The Learning & Development podcast is hosted by our Chief Learning Officer David James. Featuring L&D leaders from across the globe, each conversation focuses on hot topics in the profession. This transcript is from the conversation between David and Sean Cooper on transforming L&D using a data-driven and Agile approach.
David James: Welcome to the Learning & Development Podcast. I’m David James from Looop. In each episode, I chat with guests about what lights them up in the world of people development. This week, I’m speaking with Sean Cooper, who is Learning Demand, Design & Delivery Manager at Drax Group, having recently left Jet2, the airline company.
In this episode, we talk about Sean’s approach to L&D and the impact he’s had, especially in his last role. But before we do, if you’re enjoying this podcast, please do give us a five-star rating on your podcast app of choice. That way more people can find us. Thank you if you’ve done so already. Now let’s get into it. Sean, welcome to the Learning & Development Podcast.
Sean Cooper: Brilliant. Thanks for having us, David, really. Really looking forward to getting involved and having a chat with you.
David: Sean, it’s been a tough few months. First of all, how are you and what has lockdown meant for you at Jet2?
Sean: Like everybody, it’s certainly been a bit of a challenge these last few months. On a personal level, it’s been really good. Spending more time at home, remembering what it is to be a parent, and a family man more than anything else. The flip side of that is from a career point of view in Jet2, I’ve unfortunately spent mostly on furlough, which has resulted in me– the role being made redundant.
I was lucky enough to keep a core element of my team still in, supporting the L&D needs of the business, which I was really pleased for. They helped keep on driving forward some of the work that we’ve been doing at Jet2. There’s definitely been some pros and cons I think with the whole lockdown situation.
David: Yes, it’s the same everywhere. The airline industry has pretty much been decimated, hasn’t it? Because it’s expensive to run as much as anything else. There have got to be some short term cuts, but hopefully we’re all going to come out of this very shortly. I wanted to mention Jet2, first to say to the listener, to reassure them, you have just taken a new role, haven’t you?
Sean: Yes, I should’ve led with that. Yes, I’ve got a new role. I was fortunate enough to secure that while going through the consultation period, so it’s not even that I’ve kind of been unemployed, it’s straight out of one into another. I’m really pleased to be joining Drax Group, and continuing the great work in blended learning and digital learning. It’s a role that really jumps out and speaks to me, so very, very excited for that.
David: Yes, wonderful. We can’t talk about that role yet, but I did want to get you on because of the work that you had done at Jet2, which the word transformational is banded about sometimes for such a small amount of change. I don’t think that it’s an understatement to call it transformational what you’ve been through. Can you share with us some of that journey from perhaps what you were brought in to do, and what you inherited from there?
Sean: Yes, certainly. I love to think of it as transformation as well. When I joined Jet2 back in January last year, when I walked in, I didn’t really know what I was getting or what I was inheriting. At the interview stage, it was very clear that what they were looking for was somebody to come in and really transform what L&D meant to the contact center. The director was very, very supportive, forward-thinking in his approach to what he wanted from me.
There’s a real sense that they wanted to go on a digital journey, transform what it is to go, I suppose the traditional chalk and talk in the classroom, and revolutionise that. It was still, what am I getting, what are the foundations that are in there, what’s going to be happening, what have I got to work with? I suppose the answer is, I had a great team. I inherited a great team that had some absolutely fantastic knowledge of the business, the operations, the processes, but from a traditional training sense, it was very traditional. A lot of it was delivered in the classroom.
The kind of digital side of things was more content for your compliance, so health and safety, data protection, all this stuff that I think you get, that traditionally learning gets tarnished with, nothing really in the digital space from a personal development point of view. That’s where I started with this, I suppose, blank piece of paper. I always remember sitting down from my first meeting with my manager.
Again, she always had my back on this. She basically said here’s the brief, turn up with your notepad open, a blank piece of paper, and make it happen. I’ve never had that. I’d always been in the job involved with transformation digital throughout my career, both at Orange and at Sky. For somebody to actually turn around and say, “This is yours now, make it work.” I was like, “Right, okay. I can have some fun here.”
David: It could be as frightening as it can be exciting though, can’t it?
