The average learning business does a lot. Add what a learning business could or should do to what it already does, and the list of possibilities is overwhelming. This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast focuses on four often-overlooked areas where we think investing more time and energy will pay off for learning businesses: supporting subject matter experts, providing practice opportunities, evaluating impact, and telling a coherent value story.
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Celisa Steele: [00:00:00] We believe greater investments in supporting subject matter experts, providing practice opportunities, evaluating impact, and telling a coherent value story can pay off exponentially for learning businesses.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:18] I’m Celisa Steele.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:20] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:28] The average learning business does a lot, and its work often includes many complicated processes and intricate tasks. Add what a learning business could or should do to what it already does, and the list of possibilities is potentially infinite and definitely overwhelming.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:46] And we want to help with that sense of overwhelm by focusing today’s episode, number 380, on four areas where we think investing more time and energy will pay off for learning businesses. These areas are often overlooked or ignored, usually not out of any ill intent or negligence but simply out of a lack of clarity around how to direct and focus limited resources.
Celisa Steele: [00:01:14] And the four areas that we’re focusing on today are, one, supporting subject matter experts; two, providing practice opportunities; three, evaluating impact; and, fourth and finally, telling a coherent value story.
Support Your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
Jeff Cobb: [00:01:30] So let’s take those in order, I suppose, and we can start with supporting subject matter experts. And, if you think of these in a “Do This” versus “Not That” column, the do this here is to support your SMEs, support those subject matter experts as opposed to….
Celisa Steele: [00:01:48] Do not assume that your subject matter experts know how to teach.
Jeff Cobb: [00:01:53] Because, the truth is, many of them don’t. We’ve witnessed this ourselves. We’ve experienced it ourselves. And you can’t assume that just because somebody has deep expertise in their subject matter, which is why you choose them to deliver the learning experience, that they actually know how to convey that effectively to adult learners.
Celisa Steele: [00:02:11] Right. And we’ve talked before on the podcast that both you and I did some teaching in graduate school, and the assumption there was because we knew the content, we could teach, or we could teach with minimal training and support.
Jeff Cobb: [00:02:24] Yes, and that’s a word of caution to organizations that may be relying on PhDs or people coming from academia to deliver their content. Even those people may not know how to teach well because it is not something that’s prioritized in academia. When those people get out into the actual academic world and hold jobs at universities, it’s that publish-or-perish world. They’re really focused on the expertise, not necessarily the teaching of the expertise. And, of course, that’s going to apply if you’re dealing with tradespeople, if you’re dealing with professionals out in any of the big professions. You don’t even have that academic background, but they do have the expertise. You just can’t assume that they know how to teach in a way that’s going to effectively create the transfer that we’re looking for in terms of knowledge and experience with our learners.
Celisa Steele: [00:03:16] Right.
Take that term “subject matter expert” at face value, and recognize that they may be experts in whatever subject matter you’re asking them to teach or facilitate online or offline learning experiences with. But do not assume that they also understand andragogy or how to effectively support adult learners.
Celisa Steele
Jeff Cobb: [00:03:36] Right. They need that support from you. You need to help them with becoming much better instructors, much better facilitators of learning.
Celisa Steele: [00:03:44] I think this happens, as you’re already saying, across all types of fields. And I was thinking too, when you spoke to Manny Avramidis of the American Management Association a few episodes ago, he quoted a statistic. He said that 57 percent of the 24 million people who are classified as managers in this country receive zero formal management training. So this is a corollary to this issue. Just because someone is an expert in a particular field, don’t assume they can teach. Just because someone is promoted into a management role, don’t necessarily assume that they can manage. There are places where we need to be supporting people. We need to better support managers, as Manny was speaking to. But what we’re talking about today is really better supporting your subject matter experts.
Jeff Cobb: [00:04:31] Right. Those people—and there probably are millions of them classified as subject matter experts—how do we help them become better teachers, better instructors? And it can be challenging to do that. We acknowledge this. We know that this is tough, in the first place, getting the time and attention from those subject matter experts to really focus in on the teaching, your hopes for them, and being a better instructor. It’s even harder probably when they’re volunteers, so they’re giving you this time; they’re not being paid for it, and you, somehow, have to convince them that investing some of their time into being that better instructor, being that better facilitator is the right thing to do.
