Learning leaders are often focused on content in training solutions but sometimes do not put the same emphasis on how the course is designed. In this episode of Powered by Learning, I talk with d'Vinci Visual Design Director Melissa Wimbish to explain how to marry art and science to create impactful learning experiences.

 

Show Notes:

• In order to motivate a learner, you have to get their attention. Grab their attention, and keep their attention. One way we do that is through visual design. 
• The first step is often to brainstorm about the learning solutions project. When you're brainstorming, the idea should be generated freely by all individuals within the group. Keep in mind that every idea matters.
• Use a learning solutions creative brief to align on the project’s goals before discussing your design. The information captured in the brief will guide design principles at the same time that you create the learning content. 
• Typography and color are really a key step when you're establishing that visual hierarchy of content. They're used to complement the brand. They're extremely important for not only word emphasis but also visual design direction for the user.
• Integrating impactful design doesn’t have to break the budget. Depending on your learners and the objectives of your course, you can scale design to meet their needs and stay on budget. 

Download our Learning Solutions Creative Brief template to drive better results with your next project.

Watch this short video to see how d'Vinci can help you revolutionize learning experiences.

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VIEW TRANSCRIPT

Female Speaker: [00:00:00] This is Powered by Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

Male Speaker: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan Cort: Hello, and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host, Susan Cort. Today, I am joined by d'Vinci Learning Solutions Director Jenny Fedullo and Visual Design Director Melissa Wimbish, who are going to talk about the art and science of learning to help you create more successful learning solutions for your organization. Welcome, Jenny and Melissa.

Jenny Fedullo: Hi, Susan. Great to be with you.

Melissa Wimbish: Hello, Susan.

Susan: [00:01:05]  Well, I'm so glad you could take some time to talk about this topic. I know you recently presented this topic of saying, "I do," to the art and science of learning recently for a Training Industry Leader Talk. Let's talk a little bit, first of all, about why you feel that the art is an equal partner to the science.

Jenny: Really, from our perspective, one of the most important factors in making sure learning happens is learner motivation. In order to motivate a learner, you have to get their attention. Grab their attention, keep their attention. You really have to engage them. One way we do that is through visual design. The saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words," is absolutely relevant to learning as well. Melissa, anything to add?

Melissa: Sure. When looking at that art and science, I think a first step is to really take a look at your content and your level of learning touchpoints as well as interactions. A solid understanding of this content [00:02:00]will then get your team designer that leg up on how they can interpret that into an immersive design experience. To get a leg up on that, one of the first areas where we like to start is with brainstorming and concepting.

This can really jumpstart, not only the content of your course but then also creates an equal part of art and science than working together. Also, another useful element that you can utilize is a creative brief. The brief can provide a substantial amount of information to help guide the design in relation to a specific brand. We're looking at tone and overall look and feel, and we're also utilizing these elements to add those basic design principles. Those will help then define that art side of learning upfront.

Susan: Let's talk a little bit about the creative brief. Most of us are used to using a creative brief in a marketing agency. Let's explore a little bit how the learning solutions creative brief works and how it impacts the brainstorming and the concepting.

Jenny: [00:03:05] You mentioned a lot of agencies use a creative brief. Since we're born of a creative agency with JPL as our parent company, we've adopted the agency creative brief, as you said, to a learning solutions creative brief. Again, a brief is really that agreed-upon document that's created through all that upfront discovery, interviews, discussions with the client. It really informs and guides the work and the design throughout the entire project process.

Some critical questions that we ask when we're putting together the creative brief is really, what's the target message? How are we going to motivate the learner? What's the style and tone of the messaging? Obviously, who the target audience is. Another key factor is the diversity and inclusion considerations. That creative brief really becomes that justification for all the designs that are presented.

Melissa: Also, a good point to make and [00:04:00] leading into some brainstorming and concepting is after we have that creative brief, that's going to put us into a good position to start looking at that content creation, the design. We want to make sure that brainstorming and concepting is also included in this upfront process. We have creative brief, which leads us to brainstorming and concepting. Then from there, we can continue on.

When we're talking about brainstorming, brainstorming can take many forms. Overall, it's basically defined as a process for generating creative ideas or concepts with your team. When you're brainstorming, the idea should be generated freely by all individuals within the group. When you're brainstorming, keep in mind that every idea matters. If you need any guidance on how to run a brainstorm, there's actually a lot of free online tools and documents to really help get you started.

[00:04:55] As far as concepting goes, concepting is started after the brainstorming. Concepting is the intersection of the design and also the story at a high level. When you're concepting visually, it's always a good idea to start with that upfront visual research. Once you've completed your research and you created your visuals, this is the point when the design of the story can really start to come to life.

Susan: Once you've gone through all those steps, how do you then plan for the design? Because people are very focused on the training and the concepts and maybe they haven't let themselves start to think about, actually, how it's going to look. What advice would you give on how you actually execute the plan?

Jenny: At d'Vinci, we use really a five-step approach. It's discover, imagine, create, review, and deliver. It's in those first two phases, discover and imagine, that we really do that upfront planning that's going to inform the design. We meet with our clients to look at the content. We do discovery sessions. We do detailed [00:06:00] learner profiles. All of that information we gather informs that creative brief, which in turn informs that brainstorming and concepting phase that Melissa was talking about. That's how we plan for it upfront is through that discovery and imagine.

Susan: When you both start to think about designing for a learning project, what are some of the first things that you consider and what you encourage clients to consider?

Jenny: I jumped in on that one. I think, Melissa, you probably can be able to elaborate a little on this one, but I certainly think it's brand standards. I think those are one of probably the first things we ask a client. When we ask for brand standards and-- Those of you listening, when you hear brand standards, you might automatically think, "Okay, I'm going to use my company logo, the right colors, and the right font."

It's so much more than that. Again, if we did our homework and we did a creative brief correctly and we captured what we need to know. [00:06:56] We now know the audience. We know how they work. That's part of your company's brand too. The brand should evoke a feeling. That feeling is what you've got to convey in your learning because the feeling connects directly to how to engage and motivate that. Melissa, you probably have more to add on that one.

Melissa: Sure. We can discuss a recent client and how we use their brand standards to then create the visual design direction for a recent e-learning project. If you're not familiar with Constellation Brands, they are an American producer and marketer of various beer, wine, and spirits. Their portfolio of brands is well-established within the US marketplace and it contains some very well-known products such as Corona, Modelo, Robert Mondavi wines, and also Svedka vodka.

Upon looking at that constellation RFP, they had two overarching main goals. The first goal was to educate, inform, inspire, and also deploy their brands as well as their sense of place. Also, they wanted to create modules that were interactive, creative, [00:08:00] immersive while also transferring that knowledge to not only their internal audience but also their external audience.

Our next step from a design standpoint was to review the client's brand standards as Jenny mentioned and to start fusing those brand elements into our designs. With our first round of designs, we were able to focus on a specific product in that product's brand. We started with a product that gave us a good idea of the brand standards, and then we moved forward with the development and design on that product. Many products came in after that in the future.

Susan: That's a great example, Melissa. Those are such beautiful learning solutions that you and the team created. When you're giving advice to clients before they're starting a project with you, what are some of the key elements that you always consider when you're designing a course?

Jenny: Key to the visual design approach is like you said that there's some critical design elements and, really, the building blocks of design. [00:9:00] And I think we would look at those as the typography, the color palette, illustrations, and iconography, and then you build on those elements for those custom interactions, video, and animation. Melissa, I think you had another example you were going to walk us through or talk through?

Melissa: Sure, I can share with you some of those key design elements. When we're looking at some of those design elements to really bring the course together visually, we want to look at typography first. The purpose of typography and also color working together, it's going to help arrange the design components into that cohesive whole. We're talking about content plus design.

Typography and color are really a key step when you're establishing that visual hierarchy of content. They're used to complement the brand. Also, they're extremely important for not only word emphasis but also visual design direction for the user. Another element that we like to consider as well [00:10:00] is illustration and icons. Illustrations and icons can serve many purposes within a design. They can help tell a visual story and can be a strong reinforcement for any important messages that you want to share with the audience.

