Welcome everyone to another episode of Train Like You Listen, a podcast about all things learning and development in bite-sized chunks. This is a special summer series of podcasts that are hot off the press, just in time for you to bring with you and up your learning and development game, even while you’re taking a break, relaxing, traveling, or just staying put in these warmer summer months.
Introduction
I’m Brian Washburn, your host. I’m also the co-founder of this company called Endurance Learning and I’m joined today by Tim Barnosky, Manager of Training and Development for Innovative Solutions. I spoke with Tim about a year ago as he was freshly hired and just gearing up to build out a learning and development function at his company from the ground up.
When we finished that conversation, we said we should do this again in a little while and see how it’s going. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. But before we get to all of that, I just want to let you know that today we are brought to you by Endurance Learning’s Train-the-Trainer programs. If you and your team need some help with your training design and delivery skills, drop me a note. We have half and full-day virtual programs, and we also have two or three-day in-person sessions. For more information, visit us at https://endurancelearning.com/train-the-trainer/.
Six Word Biography
Brian: You are the manager of training and development for Innovative Solutions.
And as we customarily do, we like to have our guests introduce themselves, but because we do this in bite-sized chunks. We give you exactly six words to introduce yourself. How would you introduce yourself to the masses who are listening today in exactly six words?
Tim: Well, first, thanks for having me back, Brian. It’s really great to be here with you again. And I would have to say to answer your question, I’ve traveled a pretty unique path. Which I’m really excited to, to hear a little bit more about the most recent part of that path. I know that your path started way back as a humble student in the Brockport Central School District, which is also where I went to school.
Brian: And that’s actually originally how we met. We ran cross country together and we we didn’t graduate together. I think you were a year ahead of me. But that’s where it all started. You’ve had some twists and turns. You’ve worked for a news station, but somehow you found your way. Into this world of learning and development.
About Innovative Solutions
Brian: As we return to our conversation that took place about a year ago, can you remind us a little bit more about Innovative Solutions and what what you all do?
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. So we are for all intents and purposes, a managed services provider. We are a managed services provider IT consultancy with a heavy focus in the cloud. We do a lot of generative AI work. We still do a lot of migrations, application development and modernization really all things cloud. And we still do actually support a small number of customers with on-premise workloads.
Brian: And so when we spoke originally, you were talking about how Innovative Solutions had some really big projections for growth.
And you were brought on to build out a learning function that was going to primarily focus on your internal learning needs, things like building a formal onboarding program, training for your sales team, service, delivery teams, and technical teams. So that was the vision. Has that actually been your focus over the last year?
I’m really excited to get to this conversation because we all have plans and then once we get into it, plans can change. So I’m kind of curious how close are you a year down the road to what your vision was or your organization’s vision was a year ago?
Tim: Yeah. So it’s sort of a two-part question, right? Have those things been my focus, internal training, upscaling our sellers, upscaling our delivery folks. Yes. And I mean, that has been an overwhelming majority of my focus throughout the year. You know, this has been the year of Gen AI. So there was a ton of upscaling to do in that time. A year ago, we were almost entirely focused on being an AWS partner, but we have entered a really focused partnership with IBM as well. So here’s a whole other, the Watson X technology. We’ve got to get everybody up to speed on that. And, we’re building things. With tooling and services from both of those providers.
So we need folks who know those cold. We need folks who know how to sell that sort of thing. So, yeah, so much of my year has been spent, focused on last-mile training, right? What are the things that this business pivots so incredibly quickly throughout the year. We have to stay ahead of and we have to get our folks focused on.
So that part of my thinking, it turned out to be exactly right. Am I where I wanted to be at this point? No, I’m actually just now beginning to get the mechanisms in place and the structure and the rigid process that’s going to let us scale and do this consistently and help anybody who comes into the org, in any role quickly and easily know where they’re headed and what they have to do to get going. So I did a lot of what I anticipated and I’m just starting to do the strategic vision kind of work, which I’m really excited about.
Brian: And it is so interesting that in any part of the organization, but definitely learning and development, you can have these great plans and then the organization does something that maybe the organization had in the works, but we didn’t know about such as bringing on, you know, folks that are working with IBM consulting or whatever it might be. And so when I asked you a year ago to anticipate what your biggest challenge might be you said several things. One, you mentioned building parallel content for a pretty disparate group of teams that do very different things. So trying to build all sorts of content at the same time for all sorts of different people. And then you also mentioned that one of your challenges might be. How to structure that content so that you weren’t going to disrupt your learners flow of work.
Because people, if you’re in sales, the more time that you spend in training, the less time you can be selling. And so we definitely want to try to figure out how do we create that’s going to be as close as possible to the flow of work. So those were the two things that you mentioned could be challenges.
Biggest Challenges Building an Internal L&D Team?