Celisa Steele: [00:05:12] So that’s definitely a challenge. That’s why, as obvious as it can sound, you need to support your subject matter experts. Just getting their attention and their time, that’s a real challenge. We get that, and that can be part of why doing this obvious thing doesn’t happen as often as it should. I think another challenge is how do you help them? You know that you need to support them, but how do you go about conveying to them key tenants of what it means to facilitate and help adult learners learn as effectively as possible?
Jeff Cobb: [00:05:45] Right. A lot of organizations, you’ll do things like put together a PowerPoint template for them to use, hold some sessions around logistics, maybe throw a few pointers out there, like, “Be more interactive.” We see that a lot: “Be more interactive.” What are the SMEs going to do with that? We don’t quite know in most instances. So there are some lightweight ways that you can provide a little bit of support. But we’re talking about real structure here, really educating these people on how to be better presenters, how to be better facilitators. As it happens, we do have a resource around this that helps to provide that structure in a way that really does move them from having their raw subject matter expertise to being able to create presentations, at least, that are going to be much more effective educationally.
Celisa Steele: [00:06:33] Yes, we were lucky to get to work with a learning business that had decided to invest in supporting its subject matter experts to develop that course initially. It’s now something that we make available. It’s called “Presenting for Impact.” We’ll make sure in the show notes to provide information where you can learn more about it. But, in summary, Jeff, what you and I did was we looked at what we know about learning and thought, “What are the top takeaways that could help most presenters do a better job in developing their session and then in delivering their session?” So we do things where we focus on things like cognitive load and what that means in terms of you really need to prune back your content; you need to also make sure that whatever visuals or slides and things you’re using really support the key learning points. It’s meant to be very practical. It takes about an hour for people to go through. Again, back to that challenge of you’ve got to get their time and attention. But, if they’re willing to invest an hour, they can learn a lot in that time about what they might be able to do in how they develop their presentations and deliver them to make them more effective.
Jeff Cobb: [00:07:43] We try to practice what we preach in other areas of this podcast. We do align it around practice opportunities for them to be applying what we’re conveying to them. And we do also try to do the minimum effective dose because we know that the time constraints are there; we’re not going to get people to tune in to a big, long course around this. But, to take an hour and some practice on what you learn in that hour, most people would be willing to do that. And we’re not focusing on bells and whistles or things like that. We’re focusing on things that are easily within the grasp of any subject matter expert to take and make some improvements. And did we mention that this is free? “Presenting for Impact.” Check out the show notes for this episode, and you’ll find a link to that, or you can always find it in the navigation at the Leading Learning Web site. But we wanted to do this because we wanted to provide organizations with a resource that helps to support subject matter experts and because we recognize that this is the proverbial win-win-win situation.
Celisa Steele: [00:08:48] That’s right. If you support your subject matter experts, hopefully that translates into them feeling appreciated. And then, when the subject matter experts get a little bit better at how they develop and deliver their content, then of course learners will benefit from those better experiences. And then of course that’s going to redound to the benefit of your learning business because you’re going to have satisfied customers and then hopefully repeat customers because they can see the quality, the high quality of the instruction that you’re providing.
Jeff Cobb: [00:09:21] So everybody’s happy. And, really, we cover this one first because I think it really is the low-hanging fruit for all learning businesses.
I think there’s not a learning business out there that couldn’t benefit from supporting their subject matter experts better than they probably are currently.
Jeff Cobb
So that’s our first one: in the “Do This” column supporting those SMEs, and, in the “Don’t Do That,” it’s don’t assume that subject matter experts know how to teach.
Partner with Tagoras
Jeff Cobb: [00:09:52] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.
Provide Practice and Application Opportunities
Celisa Steele: [00:10:22] Our second area of focus is around providing practice and application opportunities as part of your learning business’s portfolio. And, Jeff, you already alluded to this in passing when we were talking about “Presenting for Impact.” When we developed that course, we did build in opportunities for the subject matter expert going through that to pause and think about a presentation that they’re working on, apply those concepts, then resume, and so on and so forth. Again, we do always try to practice what we preach. But, for this one, we’re saying do provide practice and application opportunities as part of your portfolio. That’s the “Do This” column. What’s the “Not That,” Jeff?
Jeff Cobb: [00:11:03]
Don’t assume that learners are going to practice and apply whatever they’ve been taught on their own, after the fact, because most of them simply aren’t.
