters of Arts in Educational Technology program. It did not take long as the very first class influenced my pedagogy, and has continued to influence my department ever since.
When I started my first class at MSU, our training sessions were very boring and almost the dreaded “death by PowerPoint” corporate classes that no one wanted to attend or stay awake for. That all changed after starting CEP820: Teaching Students Online. In this class, I learned about learning management systems and was currently in charge of building a SharePoint site for my organization. We were having trouble getting our employees to perform the basic tasks of their role as customer service representatives and I was in charge with coming up with a solution to ensure they were retrained on these basics. I built a hybrid-learning module called “Back to the Basics” and it was a huge success. From this course, I was able to implement a new way of learning to my audience that they had not seen before. Opposed to the trainers talking to the employees, they were able to log on to the learning management system and follow along. They took a pre-assessment to determine a baseline on where they were coming into the classroom, had hands on interaction with the content, and in class assessments that guided the trainer on what areas he needed to address again to ensure everyone understood the content. This course is still available today and easily accessible for those who need to refer to the content from time to time.
My department is in charge of training a technical resource center, it is difficult to take employees off their essential job duties to perform training, and must rely on other forms of communication to deliver messages to our employees. In addition, it is important that we understand our audience and how to reach their preferred method of learning and track their results. In CEP813: Electronic Assessments, I learned about digital portfolios, and infographics that enhanced the way that the technical resource center managed learning and development for their employees. One of the services that we offer is to locate and administer cost savings for clients in an effort to keeping the total cost of ownership down for vehicles they use to run their business. At the time, the railroad industry was suffering and challenged us with focusing on increasing client savings for them. We had been sending out basic communications of an excel spreadsheet with little to no impact on the business. Introducing infographics to the department really changed the way we communicated with our employees. I built an infographic for railroad cost savings that displayed what our goals were and where were we were each week. This change in communication design helps us to exceed our clients’ expectations and lower their total cost of ownership.
No one in my organization had ever thought of digital portfolios as a way to track employee learning and development or as motivation. However, from my Electronic Assessments class we did just this. I was able to build digital portfolios for over 350 employees. The portfolios were great for the supervisors, hiring managers and training staff to get an understanding of each employee and how they could reach them on a personal level. In these portfolios, we were able to capture their preferred method of learning. This was great because we could focus on their style and group them with like-minded individuals to maximize our training efforts. We captured their personal motivators and personality style in the portfolios. This way when their leaders needed to coach them on opportunities or entice them to do something they could refer to their portfolio and determine how they wanted to be approached and what would motivate them to perform tasks. These portfolios also encompassed their personal life and any badges that they earned from our organization's development paths. Many of these elements spread throughout the organization and are still being utilized today.
Another reason why I decided to apply to Michigan State University is that I could earn a certificate in Serious Gaming. I attended a seminar for corporate learning and development and found that this was a new trend in my industry and I wanted to be on the forefront of that movement. During the time, I was in MI/TC830: Foundations of Serious Games; our department was undergoing a large change, our employees were being held to a higher standard, and we implemented Key Performance Indicators that would increase productivity. As with any change, there was a lot of resistance and I wanted to help the employees understand the reason behind the change as well as begin to implement gamification into our learning programs. I designed and pitched a board game called “Behind the Metrics.” This game was similar to Monopoly, but the employees were given a budget and had to earn and keep clients to successfully run their fleet management business. In this game, they had limited resources and could only allocate them in specific ways based on their client’s needs. This game put them in the driver seat of running an organization that they were a part of to get them to understand the importance of key performance indicators and help them get through the change. This game opened up the eyes of many that learning could be fun and still have a positive impact on knowledge transfer. We continue to use gamification in our learning and development department and are constantly looking for ways to grow this part of our pedagogy.
During my time at Michigan State University, my department restructured all of the leadership from the President down to me and was looking to combine the quality measures with learning and development. In CEP817: Learning Technology through Design I was challenged with creating a problem statement and use design to develop a solution for that problem. At the time our departments quality assurance sample data was four calls per month per employee and there were many customer concerns that we over-reacted on because we did not know the scope of the issue. This is because the employees handled over 1300 phone calls each month and we only measured four. By using technology to measure quality, we now are able to capture over 10 million lines of data per month, filter that data to find trends of quality concerns, implement training initiatives, and change the way we communicate with our clients. We can now catch our own concerns and provide solutions before clients bring them to our attention. We also are more transparent with our clients and when they bring us a concern we can agree of the mistake but show them were where get it right 99% of the time. This project is still ongoing and forming, but is being used to change the entire structure of my department and the scope of what we can do.
Even though I was born in Ohio and lived in multiple states, I had never been to Michigan. I decided that I wanted to experience Michigan State campus life and enrolled into the Hybrid Cohort Program. It was one of the best decisions ever! It was an intense two weeks followed by four weeks of research but the connections I made, learning I did and research performed changed my view on growth mindset and training strategies forever. One thing I learned was that learning did not have to happen in the classroom and it was actually better when it was not. Although we were on campus, we moved around and held our sessions in various locations and each time we changed our environment I actually I learned more information. This was huge as all of our training was held in the exact same place. So, imagine employees stuck in a six-by-six cube all day to move to another rectangular room to learn then back to the cube. When I returned to work, I decided that we would hold training in locations other than the training room as much as possible and outside if possible. This small change in our pedagogy really increased the effectiveness of our sessions as the employees now love to come to training outside, breath the fresh air and remember the positive experience of learning.
The second half of my hybrid program was to determine a problem, perform educational research and produce a research paper on the problem. My problem was that my stakeholders did not understand the true value of training and the impact it had on their organization. Therefore, I decided to research Training Evaluations and Training Return on Investment. Many of my stakeholders understood quantitative measures for success but did not comprehend qualitative measures. In my research, I found the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) Kirkpatrick models were the practices that have stood the sands of time. They did not compete with each other, but rather built upon each other to display the return on investment of training programs. As a result, I understood the importance of building a comprehensive training plan up front. The stakeholders have to all agree to what the desired outcome would be and what success will look like. This has led to new responsibilities in my department with the training staff taking more of a consultant type role and developing solutions to problems rather than just taking orders from stakeholders who just think they need training performed.
I am beyond excited in how the Master’s program at Michigan State University in Educational Technology has changed shape of the way that we perform learning and development at my organization. In a short four years, I set out with a goal to increase the effectiveness of my teaching programs within my organization. With the help of many people from different perspectives throughout this program, I surpassed my highest expectations. With each course, the instructors encouraged me to create projects that were meaningful to me and I was able to use these projects to develop solutions to many problems I was faced with in my department. As I look back, I could not have accomplished anywhere close to the level of success for my department if it were not for my organization providing tuition reimbursement, my instructors for allowing me to use my personal experiences, my fellow students for providing excellent feedback, my managers for allowing me to try new things and my employees for trusting in me to guide them in the right direction.
Now, my training team is the leader in learning and development in my organization for technical training. I have assisted in getting other training departments started and am in the process of working with other departments as well. Our parent company has decided to combine all sister companies to do things in a uniform way and now even departments from different industries are reaching out to me to provide guidance on how to build and increase their training programs. In addition, I see many communications and actions from other departments that have elements of items that I implemented and shared over my time in the MAET program. It has been an amazing experience that I would not change at all and I look forward to seeing how much more I can spread these practices in the corporate learning and development industry.