Sean: Yes, definitely. I definitely felt a sense of fear at that point, yes, but I’m motivated by the challenge. That challenge was one where my eyes just lit up and it was going to be interesting because I obviously had the people to consider as well. I always remember the first meeting I had with my team. One of the girls turned around and said, “Are you here to make us all holograms?” I was like, “No, I’m not that good. Anyway, maybe in five or six years.”
David: You mentioned there that digital wasn’t really embraced for much other than compliance. But you went as far as banning the term eLearning and becoming more user-centric. What was the situation there and what were you trying to achieve?
Sean: It’s historically– speaking from a personal level, when you mentioned the term eLearning, the first thing that jumps to my mind, it’s the dreading health and safety. We know we’ve got to do it, but a lot of it is big clunky courses where people have potentially just dropped a PowerPoint, put it on a certain storyline, put a bit of point and click animation, and then that’s it. As a user, I always remember sitting there and going through it because I had to and clicking it, clicking it, clicking it just to get to the end, and passing your test.
That’s not learning to me. That’s just getting the knowledge that you need to be able to say you’ve done something. It was definitely in that sense, that eLearning, that was what was meant when you said eLearning at Jet2, or even in Sky, in some respects when you said eLearning, it was the traditional compliance courses.
I wanted my team to really think differently about what digital is because digital learning to me is not about something that’s mandatory or something that you have to do. It’s about something that can enhance your job, whether it be prescribed or going to grab it yourself, getting that push-pull element right. I just thought that by changing the conception of my own team to think digital, not eLearning, will help them get their heads around actually what we wanted to achieve as a function.
David: You’ve just described the legacy of eLearning. It was great at taking the pain away from Learning & Development. My first few Learning & Development roles, or training development roles, there was no supplementary eLearning.
I was delivering the manual handling training, the health and safety, so much, and often 20-minute, half an hour courses for just a handful of people. eLearning came along and it’s like, “Great, I don’t need to do that anymore.”
You add into the mix as well that when perhaps an organisation’s looking to maybe get rid of people, the first port of call is, did they do the client’s training? It’s brilliant at backside covering as well. But what we’ve done, and the way that I interpret it, is that we didn’t get rid of the pain. We transferred the pain onto the individuals, and we made them not so much have an interactive experience with a lot of the face-to-face training on regulatory stuff.
A lot of it was dull as well and delivered at people, this whole load of, “We need you to know this,” rather than, “Let’s help to instill some judgment in you.” People are being expected to absorb this information, to understand enough for it to affect their performance, but more than anything else, devolving culpability from the organisation to the individual, we all got that.
But then you throw into the mix that without trying to understand what it is that people are trying to do or the challenges they face in service of those goals, here’s 20 minutes worth of content, that will help. It’s like we sullied the term. I’m still yet to see any good eLearning. I’ve been in Learning & Development for more than 20 years. I see that a lot of Learning & Development people have the IKEA effect when it comes to eLearning, that when they build it themselves, they’ve got an attachment to it. Although a lot of the time, I’m not sure whether you’ve experienced this as well, they’ll show you some eLearning and you look and think, “Oh my goodness.”
Sean: It’s really interesting because a lot of the stuff that was designed– I think the good thing is that, as I look at Jet2 now as I’m leaving, a lot of the stuff they’re doing now is really forward-thinking, not just from my team’s point of view, but the wider business. I’d like to think I’ve a little hand in that. You’re right; I always remember doing fire safety. We try and make it interactive, and you try to escape an office build, and then press it on the different things. Then, the message is lost because actually, all I’m trying to do is escape this fire in this building and clicking here and clicking there to get out of it. That’s what we wanted to change or what I wanted to change.
The design that I had at Jet2, I gave a very clear brief. I was like, “When we create the digital, we want to make it as short, snappy, and user-centric as possible. I want you to think if you’re on the phone, you’ve only got a couple of minutes to get the information you need. How are you going to bring that to life and bring it to the forefront for people so that it doesn’t feel like a prescribed eLearning course?” It’s a challenge to say to a designer, “I don’t want anything longer than five minutes long from you” because the go-to is let’s create a nice all singing, all dancing, but actually, to get them to think differently and think that actually an infographic is just as powerful as a simulation, which was a really, I suppose, challenging thing to do, but we got there.