Jeff Cobb
They’re going to go back to work or whatever, and life’s going to take over, work’s going to take over, and, well, we all know the forgetting curve. Within a few days, most of it’s going to be gone because they haven’t actually practiced it. They haven’t applied it.
Celisa Steele: [00:11:28] And so even the best intention of learners, they’re fighting an uphill battle to carve out the time to practice and apply once they get back to their usual lives. Again, this is an area where we have some resources that we can point to to help you, in your learning business, get more intentional about providing practice and application opportunities.
Jeff Cobb: [00:11:52] For example, we did an episode dedicated to practice and feedback. This is episode 276, which you can search for on the Leading Learning site, or obviously we will link to that in the show notes so you can get to it. And something we talk about there, and we should talk about this a little bit here, is what constitutes practice because it doesn’t necessarily have to be anything complicated. You just mentioned pausing and giving presenters the opportunity to do some of the things to their presentation that we’ve been talking about in “Presenting for Impact.” It can be pausing and having people reflect and then talk about how a particular concept that’s been introduced in a Webinar or a seminar of some sort, how that actually applies to their day-to-day work. Have them do that elaboration. It can be testing. Testing is a form of practice. It draws on effortful retrieval, which we know is one of the key practices that can make learning stick. And whether that’s a simple quiz or whether it’s a full-blown, high-stakes exam, that can be a very useful form of practice.
Celisa Steele: [00:12:56] Right. So this does not mean you have to have or build a hands-on lab where your learners are going to be…
Jeff Cobb: [00:13:02] Or simulations.
Celisa Steele: [00:13:03] …or do a simulation. Certainly, you can do those things…
Jeff Cobb: [00:13:06] Yes, and it’s fantastic if you’re able to.
Celisa Steele: [00:13:07] …and if they make sense for what you’re teaching, absolutely. But, to your point, Jeff, this can be very simple. Basically, the idea with practice is you want to give the learners an opportunity to perform something based on what they’re learning. And, by performing, that often is going to allow them to then think about how that skill or knowledge applies to what they do on a daily basis. So it’s also going to get into a little bit of that how do you actually apply this in your own situation? We recently put out an executive briefing called “Practice Makes Profit,” and the subtitle is “The Business and Learning Case for Practice.” In there, we unpack different types of practice, and we look at different conditions that support practice and then also different tactics that you can use, six tactics in particular. So we think that’s a very practical look at practice, and we encourage you to check out that executive briefing if you haven’t already. We also had a recent podcast episode where we took more of a case study approach to practice, in episode 377. Jeff, I talked to you about a performance project which involves you practicing the performance of singing and guitar playing.
Jeff Cobb: [00:14:28] Right. I was put in the spotlight, so to speak, there. And this is my own little deliberate practice attempt, my attempt to get at least some subset of the 10,000 hours that’s famous for taking somebody to mastery in a particular area. And, for me, this is in being a singer-songwriter, performer. And so putting a lot of hours, recently, into getting on a stage in front of people with my material, as often as possible, and learning from both being up there and in the moment of doing that, but then all the preparation that goes into that, what I then take away from that and apply, whether it’s revising my songs or preparing for the next time that I get up in front of an audience of people. But I guess the metapoint in all of this is we all have these opportunities for practice in our lives that we’re more or less intentional, more or less conscious about. And the message to learning businesses is figure out how to make those more intentional. Figure out how to make them more conscious for your learners in whatever subject matter you’re trying to educate them in and increase their learning in.
Celisa Steele: [00:15:37] We touched on challenges when we were talking about supporting subject matter experts. I think maybe we could touch on some challenges related to this one as well, providing practice or more practice opportunities as part of your portfolio. One issue around practice is the one we already touched on, which is simply that, if you leave it to learners and outside of the learning experience, the odds are low, that only a small percentage of learners are going to actually do that and do that practice work on their own. In terms of from the learning business perspective, I think one of the challenges can be that there…well, it gets back to our first one. I think sometimes subject matter experts have so much that they want to impart around the content that they’re passionate about, that they know so much about, that they don’t want to leave time in a session, for example, for there to be practice.
Celisa Steele: [00:16:27] And so there’s that pruning that has to happen. Supporting the subject matter experts is going to help with practice opportunities because, when those subject matter experts begin to understand the need to really prune their content down to the essential and then the fact that that creates some space where there are practice opportunities—and we know that practice is how we move information out of our short-term memory into our long-term memory—once they appreciate that, they’re going to support that. So I think that there’s just a certain amount of awareness that can be a challenge around providing practice opportunities.
Jeff Cobb: [00:16:59] Yes, I think it’s awareness and getting past the idea that it’s more complicated than it really is. It doesn’t have to be difficult to provide practice, and, as soon as you do, all those wins are there. Once again, it’s great for the learner. The learning is going to stick much better. They’re actually going to be able to get use out of the learning. They’re going to look back at you as the organization that helped make that happen. You’re almost certainly going to get some measurable data out of providing practice opportunities that you can then feed into your future product development and your marketing. And then, for your subject matter experts, again the satisfaction, if you’re somebody who does have expertise, in being able to see somebody take what you’ve taught them and apply it, for me, that’s the ultimate victory in teaching. So you’re providing them with a way to have that victory.
Evaluate Impact
Celisa Steele: [00:17:51] The third area we want to talk about today is evaluating impact. And so in the “Do This” column is evaluate impact in meaningful ways, especially long-term impact.
Jeff Cobb: [00:18:03] And then the “Not That” column, what you don’t want to do is rely on single-instance smile sheets that are completed by a handful of participants, usually immediately following whatever the learning interaction is.
Celisa Steele: [00:18:20] I’m thinking about a conversation that you had recently with Will Thalheimer for the podcast—actually, the episode right before this one, number 379. Will is so thoughtful about learner evaluation, and I know, in that conversation, he points out the fact that organizations so often complain about the abysmal completion rates on evaluations. Often you’re asking about the wrong things. You’re asking more about the satisfaction. So that’s the smile sheet issue—how happy did this make people feel rather than actually looking at what did they learn? And so you’re maybe asking about the wrong things, and you’re tending to get a very insignificant response rate to it. So it makes it very hard to actually do anything very meaningful with learner evaluation.
Jeff Cobb: [00:19:10] Yes, and I think a lot of organizations shy away from doing more than that relatively easy-to-execute survey at the end of a course, Webinar, conference session, whatever it is because it’s hard to get people to participate in it and get that meaningful feedback over time. I like that one of Will’s positions on that is that we’re not asking good questions. Basically, that’s the root of non-participation. And, sure, there are other reasons, but I think he’s right because you look at the kind of evaluations you get from the experiences you participate in, and a lot of it is “Did you like it?” sort of stuff, which is fine—they’ll tell you they liked it or didn’t like it or whatever. But then, beyond that, you hardly ever get asked anything meaningful. And he’s a big proponent of asking questions that signal to the learner that you’re taking them seriously, that you’re trying to get stuff that really is going to change things going forward, and that you’re making that promise that you are going to change things based on the types of responses that you’re getting from them. And he’s developed this whole methodology into what he characterizes as distinctive questioning, so really upping your game with what you’re asking and how you’re asking in your evaluations. And learners get that; they understand that this is somebody who really is watching out for me and my learning, and I’m willing to respond in this instance.
Celisa Steele: [00:20:35] One of the other things he suggests is building in time for evaluation in the learning experience. Rather than sending out that link to the smile sheet the next day or even an hour later, actually build in time because that will increase your response rate. It gets back to what we were saying about practice, where, if you build in the time for practice in the learning experience, you’re going to have more people start practicing things. Same thing with evaluation. If you build in time for that evaluation, you’re going to have more people completing that evaluation. I’ll point people back to that last episode, 379, for more tips because that’s one of the wonderful things about Will Thalheimer’s work is that he is very practical about how to get better at learner evaluation. One of the other episodes that I would point people back to, if you’re thinking about how to really get some meaningful data around impact, is episode 277 with Rob Brinkerhoff and Daniela Schroeter, and they were talking in that episode about the Success Case Method, which is a really interesting approach to looking at who is really benefiting from your learning experiences and then talking to them about why. It’s about focusing on the people that it’s working for and then deconstructing why, so that then you can hopefully make the learning experience work well for even more learners over time. But it’s a relatively lightweight approach to getting some useful information around how you might be able to improve your products but then also to what you could use to market your products. You could hold up those success cases as effective marketing tools as well.