Not only are they good for strong reinforcement of messaging, they also are very helpful in the absence of photography. If you do not have a lot of stock photos or you don't really have a lot of photography, some of these icons and illustrations can really help get the modules a nice visual design. There are some things to consider when working with icons and illustrations. You want to make sure that they do stay simple and clean and they also need to have that quick impact on the audience.

This is going to help them to connect the visual elements with also the content messaging. Looking at these and once you have some of these elements of design under your belt, you then can really start to expand these skills and to other design elements such as custom interactions, video, and animations, or even 3D. [00:11:02] Then this will help you down the line and start taking some of those out-of-the-box solutions and create a more immersive interaction.

Susan: A lot of people listening, thinking about their next learning solution, might be thinking this all sounds wonderful, but why do they need to focus so much on design? Talk a little bit, both of you, about the significance of the design and how it impacts the overall learning.

Jenny: I think, Susan, it all comes down to that phrase I said in the beginning is that a picture is worth a thousand words. The learnings got to grab the learner. It's got to engage them and keep their attention. Through visual design, we can do that. The content can only go so far. That's why we've got to have both together. The art and the science. That visual appeal, that visual look, is a way to connect and engage and motivate the learner as well.

Melissa: Going back to what we previously chatted about a little bit as far as the design elements, working with those design [00:12:00] elements, they're a good workhorse for, again, leading that audience or that user through the information in the most intuitive manner. As the user is reading through the content on the page or the module design that those elements are going to engage, they could be something that they interact with. Again, they provide that strong hierarchy of information as you're going through any type of e-learning content.

Susan: Yes, it definitely sounds like it's going to make for more meaningful and impactful learning, which is the whole point of it, right?

Melissa: Correct.

Jenny: Yes, you're exactly right.

Susan: Some people also might be wondering, "Well, this all sounds great, but how do I afford to do this kind of design?" Talk a little bit about the scalability of having those design elements in your learning solutions. It doesn't always have to be that top-notch, high-end custom illustrations. There are many ways that I know you've helped clients accomplish that marriage of art and science and it doesn't always have to be that high-end.

Melissa: [00:13:05]  I think you can take a look at it from a perspective of design at a small level, design at a medium level, and then design at a high level. When you're looking at small, medium, and a larger size, you could start breaking down, "Okay, how much can I achieve within the small? How much can I achieve with the medium and then with the large?" A small, we're talking pretty basic interface. You're really going to focus on that typography to lead you through any type of learning content. Maybe there's some little hints of imagery here and there.

Medium would be more, again, typography, really infusing the color palette, bringing in the images, following the brand. Then large would probably be something like we spoke about with constellation, so you're really diving in, looking at that brand guideline, and pulling all those elements from it. When I say all those elements, its typography, color palette, illustrations, icons, [00:14:00] textures, any type of photographic imagery. Constellation was able to provide us with a lot of really beautiful full-screen photos that we could leverage and, again, really engaging the user into a visually lush experience.

Susan: Jenny, something you said at the beginning I wanted to come back to and that was the importance on using design to help accomplish some diversity goals. Of course, the learner wants to see himself or herself in the training program. How can you use design to help accomplish that so people can actually identify with the course?

Jenny: Again, in that upfront discovery and analysis, it's all about focusing on the learner. Who is your target learner? I know a lot of times, people think, "Okay, well, I've identified their role and they're sales reps." That's a title. That's not a target learner. [00:14:56] So it’s so many more characteristics. It's really the overt and the covert characteristics of not only the person but the environment and where they work. What is their entire ecosystem of learning look like? How's it feel? Let's really immerse the learner. If you do that correctly, you're going to get a complete picture and then properly recognize and include that diversity within your course.

Melissa: Again, when we're looking at design, we also want to consider any disabilities the user may have. That can also be something as hearing impairment or visual impairment, so we want to make sure that we're very clear with typography and text design as far as color contrast. We also want to make sure if somebody has a hearing impairment, we want to make sure we have those closed captioning and elements such as that.

Another thing that we really like to look at as well when we're designing is to make sure that we're providing the user with a very open and very diverse set of photography. That's another thing that definitely needs to be considered. [00:16:00] We have a lot of people who they're part of a different culture or have other, again, disabilities or impairments. We want to make sure that we do represent everybody so nobody feels left out.

Susan: Then one thing you had talked about previously with design and keeping diversity in mind is that you can accomplish that in a lot of different ways. Talk a little bit about that, Melissa. It could be photos. It could be illustrations. What are some things that you've seen that have been successful?

Melissa: When we're talking about design, photos and illustrations, I think, we did speak about. Another thing that I want to mention too is also tone. How you're speaking to that user or how you're speaking to that audience. There could be a different tone that you need to consider when speaking to different-- Maybe it's K-12. How do you speak to them or if it's something that's more like a corporate e-learning? Again, what's your tone for that? You want to make sure that you're also diverse in that tone when you're speaking, and then that will also help really bring the design to another level as well if you're reinforcing those points that are considering different tones for different audiences.

Susan: [00:17:08] Thinking about the topic for this podcast, say "I do" to the art of learning, probably a lot of people are a little nervous about saying, "I do," because it couldn't be overwhelming. What advice would you both give as we wrap up today to help people feel more confident as they step forward and creating that learning solutions creative brief and really stepping into that world of marrying design with the science of learning?

Jenny: With anything, it's that upfront planning. Make sure you do your research, you know what elements you want to include. Like Melissa had mentioned, those building blocks. How are you going to use typography, color palette, illustrations, and iconography to connect the learner to the content? Really having those discussions upfront, really doing that analysis [00:18:00] to make sure you have the right information to inform the design.

Susan: Melissa, anything to add to that?

Melissa: Sure, so looking from a design perspective for upfront planning, Jenny did mention we have those upfront steps that we shared with you. From a design perspective, it's also very important to start researching visually what could be inspiring to you or inspiring to your audience. That's going out to Google or any website and start looking at maybe another inspirational website or even inspirational photos or anything like that to really start getting you into the mind frame of what your user, your audience might visually become tied to. There's also if you're struggling and you may think, "I can't do this. I can't say I do." There's a lot of resources online again that you can go to, articles, to give you a little bit of education on how to start something, a visual design process of some sort.

Susan: [00:19:00] This was great information. I know learners everywhere will be thanking you because the people creating the training programs are going to benefit from this great advice. Thank you both for joining us today.

Melissa: Sure.

Jenny: You're welcome, Susan. And thanks, Melissa. It was fun.

Melissa: Thank you, Jenny.

Susan: You'll also find a learning solutions creative brief template on the d'Vinci website that you're welcome to download and use. The link to that is in our show notes. If you have any questions about what we talked about today, you can reach out to us on d'Vinci social channels through our website dvinci.com or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

Advertisement 3: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at d'Vinci.com. [00:20:00]

The Davey Awards selected Navigating the Digital Universe as a Gold winner in the “Best Use of Animation/Illustration for Websites” and “Educational Websites” categories.

Navigating the Digital Universe, a new curriculum developed by SAE International’s A World In Motion® (AWIM) and d’Vinci Interactive, helps educators teach children about their rights and responsibilities as digital citizens.

Through blended hands-on and digital activities, students learn how to engage with the digital world in a positive, responsible way. Students explore planets related to digital safety, communication, literacy, and ethics. The interactive, character-driven curriculum creates an emotional connection between young learners and content—providing compelling learning opportunities and better knowledge retention.

The Davey Awards honors the best in web, video, advertising, mobile, and social from agencies worldwide. Sanctioned and judged by the top-tier professionals of Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA), the Davey Awards has become one of the largest and most prestigious awards competitions for small agencies.

Learn more about Navigating the Digital Universe

For marketing agencies, the creative brief is imperative no matter the size of the campaign. The brief serves as the unifying document for the creative campaign to ensure all involved are looking in the same direction as they begin work on the next big idea.

