Unknown Speaker 0:07
Learning and Development is a noisy space. There is no shortage of big claims, shiny tools or confident answers, but if you actually do this work, you know that improving practice is usually slower, Messier and far more interesting than any headline would suggest. This is what this podcast is all about. I'm Tom McDowall, and this is the idtx podcast.

Unknown Speaker 0:35
Welcome to this episode of the idtx podcast. In this episode, I'll be interviewing Clea Mahoney and chatel Rivas ahead of their sessions at the upcoming idtx online virtual conference. Before we get started, remember, it is not too late to book your tickets today. The event is scheduled for the 18th and 19th of February. Every session, though, will be recorded and made available to you completely free of charge on the instructional design tips YouTube channel, you can learn more and book your tickets@idtx.co.uk

Unknown Speaker 1:09
with that said, let's get into the first interview with Clea.

Unknown Speaker 1:16
I am Clea Mahoney. I live in Colorado in the United States, and for almost two years, I've been working in customer education at roost, technical startup aimed at managed service providers. So IT companies that have a bunch of external clients, they need to figure out how to make automations work for their own company and for their clients.

Unknown Speaker 1:41
Marketing might kill me for saying this, but it's kind of like a very fancy Zapier on steroids. We pull everything together into workflows on a canvas and do our best to make it work. I started as a trainer and community enablement manager and went on to lead instructional design function, and now I manage our small but mighty team of three total, including me

Unknown Speaker 2:07
fantastic. And I want to say thank you, obviously, for giving your time to present a session our upcoming idtx Online Conference, which is scheduled for the 18th, 19th of February. Your sessions on day one on the 18th at 4pm here in the UK, and it is LMS speed launch, selecting and shipping a customer Academy in just three months. I'm really interested, because LMS selection implementation is not usually a quick process in most organizations, and it's usually,

Unknown Speaker 2:43
everyone has their own thing on this process. I think it's the most painful process I've ever gone through in any organization. And no matter what I've done, it hasn't really got any better. So I'm fascinated to know, first of all, you know, what was it that made you think this? This is what I want to speak about. And then could you share a little bit with us about, you know, what, what? What's in the session? What will you be discussing, and what are those kind of key takeaways that you're hoping to share with us? Yeah, thank you. I will say that it's a session that's close to my heart, because when I was hired at roost, I was even asked like, do you think we need a learning management system for customer education. And I said, you might not, which I think was a hot take. I am a former LMS trainer and administrator from my time in higher education. I've taught in those systems. I've helped build those systems. I've helped with massive University migrations from one system to another. Last one was during the pandemic. That was a ton of fun.

Unknown Speaker 3:44
But in customer education,

Unknown Speaker 3:47
the learning management systems are pretty unique from what we typically see in learning and development for internal employees or even higher education, right? So they have more of a marketing focus, more of a product usage focus, and

Unknown Speaker 4:02
I would not recommend that anyone speed launch an LMS in 55 days, but we did it because we had to. We had to move at the speed of startup, which is faster than the speed of light. If anyone didn't know, I will say that a lot of groundwork was done to research and select three different vendors before that timeline that I'm talking about, but then we really just had to, like,

Unknown Speaker 4:29
speed test them, figure out what's going to work for us, figure out what to prioritize for our customers. After all, they're going to be the people logging in and learning with us, and we just had to figure out a way to make it happen. So I actually shared about this on a podcast called customer education lab. Folks can listen to that story. And what I want to bring to this ID TX event is stuff that I didn't necessarily share there. I want it to be very.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Be interactive and informal. I want people to feel comfortable asking questions, because they might be going through the same exact thing, or they might have it on the horizon. And I'm very candid, I'm very honest, I'm very transparent. I hope to bring that to the community, because we need more of it. We don't need more sales pitches about which LMS is best, or how to do implementation perfectly. We just need to learn from other humans who care about learning and who want to really help all of us in this system succeed.

