My first professional transition happened when I went from being a graduate student to working in educational development at UC Santa Cruz. I loved the teaching part of grad school, and it felt natural enough to move into a role focused on helping others develop their teaching, and collaborating on university teaching and learning projects.
When the time came to look for another career opportunity, I turned to industry. I knew my skills and experience could be applied to learning & development, especially in the field of instructional design. But I was much less confident about making that transition, and when I got the opportunity to move into corporate instructional design, I braced myself for a steep learning curve.
Almost three years into the new gig now, I’m happy about what I was able to bring to this new environment, and how much I’ve grown. So, I thought I’d take this post to reflect on three things that surprised me the most about moving from teaching and learning in higher ed, to corporate L&D.
The business context doesn’t change the learning challenges like I thought it would.
To be clear, the business context changes everything. But I thought the world of KPIs, corporate values, regulatory requirements, and other aspects of being in a business instead of a school would fundamentally distort the stuff I like most about being a learning professional. But over time, it mostly just started to feel like different requirements and constraints that any professional feels. I remember being at a POD Conference while I was at UCSC and hearing instructional designers talk about how the accreditation process affected their work. I couldn’t relate to those specific experiences, but I could see how accreditation influenced everyone’s decisions, approaches, limitations, and priorities.
It feels like I’m playing a teaching and learning video game, and I’ve dropped into a new world map and rules with my same core actions. At the core of my job, I still think about how to help people learn things, and how to help people instruct things they’re really passionate about, that they want others to learn. Whatever is going on with that other context stuff, I appreciate that the core of what I enjoy is still very much intact and has room for growth.
School experiences and practices permeate learning in industry more than I expected.
I was really interested in how learning practices, language, tools, and environments would look outside of school systems. I remember starting to “build a network” with industry L&D professionals online, and being surprised at how much discussion there was about classrooms, corporate “universities,” and how to set “passing grades.” Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, but school experiences really impact how we think learning should look outside of it. I guess I thought those experiences would be more of a starting point than a template.
This does mean that people are a little more open to discussing things like assessment. On the other hand, it can be hard to get passed ideas like, there must be a quiz to pass for it “to count,” for example.
Reading Erin’s post on positionality, I also got to think more about why I always feel some kind of way when employees in corporate training are referred to as “students.” In grad school, I really struggled with the sudden switch from student to instructor in the teacher-student power dynamic, but it was also incredibly useful to think through any time I made an instructional decision. But outside of the school or university context, it feels so weird to bring in this dynamic when working colleague-to-colleague. There are plenty of other power dynamics to consider.
Most of the time, the use of “student” is just an innocuous word choice because people are used to it. But I also notice when this becomes an unexamined dynamic that influences assumptions about colleagues, their prior knowledge, facilitation choices, how and why we assess learning, what kind of environment supports learning, and how tools are discussed and marketed.
Sometimes, we don’t actually care about learning.
A few years ago, I was on a team developing a lab activity for general chemistry students. We wanted them to tinker with physiochemical properties and decided to use software that scientists use to simulate drug interactions. It let students create and design at a molecular level, and get quick feedback on what they’d done. They only were going to use a fraction of the program’s features, so we made a cheat sheet of the commands and functions they’d use most to help them jump in.
I agonized over this cheat sheet. Were we taking away their agency? Were we shutting down productive paths of learning just because we didn’t think it was part of the learning goals? Scott told me to chill, probably. We used it when we taught the lab, and it was fine. We didn’t notice any resistance, the students used it to create some pretty cool molecules, and they made all kinds of connections and explanations about the program’s simulations. All without having to do a long and boring module about how to use the software.
Now, I realize we just made a nifty job aid. And that sometimes, it’s less important that someone learns something than it is to reference something, in the moment of need, to successfully complete a task. That’s performance support, sort of. While not new at all, this was new to me, and now I see it everywhere, from Ikea furniture assembly to flight emergency checklists.
And while “corporate performance” sends off all sorts of alarm bells and whistles in my head, I’ve loved having this approach opened up to me more, and in obvious ways, since I’ve left higher ed. If I’m really advocating for learners (performers?), sometimes the most helpful thing is to do everything except train. Depending on the context of the job, a sound learning experience may be less learner-centric than making useful stuff for people to use when they need it.
I could probably figure out how to better connect these three areas, but more than anything, they’re the things that continue to surprise me in my new environment. There have been plenty of other changes, and some of them easily fade into my new world map and game rules. But I know not to get too comfortable with new environments, and I’m glad there’s so much to explore and challenge my thinking, decisions, and actions.
Hi, Rafael:
I’m always happy to see people finding value in job aids, especially if that included a visit to my blog at ensampler.com .
I couldn’t agree more with your statement that sometimes it’s less important to learn something than to reference something. In fact, one of the ways I describe the benefit of a job aid is that it enables people to accomplish things when they don’t know how.
I absolutely believe in the value of learning. And most skills have to be learned; the nature of a skill is that you’ve developed (successful) fluency and automaticity, which means you’ve essentially overlearned the building blocks so you don’t have to think about how to balance yourself on a bike or what the proper form is in French for the conditional tense.
Even in a more explicitly educational setting (I say as a former Teacher Corps intern and high-school teacher), you can use reference materials to lower the cognitive load for people who are working on some larger problem.
If you don’t know them already, I recommend two books: Bob Mager’s “What Every Manager Should Know About Training,” which does a great job of smuggling ideas about performance improvement into the traditional corporate training framework, and Cathy Moore’s outstanding Map It!, which is all about finding the results that matter and helping people achieve them.
Chill, probably.
I wanted to ask you about “students” and “learners” — you talk about the term “students” in terms of power dynamics. Do you think “learners” is better? Worse? Different? The same?
I think it’s fair to say that all (from young children to adults) are students/learners and teachers at different times. As I lean into identity work for my research, I’m thinking heavily about connotation. Depending on personal experiences, we have different reactions to some terms, student being one. Professional coach makes me personally cringe, and I’m spending some time analyzing why.
Two thoughts:
“School experiences really impact how we think learning should occur outside of it.” At a conference I attended last week, different people in different spaces talked about how most people are in education because they loved school and because school worked for them. These two thoughts make sense in the same conversation, I think, but I’m trying and failing to articulate why.
My view on tools: As Dave mentioned, at some point we have to free up space for higher level thinking to take place. In my world, getting to critical thinking is more important than sticking to basics. As a learner in my professional context, I dread PD if the goal is to teach the basics–give me some meat that I can apply in my classroom. But then here too, I wonder if the point of the training is someone’s perceived ineptitude at someone doing their job, and someone, somewhere feeling like giving a blanket training to everyone will fix everything (vs. trying to provide an experience to transform work and take it to the next level). I guess “training” has some connotations for me that are based on previous experiences that were less than helpful. All this to say, “sometimes the most helpful thing is to do everything except train” resonates.
Erin – there are so many aspects of what I loved about school that I enjoy just as much outside of it. In my experience so far, it’s been interesting that so many of the high-stakes aspects of school are what transfer over. Ideas about “rigor” and “objectivity,” especially around assessment, and only defined in a narrow way, have probably surprised me the most. Especially when there are always so many interesting and nuanced discussions happening around assessment.
Scott – As a term in school/college, I don’t have much preference being on either side of it. It’s more just interesting what it means for teaching decisions. I’d be in lots of PDP discussions digging into what good recognition looks like, and how we could do a better job with it. Not to overgeneralize, but it felt like we were often talking about how to move from giving recognition for good student work, to giving students recognition for their interesting observation/question/idea. What “counts” as “interesting” was then another meaty topic.
But in my environment now, if the learners are all engineers at the same company, then I’d rather just say “engineers.” There are plenty of other power dynamics at play.