For learning organizations, the training needs analysis (TNA) often serves in this capacity. The TNA acts as the roadmap for all involved and identifies the who, what, when, where, why and how of the project. If done properly, a TNA is performed at three levels: organizational, job and individual. It seeks to:

• Clarify organizational and training program objectives

• Determine the scope of the project

• Identify constraints

• Understand the audience and the job

• Identify performance gaps

The results of the TNA can be used to plan instructional objectives and the design and delivery of the program. More often than not, though, there is limited time and budget to conduct a thorough analysis, if at all. But, there is a solution that you can make time for – a Learning Solutions Creative Brief (LSCB).

Introducing the LSCB 

A LSCB can be a great unifying document to gain team and stakeholder alignment. The creative brief informs and guides the work and the design throughout the project process. It provides background and serves as the foundation for design. It becomes the justification for all designs presented.

Use it throughout the project lifecycle as a reference and decision-making tool. You can refer to it at the end to determine return on expectations and measure success.

One of the most important questions a brief answers for a marketing agency is the reason to believe—the compelling reason the target audience should choose the product. On an LSCB, adapt that question to capture learner motivation. What is the insight statement, the bright idea that will entice learners to engage in your course? You can use a brief to ensure you’re reaching your audience in a creative way and making an emotional connection with the learner to aid in knowledge transfer.

How Will It Help Your Organization?

Here are the key advantages of using an LSCB:

• It unifies the project team and customer
• It’s crisp and concise
• It tells us why the target audience should believe our message (learner motivation)
• It sets the foundation from which strategic, creative ideas are born
• It identifies one thought or idea to be communicated (terminal objective)
• It captures characteristics about the target audience (the learner)
• It identifies the call to action (performance improvement, behavior change)
• It identifies the style and tone of the message
• It aligns training with an organization’s brand and external marketing communications

You can adapt a marketing agency creative brief to work within a learning and development organization by slightly modifying a few of the questions. Use it to inform brainstorm sessions and come up with your own big idea for transferring knowledge—a theme or story, perhaps. It’s also helpful in the hand-off meeting between the instructional designer and the developer to ensure they are on the same page.

Get Started Today!

Download a sample Learning Solutions Creative Brief. Then use it to guide you and your team to a higher quality outcome and a more impactful relationship with your team or client.

 

In order to help customers make good buying decisions, Best Buy Canada advisers need to be well trained on the products that they sell. In this Powered by Learning episode, Marjorie Van Roon, Senior Manager, Learning and Development at Best Buy Canada, talks to us about how the right training can drive retail performance.

Show Notes:

• Well trained people are at the heart of what makes a great shopping experience at Best Buy Canada. Marjorie Van Roon offers key takeaways including these points:

• Best Buy Canada trains its advisers using customer personas so that they can assist buyers, no matter what their level of technical expertise and regardless of where they are in the buying journey.

• In addition to company training, advisors receive training directly from the product vendors which increases their expertise and creates a sense of pride among team members.

• Employees are motivated to complete a certification journey each year and are incentivized to take additional training to compete for prizes.

• Best Buy Canada measure training impact with the Net Promoter Score and through customer feedback.

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Susan Cort: This is Powered by Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

Male Speaker: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan: Hello, and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host Susan Cort and today I'm joined by d’Vinci CEO Luke Kempski who is going to talk to our guests, Marjorie Van Roon, Senior Manager Learning and Development at Best Buy Canada about how training can drive retail performance. Welcome, Marjorie, it's so great to talk with you again.

Marjorie Van Roon: Great. Thanks, Susan, real pleasure to be here.

Luke Kempski: Thanks so much for joining us. We're really grateful to have you.

Susan: Marjorie, we last talked to you at TICE the Training Industry Conference and Expo a few years back, and we're so excited that you're a guest with us today on Powered by Learning. Let's start off by telling our listeners a little bit about your role at Best Buy Canada.

Marjorie: Sure, thank you. My team and I, we lead the learning and development function for 10,000 Best Buy employees across Canada in our stores, our head office, and our distribution centers. I'm really proud of some of the transformational work that we've been part of with helping our employees take a real "be amazing" approach with our customers, and helping our leaders understand the impact of leading with authenticity, with emotional intelligence, and really some of our groundbreaking work around diversity inclusion, mental wellness.

My greatest sense of achievement comes I think from knowing that we've all had a part in helping the company be successful in their goals and making Best Buy a place where employees feel like they can be their whole selves at work and our customers get the kind of service that makes them true fans of our amazing company.

Luke: That's so good and it's so nice to hear that. We all love Best Buy, to go in there and see all the exciting products that they have. When you come in there, sometimes it's a bit overwhelming because there's so much cool stuff, and with that said, it's a bit intimidating. Your employees, how do they approach those slightly intimidated customers to make sure that they know how to navigate the products and make good decisions?

Marjorie: Thanks for first of all for saying that. It really is a cool place to shop and I love going in there myself. We realize that for some of our customers, it can be a little bit intimidating, specifically with what's going on in the world today. We know that if the customer is making an effort to come into our stores, they really need our help. Our advisors, that's what we call our salespeople, they really need to be knowledgeable but on top of that, they need to be able to show empathy and be really ready to recommend the best products that fit our customer's needs. When we created our sales training, we actually talk about those types of customers that come into the stores and we give them personas.

One type of customer that we have, we call them the decided customer, that's the one that comes into the store, they know exactly what they want, they're going to pick it off the shelves and go right to the cash register, they don't really need any help from our advisors. Then, we have the ones that come into the store that are undecided so maybe they're choosing between two different laptops or something and they need some expertise from our advisors to recommend the right one for them.

Then, we have that third persona, the customer that is uninformed, so they come in and they don't know what type of product that they're looking for. They don't know what's the latest and greatest things happening in the tech world, or how they can get better performance out of some of the products that they're looking for. We know those customers are going to need a lot more time from our advisors to really get their expertise, and help them really choose that right tech for them.

Luke: I would imagine that with all the different products that you have that are constantly changing, that keeping your advisors so that they're learning about how these products are evolving, whether it's a smart TV or a tablet, or an audio system, even a phone, they're all constantly evolving. How do you keep them informed enough to be good advisors?

Marjorie: That is definitely something that we struggle with all the time is keeping on top of the tech. We've got a really great strategy around that though, and what I love with our specialists that we have is we partner really well with our buyers first of all, so our buyers are aware of the trends that are happening, the products that are going to be the next latest and greatest products. If we can get early enough in that process, we can help to deliver some great training on some of those products, but then we also partner really heavily with our vendors as well, and they provide us content that we can serve up in our LMS.

That could be anything from a video, a document, a full on e-learning, but we get a lot of the content directly from our vendors. As well as doing e-learning, we also provide a few times a year where our vendors partner with us and we call them business leadership summits. We have select people out of the stores attend a virtual summit with our vendors and a few other partners as well and we create a learning experience for them where they, again, get the chance to talk with our vendors about some of the products that they're doing.

Then we're branching into different ways to partner with our vendors as well. Lots of different things.

We have something called a brand expert program where our advisors, they may wear a Google shirt or a Sony shirt or a Jabra shirt for the shift that they're in and they're actually representing the vendor's products. A lot of stores will go to third-party vendors, but this one, we actually get to use our own advisors, pay them a little extra, and they get really deep learning in that vendor's products and can just give amazing experience to our customers then because they're like the experts in that product.

Luke: Oh, that's really great. It's really different. I hadn't experienced that yet. I'm sure I will at one of these days when I go into a Best Buy. That's good, and I know that the retail experience has changed a lot in the last couple years due to the pandemic and that you've had to adapt a lot to be able to service customers in different ways besides having them on the retail floor itself. Can you talk a little bit about what's changed and how that's impacted you from a learning and development standpoint?

Marjorie: Yes, so when the pandemic hit, we didn't know what to expect, and some of our systems had to change, some of our processes had to change based on how we could still help our customers in the best way. Our IT, and our tech, and our ecommerce teams all got together and have been able to create some amazing different processes and systems that have really helped that go a lot smoother. With every new system, with every new process, there's training involved with that as well.

