Upskill/Reskill: Innovative Ways to Launch Careers Recorded Webinar

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining our webinar, leveraging upskilling and reskilling to accelerate exceptional career paths, sponsored sponsored by Instructure. We are really looking forward to talking about the complexities of offering the right upskilling and reskilling opportunities for your company. But first, I wanna introduce our esteemed and knowledgeable speakers. First, I'll introduce Brian Gold. He's head of learning and organizational development at Gallagher.

Brian, can you give a quick intro and background? Yeah. Sure. Hi, everybody. To be here on today's session. As you heard, I lead the learning and development function for Galla US division.

I've been with them a little over two years and have spent the past, well, twenty twenty five years or so in the financial industry and varying roles from underwriting and sales and insurance to sales enablement and ultimately into learning and development. So my team is responsible for, learning leading learning and development for, pretty much all functions, early talent, leadership, across an individual employee's career arc, and, looking forward to today's conversation. Awesome. Thanks, Brian. Martha, we have we also have Martha Pabin.

She's from the education faculty at the PGA. Martha, can you also give us a quick intro? Yeah. Hi. Can you hear me okay? Yep. Beautiful.

Happy to be here. So My background actually is in education. I was a, middle school English teacher for seventeen years, and decided that I needed kind of a change. So I went into the corporate sector, and now I am, a member of the education faculty here at the PGA of America. And, we are responsible for providing education, in our professional golf management program for our associates and, students and members.

So, Excited to be here. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Martha. So I'm gonna jump right in and start with some questions, and we're gonna start pretty broad.

I just wanna sort of ask both of you, what your current upskilling and reskilling strategy is, what you're doing right now, what stands out to you. Brian, do you wanna start? Yeah. Sure. It would be glad to you. Thanks.

You know, so when I think about upskilling and reskilling, I think for us at Gallagher, it first starts out with, having a really, solid and current, skills story. I say skills, but I'm really talking about, like, what are the knowledge skills and, in fact, behaviors. That are necessary for individuals at different roles to be able to do their jobs. And we work very closely with the businesses, to make sure not only, are those inventories current so that we can be transparent with our employee base about them? But also that the businesses are really thinking future forward. Things change so much, right? Technology is moving right at the at the speed of light as we say.

And so I think really identifying and having a good understanding of What skill set is going to make an individual employee, successful for both the role they have, but also perhaps for the role they want. So when we think about upskilling, reskilling, there's a strong component of career management, in career development in that. I think, you know, once you've got that, what we do is we have, and it's a bit of a work in progress, but some personalized learning paths that, really employees can take based on their career operations, their current assessment of their skills where they have areas of opportunity, to really ensure that their upskilling efforts are aligned with their individual career goals and create some great intersection, with the business's needs, based on the definition of that of that inventory. And then I think, you know, there's there's some, additional value ads that that we bring in, you know, certainly things like creating a learning culture or ecosystem that really empowers employees, to own their development. To have a very specific direction for exploration or targeted, targeted focus.

Collaboration, mentoring, coaching, is, is certainly a component of that. And I would be remiss if I didn't say, including some sort of back mechanisms measurement, how are employees engaging with this? And, is it is it working? However, you know, a company decides to define working. So, I think those would be the primary components that we think about, at Gallagher. Yeah. That's great.

And I do wanna come back to a a a couple of things you you mentioned, but also wanna get Martha's, opinion first on that same question about what you're currently doing in terms of upskilling and rescaling. So some sort of program are more education focused, we offer, a lot of, I guess, upskilling opportunities to our members, through our member programs. So we have what are called our specialized certified and master professional programs, and those programs are, for our members to become, to grow in their skills in a certain career paths of their choosing. So, that's that's what I'm involved in. Awesome.

And, either one of you, Brian said something really interesting about, the link between career passing and creating that culture of learning. And how creating that culture of learning can actually lead to people probably investing more in their career path and taking the courses needed. Could do either of you have anything to expand upon that? I can, I can expand on that, a little bit? You know, I think, for, for our learners, and I think it really hasn't differed too too much just in my observation, over the span of a, a few different generations that our workforce comprises of today. People are really busy. Right? They're they're fighting for the right amount time to do their job.