Unknown Speaker 5:34
That's such an important point. There about so often, especially when people are presenting it's all about. Here's how I did this perfectly. Here's how you can do it exactly the same. And that willingness to share what went well and what didn't is incredibly useful. And kind of answered those kinds of questions. So I guess on that note,

Unknown Speaker 5:55
when you when you look back at that implementation or other informations that you've done, what are the things that you think that could always be better? Because I know I sort of got a list of things right now. These are my my constant pain points, if you will, have you got any one thing that you think are this is always such a tricky bit or a tricky moment to deal with? Yeah, we're coming up on almost a year of using the learning management system. And I would say what comes to mind right now is, rather than migrating all of our content, use it more as an opportunity to

Unknown Speaker 6:31
audit and abandon stuff that may not necessarily be the best. I wish that I would have spoken up a little bit more about some courses that were in there, I think seven of which we've now deprecated, kind of taken down. Let people know, hey, this is old. Go take this other thing instead, or go do nothing, because you don't really need to learn about this. So being more critical about what you are bringing from your old platform. In our case, it was just a documentation site on Git, book into your system. That's one thing. Another thing that I would do differently is have more of a plan to work with a team on how to divide and conquer. I think we were all feeling pretty frantic when we were given a short deadline. And I remember my poor boss at the time shout out, Brandon, love ya.

Unknown Speaker 7:20
He just started building stuff. And I'm like, I looked at it the next day. I'm like, Brandon, did you know that you can make a template and then you can copy that template and you can have a consistent structure of your courses, so it's not like, all over the place. And he was like, Oh yeah, that would have been nice to know.

Unknown Speaker 7:37
We also did not wait to sign our contract,

Unknown Speaker 7:43
we knew that when the contract was signed, that's when we would have access to a dedicated implementation manager. They had this whole onboarding training for us planned. We didn't have time for that. And again, startup woes some like, let's just figure it out ourselves. Let's look at what courses they have, and if we decide that they are not going to help us. We'll just figure it out and bother the salesperson who's helping us set up our demo environment. We built everything in that demo environment, and when we met with our implementation manager, we're like, Hey, is anything broken? These are the three things we still need to do. Can you help us make it happen by the end of the week? Push it live. Boom. So that was very difficult for my recovering perfectionist, heart, mind and soul, but it worked. It went out to customers. There were minor issues to fix, you know, little typos or formatting, but we did it, and I'm very proud of us for pushing forward and for paving a way that worked for us, rather than a path that the LMS vendor wanted us to follow.

Unknown Speaker 8:45
Love that I think so often we are scared of making a mistake, scared of getting it wrong, and therefore we deliver something that's maybe great, but it takes 10 times as long as it should have,

Unknown Speaker 8:58
and we obsess over details that are incredibly important to us, but that no one else in the world cares about. So this sounds like a really, a really useful session and area for us to all discuss. I'm really looking forward to it. I want to close out our time together the same way I close out all these sessions. We've all got things that are close to our hearts, things that we're thinking about in the industry, or kind of observations that have come to us over the years. So if you could leave anyone listening to this with just one thing that you think they should be thinking about or doing in their practice right now, what would it

Unknown Speaker 9:34
be? Yeah, this is a good one, and it's obviously easier said than done, so I would say, don't worry about doing it perfectly, just find a way to do it that feels authentic to you, whether we are working on customer education or internal employee training or teaching students of all backgrounds, ages, etc. I.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
I still think we don't just talk to those people enough, and that can be hard, right? When you're doing customer education, and those people have 25,000 other things to do you're just a vendor in like their massive tool stack, but any chance that you have to talk to a customer, or to talk to someone at your organization who interacts with that customer, whether your customer is someone buying a product or a Like, honestly, I think employees are customers of the company. We're buying what our company is selling. In a way.