Now I’m kind of curious, did these turn out to be your biggest challenges? And if so, how did you handle them? But if not, what ended up being your biggest challenges?
Tim: Yeah, so they really did not end up being my biggest challenges. It really was reacting to and staying ahead of the change of pace as the business pivoted. You absolutely hit the nail on the head.
We are often the last to know strategy has talked about for weeks or months and in those phases of planning and looking ahead to what you’re going to do in your business. It’s a small audience. You’re working through the details and as they become more solidified, communication out to the organization starts happening, and oftentimes, we’re left going, okay, here are four or five other things we need to do now.
And just with technology and the cloud, especially the way things move quickly that really was the challenge, keeping up with the pace of change. We also opened a brand new sales office within the past couple of weeks. They just had the ribbon cutting ceremony. So we had to hire, onboard, and train 11 new people all very quickly.
And none of this was stuff that we anticipated doing a year ago. So I honestly wish I’d had the opportunity to build more content internally, so that I could have the challenge of thinking about how to chunk and structure and pace that out for people. But, we are beginning to build a lot more content internally.
And that will be a focus, especially now just seeing how really busy everybody in this organization is really all of the time.
Build, Buy, or Borrow Content
Brian: So what did you end up having to do when it comes to building the content? Were you buying off the shelf content or are you contracting it out because you didn’t have the time or resources to do it?
What did you have to do in order to kind of shift your own focus to the more strategic level and then make sure that you actually had content to deliver as well?
Tim: Right. Yeah. So we have access to a ton of content through our partnerships with different companies and organizations. We have access to their training portals.
In some cases, we have premium subscriptions so that we can get things like full-length practice exams and higher levels of gamified learning and the advanced content. We get access to partner content from a lot of folks anyway. And, I must say a lot of that content is designed with technology workers and sales professionals in mind.
It’s short. It’s bite-sized. They’re very good at helping support with learning plans and check-ins and, you know, content reviews and things like that. So access to the content really hasn’t been an issue. We have leaned on third parties to do some seller-specific sales skills type training, but a lot of what I’ve done this last year is curating and making recommendations and, tracking and, and, checking in with people to make sure they can balance work and what we’re hitting them with on the training side. So it’s been a lot of logistics and thankfully have had access to a lot of very good content. That’s a focus moving forward. We are starting to build more around our own products that we build in-house. And teaching our sellers about it, teaching our delivery folks about it, educating our customers about it as well.
So I am really going to have to start thinking in those terms of how do I get this to people without taking them off the floor for an hour or two, which is really tough to do.
Brian: That’s really interesting. I’m about to ask you about what your biggest lesson learned, but one of the takeaways that I’m taking away just from this conversation is that even though we may have plans and want to be thinking about how do we create content, the fact of the matter is we don’t always have to be the ones who create content.
There’s probably some decent content that’s out there that may not be the perfect content. It may not be as specific as we want it to be for our situation. And at the same time, there’s a balance between, are we going to wait for a year or two years to build out specific content to us?
Lessons Learned: Go Deep
Or can we find something that’s going to be good enough right now and then slowly kind of replace it with something that might be a little bit more custom, which it sounds like that might be kind of the, the, the option that you chose. So, I’m kind of curious. Building out a learning program internally from scratch at an organization that’s never had a central learning function, it seems like a tall task. What’s been your biggest lesson learned? Or maybe even what advice might you offer to someone who’s listening and they’re in the process of building up their own internal learning function?
Tim: Yeah, it is. The experience has really been pretty eye opening. And, this is the first time I am individually building out a whole brand new function within an organization. I helped build out and rebuild programs, but this was a new company to me, a very new company, familiar ecosystem with AWS cloud technologies and just technical training and assessments in general.
But I think my biggest lesson or the biggest piece of advice I would give is to get so deep. In the weeds so immediately upon entering the organization, which I think is something a lot of people shy away from. They want to think about how do I attack this strategically. I want to do some planning, learn the org, kind of look in the corners and under the carpet and, see where some of the unknown unknowns might be, but think really strategically.
And I have found the deeper in the weeds I get, the better I understand departmental needs, individual role needs, things that are going to impact our training and development program and our learners that I wasn’t even aware of how strategic agreements and contracts can affect training goals, which tie up to larger organizational needs.
There are so many places that can drive a need for training or influence how we do it. And it really shouldn’t take six months to a year to be at least aware of all of those. So I, I would say if you’re trying to tackle something like this, creating a function like a development one in somewhere that hasn’t had one, and we’re still one of very few partners in the SMB space that have a learning function.
So, not a lot of people have done this in this type of organization at all. The details are really so important. So yeah, really take that deep dive, figure out the known unknowns, the unknown ones, and then base your strategy around an understanding of everything that is going to have an impact on your program.