We, as learning and development professionals, are, you know, fighting to get, some of that mental some of that bandwidth in these folks. And so, you know, if they're gonna take time away from the desk so to speak in in order to invest in themselves through learning and development, they wanna make sure that they're getting something out of it. Certainly that getting something out of it, in terms of compliance or the ability to do their job. But also to really set them up for six us and create a, competitive profile for themselves for the next job they want, which Right. And at least in Gallagher could be vertical, right, or it could be lateral moves, as people really get much more creative these days, I think in exploring, different professions, different aspects of a career, different roles within, you know, within certain functions.

And, sorry. I got something in my eye. So so I think there's a, there's a big part of enabling the employee to make sure that they're learning and development is is actually building towards something. And and I think in our current marketplace where it's much easier for than ever, I think, for employees to, reshuffle, right, to, seek opportunities in other companies, that becomes, from a business perspective or a, a super important attraction, and return employee retention play, making sure that people have the the training and development necessary to be successful, but also to grow. They don't feel that they need to leave the organization in order to pursue their professional, objectives.

Yeah. That that's great. And, I think what you said about retention is is really interesting and important topic right now. Martha, do you, what are your thoughts in terms of offering career pathings at at the PGA and all the different factors that go into it. Yeah.

So We offer our associates and our members, career passing in three different career paths. And that was developed because we saw, and we heard a need for it. You know, people came to us and said, you know, what you're offering is is to vanilla. So to speak, it's it's too broad. We need to kinda, we need to build out some categories so that when someone finishes with that education, they really have an expertise in something, and so that that education means something.

So we developed. We, at one point in time, we had, I think, six different career paths, and it was almost too many. So we, we scaled it down, and now we have three, and they're very they're quite specialized. And I think that that's been a better fit for us because when one of our members, you know, obtained training in the area of, one of our career passes executive management. Okay? That they finish that sort of their specialization or their certification or whatever they finish with specific knowledge in that area that they can then apply in in the workforce.

So Yeah. That's great. And do you think it's helpful to offer those three tracks so that people have some kind of guidance of what the possibilities even are. Yeah. I do.

I really do. You know, and and one of our tracks is a little bit more, still a little more broad, but, It it's specific enough that, people aren't wasting their time, and it does provide a lot opportunities once they're finished with that training. Yeah. Absolutely. Brian, do you do you have any thoughts on on that about, for example, if maybe there's an employee and they're not actually sure where they'd wanna go with their career, how does the organization sort of offer opportunities and guide them in the right direction? Oh, my gosh.

I think that's such a great question. And, I'm still trying to figure out some days, you know, what I wanna be when I grow up. Right? And I think especially for, that becomes even more acute for, you know, individuals that are really at the beginnings of their professional journeys. I think at Gallagher, one of the things that we do is really encourage career and development conversations between leaders and, and their employees, to ask questions, a little bit, a little bit differently, I think, than, many organizations may. And, and so questions that are really around what gets you out of bed every day? Like, what gets you fired up? What kind of work you like to do.

So, you know, certainly there's there's some overlay with here are types of roles that that we have or the types of career paths that we have. But, but I think more and more, we're seeing examples organizationally where, people are resisting kind of being pigeonholed a little bit into a particular track. They wanna have some conversations that really get underneath, you know, what do they find personally and professionally, rewarding, stimulating And then with the guidance of, of managers and, in some resources, that we provide they can get a little bit of guidance around, hey, you know, do you wanna spend a day over here in this department? Wanna do some informational interviewing over there. But certainly first and foremost, right? We wanna make sure the employee is being successful in their current role. And, demonstrating all of the right behaviors.

So behaviors, because they are so easy to transfer from function to function and business business and role to role. That really becomes our, our sort of foundation. And then we build you know, knowledge and skill for specific types of roles on top of that So I would say having those conversations in that way, is is particularly important. One one thing that we've done with critical leadership roles, and this is really geared towards individual contributors is we have a leadership exploration program. So, these are self nominated programs.

So an individual employee doesn't need to you know, get permission from their manager. It's pretty much all on demand, self directed learning. And it's for people who are like, you know, being a people leader in our organization seems kinda neat, seems kinda cool, seems like the obvious next step but for those of us out there who are people leaders, it's, it's, a lot of work and, and very, different kind of work when you're leading people and interacting with all sorts of different styles and personalities. And so we felt it would be a great opportunity to have a very focused, very kind of short duration. This is what it means to be a leader You know, here, you know, kind of the, the good, the bad, the ugly so that folks can use that perspective such as it might be as part of their career career thinking, their career planning.

And, I don't think it's a bad news story at all that we've had people who have on that route and have determined, oh, you know what, this, this really isn't me. This is These are not the things that, I get jazzed about. In fact, quite the opposite, and and so kind of using that as a bit of a leading indicator, around the effectiveness of a specific leadership career path thing. I think is, is a pretty cool byproduct as well. That happens to be the only the only program that we have a formal exploration around.

But, you know, I think certainly there may be opportunities, at least within my organization to do a little bit more. That. Yeah. That's that's really interesting. It's, yeah, always great to give people the option to sort of see what's out there career wise, and skill wise, obviously.

And by the way, for the audience, I'm seeing some questions come in we are gonna have a q and a at the end. So feel free to keep sending questions. I did see one thing that was related to this conversation, though, that I wanna get to before we move on. Martha, there's some interest in the three different tracks that you offer. Are you could you describe them in a bit more depth? Sure.

So, our associate students' members can choose between, three different career paths golf operations, teaching and coaching, and executive management. Those are main three. So, you know, teaching, coaching being pretty self explanatory, but, you know, getting into the teaching with golf, running a teaching business, that kind of thing. You know, golf operations is more that's the one that's a little more in general, and that one is more geared toward, you know, if you wanna run, kind of the day to day operations at the golf course, And then our executive management is more for someone who wants to go kind of general manager and into higher, level positions and run, like, the whole operation And so, that one is more focused on I'm trying to think that one's more focused on if being more, like, less involved in sort of the day to day working with customers and more in the kind of back office running everything. Okay.

Great. Thank you for that. I okay. So I I wanna pivot a little bit into talking about, the LMS, whatever, you know, how to choose an LMS, how to utilize an LMS effectively and, different aspects of that. So I'm gonna start with just asking, Brian, how do you think learning leaders can ensure that they choose an elements that is the right fit for their organization? Yeah.

I think it's, I think it's a great question. In my organization, I was not part of that part of that decision making. So, you know, I didn't have that as a variable, but I think it starts with, asking and answering some questions. How are you going to use it? And I think probably also because there's always things that that we don't even know what to ask. I think it's really about educating yourself around, what's out there and how our similar organizations using an LMS or the various functions or apps or plugins.

There's you know, such a wide variety of use cases, out there. So, and then, and then I think it you know, a question of, you know, doing doing some comparing of, you know, features and benefits and, making a basically making a well informed decision. Yeah. Absolutely. That's great.

Martha, what are your thoughts? Yeah. So I was involved in choosing our current, LMS, and I think I'm gonna cut a piggy pack on what, Brian said in that we really started with a really clear needs assessment. What did we need for it to be able to do? You know, there's a difference between different LMSes. Some of them are more geared towards you know, kind of that, training where it's just more passive. And then some are geared more towards having some educational aspects to them.

So you really have to look at what are your needs And, you have to look at to what is your budget. You know, there were definitely solutions out there that we considered that we're just out of our price range. You know, consider things like How how much does it cost from year to year? You know, is does it that cost increase? You know, as you get more users and that kind of things. And, taking a look all of those things and asking lots and lots of questions. You know, when you when at different learning management systems.

You always talk to the people who are in sales, and they wanna sell it to you. So, you know, kinda keep that in the back of your mind and, you know, don't don't compromise because you're getting convinced by somebody who's really good at sales, you know, know what you need and and stick to that. Yeah. That makes sense. And and Martha, Since you were involved in the the journey of choosing the LMS, and I know you also use utilize and structure LMS canvas, can you talk about how you came to choose Canvas illness? Yeah.

So, yeah, it was definitely like like I said, we did a needs assessment and we looked at a bunch of different kinds. And, think what really led us to Canvas was a couple of things. Number one, the ease of use, ease of use for us being who the people who are going to be going in and designing the courses and the ease of use for the students or whomever was coming in to do the learning. You don't want it to be complicated. You don't want people to have to do a bunch of different clicks to, to get to the learning.

So it's definitely the ease of use. We chose Canvas because it had the tools that we needed. You know, we needed it to have things like the ability to build rubrics and the ability to tie those rubrics to learning outcomes and the ability to, not only have know, pdfs that can be downloaded with the but run videos and, it was very robust. And then they'll kind of the last thing that we why we chose that was because it was able to be used on different flat flat you know, it wasn't just for the computer, but, you know, you're you have this multi generational workforce Some of them do prefer the computer, but many, many wanna do that right on their phone or their tablet or whatever. So those are things that we really considered when we were looking at, which, LMS would be right for our company.

Okay. Great. Thank you. And and Brian, can you relate to the to that as well about making sure that the learning platform is available on different devices and accessible for the employees of different generations? Yeah. I mean, I think some, I think some of it is generational.

I think some of it is, you know, what is what is the work day look like? Like when are people and how are people going to be engaged with it. You know, so for example, we have, a significant portion of our employee base are on the road. So, you know, very much as, you know, as as Martha indicated, you know, being able to access something or potentially access something on a mobile device is critical because they're rarely at their desks. We have, we have other folks that are at their desks, you know, kind of all day. And so I definitely think that certainly compelling.

You know, both the generational piece as well as the job design. Yeah. Awesome. So I wanna also ask once someone or once once the organization has chosen in all mess, how can they make sure that it's utilized effectively, and it everything that it offers is, known to employees and utilized by them. Martha, if you wanna if you have anything.

On that one. Yeah. So one of the things that we did was, we invested in the training that was offered by instructure about their systems so that we could be better informed, you know, there it was kind of like a domino effect, you know, once somebody knows about it, then they can help teach others to teach others, you know. And we really we had certain employees become almost like, almost like subject matter experts about about the system so that they could be like the go to people for, delivering training and, learning about the system. The other thing that we, do on a regular basis is we utilize a lot of the data and the reporting tools that our LMS has to see, you know, how long are people spending on there, how, you know, what are the average grades and things like that for, for the different courses and things that that we do.

And then we again, we enlist feedback from, our different users, whether it's, you know, our university students or our associates or our members, we are always asking them for feedback about our offerings. Okay. Great. Can I can I add on to that one a little bit? Of course. You know, it occurred to me too.

When when we think about an LMS, I mean, certainly there's the administration, part of it. But I which is a a certainly, extremely important, I guess, set of capabilities and, you know, easy is it to use? And is it gonna do all of the things you needed to do? As I was, as I was thinking about the, the question, the previous questions about the ask, and how would how would you determine, you know, a good one as well? You know, one of the things that occurred to me that is super, super important is the user experience. You know, at the end of the day for our employees, similar to how Martha was describing earlier is it easy for them to find stuff? Is it, is it you know, easy for them to engage with how they whether it's their job or their generation. Right? We're we're all so diverse. Is it easy to engage with? And I think just as, You know, right? We think about platforms like Netflix or Amazon and, oh my gosh, Amazon is a little too easy in my family, you know, to to use and and engage with I think that's a a critical component as well that, I would be remiss.

I think if we didn't, if we didn't talk about employee experience in this. Yeah. Absolutely. And What do you think are the biggest factors when it comes to employee experience within an LMS? You know, again, I think it's I think it's that it, is easy easy for them to find what they need when they want it. Mhmm.

How they how they want it. You know, I I wouldn't over complicate it. You know, Some LMSs over the course of my of my career that I've seen have all sorts of interesting bells and functions and and, and, and features. And, sometimes as learning and development professionals, we get very excited about all of, all of those types of things, and our learner could care less. You know, so it so I think it's it's kind of as we go through, thinking about these things, making sure that we are also being very in intentional about putting our employee, putting our, putting ourselves in our employees' shoes, and seeing the world or the LMS or you know, a content, like what, whatever it is through their eyes, I think is a really, really important factor.

And, and sometimes, not always, but sometimes we lose sight of that in, you know, all of these neat capabilities. There there are some things in organizations that I've been a part of that, you know, LMS does this and that and we never we never used them on an administrative perspective either. It was, you know, so again, one could argue maybe we should have done a a more effective job in some of those organizations about vetting what was the right tool, to support us. But at the end of the day, you know, I think it's the LMS is a is just that. It's a tool to help us be effective with the, you know, like the title of this webinar, the upskilling, reskilling of our most important resource.

So to put them, again, kind of front and center in that equation, I think is really, really important. Yeah. That that makes a lot of sense. I also when it asks, I know that learning within the flow of work and the availability of micro learning is, can often, you know, it's it can be a really great, addition, to any type of platform. Martha, do you do you agree with that importance? As far as, like, micro learning goes? Yeah.

And and being able to learn on demand or at the time a problem is. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, we're seeing more and more of a demand for this.