Jeff Cobb: [00:22:19] Yes, I love that approach. I think of it as essentially story-based. You’re getting stories from the people who have benefited from your learning. Another place that’s great, like you said, is product development, marketing. The types of quotes that you can often take out of those stories that you have with those success cases tend to be very powerful with boards and committees who have to approve budgeting, often for the development of different learning offerings. So definitely worth familiarizing yourself with the Brinkerhoff Success Case Method and potentially using that, and partly because it has so much value, but a lot of the value in that is it tends to be a longer-term look at evaluation and impact as well. Because, so often, all we’re doing is measuring really close to the learning experience, and you can see the dial has been moved a little bit there. But does it stick? What actually happens over the long term with the learning experiences we’re providing? The Brinkerhoff method is one great approach for doing more with the long term. I think continuing to send out evaluations, survey-type evaluations, you want to do as well.
Jeff Cobb: [00:23:30] And I’ll, once again, take us back to square one on this, to your subject matter experts, because they are some of your biggest proponents around this. As you were saying, Celisa, making time during the experience for the evaluation, whoever’s teaching, whoever’s facilitating, has to lead that happening, be making sure they take it seriously. Because I don’t know how many sessions I’ve been in where we get to the end, “Yeah, so-and-so organization wants me to have you fill these out. So please do it. Please give me good ratings so I can come back and speak again.” That’s not very inspiring to your average learner to actually do it and take it seriously. So for the subject matter experts to actually recognize it in the learning experience, at the end of the learning experience and to tee up the expectation that the learner is going to be contacted over time about whether this was successful or not. All of that can be done with the subject matter expert. So again back to square one, supporting your subject matter experts is a step towards this number three that we’re talking about around evaluating impact in meaningful ways.
Celisa Steele: [00:24:28] I would think that the distinctive questioning that Will Thalheimer talks about opens up the opportunity for an evaluation to actually deepen the learning for the learner. How powerful would that be if you’re completing an evaluation and, as part of that, you actually have an aha about some takeaway from the session? That, to my mind, could be a wonderful goal to have for your evaluations. How can you make it valuable to that subject matter expert who’s delivering the session, to the learning business who’s looking at data, but then also for the learner?
Jeff Cobb: [00:25:02] Yes. And, of course, evaluations, they’re surveys; they’re not assessments. But they can provide practice opportunities because, if you’re asking somebody to think about…. I can propose a question. The question might be, “Think about what you’ve learned during this course today and how you’re actually going to apply it when you get back into work. How much is this going to help you with doing your job on a day-to-day basis going forward?” Well, if you ask somebody that question, they have to think about it. They have to start connecting the dots, doing the kind of elaboration that really is a form of practice to support learning and make that learning stick. And then they’re giving you some meaningful feedback based on that. Again we’re back to these win-win-wins going on all over the place.
Tell a Coherent Value Story
Celisa Steele: [00:25:52] The fourth and final area we want to talk about today is telling a coherent value story. So that’s definitely in the “Do This” column.
Jeff Cobb: [00:26:02] And then the “Not That” column, what you don’t want to do is assume that potential learners understand the value of your offerings, how they connect together, and how to choose among your offerings and between your offerings and competitive ones.
Celisa Steele: [00:26:20] Yes, there’s a lot to unpack in that “Not That” there. I think often learning businesses do a lot of the work to really think through a product and to put together a hopefully compelling offering. But they’ve done all that work; they’ve done all that thinking. And then I think too often the way it can get translated into…it’s a list of features rather than talking about the value that a learner can expect from the experience. So that’s one aspect where I think often we focus too much on features rather than value. I think also another area is around language issues. We might have things that we know we mean when we say “seminar,” “conference,” or “course,” but other people might bring different expectations to those terms. And so I think we have to work a little bit to make sure that we’re providing enough information, that learners really understand how what we’re offering might compare to other things that they’ve participated in. I think we all know, when we stop to think about it, that all conferences are not alike. But once we read that term “conference,” I’m bringing a lot of baggage to that term based on my experience with conferences. When you see that term, Jeff, you’re bringing your baggage and experience to that term as well. So there’s a lot to do around focusing less on terms and features and more around value.
Jeff Cobb: [00:27:52] And I think, as part of that, focusing on context as well. Organizations often don’t do a good job of contextualizing a particular offering. Usually, if you’re serving a specific field or industry, you’ve got a variety of different learning experiences you’re offering. And, the truth is, there are probably different levels of value to them, different ways they fit into the overall experience that you can provide to learners. So you might have something that’s brief and meant to be introductory that you’re offering for free or at a very low cost, and it’s there to help a specific type of learner in a specific way. You need to communicate that, that’s what it’s intended for, and then also communicate how it fits into the path that they may follow from there. What’s the next step beyond there? What’s the step beyond that? How is it building value for the learner over time to ultimately get them to the point where they’ve mastered—or whatever terminology you want to use—that body of knowledge, that body of skill? And giving them a story that they can see themselves participating in as they progress through the different types of learning experiences that you provide. Often that’s going to be a visual thing, and, in fact, we provide a way that you can visualize that type of process.
Celisa Steele: [00:29:18] Right. It’s usually a visualization for the learning business. It’s often not something that you necessarily expose to the learner.
Jeff Cobb: [00:29:24] Though, you can.
Celisa Steele: [00:29:24] You could.
Jeff Cobb: [00:29:25] We’re fans of structuring learning paths and showing those paths to the learners. It may be a little different from what we’re talking about doing internally, but it flows out of what we’re talking about doing internally.
Celisa Steele: [00:29:36] Yes, for the internal use case, we have a tool called the Value Ramp, and we talked about that most recently in episode 315, where we explain how it works, but we can just briefly reexplain it here, Jeff.
Jeff Cobb: [00:29:49] Yes. The main thing with the Value Ramp is that there’s a strong correlation—or there should be a strong correlation—between price and value. This is something that learning businesses have often not been as intentional, as conscious about as they should be. But you are again sometimes going to have offerings that are valuable but lower in value. You have some learning experiences that are your rock-star immersive, going-deep, really taking-you-to-the-whole-new-level-type experiences, which you want to have in your portfolio. Those are very high-value, and they should be commensurately high-priced. But then, typically, you’re going to have some things that are much more focused, just a nugget of knowledge or a very short introductory-type thing, or there may be other reasons why it’s certainly valuable, but you’re not going to get the same level of value out of that. And the pricing for that should be commensurately low or free. And then there’s this idea that you want to plot things out along the Value Ramp, starting low—lower value, lower price or free—and then ramping up to higher value, higher price, and really building momentum to help guide your learners up that Value Ramp to those highest-value, highest-priced offerings. And we do have an illustration of this that we’ll make sure to include in the show notes and also to link to other information about the Value Ramp.
Why We Focused on These Four Areas
Celisa Steele: [00:31:12] Now, for the cynically inclined, if we happen to have any of those among our listeners…
Jeff Cobb: [00:31:16] No, no.
Celisa Steele: [00:31:17] …but the cynically inclined might find it overly convenient that the four areas that we focused on in this episode are areas where we happen to have resources. And I always think of Rohit Bhargava talking about beware when Hammers R Us proclaims it the year of the nail, for example.
Jeff Cobb: [00:31:35] Yes, Rohit’s a good one for those sorts of perspectives. But these were hard-earned. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We’ve observed a lot of learning businesses. We go through this stuff ourselves. We have to wrestle with all of these same things. We’re in the trenches as a learning business. We developed these resources because of that experience, working in and with learning businesses, and seeing where giving even a little more focus and a little more attention would pay big dividends.
Celisa Steele: [00:32:11] Yes. All of these resources are free. We are offering these four areas to focus on and these related resources not in any particularly self-serving way but just because, to echo what you said, Jeff, we really do see these as areas where, if learning businesses can be a little bit more intentional and invest a little bit more, we think it will really pay off.
Jeff Cobb: [00:32:34] And we challenge you. Here we are, at the practice part of this particular podcast, to think about each of these: supporting your subject matter experts better, providing practice and application opportunities, evaluating impact in meaningful and particularly long-term ways, and telling that coherent value story. (A) To what extent have you thought about each of these consciously before? (B) To what extent have you discussed them within your organization, and do you have an ongoing discussion around them? And then see how well are you doing with each of them. You can hit pause or wait till the end of the podcast, but spend five or ten minutes just thinking about that and then deciding what you might do about those things going forward.
Celisa Steele: [00:33:29] Learning business leaders literally make thousands of decisions a day, which can make it really hard to clearly see where adding more to the long to-do list will pay off. But we believe greater investments in supporting subject matter experts, providing practice opportunities, evaluating impact, and telling a coherent value story can pay off exponentially for learning businesses.
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Learner Surveys and Learning Effectiveness with Will Thalheimer
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