Strategies to Know Your Organization Better
Brian: And I’m kind of curious what that’s, I’d love that advice to, to, it’s really important for us to get to know. Our organization. What were some of the specific strategies that you took or steps that you took to get to know the organization better?
Tim: So it really was just brute force, right? Sitting down with all of our sales leaders sitting down with our technology and delivery leaders talking to them about their team.
- What are their challenges?
- What should be happening that’s not?
- Is that a training issue?
- Is that the process doesn’t exist or it isn’t developed?
- Is it drifted and nobody sure who owns it?
Things like that are paramount to really discovering what it is you need to do to support an organization.
It seems simple, but I’m building now a training request intake requester that understands the nature of their requests before we even look at it. Being able to get that level of detail and information from them that really starts turning on lights and, and, kind of opening windows and letting you see what’s going on across the larger organization.
And there are even some things buried pretty deep in contracts and agreements that might have an effect that you’re not aware of unless you get super, super into the details and reading those documents. I creep around in everybody’s process documentation, their Confluence pages, right, their SharePoint sites, and I just start looking and digging and turning things over and talking to people and listening.
Listening is so hugely important. All staff meetings, what’s leadership talking about, right? What do the reactions around the room look like when somebody says X, Y, or Z? And that’s, a pretty good indication of somewhere I might need to focus. So, it really is knowing the nooks and crannies to look in and being able to recognize the information that’s going to be helpful to you. Things that are going to impact your learners and then, making targeted decisions with that understanding.
The Power of Relationships when Building an internal L&D Team
Brian: So, I’m kind of curious when it comes to brute force and having conversations, one of the things that you didn’t necessarily mention, but it sounds like could also be important are the relationships that you develop.
With people across the organization, is there anything that you were doing that helped you build the relationships that you needed?
Tim: Honestly, I think just being somebody, who’s willing to listen, right? Somebody who is open to hearing what folks really truly need, what they’re struggling with.
It’s just, part of the natural diplomacy that comes with being in a role like this, Or where a natural diplomacy would help. You show them you care, you listen to them. You, do your best to figure out if maybe we can attack this from a process revision perspective instead of, training everybody on the finance team.
It’s really being open and listening and showing people you care that fosters and nurtures those relationships. And it’s not just the, the business owners, right? Or the team, or the process, or the product owners, it’s everybody on every one of those teams, because they have individual needs that might not 100% lockstep align with the career paths that we’re going to recommend for people.
So to me, that’s always been the biggest part, treat people like people, let them know you, really do care, and then listen to them.
Brian: I love that. And sometimes training isn’t even the answer. So maybe there’s a, there’s a faster, quicker, better way process solution or whatever it might be.
My last question for you is what, what has been the best part of the past year at work for you? As you’ve been building this out, as you’ve been building these relationships, as you’ve been building As you’ve been having, as you’ve been pivoting, as you’ve been doing all this stuff,
Tim: Right, right. that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed when I got here.
I was really excited about being able to build something from the ground up again. And I have absolutely loved every second of it. I mean, picking the tooling, building your own process. Getting to know the organization so that you can put mechanisms and metrics and KPIs and, structure in place that I know from experience is going to scale well with the organization.
And just, knowing that I got to do that, be a part of that. And have my fingerprint on it. It’s just something I’ve always enjoyed. It’s honestly why I came to innovative. They gave me another opportunity to just absolutely from the foundation up construct something. And I’m to this day, super glad I took that opportunity.
Brian: Well, Tim, thank you so much for giving us some time. Actually, before we go one last question, since this is the summer series, if you can go anywhere other than Rochester, New York, where might it be for, for your dream summer vacation?
Tim: Oh, goodness. I mean, who would want to go anywhere other than Rochester?
But I think for me, I would love to get back to Japan. I got to go there for work many, many years ago, and I’ve been dying to get back then, so probably either Japan, maybe Italy, if I had a second choice.
Brian: I, I had a chance to visit Japan during cherry blossom season a bunch of years ago, and it was amazing.
If people have an opportunity to go, it was not even a place that was on my bucket list. It wasn’t, but I was going for work and it was so far exceeded expectations. It was so amazing. The people, the food, the sites, the culture, everything, everything about it was, yeah, I would love to get back.
Tim: I’m jealous. You got to go in a good time of year.
Brian: That was spectacular. Well, thank you again, Tim, for rejoining us a year later after you’ve been building out this learning program and for everybody else, thank you for listening. If you are interested in learning more about a broad range of learning and development strategies, there are now two books written by yours truly that you could pick up at Amazon. One’s called What’s Your Formula?: Combine Learning Elements for Impactful Training is called Instructional Design on a Shoestring. Both of those are available at amazon. com until next time. Happy training, everyone.