Less of a demand for, you know, attending a certain class or, you know, we have, seminars that are part of our program, but, We also have parts of our program that are really kind of that micro learning so that it can be on demand when they have the time and availability for it. Because, you know, as Brian mentioned, before people are busy, people, you know, don't necessarily have the time to sit down when, you know, during their work day. And so if they're gonna be doing things outside of their work day, they need it to be you know, convenient and in small chunks. Yeah. That's such a trick.

That's such a tricky one in, in the float like learning in the flow of work. And, you know, and and maybe it, it, you know, behooves us to define. What do what do we mean when we say in the you know, in the flow of work because you're at least in in our organization, people aren't coming up with a situation and in the flow of work and then stopping to go take a class or to learn something, even even a micro you know, and how how are we even defining micro learnings? Is it something that's under fifteen minutes? Something that's under ten minutes? You know, I would argue just looking at my children, you know, if it's not in, like, twenty second kind of videos that you can swipe with your finger. It, you know, it may not be effective. And and so I think for for us, we've almost taken a slightly a slightly different approach where we have job aids or performance support for those real situations, oftentimes they're technology driven.

I'm in a particular system you know, where I am stuck or I've got a client on the phone and I don't know how to enter something or, right, you, you all, in the audience have your own examples of that where you need kinda at your fingertips. Okay. How do I how do I address this and and quickly move on? But then, kind of, as I was speaking earlier about creating, a learning culture, are there ways that we can, as an organization carve out time for development. And, you know, for us, sometimes That is in person training, where we can, you know, force our learners to turn the phones off, turn the emails off and and focus on a particular topic. And, you know, obviously, that brings up questions about, you know, return on investment.

And, what what's an appropriate time big or workshop, to do that versus, versus others. And, and certainly not everything is, instructor led in that way. But I hear, I hear that learning and the flow of work, a lot. And, you know, sometimes I think we just we need to just pause and define that a little bit. And, you know, really carve out what are those times maybe in the course of a workday or in the course of a work week where we can, you know, do a lunch and or if we're a team leader, we can pull our team together and, you know, upskill ourselves, sharpen our saws and particular areas.

Yeah. That's great. I I wanna go back to the career pathing aspect for a few minutes, and talk about or ask you sort of, How do you in terms of when you offer these courses for career passing, is it connected to an internal mobility strategy that you have in place and, how do you assess people's skills in terms of, where they might wanna go next. Martha, I know you have a more specific way of doing this because you have those three, tracks. But, I guess I'm just asking how how would you assess the completion of it and determine if someone's ready to move on? To a new thing.

So we here, assessed in a couple of of different ways for our different career paths. We assess through, what we call our work experience portfolio where where it's really designed to be around, tasks and activities that they have to do on the job, utilizing the skills, and information that they have learned through, either coming to one of our seminars or through, interacting with, we have interactive course manuals. So I was kinda talking about the micro learning. And then we also, at the end of our program, we do have a comprehensive test that they take. So a little bit more traditional.

Yeah. That makes sense. Brian, what about you? Yeah, we're, we're, we're not that structured, except maybe in the, you know, kind of in the realms of, of leadership. I mean, as I was mentioning before, we have, we understand what our what our knowledge skill behavior inventory is by role. That's transparent to employees.

There's kind of a, for lack of a better term, a competency matrix or assessment that, employees can use in conjunction with their manager to identify you know, kind of a, a quick diagnostic of, hey, here of of this inventory, here's here's where strong. Here's perhaps where I have areas of opportunity to really support some individual development planning. Stations. I think it's, you know, from a from a career management perspective, we've been, much more focused the behaviors piece and really, I think identifying behaviors for different, primarily job levels. Are you an individual contributor? Are you a first level leader? Are you a leader of leaders? That kind of thing because as we've spoken with our leadership teams who are hiring, for these positions, they tend to interview so much around behaviors.

And, you know, certainly having a skills, you know, a skill set or most of a skill set is is certainly a plus, but I think there's, and I'm sure this is an organizational culture aspect, and we feel like we can develop the folks. So primarily the emphasis is on, are they living and driving the right behaviors? And that's, you know, kind of permeates everything within our organization culturally. It's part of our performance reviews. You know, for example, we we assess not only on what was accomplished, but how the individual achieved it. You know, were they collaborative, they stepping over over colleagues' backs to to accomplish an objective.

Right? Those types of things. And then you know, there are learning paths or curricula that that are aligned to different roles and and different functions, to support whatever on the job learning, and job expansion, peer to peer, that kind of stuff that we have. So we also really try to follow. I I know it sounds a little bit trite probably, but this, you know, kind of directionally a seventy twenty ten model where, you know, really about ten percent of the development that we're giving people is some sort of formal training, whether that's in a classroom, an on demand module that they have to take, you know, a virtual classroom like a webinar and building resources and enabling employees themselves, and their leadership teams, to, you know, tap into that other ninety percent of, how people learn on the job Yeah. That's great.

It's really interesting what you're talking about about measuring the different behaviors. And I saw someone in the audience asked if if you could elaborate on maybe what behaviors you would look for in each level, such as, like, first of all, individual individual contributor, first time manager, director, etcetera. Hi. Can you hear me? Yeah. Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Brian, can you hear me? Okay.

We might have a slight tech issue happening. Brian, do you wanna Do you wanna, drop off and come back on again? Hello? Can you hear me? Yeah. We can hear you, but I don't know if you can hear me. Sorry, everyone. Just give me one second.

Alright. Well, while we figure out the situation with Brian, Martha, do you have any I wanna wanna go to you about this same topic, do you have specific behaviors that you would look for in different, different employee levels. That's not something in my role that I, that I really deal with. You know, I'm trying to think how I can answer this in the context of, like, our programs. There's definitely, you know, when it comes to like our three career paths, there's definitely certain you know, behaviors and topics that we discussed of hunting upon those career paths.

That, are chosen, you know. So oh, Was he back? Hey, Brian. Can you hear us? I don't think he can hear us. I think that's the issue. Yeah.

Sorry. That's okay. No. But I can also say, you know, through our, different assessments that we use, like our work experience portfolio, those definitely target, not only just certain skills, but certain, behaviors and attributes and things that we want. Our graduates of our program to be able to do.

Yeah. Of course. That makes sense. Martha, I wanna also talk about a bit about in structure as well, in in more depth. Can you talk a bit about what challenges you had before, taking on, Canvas elements and how it has sort of helped solve these problems for you.

Okay. Yeah. So before we had Canvas as our LMS, we had kind of a homegrown LMS that we had, built ourselves. And I can liken it to, like, having a system that was very much kind of band aided together. So we it was connected to a lot of our different systems, but we were constantly having to fix those connections.

It wasn't stable. In fact, we ended up having to shut it down completely. We couldn't even use it as like an archive. Because it was just so unstable. And so we just really couldn't keep up with the updating that it needed.

And that was really one of the things that attracted us to, Canvas as an LMS is that those updates of the system weren't maintained by us. They were maintained by somebody else. So it was a very convenient for us we love that it was a change ready platform that when we have changes in our curriculum or we have changes, in information. We can go right in and update those in real time. It was easy for different generations to use where, you know, we kind of talked about this a little bit where some could use it on a desktop, some could use it on mobile, some can use it on their tablet, whatever.

And then for us, it had the ability to integrate quite seamlessly with the systems that we already had it in place. So we didn't feel like it was always being mandated to our current system. Like the old, like the old LMS was. Yeah. That's great.

And How has it helped you in terms of furthering the organizational goals that you're working towards at PGA? So our two big goals of our company are to serve the member and grow the game. So for us, our l m s allows us to take our curriculum and get it to different audiences. And and it it it kind of acts as a platform for us to share our message out there. So for us, it's been a very big, it's been a very big plus for us to really instead of, you know, people calling in and being angry because something's not working. You know, we could, we can kind of focus our time on getting the information and training and, skills out there that we need our members and our associates to have? Okay.

Great. That's that's helpful. Thank you. Also, for the audience, I'm we have a brief one poll question that I'm going to it's going to appear, where the slides are showing. If you don't mind filling that out.

And and I'm gonna go to some of the Q and A questions from the audience because we have some really interesting questions. Martha, we had, someone asked in the beginning, when you were talking about the different career paths or the three learning tracks that you offer, has your company created any sort of talent flag, so that once an employee has completed a learning track within their career path, internal recruiters may be able to see that they're a viable candidate for roles. I don't know that we have any sort of, like, flags though to speak. Our company does have our own, like, internal, we call them with career consultants that help our internal candidates to find different positions if they want within the company, and even sometimes outside of the company. But I don't know that we flag them per se.

That's a it's an interesting concept to think about. Yeah, it is. And somebody actually asked about if in a company, if there aren't many upper opportunities for upward mobility, if it's a more that organization. Like, how can we motivate? How can we motivate staff to to to reskill, and so I wanted to ask if you had any thoughts on that. And if in your program, are people also doing lateral as opposed to just promotional moves? Yeah.

I mean, I definitely think that there is some lateral movements, people who wanted to try something else within within our organization, we have a lot of different departments, and, we are open to, employees moving between departments. I think it kinda goes back to creating that kind of open and trustworthy environment where, employees can feel comfortable saying, you know what, can I make a lateral move, they they can ask about those opportunities and and, get information about them? And I think it comes to to offering it. You know, I mean, if they feel like they are stuck and can't go anywhere, then, they're going to leave. But if they feel even, like you said, like making that lateral move could be good for them as far as their learning and their personal and professional growth, you know, I think that people would be a lot happier. Yeah.

Absolutely. That makes sense. Sorry, everyone. I'm not sure. I think Brian might have had a technical diff difficulty.

We'll see if he's able to rejoin, but, Martha where there's some more questions for you as well. So, someone someone asked, for the three career path career, tracks that you offer, who created the curriculum and the content and how was that? What was the process for that? So we, ask, our curriculum was all created by SME subject matter experts, people who are experts within their field. And, it was it was a pretty, you know, long long process, and we're constantly, you know, updating it, updating our curriculum as as new topics or whatever come into it. So, you know, we we brought our subject matter experts in and, had probably, like, a week worth of workshops with them. To kind of determine what were the most important things that someone who was going through our program would need to know and be able to do.

And we kind of, you know, started there and then, from there, we had those subject matter experts, help us to write that content. And then we used other experts who were experts at writing content to kind of come in and help us, revise and kind of was the word I'm looking for, like hone in on what was the most important thing. So we didn't just kinda create it out of the blue. We, we definitely made sure that we used those SMEs and people who were experts within the field. Yeah.

Absolutely. That makes sense. So, this is an interesting question that someone asked. He asked, how can so you I know that Martha, you said that there's testing at the end of each, track that you offer. So what if somebody's just a really good test taker, and they do well at the test? Once and once they start the new job, are they still being are they still being evaluated for certain behaviors and skills? It just to ensure that they really did take in all of that content.

Yeah. I think that's why we don't just do a test. You know, we also have our, other assessments in the form of our work experience portfolios. You know, those are completed by everybody who goes through any of our career tracks, and then they are graded by our faculty and and sometimes they're returns to me. Done again so that they meet certain criteria.

We have rubrics that we've developed in conjunction with our learning outcomes that all of their work experience activities are, compared and graded with those rubrics so that, like, I mean, he's absolutely right. Some people are good test takers, but these activities that we've designed for them to do and are really where, I guess where you could say we we're asking them to prove it. You know, like, okay. So you say that you know this and you understand this. Okay.

Now prove it by actually putting into practice what you've learned. Okay. That's great. Yeah. And by the way, I I thought just based on what you were saying, I thought of an another question, which was, how has the feedback been on the the different programs? And, do you do post survey, post engagement surveys, and, like, how do you track kind of thing? Yeah.

Yeah. We do we survey, all all along. You know, we survey them. After they attend our seminars, we survey them about our micro learning, we survey them, you know, and, different data points so that we know that what we're offering is effective, that our instructors are effective and that they're getting out of the program what they say they need to get out of it. We also, survey employers who employ some of our graduates so that they know so that we know that we're producing what they need for their companies.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Cause we did have someone just ask how you know that employees are applying what they learned through the programs, when they're on the job, sounds like you just mentioned one potential way of doing that, which is serving the employers. Yeah. Yeah.

Definitely. Yeah. We wanna make sure that, you know, if they say, yes, that they graduated from our program or and obtain a certain, certificate or or whatever, you know, you wanna call it that they that they actually can do what they need them to do. Yeah. That's great.

Okay. Well, this thanks Martha. Yeah. This has been a lot of great information. I sorry, everyone, I think Brian had a tech issue, but, thank you, Brian as well.

If you can hear me. You gave a lot of valuable valuable information, And I want to we're gonna wrap up in a few seconds, but I wanted to just tell the audience that, there'll be recording available of the webinar, twenty four hours after, which will be emailed to you. And This has been really informative. So, thank you everyone for attending, and I think that's it for now. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Martha.