Copy

Welcome to issue #59!

This week was full of adrenaline at Offbeat! We've been working for 4 months now on launching a new version of the website, which also adds a bit of complexity to our project. The end goal is organizing all the knowledge we're acquiring and using all our connections in a way that will benefit L&Ds all over the world. We're trying to help you spend less time researching different subjects and use it to learn and improve your projects at work. 

Our first step was gathering all that we've learned and experienced with learning programs design in an end-to-end product:
Fundamentals of learning experience design. We'll go through using research tools and adult learning principles to put together programs that make a lot of sense for our audiences. 

✔️ If you're not sure if you should be joining, we're not either. So you can check
this self-assessment to help you decide
✔️ The format of the program uses many of the things we know about adult learning
✔️ It will take up to 5 hours a week of your time for 8 weeks, so won't be easy-peasy
✔️ We have 25 spots available
✔️ You can enroll until September 30
✔️ The program starts at beginning of October




Here you can see myself getting out of my shell to explain why, what, and how we're going to approach the program during those 8 weeks.


Can't wait to meet you,
Lavinia

This newsletter is built with the full psychological, design, development, and brainstorming support of Nifty Learning.
L&D Jobs of the week
L&D Newsroom
Some of us are lucky enough to be responsible for a large amount of money when it comes to upskilling and reskilling our colleagues. The author of this article makes a good point. Completion rates and satisfaction scores are not worthy KPIs of big budgets. You should go further, and he proposes some indicators we can use to measure impact.
"You are responsible for your own career. But in an organisation, the organisation needs to support employees with knowing what skills they have right now and where they can grow to". Loved this quote and the discussion between David Green and Rick van Echtelt, from AG5. Totally recommend it!
When it comes to building learning communities in the workplace, I think we should just look at it like any other external community, to make sure it succeeds. Out of the 13 engagement tips, I think it's really important to find the reason why you're gathering people in a community, and second to really get to know members.
Loved this case study as it gives an overview of a very interesting tool we can use when designing our programs. I'll leave here just the definition and challenge you to explore it further. The experience of learning about it is really, really cool as well! Behavioral mapping is "a systematic approach to identifying candidate bottlenecks... each of which is a possible intervention point."
Before applying what you learn, the second step of the sequence is understanding something. But how can you prove "understanding" and what does it really mean? These 5 concepts explained by Scott Young broadened my view of understanding and gave me some ideas about how to measure it.
My boyfriend, Alex, always tries to share with me leadership practices in his organization. This week, he talked about having a skip-level meeting with his manager's manager, so I decided to research the subject. It's so interesting that we already thought about sharing it with managers in my organization as well. Maybe you'll find it useful as well!
This report outlines 4 different stages of an L&D function, from transactional to high-impact. After defining each stage, it shows things like challenges faces by L&D teams at each stage during this year, budgets, resources, and capabilities across the stages of L&D maturity. Loved the structure and how insightful this was!
This article thoughtfully goes through why there's a need to look different at education and the four areas of innovation meeting changing needs of the lifelong learner, the authors observed: accessibility, social learning, creation spaces, warranting.
Let me just by saying I really appreciate the 6-months onboarding journey of Intercom. They go through product demos, monthly social connections, Q&As with product leaders, or helping people build internal networks. Beautifully done!
Older but really, really cool. This article goes through 4 of the problems with career conversations today and some ideas to improve them. The one I found to be spot-on is the difference between performance reviews and career conversations. 
Really loved reading about what unconscious bias training is, why it fails, and how using the environment is rather a better solution. Also, at the end of the resource they point towards three actionable steps of addressing bias in the workplace.
If you're looking for inspiration to build career progression frameworks here's an example from Dropbox. I really like one of their appendixes is about Promotion Principles, and one of their principles is no checkbox game. 
First, the main lesson learned for me from this piece was about the 4 stages of the psychological safety framework. This makes the implementation way more measurable and closer to be something actionable. Second, it goes to some concrete steps you can take to create a psychologically safe environment and the example of a software development team.
Overheard on LinkedIn
Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. We’re easily seduced into believing that learning is better when it’s easier, but the research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work, learning sticks better.

-makeitstick
Visual of the week
Performance Management

Once upon a time, before companies like Adobe & Netflix gave up their Performance Management Process, the concept was fuzzy, hard to implement and sell to our internal clients. Now, we're living in this new era, where the new frameworks are as hard to implement and sell as they were before.
Thanks to Kira Litvin, Daniela Ciuperca, Debbie Harrison, Abdulla Kalokhe, Andrei Szatmari, Gabriela Pana, Liz Stefan, Monica Tripp, and Roy Ben-Yehuda for sharing Offbeat in the past week.

If you found this issue insightful and think your peers could benefit from it, please encourage them to subscribe to the Offbeat Newsletter. Your support will help us grow this newsletter and bring it to as many L&Ds as possible.
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward

This newsletter is created through the joint efforts of Lavinia Mehedintu and Nifty Learning. Offbeat is our way to support the L&D community around the globe. We only share resources we find insightful, and we add our interpretation of how readers could apply what they learn. Could we be wrong? Definitely. We strongly encourage you to share your feedback and thoughts at lavinia@offbeat.works.

If you found this issue interesting, share it with other L&Ds in your network. You can explore past issues here.