Everything from having the health checks at the front of the store for employees as they come in, to being able to help customers with queuing software so that we can help the right number of customers come into the store at a time, doing online purchases, everything, there's been a lot that has shifted. With that came a lot of training as well.

Luke: That's great that you've been able to adapt. I know that one of your advisors, or almost any employee that you're trying to reach with a lot of training, it's sometimes hard to get them motivated to take that learning. What kinds of things do you do to motivate employees and advisors to take the training that's offered?

Marjorie: Yes. We do a pretty good job, I think with that. First of all, everyone at the stores is assigned a certification journey. It's e-learning, it's virtual training, everything all packaged together. It can range from 25 to 30 hours’ worth of total training that they need to do to get certified in their role. That is mandatory, so there's some basic courses that they take that are mandatory. Our store leaders do an amazing job of making sure that everybody completes all of that.

We run probably 90 to 95% completion for all of those certification journeys, which I know that that's a really amazing stat, but there's more training out there and we are always letting our employees know that, "Hey, just because you completed your certification journey, there's new stuff that's coming up all the time." With all of the content that we get from vendors, we do incentivize that. With any product knowledge courses, every time someone in the stores takes one of the product knowledge courses that we get from our vendors, they actually get entered into a draw and we pull for 25 $50 gift cards every month.

As long as they're up to date on their certification and they take any extra product knowledge courses, they're entered into a draw for that. We have some incentivizing done that way. Again, we also partner with the vendors that we work with as well. Sometimes if they've got a new big release or they've got some training that they want to make sure people are going through, they'll sponsor a contest as well, and the prizes can be even better than for the employees.

Susan: I would think one of the incentives too, might be just the pride in being the expert in a certain product, that when you give that associate a shirt, that advisor's shirt, they feel like an extension of that brand. That probably helps their confidence and makes them want to learn more since they're being looked at as the true expert. You're not just going to the vendors for that kind of training.

Marjorie: Absolutely. Our blue shirts are very proud of the training that they've done and the knowledge that they've got around some of the products. Yes, there's lots of different ways that they can feel proud about what they do.

Luke: Talk a little bit, Marjorie, about how your store employees engage in training. Are they taking the courses from home? Do they come off the sales floor to go into a training room? Are they looking at their phones and taking training? What are you doing and what have you found is working best?

Marjorie: Because of the pandemic and everything that happened about 18 months ago, we definitely had to move things around. Where it was okay to do training in the stores previously, now it wasn't because we just couldn't have people in a small room doing training together. We switched everything to virtual. Luckily, we had done a little bit of that already but then we just made it mandatory. [laughs] When somebody joins the company, one of our new hires, they actually stay home for their first three days, and they take all of their training online.

In those three days, they've got some virtual training that they do because we want them to be able to ask questions and speak to a live person and really get that sense that they're welcomed into the company and get that feeling of feeling included. It's great for them to see because we've got them all the way across the country joining some of these virtual trainings and they're all new and so they're all saying, "Oh, hey, hi from Vancouver, and hi from Etobicoke," and all of these other places. I think that's really exciting.

They do three days of training from home, a lot of it is around the safety training as well. That way, by the time they get into the store, they are prepared to serve our customers, they know our culture, and they're safe. They know exactly what to do to keep each other safe and our customers safe. That's what we do for our new employees. Then, once they're in the store, the training continues but it's done more one-on-one where they can be physically distanced from each other.

A leader would be training but we've set it up so that they can do that in the store apart from each other. We use things like customer cards, that we've got some laminated cards where they can practice different scenarios, and that kind of thing. Again, they can be wiped clean and ready for the next person. There's all these things that we're trying to do. Our business leadership summits were another thing that we do. Again, it's a few times a year, so they can meet that way. It's all virtual now. Our leadership programs are all virtual, something that we've had to shift as well, and so far, it's been going really, really well.

Luke: That's great. Are you able to measure the impact of the training that you do on the results of the store, on the results of the advisors?

Marjorie: This last 18 months has been really difficult because everything has changed. If you're trying to get metrics and measurements, it's like what do you benchmark that against? It's definitely challenging but there are some things that we look at regularly just to get sentiment on how it's going. We have NPS, Net Promoter Score, and we added a few questions in there as well. Now we know that our customers feel very safe and we know that the training helps to support that, that our customers are feeling safe. With our NPS, we also track how do our customers feel about the level of knowledge that they're getting from the employees, and that also tracks very high.

That hasn't really changed over the pandemic so that we know whatever we're doing is still working. Other things that we look at definitely as we partner with our vendors to provide us with training, they do their own metrics on the back end to see if they're getting a return on investment. We know because they're asking us for more and more and more that they are getting that return on investment and they love the opportunities to be able to get in front of our advisors. Then, we just launched a new employee engagement tool as well. Again, we're collecting sentiment from our employees and our leaders, and they're letting us know that, again, the training has been really great for them.

Luke: That's excellent. You can definitely see from the different perspectives that you're doing the measurement that you're having an impact for sure. I know that you mentioned in your introduction when you talked about your role you mentioned diversity and inclusion. What kinds of things are you doing to make sure that you're learning programs both support those initiatives and have that right feel for the diverse store employees that you have and all employees that you have?

Marjorie: There's a lot of things in what we're doing around diversity and inclusion I'm super proud of. At the same time, we're having to be extremely flexible as we find things are coming up from the stores and from our office and everywhere else, things that are becoming a challenge for employees, and have done over the last 18 months or so. We want to be able to build training that helps to support them feeling included. There was a lot of bad stuff that happened over the last year, so around Asian hate, Black Lives Matter, that kind of thing. Our employees needed to know that we supported them in those areas, and we have.

We've created training on how to deal with some of the things that they may have to face. I never thought that we'd have to create training on that. Again, that feels good that we're supporting our employees, at the same time as feeling like, "Wow, I wish we didn't have to." We're doing a lot around that. Then, even as we create training as well, we're making sure that our images, our scenarios, everything we use is around diversity and inclusion, and making people feel like they belong. We purposely pick images and scenarios and things that help people to go, "Hey, that represents me as well."

Luke: That's excellent. Good. When you think about some of the trends that are happening and some of the things that you're thinking about further ahead, if we were going to do a podcast in a couple of years, what do you think we would be talking about in terms of what's different at Best Buy from a training standpoint? What kinds of initiatives would you expect to be evolving over the next couple of years?

Marjorie: One thing about our company is we're really innovative and it's encouraged. We've definitely seen that again over the last 18 months with everybody chipping in ideas and us being able to be extremely flexible, as a company, we're getting better and better at using data to improve the business, and to improve our customer experience, and improve our employee experience. Because we have incredibly innovative people that are continually designing new and better systems and processes, our L&D teams are going to need to support those systems and processes as well. Then, we also get the opportunity to look at tech and see how can we use that to improve what we do in L&D.

I'm really proud of our team and the agility that we've shown over the last couple of years. We're in a really fortunate position where we are in really high demand from all areas of the business. We'd like to be able to support them all and support them better. In order to do that, we need to find some tools that can help us be better, faster, stronger, and be able to support everyone that needs our help.

Luke: That's really excellent. You think about it, retail is constantly changing, and then with technology constantly changing and all the products that you sell constantly changing, training will be always probably way more in demand than you're able to handle. [chuckles]

Susan: It sounds like the training you do, Marjorie, is just as innovative as the products you sell. I think that says a lot for Best Buy Canada, that you're able to be so responsive and so supportive. I'm sure that comes across to all the customers who come through your doors or come to your website, so great job.

Marjorie: Thank you. Thank you.

Luke: Yes, and thanks so much for joining us today.

Marjorie: Thank you.

Susan: Good to talk to you, Marjorie.

Marjorie: Great to talk to you as well. Bye-bye.

Susan: Luke, what a great conversation with Marjorie. Their commitment to training is certainly providing great results for their associates, and ultimately, their customers too.