Unknown Speaker 10:34
We can go on a capitalism rant another time at a different podcast, but yeah, just we care about the person who is meant to do the learning, talk to them, figure out what gets in their way, what is difficult about the thing we want them to learn and

Unknown Speaker 10:52
do your best to approach it empathetically and thoughtfully, like you don't want it just to feel like this barrage of questions, or like you're a detective trying to figure out why they can't just learn the thing. Come on. It's not that hard. It can be it can be difficult, and it certainly requires establishing a relationship and trust with that audience. But anytime that we've done it, our end product has been better as a result. And that goes back to my recovering perfectionism saga, like, get something imperfect in front of that target audience. Say, Hey, this is an early version of what I'm thinking. I would love your feedback, because it's designed for people like you. There's no wrong answers. Let's talk about it. Guide them through that. Help us make it better for for folks like you, idtx is all about bringing together amazing practitioners from around the globe to share what they know. For the last five years, we've been hosting virtual conferences, and year six will be amazing with two virtual conferences, but we are also bringing idtx into the real world. On May 29 we'll be hosting the evidence informed practice conference in the heart of Birmingham. This one day event will bring together scientists, researchers, l&d practitioners, HR professionals and people from across the performance enablement landscape, all focused on figuring out how we can harness the scientific understanding of how people work to improve our ability to facilitate performance in the workplace with a roster of fantastic speakers and ample opportunity to network, it's an event you do not Want to miss out on tickets are just 100 pounds, but strictly limited to 100 attendees. Head over to idtx.co.uk,

Unknown Speaker 12:50
today to make sure you've got your ticket.

Unknown Speaker 12:54
Next up, we hear from chatel Rivas about her session Finding Nemo in ER designing serious learning without drowning in policies. Let's get into the conversation.

Unknown Speaker 13:11
So my name is Sheetal Revis and I am the Learning and Development Manager for a company called avidity. I have been in the learning space probably most of my life, just didn't realize I was actually in there. So I was hospitality for 20 years, delivering training, you know, informally on the job that type of thing. Realized I had a bit of a passion for it, and have ended up in the wonderful world of officially learning and development,

Unknown Speaker 13:42
fantastic. And your session Finding Nemo in ER,

Unknown Speaker 13:48
designing serious learning without drowning in policies. First of all, fantastic. Phil, we can all agree, but I'd love to hear a little bit about, first of all, you know, what is this about? And then why is it sort of the thing that you wanted to present at idtx this year. Your session is going to be a part of idtx online in February this year. So yeah, little bit about what the session's about and what we can expect to get from it. Yeah. So imagine somebody comes to you and says, we want to deliver training on employee relations, probably not the most engaging topic, to be fair. And I'm kind of known in the organization for just being a little bit wacky, a little bit out there. And honestly, the reason this came about was because I already had 15 inflatable Finding Nemos in my sort of l&d toolkit from from an icebreaker I'd come up with, and we were on a little bit of, you know, kind of budget watching. And so I thought, I've got these 15 Finding Nemos. Can I do something with these to deliver Employee Relations training and just find a little bit of a hook? Pardon the pun? And.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Make it a bit more engaging, and, to be honest, make it a bit more memorable. And to be honest, this is how the session came about. I think, I think I'm actually quite lucky that my leaders trusted me to go with this concept. And so, yeah, so the training itself, and the session is basically about how we kind of, how I kind of convinced, I guess, the organization to trust that as a learning professional, we know how to deliver really engaging learning on topics that maybe aren't so engaging. But I was just very clear, you know, I'm not the SME and employee relations. I need your help with that. And I guess I pitched to, quite literally pitch to them, trust me on this, we're going to have Nemo. We also brought in a dolphin and a shark to kind of just emulate the different dimensions that employee relations has. And I'm pleased to see, I mean, the organization's up for it as well, so that helps. But early indications suggest that, yeah, people are going to have a lot of fun, and some fish might get flown around, and there's going to be lots of Finding Nemo references. But I think it'll just bring something a little bit different to maybe not so

Unknown Speaker 16:07
fun topic. Shall we say, it's difficult, isn't it? As soon as you hear things like this, you go, oh, there's a lot of fun going on and this kind of stuff. But within that, the idea of getting the organization to trust that you know what you're doing, so many L, D functions that I work with struggle with that that real fundamental aspect of being able to be more adventurous, to try new things, to be allowed to experiment, requires that foundation of trust. And we don't want to, we don't want to spill the beans before your session, ahead of time, but I'm really interested to hear

Unknown Speaker 16:46
how long did that take you to build up with this organization, and was it kind of a deliberate I am going to build this foundation of trust so I can then do X, Y and Z stuff with fish later on, Not fish specifically, but you get what I mean. Or was this something that happened as a result of kind of doing the work?