Listen to episode 50 of the Learning & Development podcast here.
David: You and you moved from a courses approach to a resources approach, which is a principle of Nick Shackleton-Jones, from courses to resources. Can you describe what this is and what you did?
Sean: Yes. It’s interesting because the resources to courses thing came from listening to your podcast. I’m an avid listener, so when you asked me to join, it was a big tick for me. I was listening to the Nick Shackleton-Jones podcasts and I’ve read the book and I was really keen to think about actually when people are looking to do the job, they don’t want to set half an hour to go and do a piece of eLearning. What they want to do is to be able to grab something. What we did very early on in the journey is we had this mentality that when we’ve got the classroom, we’ve got the classroom. We’re going to use that to our advantage, but when it comes to the digital side of things, let’s forget about creating courses.
My end goal was to kind of go away from any prescribed courses, so everything was down to the user to go and get that. There is really an interesting concept around actually, let’s create resources. When you join a new company, when you join a business, what you want is a set of resources that can help you throughout your journey that you can go back to and that’s where we got to.
To the point now where people are coming back off furlough, and we’re not having to do webinars or bring them into the classroom. We’re giving them the resources that we created along the way, so they can find a whole host of resources. If you’re struggling with how to make an amendment, click on the amendment resource and then rather than it being a huge chunky piece of learning, what you’ve got there is a really simple step-by-step guide on how to do that and service the customer in the best way.
We’re giving them easy access to that information. They don’t have to get up off their seats when they’re in the office or put their hands up on Teams to get the team leader to help them. They can go and grab that and service it. I think that the best learning takes place when you’re in the thick of it, when you’ve got that customer at the end of the phone and you want it to do what you need to do. I think the resource mentality has helped us move to that.
David: It’s really useful when trying to understand resources, to think about the context. What you just described there was the context of somebody needing to perform. A lot of the time in Learning & Development because the learning event is away from the working event, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s face-to-face or eLearning. Let’s say it’s easier to imagine when it is face-to-face that somebody faces a challenge. They need to be able to deliver a presentation. They book on a programme; they attend a few weeks or months later. So, they’ve probably done that presentation. Then they’re on this course and they experience this thing, and then afterwards, they need to wait for another presentation. We do tell them afterwards, “You need to employ this quickly otherwise, you’ll lose what you’ve learned today.”
Again with eLearning, although– I think that there’s a lot of confusion around learning in the flow of work because you can do eLearning where you work, but to stop what you’re doing, and going to a programme that may or may not be addressing what it is that you’re trying to do, to absorb this for, again, a learning event, just in case there’s something useful that you can apply again in the future. What you’re talking about here is understanding the challenges that people are facing, or will be facing. Giving them enough information to act with confidence and competence, so that you can influence the way the work is done and ultimately, the results. It’s focused on doing the work itself rather than the learning, which is the absorption of information to recall at some undetermined time in the future. Is that right?
Sean: Yes, definitely. I think that you’ve hit the nail on the head. For me, we don’t track or report on any of the resources. Obviously, we want to make sure that our pages are being hit. The key for me is, with the resources, it’s what impact they have at the end of the day in the performance of those individuals. Has it helped them service the customers, has it helped increase sales? Has it stopped that traffic from going and having to find that information? I think we certainly experiment and we’ve learned in the flow of work, we’re not 100% there just yet, but I think we’re getting there.
A lot of what we’ve created in Jet2, and what my team have created, isn’t on an LMS or an LXP. It’s in a resource library that we’ve created using SharePoint that it’s always there. You don’t have to log into it, it’s on your desktop, you can access it whenever you want. It’s that shift away I think from not just traditional methods, but some traditional delivery methods as well as content methods that we’ve tried to adapt.