Luke: Yes. They really are impressive. We have some good takeaways I think. First, we talked about how they trained their advisors in the stores, and trained them how to help customers, and how those advisors can use customer personas to adapt their approach. Of course, this requires training to be able to identify the persona. She talked about different personas like a decided customer who knows exactly what they want, a customer who's done their research and wants to be able to compare a few products and get a recommendation from the advisor. Then, there's the uninformed customer who will need a lot more guidance from the advisor in order to make a decision and make a purchase.

Then, we talked about how the advisors acquire the product knowledge they need. They take a lot of courses that are provided by the vendors who supply the products. Beyond those courses, they also have a business leadership summit, which is like a virtual trade show where the store advisors can learn from and interact with brand and product experts from Best Buy's vendor partners. Marjorie then talked about how they motivate employees to take the training. She said each associate has a defined certification journey that involves 25 to 30 hours of training and their store managers do a great job of making sure that each employee completes that journey.

They also have contests and prizes that help inspire and motivate employees to gauge in learning experiences that they offer even beyond the certification. She also talked about how they measure performance and training impact. They're using the net promoter score as well as really looking at customer feedback related to the product knowledge of their advisors and the experience their advisors provide. Of course, she spoke about the COVID-19 pandemic and how that's added new training for the systems and processes that they've had to implement. Also, how much more of their training is now being done virtual rather than gathering associates together in a training room in the store.

Lastly, we talked about how the changing worlds of retail, e-commerce, and technology are requiring Best Buy to change and how that will continue to impact learning and development and how she anticipates integrating more data and more technology into everything they do.

Susan: They're going to keep being innovative just like the products they sell. Definitely interesting to see all that they've done and all that they will do at Best Buy in Canada.

Luke: Sounds good.

Susan: Thanks, Luke. Many thanks to Marjorie Van Roon of Best Buy Canada for joining us today. If you have any questions about what we talked about, you could reach out to us on d'Vinci's social channels, through our website dvinci.com, or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

[music]

Male Speaker: Powered By Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

[00:22:01] [END OF AUDIO]

Adaptive Learning benefits both the learner and an organization's bottom line. In this episode of Powered by Learning, Craig Joiner, Senior Vice President, Brand Experience at Fulcrum Labs dispels some myths about Adaptive Learning and explains how organizations can put it to work to achieve their goals.

Show Notes:

Craig Joiner breaks down the barriers to Adaptive Learning in this episode of Powered by Learning. His key points include:

• Adaptive Learning is like a high-tech version of one-to-one coaching. It should challenge each learner just above their current knowledge level to boost confidence and push toward subject mastery.

• Remember that Adaptive Learning isn't a magic bullet. It integrates a variety of training best practices including competency-based learning, microlearning, and personalized learning.

• Adaptive Learning helps learners avoid taking training they don't need. Instead, they invest their learning time in areas where they need more knowledge and skills.

• If you're new to Adaptive Learning, you may want to start with a pilot with a small defined number of learning objectives that need to be delivered to a relatively large number of learners.

Read more about Adaptive Learning in this Training Industry article written by Fulcrum Labs Founder Patrick Weir.

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[00:00:00] Susan Cort: This is Powered by Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

[music]

[00:00:16] Sponsor: I is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

[music]

[00:00:40] Susan: Hello and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host, Susan Cort. Today, I'm joined by d'Vinci CEO, Luke Kempski, who's going to talk to our guest, Craig Joiner, Senior Vice President, Brand Experience at Fulcrum Labs. Fulcrum Labs has developed a 3.0 Adaptive Learning platform and has helped partners from both enterprise and higher education achieve their goals. Welcome, Craig.

[00:01:06] Craig Joiner: Hi, how are you doing, Susan?

[00:01:07] Luke Kempski: Hey. Great welcome, Craig. I'm so glad you could join us this morning.

[00:01:11] Craig: Thank you, Luke. It's great to be here. I've listened to a couple of your podcasts now and very insightful, both on the questions and the answers provided a lot of additional clarity and perspective for me.

[00:01:21] Susan: Well, good, thank you. We're going to ask you to do the same today. Let's start out, telling us a little bit about your role at Fulcrum Labs.

[00:01:29] Craig: I am Senior Vice President of Brand Experience, and I work hand in hand with our Client Success Director. Fulcrum is a very outcomes-driven company, and these two roles work very closely to make sure that we're delivering for our partners on what their main KPIs are and also in translating that into marketing materials or engagement materials and just all-around thinking of new ways. With learning, there's always new challenges, and sometimes we even step a little beyond what you would consider a traditional SaaS adaptive platform role. That's where I help fill in.

[00:02:09] Luke: That makes sense, Craig. I think that adaptive learning is such an interesting topic and one you hear talked about a lot in theory, but you don't always get concrete examples or practices. Can you start by giving me your definition of adaptive learning and how that applies to what you do at Fulcrum Labs?

[00:02:27] Craig: I can. Thanks, Luke, this is a good question. Over time, we've seen people's understanding evolve. I'll take it from the most general level, the real general ideas of adaptive learning, and this is pretty simple, the idea is obviously to maximize the impact and efficiency of learning, and it's really by having the trainee adjust to the individual learner's needs.

At Fulcrum, we think of adaptive learning as basically, an extremely high-tech version of a one-on-one coach. That's a very visual concept. We've all experienced a one-on-one coach, and we've all experienced the benefits of having that personalization. Where the definition of adaptive gets more complex really is in the ways that different adaptive platforms adapt and why they adapt, what those decisions are and what data goes into those decisions on how it adapts.

Obviously, I can't speak a lot for other providers, but for Fulcrum, one of the main goals of that activity is simply to achieve optimal challenge, really, that learning sweet spot for each learner that's just above their current capability to maximize that application-level mastery and to boost their confidence in these new skills. Really, it all comes down to what I say all the time, which is so that people can apply these skills back on the job. This isn't just theoretical knowledge.

I'd also like to mention that while adaptive is really this critical component in achieving great training results and reducing training times, it's really just part of what an adaptive platform like Fulcrum is all about and why they're so successful. Adaptivity, while it's very powerful, when you combine it with other things like microlearning, or competency-based approach, or data analytics, learner choice, any of these things, that's really where you start to see the dramatic results in terms of learning outcomes and also the learner experience, which, as you know, is key to engagement.

When you're combining those things, it really is that 1+1+1=10. You really get this, adaptivity is the hot thing right now that people want to talk about because they've seen the results, and they understand the benefit of that idea of a one-on-one coach, but really, it's the combination of these other elements that really make it the most powerful.

[00:04:42] Luke: Yes, and that definitely is what's most interesting about it is how different aspects of learning and some of the current approaches to learning are overlapping with this whole idea of adaptive learning. It would be great if you could zoom in on an example of how adaptive learning can apply in an enterprise setting.

[00:05:03] Craig: One of the things we've talked about in the past is we talked about something very topical right now, is companies are seeing a significant amount of turnover. I'm sure you've heard it as well. Obviously, having their advantages to be able to get your employees trained up, both in terms of speed but also getting them on the job. Something that we talk about, which is what you don't want to have happen, is you don't want to have training and check the box.

You don't want people to go on the job and be, as we say, faking it till they make it where they're out there really making mistakes. Obviously, some situations are more critical than others. We often talk about and people ask me, "What does Fulcrum specialize in?" I said, "If the idea of people in your company faking it till they make it just scares the hell out of you and you can't sleep at night because of that, then we're probably someone that you should be talking to."

For a specific example, one of them is onboarding. Again, very topical, we're seeing a lot of turnover. We've heard terms like the Great Resignation. A lot of people, because of the pandemic, are reevaluating life and moving around, taking different jobs, having different criteria, so onboarding is very important. One of the partners that we work with, really high turnover rate, in the 80% range, and the skills that people were applying were critical and, in some cases, dangerous.

They began using it for onboarding. What they saw, the way that they were measuring, we always talk about, we want to make sure that they have success. In this case, they were measuring equipment damage as their primary KPI, if these people were actually applying the training on the job. What we saw, what the training delivered in Fulcrum's platform is they told us within the first year, they had reduced accidents by almost 60%.

When we heard that, it was almost too much. It's like, "Oh, people aren't going to believe us." Again, this is the partner's number. We were astounded by that. They said they had three months during the year where there were zero accidents. This is incredible for them in terms of cost savings and worker's comp that they were having to pay when equipment was damaged and things like that.

[00:07:18] Luke: In that case, Craig, can you talk about, what was the learning experience like? How did the learning actually adapt? Without getting into it really technically, if it's in a manufacturing environment, for instance, how does the learning adapt to the learner?

[00:07:34] Craig: One of the things that Adaptive is really good at is not penalizing people who come in with preexisting knowledge. We see this with onboarding, time after time. You might have someone who's just coming into the field for the first time, this is their first job. They basically need everything, all your skill set. Then you have other people who might have changed companies, and they're coming into your company from another company.

Onboarding is very different for them. What those people specifically talk about, they say, "I love that you didn't penalize me for the things I already knew, that this system allowed me to test out of areas." That's a common theme, too, testing out. Adaptive allows you to test out again at application-level mastery. It allows you to test out and very quickly move through the training.

Then the people who didn't know anything, they said, "I felt very supported. I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning." Again, we see that in the data. People come in, they don't have any existing knowledge, they make a lot of mistakes. The system is delivering at the optimal challenge, so the whole time, they feel confident. They never lose confidence, they always think, "I can do this. I can do this" because it's not, for example, serving them content that's difficult and then serving them even harder content.

It's understanding, it's mapping both their performance in the course but also their behaviors, and it's making suggestions to them. That's something that they say, "Oh, I loved it."

The other thing that people talk about, you talk about, how is this for the learner? They talk about how the platform, they say, "It put me in the driver's seat." It's funny because the learner doesn't necessarily talk about the adaptivity in that sort of a way, they talk about the experience. "I love that it put me in the driver's seat" is something we hear a lot of.

[00:09:20] Luke: That's great. I know that adaptive learning in terms of how it's evolved over time, what we talked about five years ago or even longer ago about adaptive learning is different than what the evolution of technology, and the use of data, and other things coming along that have really influenced-- I know at Fulcrum you talk about Adaptive Learning 3.0. Can you give us a brief history of the prior versions and leading to what's new about it today?

[00:09:48] Craig: I can. We've had a front-row seat to that because these aren't just versions, this is literally the experience that Fulcrum went through developing. When we started out, adaptivity was really about branching, very basic branching. In a lot of cases, we were a little more advanced, but the most basic branching being someone went in at the very beginning, gave some input, and then a pathway was projected for them that they went on, and there was no further adaptivity beyond that.

We started to evolve, and that was a little more various points along the learning education in Adaptive 1.0 where it was also further branching. That was really the beginning for us and for a lot of Adaptive platforms as well. What we started to see in the next level of sophistication of Adaptive 2.0 was the use of algorithms. It's like, "Okay, we could write these algorithms. We could put these things in place, and it could adjust a little, in a much more detailed way."

We could tap along the way, people, their pathway could be adjusted. That was great. That got us a long way until we realized, well, the systems should be learning and in comes Adaptive 3.0, which is really taking advantage of artificial intelligence and having the system learn from what is successful, what's not successful and really optimizing that. The accuracy, what you get with the AI, the ML compliment in Adaptive 3.0 is you get the ability to more accurately deliver exactly at the person's need, again, more to that optimal challenge.

[00:11:26] Luke: How would that apply in the situation we were talking about before, in terms of the onboarding at the 3.0 level where the system is actually learning? Can you give an example of that?

[00:11:37] Craig: I can actually give two quick examples. The system is learning and adjusting. One of the ways I'll give an example is the system is whilst the AI is going through and not only evaluating what to deliver to the individual learner, it's actually identifying how well the course is performing and giving us analysis, very actionable analysis. It's actually flagging content areas that are problematic.

What we've seen is that when we go in, we've adjusted these problematic areas, we've seen something really interesting. As you would expect, what we saw in this onboarding scenario, we saw an increase in performance in those areas where the content wasn't performing well, but what we additionally saw that is more interesting and also very powerful extension we saw performance in the whole course increase.

For example, if we identified a few problem areas and we fixed those areas, we saw overall course performance go up so that what it's proving is that when people have these experiences and it's not great, it's not optimal, people are underperforming in other areas of content. You go into a new section, you might be-- Let's say you're in hydraulics and all of a sudden you move into another section that's on weights and balance or some completely different subject.

The under-performance of the one content is bleeding into the other. Being able to fix those things and also the other thing you see is the instructional designer gets smarter. They start to learn how to craft better questions because they're seeing actionable analysis and they can A/B the content that they've edited.

[00:13:11] Luke: I'm glad you pointed out the instructional designer impact. I think that would be a good place to go next. A lot of our listeners, Powered by Learning, are involved in the development of learning experiences. How do they have to change in their approach to developing learning experiences based on having an adaptive platform at their fingertips?

[00:13:35] Craig: That's a great question. Obviously, part of that depends on where they're coming from. For example, we're based on a microlearning framework, all the studies have shown that microlearning increases performance. If you come from a microlearning, the transition into a Fulcrum platform is even smoother. Obviously, if you're not microlearning, I would suggest you start doing that anyway because all the studies are showing that that's the most effective way to deliver training.

A lot of it has to do with when I talk to instructional designers, what I get a lot of is a lot of myths. You talk to them and they say, "I'm hesitant. I love the idea of adaptive learning, but I don't want to give up. Craig, I love Storyline 360," or "I love Rise," or "I love this simulation tool that I've been using. I'm not interested in." That's just a myth that's out there. That's not with Fulcrum's platform.

We have the benefit that we originally also had a content division, so the fact that our content team of 40 people was working with our tech team, we were really building a CMS and a design system that accommodated for, and we had feedback all the time. We built a system that can accommodate any of that. Although people often come to us, they don't think that at first.

The other thing is, building a course in our Adaptive platform is actually a lot more similar to a traditional e-building and traditional e-learning course when people think. I think another myth that's out there is people think, "Oh, I have to think of all these pathways. It's Adaptive, so I must be thinking of all the schematic of all these pathways that could happen." That's really not the case. You build a fairly traditional style and then the system is really what takes care of all that. That often comes as both a huge surprise and a huge relief to people when we talk to them.

[00:15:47] Luke: Yes, that makes sense, and it sounds like the real key to it is to think in terms of small chunks, in terms of microlearning so that the system can pull in what's needed to adapt, based on t hose learning elements or those learning objects or those microlearning pieces, however you want to refer to them.

[00:16:06] Craig: Exactly. Again, we're achieving application-level mastery, and part of the way that we do that, as well, is also we're based on a Bloom's system, so we're pushing people towards application [unintelligible 00:16:19] level.

[00:16:20] Luke: Excellent. Adaptive learning makes a lot of sense. It still hasn't penetrated a lot of organizations, I guess, in their approach to learning. What do you think gets in the way of that?

[00:16:32] Craig: A lot of it is back to the myths. Eight years ago, nine years ago when people were like, "Adaptive? What's that?" and we would have to really explain like, "Here's what Adaptive is." Over the years, what we've seen is now there's more interest in it. There's been enough time where there are results out there, but there are a lot of different platforms that are out there or have been out there that are no longer out there but put a lot of ideas out in the workspace.

It's really just about educating people on the differences, and I think people come to it sometimes with a dated idea. We talked about Adaptive 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Sometimes people come to us and their concept of Adaptive is more of a 1.0 or a 2.0 thought, so they're like, "Well, it sounds pretty good," which 1.0 and 2.0 were pretty good for the time. We have to get them up to speed on what the latest and greatest--

Usually, what perks people's ears is, "Would it be valuable for you to be able to objectively measure the results of your training?" That usually gets a lot of heads nodding. We've always been challenging. Most of the people we start out with are at the level of surveys, right?

[00:17:50] Luke: Yes, absolutely. I wonder if you could take it another step further in terms of that value to the organization and maybe talk about if there was, for instance, a large health system with lots of employees, multiple facilities, multiple locations, defined roles but a lot of variations in roles, where would having an adaptive learning platform bring value in that scenario?

[00:18:16] Craig: Well, when you start talking about a health system. I'll go back to what I said earlier, which is, "Oh, that sounds like not a good 'fake it till you make it' scenario."

[laughter]

Whether people's lives are at risk here, it's like, on the clinical side, these are situations where you want people to do the training. The first time they apply that skill on the job, it needs to be accurate. The big value of Fulcrum is application-level mastery, and we achieve that. Two things, one is we get people to application-level mastery. The other thing that is part of Fulcrum's mission is helping turn these people into confident subject matter masters.

It's giving people the confidence. Adaptive can be really powerful in terms of giving people confidence, again, because it's adjusting. Think of when you're at the gym and you have a trainer working with you, and they're pushing you at optimal challenge, and you know they're not going to get you hurt. They know your limits of your body better than you do, and that's the way the system is, as well.

At The Cincinnati Insurance Company, they're taking training to a new level by using just-in-time learning, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) to help team members be more confident on the job and more efficient in their work. In this Powered by Learning podcast episode, Tricia Inderhees, Learning and Development Consultant Manager of Cincinnati Insurance shares the best way to create innovative learning programs that get results.

Show Notes:

Tricia Inderhees of Cincinnati Insurance offers great advice for organizations looking to improve learning and development through innovative training. Her key points include the following:

• Before picking a learning modality, look at your audience, the subject, and content to determine if instructor-led, online learning, or a blend is the best approach.

• Virtual reality can provide learning experiences in simulated environments that help team members learn in a safe environment and do their jobs better.

• Virtual reality is a supplement to other forms of training and not a replacement for in person training.

• Don't be afraid of VR and AR. Start doing your research to find the best way to pilot it in your organization.

Powered by Learning received the Award of Distinction from the 2021 Communicator Awards and is named to the Top 40 L&D Podcast list with Feedspot.

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[00:00:00] Announcer 1: This is Powered by Learning, a podcast designed for learning leaders to hear the latest approaches to creating learning experiences that engage learners and achieve improved performance for individuals and organizations.

[00:00:15] Announcer 2: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com.

[00:00:41] Susan: Hello, and welcome to Powered by Learning. I'm your host, Susan Cort. Today, I'm joined by d'Vinci CEO Luke Kempski, who's going to talk to our guest, Tricia Inderhees, of Cincinnati Insurance Company, about designing innovative learning programs. Tricia is a Learning and Development Consultant Manager at the Cincinnati Insurance Companies and a recent speaker at the Training Industry Conference & Expo. The Cincinnati Insurance Company is among the nation's top 25 property-casualty insurer groups based on net written premiums. The group markets business home and auto insurance products through a select group of independent insurance agencies in 43 states and the District of Columbia. Welcome, Tricia.

[00:01:22] Luke Kempski: It's great to have you on, Tricia. Welcome.

[00:01:24] Tricia Inderhees: Thank you.

[00:01:26] Susan: Tricia, to start us off, explain a little bit about your role at Cincinnati Insurance Company.

[00:01:32] Tricia: Absolutely, Susan. I am the Learning Consultant Manager for the Cincinnati Insurance Company, which we oversee all of our training for both associates and agents. Our role is to take it from the very beginning of understanding what is the business opportunity or the business gap that training is going to actually support, and maybe even help close that gap. We go through a needs analysis, we go through a discovery period of interviews, we design, and we create the solution.

We then work with a team of developers that will either help us do some of the online development or will take it into the classroom and facilitate as well. My role in all of that is to manage a group of people who oversee that process, as well as participate in that process. I also assist in coming up with our new strategy for the company and for our agents, depending on what the company's strategy is as well. It's partly my role in the learning and development space.

[00:02:36] Luke: That's great. You're definitely using a variety of methods for delivering training or learning. When you think about them, what modality to use to deliver training? How do you decide? What do you look at? What do you consider?

[00:02:49] Tricia: When we think about the modality, there's a couple of things we consider. We consider; one, the audience. We do have people across the country that both work for Cincinnati Insurance but then even our agents, and so we have to think about the audience. How often do we want them to participate in this training? Do we want them to be able to reference the training back at some point in time, or is it one of those things that they need to actually attend a training conference to be able to apply the knowledge in order to remember it so that they can get back to their offices and actually start doing that work?

We take that into consideration as, again, who's the audience, where are they located, how often will they be needing to reference this training back, or even maybe possibly how fast will they apply this. Then we take into consideration the content. Is it content that we consider sharing the knowledge, or is it content that is building up a new behavior and new skill set? Anytime that we think about the specific skill set, we usually are in the classroom because we're teaching them something new.

Maybe that's system training. That might maybe a little bit more about how they handle a specific product line. Then, obviously, well, I should say, a behavior development is also something that we usually do within the classroom, from a standpoint of we want them to go through role-plays and different things like that. When we think about the classroom, we are also doing that through web sessions and different modalities as well, not just a classroom specific in a room.

[00:04:22] Luke: That's excellent. I also understand that you've branched out to more innovative approaches like using virtual reality or VR to help teach claims examiners to identify hazards in physical spaces. Can you tell us how you decided to use VR?

[00:04:38] Tricia: I would say probably about three or four years ago, we realized that what was needed in the industry was not being taught specifically in the classroom like we were doing, so this probably started maybe three to five years ago. We toured many other facilities and other companies to see what they were doing, and a lot of them were building brick and mortar, and really building buildings where people within the industry could apply the knowledge, and we thought about that. We thought about maybe we needed a building so people could come in and do the hands-on learning.

As we went through that process, we also realized that it's a very expensive thing to do and that maybe it wasn't what was best from a standpoint of, “How often are you going to be able to bring people in? How often are they really going to be able to do the things that we need them to do?” As we went through thinking, “Okay, what does this look like next?” we came up and we started to learn a bit more about AR/VR. That was coming out at the time and it was new to the industry-- I should say new to the world, but it was also very appealing and exciting. We started to explore, “What would this mean for us?”

What we learned was just-in-time to training was what it was really going to mean for us. People within the United States who were going to help deliver our services as well as use our services would be able to do this right at their home and be able to do it right from their desk versus having to fly in and be at the brick and mortar. We started with a small pilot group. When I say small, it's one unit of our company. We started in the claims arena, quickly realized that we have people that are coming from college grads, right out of college, that are going to participate in being at claims associate for us, as well as agents that are coming directly out of college and they're going to start selling insurance.

Very rarely are you finding that people are talking about the construction industry within the business degree for different colleges and universities. In order for our claims adjusters to really understand how to adjust claims, how to handle claims, they need to know a lot about the construction industry. They need to know about what construction types, how do particular damages occur from what coverages we provide. We realized that in order to do that you had to see it; you had to be able to see what was really happening. In the past, they were getting up on roofs. They were getting up and going to specific damaged property to be able to learn a little bit about that.

It was working, but it wasn't working as quickly and as effectively as what we wanted. When we looked at the AR/VR, we said, “You know what? Let's put them in a specific space with a headset and let's show them.” I will tell you that you're not missing a beat. It's just like you are up on that roof. Yes, you might get a little dizzy here and there, so you have to keep your balance, you can't keep the headset on too long, but the other part was that you could reference it back. We really took into account just-in-time learning.

Then obviously-- well, I shouldn't say obviously, but also, we took into account, “What do they need to know, and what's the best way to show them what they need to know, minus being able to put them up on a roof and possibly even hurt themselves?” There was some thought that went into that, and that's where we are now. Again, we've had some success with that. We've had people who've participated and said, “It's just like you put us up on a roof at a real loss.''

[00:08:11] Luke: That's great. Talk about how you delineate between augmented reality, where you put the learner in a real environment and have them interact with virtual objects through their phone, versus virtual reality, where you immerse the learner in a virtual environment where they wear a headset and have them interact with controllers?