Unknown Speaker 17:08
Yeah. So I've been with this organization for about 18 months, and when I first came into the organization, it was a very compliance led learning and development department, so that's kind of what their focus had been. And I think this actually started the interview stage, because I was very honest that I am a bit of an out there trainer. I've got a big personality.

Unknown Speaker 17:31
Think light to think that. I think outside the box, this maybe proves it. And I did see right from the get go, I said, if that's not the type of learning that you're looking for, or a type of leader in that role, I'm probably not the right fit for you, because I'm not here to just sit and dish out compliance training. I want to design, I want to deliver, and I want to do it memorably and different. Because let's face it, we've all sat in boring training,

Unknown Speaker 17:54
and so I think that helped that openness and honesty to make sure I connected with the organization in the right way to begin with, but it's taken a time. We have definitely been on a journey of going from this, let's say, compliance Police Department, to becoming these trusted learning advisors. And I know that's a kind of a phrase and a buzz that we kind of hear in L, D, and how do we do that? And I think there has been that from the get go, I brought my true, authentic, kind of, I say, a little bit wacky, little bit out there self, and I brought the energy. And I do believe learning should be and can be fun. And I said that that's kind of the vibe of the training that we want to deliver. But some topics are more serious. We have to get that the angle right, and time will tell. And we did a kind of dry run through just the other day, and time will tell if we land that. But I think people appreciated the kind of angle we came at to say, Do you know what this this might help land the messaging. So it does take time and credibility. Absolutely. You know, we can talk about learning, design all you want, but if people aren't in that space. They don't understand it. So you have to give them practical examples. And I was fortunate enough to spend a bit of time in education, and that's where I really saw this brought to life. We learn the most when we are younger, when we are more curious, and so I take that ethos and tap into that, into adult learning, and go. How do we bring a bit of fun and engagement and activity? Because, let's face it, adults do not want to sit for eight hours listening to somebody talk. Nobody does, actually, whether you're an adult or a child, and so I took that ethos and applied it into this approach. Fantastic. Well, I think I can speak for anyone listening to this and hopefully everyone attending. I'm really looking forward to this session. I would say that, obviously we put it on the agenda for a reason. But again, I think it speaks to both a really interesting and novel approach to a specific situation, but also, very clearly, some areas where every L and D.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Function I've ever known struggles in terms of organizational dynamics, relationship, trust, so phenomenally useful stuff. I want to finish off our chat today with the same question I'm asking everyone. If you could leave every listener today with one thing that they should be thinking about or doing right now? What would it be?

Unknown Speaker 20:24
So for me,

Unknown Speaker 20:26
I think it's if you're sitting here listening to this and going, I want to deliver really cool, funky training, and I'm just not in the environment to do that, hold that mirror up to yourself and ask if you're in the right place to

Unknown Speaker 20:38
to be that creative that you want to be, to deliver the training and the learning that you want to do, and find the organization that that makes you feel like you fit and because you know, at the end of day, life's too short for borrowing training. So I hope, I hope that helps a few people, not creating a mass exodus of people, even their jobs, but find the place that fits your vibe, that fits your energy. And I guarantee you you'll you'll just love every every Monday

Unknown Speaker 21:06
chatel session, as well as clears will be live on the 18th of February, which is day one of the idtx online conference 2026

Unknown Speaker 21:15
sponsored by l&d Free Spirits and supported by the CPD group and learning news. You can book your tickets and find out all about these and all the other sessions@idtx.co.uk

Unknown Speaker 21:28
There, you'll also find information about our other events scheduled for this year, the evidence informed practice conference and the virtual Summit. Thanks for listening to this episode of the idtx podcast, and I'll see you in the next one you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai