BLOC Podcast

34: L&D and the Changing Economy with Chris Young

October 05, 2021 Episode 34
BLOC Podcast
34: L&D and the Changing Economy with Chris Young
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, I chat with Chris Young about the changing economy and its impact on L&D, what L&D hiring managers are looking for, and about BS words in L&D. :)

Chris Young serves as the director of Workforce Development, a section of the Human Resources Division at the Texas Department of Transportation.

Chris began his career in the U.S. Army.  After the Army and then undergraduate work at the University of Texas, Chris served as a diplomat for the State Department where he led training programs overseas for foreign governments.  In 2008, he left the State Department and went to work for a small business as a consultant to the U.S. Government – building and implementing training programs for the intelligence community – before moving back to Texas.

Chris has degrees from the University of Texas, an MBA from the University of Colorado, and a PhD in industrial-organizational psychology.  Chris holds multiple certifications and is a member of research and professional committees for transportation, training, and HR. 

Chris lives in central Austin with his wife and 3 kids and is looking forward to retiring from TxDOT in a few decades.

Chris's suggestions for learning more about L&D and performance improvement:

The Chapman Alliance - How Long Does it Take to Create Learning?

Louis Hyman's - Temp

Connect with Heidi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidiekirby/ or on my website: www.heidikirby.com

Thanks for listening to the BLOC!

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidiekirby/

Or check out what I'm working on over at https://www.getusefulstuff.com/

Chris Young:

So we want something that's going to go into the learning management system. We want to see that you can finish a project, we want to see that you have a track record of performance. Anything that highlights those facts, checks that box for us.

Heidi Kirby:

Hello, friends, and welcome to the blog, the building learning and organizational culture podcast. I'm your host Heidi Kirby. On today's episode, I talked to Chris Young about the changing economy and what it means for l&d What l&d hiring managers are looking for in candidates and Bs words in lnd. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hi, Chris. How are you doing today?

Chris Young:

I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.

Heidi Kirby:

Thanks for coming on. So let's dive right in. Why don't you just tell me a little bit about you your background and how you ended up in the l&d space.

Chris Young:

Sure. So right now, I'm the Director of Workforce Development at the Texas Department of Transportation, which honestly, when I started working there, I wasn't sure what job I was getting into, because Workforce Development sounds so nebulous, but it turns out that that's just what the transportation industry calls learning and development. It's kind of an old fashioned term. But that's the job. I started in 2015. And prior to that, I was working for a small business as a consultant building, learning and development programs for the intelligence community in Washington, DC. And then before that, I was working as a diplomat for the US Department of State overseas focus really on training foreign militaries and foreign governments on behalf of the US government. And then before that, I was in the army, doing whatever they told me to do. But mainly I was, I was a I was an Arabic linguist, before it was popular. And I spent a lot of my time training others. So I've always had a training and development kind of bent to my career and everything I've been doing. And now that I'm in a pure training and development role, I've really enjoyed the last six years.

Heidi Kirby:

Awesome, great. Well, thank you for your service. And thank you for all of your posts and comments on LinkedIn. I really enjoy following you and hearing about your thoughts. And I feel like we share a lot of the same opinions about things. So what kind of, can you tell me about kind of this whole idea of the great resignation, the worker shortage, and how does that fit in with the field of l&d right now? In your opinion?

Chris Young:

Yeah, that's a great topic to explore. Because I feel I'm a little biased here. I identify myself as as a Gen XOR. And as a generation X person, we've been referred to as kind of the saddle generation, the Forgotten generation, we've always been doing more with less. So for us to hear folks now talk about great resignations, and people aren't showing up to work. For us. It's kind of like, Yeah, no kidding, where the hell have you been for the last 30 years. So I do appreciate the fact that the great resignation is happening. But I think we're just seeing a lot of things kind of come together all at once. These are things that we haven't really noticed over the last 30 years. So think about the 80s, when, you know, a lot of temp workers weren't being counted as full time laborers, and they were underemployed. Think about all the all the moms who were expected to stay at home in the 80s and even into the 90s that weren't counted as part of the labor force. And right now we're seeing those people that have been previously disenfranchised, holding up their hands and saying, Ah, not this time. Y'all are treating us differently this time. And we're not going to put up with this crap. And I think that's a good statement. And the great resignation is a good way for us to realize we're seeing things that we've just ignored over the last 3050, even 100 years. So I've got no problem with the great resignation. If you're a crappy employer, guess what, you're not going to get employees and if this is capitalism, so we don't care about you, you'll be gone in 50 years anyways. So that impacts us and then in the l&d space and learning and development. It's the teachers. We all hear the stories, the teachers who were like I can't take it anymore. I think it was, is a I think it's the cover of Time magazine that has a woman with two master's degrees 16 years experience and she's basically has to use the Get through stamps. That's wild. And so now in learning and development, we're seeing folks who are like, Hey, can I make this switch? You know, Hey, I like the classroom. But I would rather be an instructional designer. What even is that? So I think we're seeing a lot of really cool people come into a field that didn't really realize it was kind of its own thing. So I think this is an exciting time for l&d. Honestly,

Heidi Kirby:

I agree with that. Yeah. As somebody who has spent the past almost year kind of trying to help mentor and coach and help those teachers kind of find where those knowledge and skill gaps are, and to help them move into the field, because I have so many people close to me, who are teachers and I and I saw what they went through. And just kind of, you know, I keep calling it like it is because I have no skin in the game. I keep seeing the administration, in schools kind of failing these teachers over and over. And, and I've said from the beginning, they're gonna blame it on teachers. Right, just read an article that that did blame it on teachers where the administration was saying that there weren't enough qualified candidates. And that's why we had a teacher shortage. Yeah,

Chris Young:

that is great. Oh, no, no, yeah. Yeah, for sure. When it comes to Yeah. qualified candidates. Yeah, congratulations. So if anybody's not paying attention, the United States has a very finite amount of humans in it that are available to work. And since June of 1999, every single year, the amount of people that are available to participate in the workforce, the workforce participation rate has been declining since 1999. Every day, you can tell someone today is going to be the hardest day for you to hire someone. And then you can say the exact same thing tomorrow morning, because it will still be true. And you can keep saying that through 2050. So everybody needs to realize, yes, there aren't enough qualified candidates and not will not be here until at least 2050.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, so So then, in that sense, is it an employee's market? Is this a market where those teachers because I, there's a couple of different different opinions, and one of them is that the market is super oversaturated, don't bother applying for instructional designer lnd jobs because you and everyone else is doing so. And then there's also this it's becoming more appreciated as a field and more, you know, invested in by different organization. So there's plenty of room for everyone, what's your thoughts?

Chris Young:

So my first thought are, when in doubt, apply. Always apply, no matter what, even if you're not qualified, it doesn't matter, you always apply, because the only thing I'm certain of is that you will not get hired, if your resume is not in the stack. That's the only thing I can guarantee. After that, then we need to talk about you know what it means to be in the learning and development space. It depends on where you are and what industry you're looking at. So traditionally, learning and development falls into employee performance, human performance, performance, excellence, organizational excellence, kind of in that human resources kind of frame. So if you're in a school district, it's, it's those folks who are responsible for professional development hours and that kind of stuff. That's where lnd would traditionally live in the private sector, or even the public sector. But then there are other weird places that you'll find it like over in sales, when your job is to teach customers how to use software and stuff like that. And then that job feels a lot different than what you would have found in a school district or in a traditional education setting. And those fields are growing just like everybody else's. There is no shortage of instructional design jobs out there. And even the more advanced stuff that's becoming what I think is going to happen over the next couple of years, is we're going to we're going to lift our heads up and we're going to stop focusing on purely instructional design. And it will morph into performance, coaching or performance enhancements. Like I always say the best training you get is the training you never realize you have it's that's it's very correct. It's very karate kid that's my favorite training movie is Karate Kid is Danielson is very upset. Know what he's doing until finally he realizes Oh, I'm getting psychomotor skills training that I didn't realize I needed to take the next cognitive step in my development. It's a great training movie. So I think we're getting to that point where instruction Rule system designers will come into a world where they're being asked asked to be performance coaches. And then they're going to come to the line, when they'll be asked, Hey, you know, how can we make this process better? You know, instead of sitting somebody down for eight hours of computer based training, why don't we just make a job aid that they can read when they need it, kind of training in that moment of need from Bob motors books? That's where I think it's going to get more exciting. And so even if we're saturating the market, once the market gets saturated, we'll push out into that kind of level of support.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, totally. So on the other side of things, what would you say that hiring managers and l&d are really looking for right now? What is going to give those new people new to l&d? Or people who are just trying to kind of move up in l&d? What's going to give them the edge?

Chris Young:

That's a good question. I think the easiest thing to to highlight is a portfolio. So we want to see that work has already been done. And that's maybe maybe you're thinking to yourself, oh, well, you know, I've been teaching in a classroom for the last 10 years. And I do whatever, you know, the curriculum standard is, but you've done other things. And the way you've implemented it in the classroom, are unique to you as a person. And so you can highlight that. And you've also done other things. And I say this to everybody who's been kind of, you know, trying to break into instructional design or learning and development is good instructional designers are good project managers, and everybody who's on LinkedIn or doing anything, they're all project managers, what, whether it's coaching a T ball team, or managing a PTA meeting, or just being responsible for this year's charitable contributions for your district, those are all unique and discreet projects that should be highlighted as part of your portfolio. Because as hiring managers, what we're looking for is we're looking for people who have experience in learning and development. But more importantly, we're looking for people who can execute. You know, it's great to have good ideas. But if we don't get to the first day of school with your class, then we got not fit. So we want something that's going to go into the learning management system, we want to see that you can finish a project, we want to see that you have a track record of performance. Anything that highlights those facts, checks that box for us. So we don't care if it was soft skills. We don't care if it was advanced engineering. We don't care if it was theoretical particle physics show us that you've finished something in some place. I think that's the key thing.

Heidi Kirby:

Great. No, I think that's really good. So I want to switch gears a little bit. Sure. And I want to kind of talk about your philosophy of kind of nonsense words. So you've mentioned innovation as a nonsense word in l&d. And then you also have in your linked in about section that ninja and unicorn do not appear on the O net search. So take that nonsense out of your job description. Can you tell me more?

Chris Young:

Yeah, I use that term nonsense in a very meta level as my own kind of jargon. So I even have an older LinkedIn post there about how your jargon is killing our meetings. I think there's, there's actual, and I'm gonna say bad words. So here's everybody's trigger warning. But this is a legit philosophical concept. The concept of bullshit is a very important concept in the learning and development field. Now, there's an actual definition. And I forget, you know, my apologies to the author right now of this philosophy, but it's we're actually doing research in my organization right now on the concept of Bs, and so I'll use that politically correct term BS. So there's a specific definition for BS. Bs is talking with no regard for the truth. It's different from deception. When you're lying to people or you're lying by omission. You know, you're doing something shady, but when you're be assing shot, you're talking with no regard for the truth. And when that enters into our interpersonal communications or organizational communications, it gums up the works. So when you go to a meeting with the IT folks, and they're trying to sound smart, and they're thrown around words that you've never heard of like Scrum, stand up and agile methodology Do you and other seemingly normal English words that have been repurposed into nonsense, then that messes everybody's meeting up. And I feel bad for synergy. Because synergy used to be a real word that meant something until we turned it into a nonsense word. And so I feel really bad for sinners. Sure. And these things come up, because, you know, I, I learned Arabic when I was younger on in my career, so it was always so telling, when I would have to go train in a foreign language, because then you have to translate everything. And when you're translating things, and you're thinking to yourself, I don't need to translate that because that's nonsense. And it has nothing to do with our learning objectives. And you just stand there. And then when people say, What was you just talking about for the last three minutes? And you're like, it was nonsense. That doesn't mean anything for what we're trying to learn here. And everybody's like, Oh, okay. It's like utilize stops utilizing utilize. But word is use, it works just as well. And it's only three letters.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, yeah. It's like, back when I used to be an English professor. And I could tell my students who had it, and it was very few and far between, luckily, but there were some students who I swear to you would take us of Soros. Right. And they would switch out words in their essays with bigger words. Oh, yeah. To sound smarter. Yeah. And when you were reading through it, you were like, you could tell right? You could absolutely tell that they did that. Because you're the meaning was like, just next to what it should have said, right. And so like, it didn't quite make sense. And you were like, what, what happens here? But there's also you could almost, you could almost do like, like a drinking game, or a bingo or something in some of these corporate meetings with like the, you know, sexy or jargon words, nonsense words, as you call them? Oh, yeah. You different organizations use?

Chris Young:

Yeah, we've done that before. You know, just just to keep things interesting, you know, to stay awake during meetings is, you know, you always have whenever anybody says synergy, or, you know, circle back, or touch point, you know, it's like, you really need this thing. And so my suggestion for l&d professionals were brevity is the spice of life, is to take everything that you have in text, run it through Google translate into Spanish, and then run it back into English and see if it's changed. If it's changed significantly, you probably don't need that word. You want to use the easiest word possible simplest language, we want to reduce the cognitive load for our participants and training just like we would for our students. So nonsense words, we have to get out of our vocabulary.

Heidi Kirby:

Nice. I'd love that. And I like the piece in your about that says Agile is often code for I messed up my schedule.

Chris Young:

Oh, for sure. Well, I'm a Project Management Professional, among other things, and the recent agile trend has, you know, it's impacted project managers. But I think most often, agile is code for I don't know how to plan my schedule correctly. And I'm just going to call it agile, and we'll call it a methodology. But really, Chuck, changing your schedule every single morning, and having ad hoc requests every single morning, that's not a project management anymore. That's just trying to put out fires and continuous operations. And continuous operations and project management are two different things.

Heidi Kirby:

Sure, well, and I think the same applies to learning and development too, right? I hear a lot of people say like, you know, in these new in these l&d roles, you need to be familiar with Agile methodology as it applies to l&d and to me, having agile instructional design just means more frequent touch points with your stakeholders and Smedes. It doesn't necessarily mean you know, that you need to have a certain methodology, or you even need to know about the Software Development Origins of it. It's just no, you need to have better communication with your homies.

Chris Young:

Yeah, it's like when we were having those old arguments of you know, hey, is is the is the methodology Addie? Or is it Sam? You know, we're, we're like, oh, no, you're supposed to go through this regimented process, or you're supposed to do this Successive Approximation Model where you try and get to market as quickly as possible and then You refine it. And it's the same thing with the Agile. Yeah, with everybody who's getting into l&d agile just means, hey, can you respond to last minute changes in your schedule and make sure everybody knows what the heck is going on? Yeah, you shouldn't be spending money on agile certificates or anything like that, you don't need that. It's everybody's qualified enough as it is. And I will point that out, too, because there are plenty of people in this space, who are trying to separate you from your money. And if you are a professional educator, and you already have a license to teach in a state, I'm pretty certain you have all the credentials that you need to be a learning and development professional. So don't let anyone snow you and say, Oh, you got to get this master's in instructional design? Well, yeah, if you want to, but it's not necessary.

Heidi Kirby:

Sure. 100% i 100%. Agree. And that's what I tell people a lot because I get, you know, educators who come to me who have doctorate degrees, right, in their respective fields. And they're like, do I need to go back to school for this? And I'm like, listen, I get it. Because I'm also pursuing a doctorate. You love school. So do I. But this is not necessary?

Chris Young:

No, no, it's not. And I mean, and the people you're going to end up working for, you know, they got a Bachelors of English, like in 1982. And I've never looked at the campus since. And so you know, don't beat yourself up.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the other things I want to address that's also in your about section of LinkedIn, I felt like we could make just this whole episode just me saying, Tell me more about this statement. Right. Is the the Kirkpatrick method hasn't been proven, but we should keep using it?

Chris Young:

Absolutely. Yeah, this is something I get into all the time we're talking about, we're essentially talking about program evaluation. And that's not specific to l&d. That's not specific to anything, every program in every organization needs to be evaluated for its efficacy. Now, where we get stuck in the school districts is, you know, we're killing and drilling kids so we can get them to pass a test. And that's the only measure of success we have is, Hey, how are they doing on on the standardized tests? And so that's what the focus becomes. And then your focus becomes your program evaluations, that strategy is, how are they doing at the core on the standardized tests? That's not a measure of success, but that's the best thing we have. The same thing happens with the Kirkpatrick method. And I'm, uh, I support the Kirkpatrick method, whether you do you want to argue about, you know, what's level three, and what's level four. But the basic concept of you know, hey, I've got to get everybody's reaction in the moment, which is very close to net promoter score for every other chemicals organization around here. The second level is the end, of course exam, you know, the pre post test, did they learn something? How can I see if they learned something? Again, we know that's not a perfect measure, just like standardized testing in schools. It's not a it's not a perfect measure of success. And then the third level of the behavioral change, you know, did they actually apply this in the workplace? The problem with that is that we're asking them, they're not qualified enough to evaluate their own perceptions. And they're probably really pretty biased, because they invested the time and training. So I know their data is poison. And the same thing with their supervisors, the supervisors said, Hey, I let them go for four days where they weren't productive. They were on overhead for four days. So yes, of course, it was useful, and they're using it. So they're poison to, because they want to perceive their decision to send that person to training as being good idea. And then the return on investment, you have nothing in those first three levels, that gives you any decent data to say, okay, the cost of the wars, divided by what we actually saved, divided by the efficiencies we gained equals x, and therefore it's great. And it's like, Well, is it great? Or, you know, you can show me how we saved 15 hours and how that equates to X dollars. But can you show me an alternative scenario, where you just put a sticker on the back of the sign that said, Don't put this up in a zone that's marked for less than 30 miles an hour? It's like you didn't show me that alternative cost there. So it's an imperfect program evaluation strategy, and that's why I say it's imperfect and it's unproven. And if you look in Google Scholar, you will find that not that much about poo proving the Kirkpatrick method, which is why I point that out. And then the flip side of that is, I say that we should all continue doing it. Because the fact that we're trying to evaluate a program is important. The fact that we're asking people, Hey, did you like the training, and they tell us, you know what, the room was too cold. That's not useful for the training curriculum. But it's useful to know how these folks felt about their experience. That's useful data. So we got asking that, and people expect it. People who go to a training event, if they don't get a level one survey, they feel like they're being robbed. And it creates cognitive dissonance. And then they're like, that wasn't real training. So I say just spend the money on the extra, you know, ask them three questions about their experience, that's fine. And keep trying to prove that your training works. And that I think, requires more sophisticated science than just a simple four step model that everybody thinks they can apply to everything.

Heidi Kirby:

No, I think that's a good point. And I think you've pointed out pointed out something that I often see as a disconnect in that, you know, we we, and I say we as in just general, corporate America have this idea of what education is and should be. And then they just carry that over into corporate, right? And they're like, well, training is where somebody who knows everything stands up in front of everyone else and tells them everything they know. And then they go and do whatever they do with that information. And, you know, if you're your boss, your hiring manager, the person who's in charge of ops has a degree outside of l&d. They don't know what else is possible, right? They don't know the, you know, different, they don't understand and they don't think, Oh, well, we could just put a sticker on that instead of doing a three hour training. Right. And so that becomes the l&d professionals responsibility. And where they can provide value is saying, No, we don't need to spend eight hours on training today, we can do this other method, or we can do just, you know, when I was working for NASA, and I was traveling to all these different NASA centers in the United States, I was like, I just kept noticing that in the bathrooms, there were all these different, for lack of a better term job aids, right, like, how to use the bathroom successfully at that building, or announcement. Announcement announcements are posted on bathroom mirrors, and on the back of bathroom doors. And it is crazy and wild. How often like that's used as a place to disseminate information, right? Like you wouldn't normally think of that. But it's a non standard way. And you have to kind of really think outside the box for some of those different things in order to best like you said, improve the performance. Right? Right.

Chris Young:

And that's what I think we're all about, and learning and development is performance improvement. So I will tell anyone, when we do that initial analysis, that the very last thing I'm going to recommend to you is training. And, and the training I recommend is probably going to be about 20% of what you thought you needed. The rest of it is all traditional gap analysis. You know, why are you not performing? What policies are in place? What it support? Who's doing this? Do you have the right staff numbers? Shouldn't we just outsource this? You know, why are we doing this? How does it tie to strategy? Once we answer all those questions, then we'll end up with this one tiny little thing that requires training, and the other 80% are interventions, performance interventions, but are not traditional training. So anybody who can have those conversations are great, and you bring up some good points. You know, this is what we see in school districts. I mean, the fact that we organize the I totally love watching the buses run and part of it is because I'm now a transportation nerd. But the fact that our society can get that many kids in and out of a facility that efficiently is amazing. All this stuff is out there, you know, the cones, the signs that you know, Teacher A through K this line only, you know, the crossing guards who are out there helping, you know the one way entry on the streets and it's now flashing 20 miles an hour and No, no cell phones. All of that is being done to manage the performance of everyone that's out there and We didn't all go to a formal How do you get to school training? As part of our back to school preparations, none of our teachers or administrators were asked, okay, let's go over a crossing guard protocol for all of our new students coming into kindergarten. That didn't happen. We all trained and we're performing in the moment and it works.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah, absolutely. As someone who my son just started kindergarten, and, you know, that was that was one of my husband's biggest worries was like, we're gonna put him on this bus, and hope he gets to where he's going. And you know, he was like, right, this isn't the bus drivers first time, right? You know, he's done this before, right? And I'm like, yeah, he's gonna be fine. You know, but the kid you know, I love him. And he's smart. But sometimes he doesn't even put his pants on the right way. He puts him on backwards, you know? So, you know, you're trusting him to get on this bus and get to school and get on the right bus to get home every day. And yeah, absolutely. It's, there's so many things in place that, you know, once you really become immersed in l&d, and you become kind of an l&d nerd. You notice all these little things in different places. And, you know, like, my husband and I went to a museum, and I was like, wow, whoever they've got, who's on like, the instructional side of teaching what is in this museum? It's just great, because there's so much useful but brief information, and you just start noticing in different places. Those very non standard or non instructional, right, non instructional interventions.

Chris Young:

Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I say the best training is a training you never realized you had when you're automatically performing. And it's second nature, and you don't think about it, it's invisible to you. So you don't see how much went into it beforehand. And that's when that's when I think that l&d professionals have done their best work is when someone performs exactly as they're supposed to, and doesn't realize that they were formally trained.

Heidi Kirby:

Yeah. 100%. So my last question for you. And I ask all of my guests some form of this is what resource website book, whatever it is piece of media, would you recommend for an l&d professional, who's like, Why do I keep hearing about this performance improvement? What what is up with this performance improvement thing? And what What connection does it have to l&d?

Chris Young:

Yeah, that's a good question. If I had to get anybody started off in the in a resource to look at l&d is, I always go back to Brian Chapman is it uh, he put together some research a bunch of years ago that is still relevant to this day at the Chapman Alliance, that talks about how long it takes to develop training. And he goes through computer based training, instructor led training, and how much it costs. You know, if it's a small level of effort, medium level of effort, I encourage folks to look at that so they can understand how much organizations are spending on training. It's a good benchmark, I use it as a benchmark. It's also a good benchmark. If you're going into the freelance world, if you're thinking, Oh, well, how much time is this really going to take? I think the Chapman Alliance, Brian Chapman's data is a good place to say, You know what, one hour of instructor led time could be up to 24 hours of my labor. So that's a good place for you to start. If you're thinking about, well, what should my rates be? So I would always send everybody to Chapman heights. And then other things I always like to look at. So we talked earlier about Gen X and how the saddle generation we've always been understaffed and we get it. One of the books I recommend that kind of frames that argument better than others is Louis hymens work temp. It really talks about labor in North America, and how what we thought about labor in the 60s 70s 80s and 90s was a really whitewashed and rosy version of reality that did not apply to most Americans. So the people that tell you don't apply the market saturated, you'll never get a job there. Those are voices of the 60s and 70s talking that do not make sense anymore. And I think reading that book really helps me understand just how different every single generation is when it comes to the labor force. And today's days are completely different from the 70s 80s 90s. So, you got to take that same adage that you do for your retirement is past performance is no indicator of future returns.

Heidi Kirby:

For sure. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been really nice talking to you and getting to know you better.

Chris Young:

Yeah, my pleasure.

Heidi Kirby:

Thanks again for joining me on the blog. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and review us on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you'll tune in again soon.