[00:08:29] Tricia: It's a great question. I don't know that we're quite there yet. I think we're exploring both. I think what we have said was the cost and what's needed in order to do either one. That's really what it's coming down to. If you have a tablet, a phone, you're going to be able to do one without the other. We do have to take that into consideration. How many headsets do we want to buy? How do we want to ship them? How do we want to let people use those? It's a cost right now, but it's really pulling us either way, but we have not specifically said, “We know which one's best yet,” we're doing both right now, and we have a developer who's actually able to do both. That's still to be determined for us.

[00:09:11] Luke: Now that you've implemented this pilot, what kinds of feedback are you getting, and then what kinds of things are you measuring to determine if you're getting the results that you're sought after?

[00:09:23] Tricia: Well, the first thing that we are receiving from a feedback standpoint is one that, again, the just-in-time learning is going to be key. In the past, we would bring people in, they would learn a little bit about their specific role, and then they would go out to where they worked. If that particular event did not happen or that particular loss did not happen, or maybe that they didn't run up against it, they would lose that knowledge because they couldn't apply it right away.

What the biggest feedback has been is that we can apply this just-in-time learning at the situation when it arises, and that has been very helpful. Now, these folks are also the ones that have the headsets, they're the ones that are set up to do both AR and VR with their tablets and with their headsets and everything else. That is one of the things that they have said is that, "I can get back into the course. I've had this particular instance. I've had some hail damage. I can go back into the course and I can get that information again."

That is still also to be determined for us is that how do we supply all of those materials and all of those things to every person that might need it. That's a conversation we're still having, but the feedback is, "Hey, we can get back into that course or that development opportunity, get what we need, and then go and actually work that real-time application process right after learning it." That's been huge for us. The things that we're measuring is; one, how are we adjusting claims? Are we overpaying? Are we actually paying what's appropriate? Do our folks truly understand what is happening from a loss standpoint, either to a vehicle, to a building, whatever it might be?

They're being able to, I don't want to say reduce payouts, but they're paying fair amounts. They're also able to quickly identify what has actually occurred where before they would have to get up and take the pictures, and then go through their materials, and then say, "Okay, this is what I think I saw. Now I need some coaching and development and help." The identification of what's happening for a loss is a lot quicker as well. The confidence in these particular people. They would go out and they would say, "I've never seen this," and now they're really being able to go out and say, "I can reference something back." The confidence that allows us to put into our associates to be able to settle also is giving us some feedback from our insureds and agents that we're really starting to see the experience and the professionalism come out as well.

[00:11:53] Luke: That's great. You know a lot of learning leaders haven't had the opportunity to work with AR and VR yet. Do you have any advice for them as they prepare for or consider using these more innovative applications to their training programs?

[00:12:08] Tricia: I would say don't be afraid of them. I would also say that, do not go in with a mindset that this is going to take away from that human connection because that's not true at all. What it will do is it'll supplement the human connection. We're still big believers that we want to see you face-to-face, that the relationship is key, that we offer an experience to our customers that is top-notch. We must also sometimes work shoulder-to-shoulder and really just try to build our relationships up and have great communication, but this particular type of innovation in the training world and the development world is still going to give you those types of experiences. It's still going to give you that service level, so I would say, don't be afraid of it.

I would also say, do the research. What I mean by that is that there are plenty of vendors out there that can support you, but really, when you come down to the business case, you have to determine how much you're willing to spend. There's a lot of developers out there that actually are developing this stuff on their own. This is not one of those particular fields where you don't have a group of people who are really just like-- I like to call geeked out about it. [chuckles] They do. Our developer that we found, he was doing this on the side and doing this at different times as well to build up his skill level. I would say, do the research, pick what's best for you, but there are people out there doing it, and they're doing it for fun. You might snag up a pretty great associate that can help you.

You just have to do the research to find out what people are doing and what they're not doing. The other thing I would say, too, is that, understand that it's a fast-paced world right now. People want things at their fingertips. They want to be able to explore and do things differently, and so you can't fight that. You probably have to join the race, and this is a great way to do that. We also have come out of a huge change in the way we work. People are going to want and expect things differently. I think we just have to tackle that and approach it with an open mind.

[00:14:16] Luke: Yes, for sure. With that, Trisha, talk about what you see next for learning and development at Cincinnati Insurance.

[00:14:23] Tricia: Well, I think what we see next is really being able to participate and take this particular technology and this particular scenario and this particular learning to our soft skills. That's our next goal. We want to be able to do interview skills, we want to be able to do presentation skills, we want to be able to do different roleplays and assessment centers using AR/VR. The amount of people that can join, the amount of different personalities, and different job profiles that can join something like this is just going to help us get better.

Our next goal is to take out of the, what I like to call, the production component, the technical component. It was the easiest for us to tackle and now take it to the soft skill. We hope to have really this built up so that we are using this across the board in developing our associates for all different ways. I would also say that our strategy is to really find that learning euphoria. Building everything we can possibly build, socially connecting, creating a space where people can really just learn from others, and doing it from a virtual standpoint, we will always bring people in.

That's how you get to know us, we have a home office, and we have one home office for a reason. However, we want to build up that competence and that skill level from a standpoint of just-in-time, and so I think this is really going to take off for us in how we do that from a professional and technical standpoint, meaning hard skills and soft skills.

[00:15:52] Luke: Yes, that's for sure, Tricia. With all that exciting innovation happening there, we'll have to catch up with you in a year or so and [crosstalk] see how everything is [crosstalk] progressing.

[00:16:03] Tricia: I know that the next group that's coming in is going to be early this year and every particular person that's going to be able to come into the training is going to be able to participate in this particular AR/VR situation for us and learning environment for us. Definitely, after early next year, we'll have some feedback on additional items because it's spreading out from a pilot group to now really being part of just a 30 person training. I'm just really excited to see where we're headed as well, so for sure, check back in.

[00:16:37] Susan: Yes, it sounds like the possibilities are endless. This is --

[00:16:40] Tricia: They are.

[00:16:39] Susan: -- really exciting to hear about and certainly inspirational, not just for people in your industry, but other industries as well.

[00:16:46] Tricia: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:16:48] Susan: Thank you for sharing.

[00:16:49] Tricia: Yes, thanks for having me.

[00:16:50] Luke: Thanks so much for joining us, Tricia.

[00:16:52] Tricia: Yes, thank you, Luke.

[00:16:55] Susan: Luke, great conversation with Tricia. She's got some great ideas and the future for her company is bright. What are some of the takeaways that you got from the conversation?

[00:17:03] Luke: Yes, Susan. I think we have some really good takeaways from Tricia and her work at Cincinnati Insurance. First, before she picks a learning modality, she looks at our audience. She's training different types of roles within the company, and also agents as well. Then she looks at the subject and content and decides whether it's best for instructor-led, online e-learning, or some blend. Then she spoke about her ventures into virtual reality to provide learning experiences in simulated environments for employees involved in evaluating claims. She talked about how VR can provide more efficient and safe learning experiences for employees.

We also talked about what she is learning from these VR pilots. They see it as valuable just-in-time learning alternatives versus bringing learners to a real environment at a specific time. She also talked about real-world metrics they are trying to change through learning. Ultimately, they want accurate claims outcomes that pay out the appropriate amount. They also want the process to be efficient and a more skilled examiner to be able to identify the factors and determine the loss faster, and a more skilled examiner will also provide better customer service, and that will be measured through feedback.

Tricia also talked about VR being a supplement to other forms of training, not a replacement for the human elements. She challenged other learning leaders to not fear VR and AR, to start doing your research now, and look for opportunities to start piloting their use. Finally, she talked about future plans to try to use VR to teach and practice soft skills like interviewing. Overall, a really good conversation about an insurance company jumping into some progressive training approaches.

[00:18:45] Susan: Thanks, Luke, and many thanks to Tricia Inderhees, Learning and Development Consultant Manager of Cincinnati Insurance for joining us today. If you have any questions about what we talked about, you can reach out to us on d'Vinci social channels through our website dvinci.com, or by emailing us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com.

[00:19:06] Announcer 2: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. For more than 25 years, d'Vinci has provided custom learning solutions to government agencies, corporations, medical education and certification organizations, and educational content providers. We collaborate with our clients to bring order and clarity to content and technology. Learn more at dvinci.com

 

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