David: That’s the thing. You can experiment with digital, using the tools that you already have. The important things are that you gained some kind of adoption and it’s moving you towards achieving something important so you can see milestones along the way. Once you’ve got a proof of concept, then you can get smart, and you can map out your entire journey, and you can look at how you’re marketing that, AB test, and again smart technology can do some of that work for you. To get up and running– I was on a panel with Adam Harwood, at a CIPD conference a while back and somebody asked the panel, “What would you do if you’ve got an LMS full of content and nobody’s using it?” Adam leaned forward before anybody else and just said, “Certainly unplug it and see if anyone notices”. Which not a lot of people can do because there’s so much invested in it. Of course, when launching an LMS you spend a lot of currency as well as money getting buy-in for it, so not a lot of people can unplug it. What you’re describing here is that you’ve probably got tools that are easier to access and create content then track than an LMS, which again, suffers from the perception that a lot of eLearning does.
Now, you’ve mentioned that you previously worked at Sky. We had Tracy Waters on the podcast last year. She talked extensively about Agile. Now you experienced it there and you introduced it at Jet2. How did this work?
Sean: I think I started to dip my toes in Agile towards the end of my Sky career. The last couple of years I was working there I started to get involved with the big transformation projects. It became more and more the way to work with Agile and it really opened my eyes. I probably failed a few times when I was using it at Sky but those lessons helped me when I moved to Jet2. The first big project that I wanted to land was the transformation of one of the induction programmes at Jet2. I was working with no budget, very tight timeframes. To do that, what I realised is that Agile certainly was going to be the way forward to make it happen.
I introduced the concept to the team that we’d start to work in sprints. We’d have set topics that we wanted to get out there and we prioritised with the business which ones would be the ones we’d go after. Then I think the biggest game-changer was introducing the concept of using MVP, the minimum viable product. I’ve been guilty of this myself. I think this where my key learning for Agile at Sky came in that I always wanted the shiniest, the biggest and the all-singing, all-dancing solution, where actually, it’s a proof of concept. I don’t need that. What I need is something that will help me demonstrate to my stakeholders that actually this model that I want to implement is going to work. I wanted to make sure that they knew that we’d be working sprints, that we’d sat out and we’d achieve what we needed to achieve in terms of the content within these clearly defined areas that we were going to run for.
What we were looking for is an MVP that we could get out at different stages and test. We were turning around such a vast amount of content, so it was also a way that we could get these out to stakeholders and get them to sign off and agree on the different models and resources as we were going through. It was a journey because I can’t pretend to be a fully-fledged Agile practitioner. I’m still on my own learning journey with it. I think every time I move, I get better and stronger with it.
Obviously, at the same time as me adapting it yet again, I was having to coach a whole set of people that had only ever worked in Waterfall or that had always had a project that they’re just focused on solely. It was a good journey. I think the results that we’d seen from that first project where we used Agile. Every big piece of work that we did from then on it was that same concept. Daily stand-ups, stand-downs, working in sprints, always looking at getting the MVP out first with the view of then going back and putting the polish on it and adapting it once we’d seen the used-case and the business case be approved of what we were doing.
The induction model I’m talking about in particular went from one stage that we saw when we piloted it in June to something completely different that we’ve got now. The context is still the same but the content has been enhanced and built on as we’ve been going through it.
David: Sean, I’m always told that what listeners really want are detailed examples of what you did, and the results you achieved. Could you talk us through some initiatives that you led and the reasons you got involved, your approach, the results, and how you brought people with you?
Sean: Definitely. I think there’s probably a couple and they both link into each other really nicely and I think are really relevant to what we’re chatting about today. The first one was when I joined Jet2; I mentioned that it was quite traditional. Everything was done in the classroom and everything was referenced by what they called the manual. This was a huge 500-page paper-based red folder that every new starter got when they joined the company. I remember thinking, “How am I going to find what I need to find when I’m speaking to somebody and I’ve got this folder in front of me?”
The first thing that I immediately spotted was that there has to be a better way to do this. That’s where the resource library came to in its first iteration. What I started to do is look at how we could digitalise all of this content into something that could be put online, and not put on an LMS, just put online, so people can get easy access to it. They don’t have to go fumbling through all these different pages and that’s where the SharePoint resource site was born from. Transferring this to a digital space. First iteration of it was really straightforward.
I’ll be honest, we took all of the– everything was on PDF and PowerPoint, so we took all of the content. I just created individual pages for each of the different points in that manual with the team. Rather than just putting the PowerPoints or the PDFs onto SharePoint, we copied and pasted and put them onto webpages. It felt a little bit more user friendly. Was it perfect? No, but it was enough to get us to where we needed to be. That was, I suppose, the first part of it to show that actually not everything has to be done the way that you did it previously. We can take something that is known as the only way to get knowledge there and we can do things a little bit differently and make it a little bit more easy for the user.
While I was going through that what I then spotted was I’d been brought into digitalise or blend the induction. We had a lot of new staff joining the business that were being employed to work from home. Yet what we were doing is we were bringing them into either the office or a rented office for two to five weeks at a time and training them face-to-face in an office environment, where actually they’re going to be working from home. So you’re being employed as a homeworker yet you’re going to be in a static place for at least five weeks.
Initially, I’d set out that in terms of the inductions, it was going to be a two-year plan. We would probably only be implementing them roughly about now. Looking at what was achievable I’d spotted quite quickly that the sales induction, in particular, lended itself to quite a quick transformation in terms of what potentially could be achieved. This is where the first Agile project that I mentioned we really kicked in with. We started to look at what was included in that induction model. What could we do to almost break it and rebuild it and build a proposal that if you go to stakeholders, to the senior group and say, “Look, I want to break your induction and I want to pilot it in six weeks’ time”
“Really? Can you do it?” I was like, “Let’s see.” I said on the back of it, what I’m looking to do is I want to– I’ve become a big fan of data-driven. I want to be able to go back and say, ‘Look, I said I’m going to do something. This is what I’m going to do and this is what I’m going to impact.'” I only had three key metrics. I wanted to reduce attrition, improve speed of competency and increase performance. I suppose the basics really, but I wanted to be able to go and have some real tangible business benefits off the back of it. I showed them what I wanted to do. It wasn’t going to be a full digital induction.
There was part of me that actually wanted to get people to do it before they even joined. As soon as they joined, they’d be logged on from day one, taking calls, but baby steps. It was a blended induction model that I wanted to implement. I think that’s where I now see my passion is looking to blend the classroom and digital. What we did is we took this five-week, two weeks in a classroom three weeks in digital induction. We shortened it to a week if you like and only two days of that were in the classroom. This wasn’t so much about bringing people into the classroom to transfer knowledge. This was about giving them a warm welcome to the business.
One of the things that I wanted to do is add that human element to it. You’re going to be joining the business as a homeworker. You’re maybe not going to get to see a lot of your colleagues and the people you’re going to work with on a daily basis. What I wanted to do is have these first two days almost like a bit of a wild day. So, bringing them into the head office, getting to meet the leadership team, getting to know a bit about the brand, and also giving them the equipment as well. Giving them all of the key things they’re going to use, and introducing them to some of the concepts that we’d be doing as a learning journey.
That proved really successful. That kick-started I think everyone’s engagement with the business. Then what we did is we looked at “Right, how do we take these two weeks’ worth of content and make it readily accessible so that it can be done remotely and flexibly during that week as and when people need it?” It was a case of stripping it back, putting in webinars where needed and introducing the flip-classroom mentality to my teams. So that the guys that were delivering the webinars, we’d always have one at the start of the day. Which was about this is what we recommend that you go in and look at today. Then the one at the end of the day was getting back together and saying, “Right, who’s looked at the resources? What do you think that means in a real-world?” The classroom element of it, if you like, became more about actually adding the context around the knowledge.
I’ve become a big believer in knowledge without context isn’t learning. It’s when you have the knowledge and the context together seamlessly that the true sweet spot I think you hit it. That’s why I’ve topped and tailed it in that way. When what we did is we went and we created all of the digital resources that were going to be needed, that used to be 200, 300 PowerPoint slides and a few flip chart activities systems training that nobody thought you could do unless you have them sitting there typing away on their computer with you in the room.
A bit of simulation, some step-by-step guides, real blended content. I’m a very big believer in user-generated. We didn’t have the platform that allowed us to create user-generated content. What we did is we got out there with our iPhones and we captured the best. The top sales advisers, the training team sharing their top tips and created little videos that people could access. And that then started to create it and because we were working in sprints, we had the critical stuff that we knew we had to do that was going to be digital. We had the stuff that was less of a priority because we knew if we didn’t meet it or we didn’t get that done we could always do it in the classroom or webinar. We actually got to the point where we got everything done ready for the pilot.
Listen to episode 50 of the Learning & Development podcast here.
Feedback was amazing from the group, which is always nice, but I’m not here to get the happy sheets, I want to see what I can do. We followed that up with surveys around actually are you using the resources that we created? And we saw that actually after the inductions, we were seeing that with the new starters, around 74% of them were actually revisiting all of the resources and the stuff that’s on the LMS to actually help them with the job.
We also wanted to make sure that we created a sense of community. The Grad Bay became virtual. The Grad Baywas monitored virtually via Teams, it was the start of a bit of a Teams revolution at Jet2 as well. It wasn’t widely adopted at this point. It just exploded, which I think has helped where we are now with the current pandemic.
The on-the-job learning coupled with the resources and the digital learning journey that we created, we ended up having this, I suppose sweet spot, of blended virtual induction that I delivered six months ahead of where I wanted to be. It actually resulted in the end goal of getting new starters home working and getting a huge population of homeworkers at Jet2.
I think before the pandemic at the end of the year, we were at about 84% of the home working population. A lot of that was directly attributed to the new onboarding model. In terms of what I set out to achieve, I can’t go into the figures, but we increased revenue for every new starter that joined and the attrition dropped.
One of the big things that I wanted to do was test it. We had this group that we had on the pilot, but we also have a group that joined on the traditional model in January when I started. I had a very– Not a huge sample size, but I had two pots of people that have gone through both methods of induction that I could track not just their performance there, but the attrition data against as well. Which then allowed me to go back to say well I said that I was gonna do this, this and this and here you go.
Then, rolled out, the induction became BAU, not just for homeworkers, but for the staff joining the contact center as well. Instead of doing all the remote listening from home, they sat and buddied and did their learning at their desks when they needed to. It just became BAU from that point onwards.
David: That’s testament to the approach. I hear you. I’ve had conversations with L&D professionals who want to create a digital experience for, say, satellite offices away from headquarters. The conversation I want to have with them is how do you create something that at headquarters they say, “Well, can we have that too? Because it is so good.” It seems as if by challenging whether you need to bring people together for delivery, you create something that is so fit for purpose, which I love.
You’re laser-focused on solving real problems around attrition, around speed to competence, around revenue. The critical part of that, things that are really important to your organisation and therefore if they’re important to your organisation, it doesn’t take much for it to become important for either stakeholders or the individuals you’re seeking to influence. If your actions then are all in service of getting an uptick in that data, then you make sure that you experiment to move the needle. I absolutely love it. It’s textbook. You must look at it now and think, well, it’s totally common sense as well.
Sean: I kind of look at it and a lot of people certainly thought this is grand, but to me, it was just like, “Well, this is what we should be doing.” You mentioned the data side of things as well. It’s like, for me, if you want me to do something, tell me what you want me to impact. It just seems, like I say, so basic, but quite often missed. I’m so proud of that, what we did there. I think that because of that, when obviously this whole COVID situation kicked in, it allowed my team, but also the wider Jet2 contact center team to adapt to it because Teams was highly adopted, and resources have become more and more the norm.
The amount of times now we drag people out to the classroom is minimal. We don’t do that anymore. What we do is we look at creating the right resource for the right business need rather than actually– So when a process changed, traditionally it would be, “Right. Get everybody in. Let’s teach them about the new process.” Whereas now, it’s like, “Well, let’s create something that people can reference and not force it on them and they can get it when they need it.” It’s been good.
David: Of course, you were then recognised with the Silver Award at the Learning Tech Awards, which must’ve been a very proud moment for you and your team?
Sean: Yes, hugely proud. I’d always set myself a goal when I joined Jet2 that I was going to win an award by 2020. That’s what I wanted to do. It was just a little personal goal of mine that I wanted to get recognised and I suppose have a bit of an ego boost really more than anything else. When I won it, it wasn’t the award that made me proud; it was the fact that my team won that award. I think that for me, everything that I’ve done in Jet2, learning-wise and digital and transformational-wise has been fantastic. But the team and the way they’ve adapted and evolved to the point now that I can step back and know that my legacy will be carried on by the team that’s still there, I think that was the proudest moment.
It wasn’t about winning the award; it was about the fact that a designer that has never been a designer before had designed this induction programme and won an award on it. A team that has never really embraced digital before got behind this and backed it and won it. That to me was the proudest moment. The people side of the transformation, I think it’s quite often forgotten about. What my team has done, they’re not my team anymore, but the journey they’ve been on. I couldn’t be prouder of that and obviously, the industry saying yeah, you’ve done a good job.
David: I’ve always found that influencing the Learning & Development team themselves to do something different is the hardest part of that change. Employees, if you’re giving them what they need when they need it, during periods of adaptation, they jump on it. As long as you don’t remove the stuff that they enjoy. It’s almost like you can’t be all-digital, there’s still got to be an opportunity to come together. It’s almost as if you can’t be seen to be taking stuff away, but largely, you give people what they need when they need it in order to perform and they’ll jump on board.
Stakeholders, it’s difficult because of the transaction of buying and selling training. Stakeholders asking for it, selling it to their staff, asking for it with L&D. It’s a long-established trope. If people know how to engage in that. Of course, you can influence stakeholders with data as well and talking about what they really want to see that’s different, but the L&D team, to start unpicking some of that know-how around creating and delivering learning, rather than facilitating and achieving real results via experimentation with Agile and resources and workshops rather than training, that’s the tough part. I don’t know whether that was your experience, but you have always said your team was great.
Sean: Yes, it is. It was a journey for some of them. A lot of people adapted a lot quicker. In the end, everybody did, but there was certainly that challenge. “What do you mean, we’re not going to sit there and tell these people this process? We need to tell them. We need to tell them how to do it.” I’m like, “No. Trust me. We don’t need to tell them.” “We can’t just let them do it.” “You can. Just chill.”
I suppose for a lot of people, you’re a subject matter expert and you’re the fountain of all knowledge. Whereas, all of a sudden, you’re not. You’re just just pointing them in the right direction now. You get a team, you message, “Can you give me this information?” “No, why don’t you go check this instead?” It’s that fear of actually, “Well, if I’m not the fountain of all knowledge, what am I actually here to do?” It took a while, but that team now, I think that– I think that, I’ve got no doubt I’ll be reading about the success that that team will still have. If you leave a job and you know that they’re still going to succeed, I think you’ve done your job that you were brought in to do and that’s the way that I’m looking at that side of it.
David: Well, Sean, I’m assuming that once you had a more traditional approach to L&D, looking for learning needs, leaning heavily on classroom training as the cornerstone of any solution and procuring or building eLearning, but what prompted you to, can I say, swim against the tide and to change and modernise?
Sean: I certainly did. Like any others, I think initially when I started in L&D, my first job was to stand in a classroom at Orange and deliver briefs on bonds and tariffs. It was literally, “I’m going to stand here and talk at you and you’re going to take it all and then go away.”
After that, I first got into design, really. My first port of call design, it was when the big accelerated learning boom happened. Everything was flip-chart oriented. “Let’s create a new flipchart.” I always remember watching the pilot of one of the courses I designed and one of the delegates turned around to the trainer and said, “You’re going to make us do another flip chat now, aren’t you?” It was at that point I was like, “Oh god, there’s got to be a better way to do this.” I think it was the fact that here was me thinking, “Nobody wants PowerPoint.”
We’ve had it driven into us that effective facilitation, getting people to create posters and let your people get creative, but then that’s not what everybody wants and there’s only so many times during induction that you can say, “Right, grab a piece of flip chart.”
That moment the trainer was just about to say it and the delegate said it I was like, “Right, things need to change.” When I joined Sky, initially I joined as a trainer, but a year and a half into my journey at Sky, I got the chance to set up and I managed the design and consultancy function within the retail estate and that’s really where I wanted to challenge what traditional training was.
We still did a lot in the classroom, but I think what we did in the classroom was blending classroom and digital. I had this realisation a few weeks ago when I was reviewing some old photos on my Mac and about five years ago me and my designer at the time we were out down in Bristol videoing one of the retail stands setting up their own retail stand that we then used as an instructional video that we pushed out to the estate, but that’s where the real passion for it started and I think from that point onwards it’s always been about how do we create a user experience and I think that’s it.
That’s why I decided to swim against the tide; I wanted to put the user at the heart of everything that I do and everything that my teams create. Everything that I roll out is as an end-user is it fundamentally going to help me do my job? If you are going to drag me into a classroom, is it going to be a solution that I can have a real experience about?
I listened to a podcast you did with Danny Seals and I know he’s very big on experience design. It really resonated with me that actually we’ve got to create experiences for these people because if we don’t, how are they going to remember what we’re doing? Whether it be digital or classroom-based. That’s what made me swim against the norm I suppose.
David: Sean, my final question then, if the listener likes what they’re hearing and would like to move towards your approach as we said, embracing data more, experimenting, if not going fully Agile, then certainly experimenting with the approach, being more performance-focused and therefore using resources and as you mentioned only dragging people to the classroom when it’s really necessary, when it’s an important experience.
We also know that there are constraints around L&D and largely the expectation from within their organisation, perhaps their line manager in L&D, or for any other reason they perceive that they can’t change. What advice would you give to them about how they can progress both their thinking and their practice in order to be where you are?
Sean: I think the first thing I would say is to find a believer. That sounds a bit cheesy but find an advocate within the business that backs or believes in this approach. I was quite lucky that the director that I was working for in the contact center was a big believer in this approach anyway, but it was about actually finding somebody, maybe not that senior that could get behind it and having them as an advocate for your approach helps to drive that traffic because I think that you’ve got to think about stakeholder groups in particular that you’re trying to influence.
They may be very stuck in their ways, and there were quite a few people that I came across in Jet2 where I had to really work hard to get them behind. What’s helped me is having those pockets of enablers within the business that really believe it, and the other thing that I think is fundamental is the data side of it and being able to say, “Let me, pilot something first.”
Because I think that quite often and I’ve certainly been guilty of it in the past, you rush straight out with an end product. I think if you can take the time and pilot something. The sales induction is a key one. Piloting something that big it doesn’t have to be as big as that, but because I was able to pilot something and be able to then go back with the data and say, “Well, actually look, this is what you’ve seen on the back of it, this is what this approach can do.”
Like you said earlier on, data speaks volumes for a lot of the senior stakeholders and that I think was the key. My key takeaways are, find somebody that can be an advocate for what you’re doing and use the data to your advantage.
David: Fantastic. So, Sean, if people want to follow or connect with you on social media, how can they do so?
Sean: LinkedIn is probably the best, I’ve not been as prolific as I like on there but I am planning to up my LinkedIn game moving forward. Sean Cooper on LinkedIn is definitely the best bet to get in touch with me.
David: Wonderful I’ll put the link in the show notes, but thanks Sean, this has been a fabulous conversation and thank you very much for being a guest on the Learning & Development Podcast.
Sean: No, thanks for having us, it’s been amazing. Cheers, David.
David: I’m often asked, “Who’s doing great stuff, that’s forward-thinking and successful in L&D?” And I’m always heartened when meeting people like Sean to know that the answer is, more people than we know. It’s important we continue to share stories and profile professionals like Sean, who show the way forward is less about new and novel and more about experimenting to make a demonstrable difference.
If you’d like to get in touch with me, perhaps to suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, you can tweet me @davidelearning, or connect on LinkedIn or Facebook, for which you’ll find the links in the show notes. Goodbye for now.
Sean is Learning Demand Design & Delivery Manager at Drax Group, having previously been L&D Manager at Jet2. He is a forward-thinking, outcome-focused L&D leader who uses data, experimentation, Agile principles and digital-first solutions to affect the way the work is done and desired results. In recognition of this, he and his team at Jet2 achieved the Silver Award at the Learning Tech Awards
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