Photo by Sarah Dorweiler on Unsplash

Here's just a small sampling of various learning and knowledge transformation launches, that I’ve led and supported over the last few years.

With a ton of hard work and travel in between, being given these types of opportunities constantly allowed me to grow and gain rich experiences that led me to meet great clients and meet amazing people across the world.

For that, I am eternally grateful.

detroit, michigan

Ford North America Launch 2016

Brrr…This project was actually the initial large scale North American launch I supported for Ford, across the USA and Canada. I traveled back and forth between my city of Toronto and Detroit (in the dead of winter, if I may add) for 3 months straight prior and post launch of their new online technology. This relationship and training evolved and continues to do so into over 25+ global market regions.

These pictures definitely say a thousand words, and is hands down, one of the greatest learning solution launches I participated in. A collaborative effort across 9 work streams, all working together in an Agile environment with one goal.

A powerful experience.

london, uk

A class made up of three regional support roles from the UK, to France and Germany launching a new technology based product for one of the largest and innovative automotive companies. Exciting!

Collectively, this class of 12 resources lived and worked across 6 countries and 3 continents. So much great conversation around cultural similarities and differences and learning about why experiencing travel around the world with this group was so important. I facilitated two weeks of history, culture, product specific and systems training for this lovely and very diverse team.

Unfortunately, the Queen wasn’t available for tea. Maybe next time!

pudong, shanghai

For this launch I spent 3 weeks away from home in Shanghai. The majority of the time was spent on a rigorous 1 on 1 Train-the-Trainer for the bilingual facilitator who would learn and effectively teach back to me what knowledge and training my team had created specifically for their regional launch.

During my 3rd and final week, I was lucky enough to sit in and partake in the new hire class, by observing the learners and supporting the facilitator while they all spoke in their native Mandarin language. Personally, I always found it so profoundly interesting to watch how other cultures interact with the training material and the experience our teams created. I definitely learned a lot from this project launch and why it is so important to integrate cultural nuances into training experiences.

This was definitely one of the most challenging but satisfying training launches in my career, absolutely one for the books.

quezon city, philippines

Now here was a uniquely energetic team who sang, danced, promoted and celebrated great customer satisfaction results and initiatives in a big way!

For this project, my team took on a highly complex and challenging migration of knowledge assets from one legacy system into a bright, shiny and new knowledge base platform.

After finally assessing thousands upon thousands of knowledge articles, job aids and process flows and migrating them into new templates and formats, while simultaneously aligning our timelines with the launch of a new site in two separate global locations and on-boarding 50 new employees, you might say these big smiles were a result of closing out the project on time but more importantly the end of a successful launch and possibly a happy sigh of relief.

manila, philippines

When you are dealing with a large scale successful company made up of thousands of employees, the pressure is on to create new innovative training that delivers the best quality and a performance based return on investment. This training and knowledge transformation project is definitely on my top 3 list of “most complex” learning solutions I have managed and implemented in the course of my career.

The instructional design team was strategically selected to work in a rapid development environment, while partnering closely with a creative media team that would develop experiential, highly engaging, interactive new employee on-boarding programs across 6 different lines of business.

The local leadership Learning and Delivery team in Manila seen in the snapshot above worked collaboratively with the design team across several months, weeks, days and tireless hours across multiple time zones to get the job done. After countless subject matter expert working sessions, system and tool walk-throughs, material and process flow reviews the 6 curriculum’s were finally launched.

The end results from the initial pilot classes demonstrated immediate performance improvements in speed to proficiency, training time reduction, average handle time, customer satisfaction and most importantly positive learning experience feedback from the participants.

Truly a labour of love.

kista, sweden

Tele2 Sales Training Workshop | January 2019

Sales training is a critical process, which ensures that a company is not misinterpreted by its staff. Effective sales training improves performance, builds a team and, ultimately, leads to more revenue. For this initiative I participated in a series of sales team onsite evaluation workshops with participants across mid to high levels of the organization. Each day brought brainstorm sessions with new sales leaders, technology teams and project managers. The ultimate goals were to improve the sales on-boarding experience, prospecting and pipeline management technology and strategies, and implementing new innovative ways to pitch and close deals.

The learning solution for this engagement included creating a series of custom designed sales training components that were tailor fit and then trained by highly experienced sales Facilitators across 4 locations in Sweden and approximately 75 cohorts.

Our team successfully led the design and project management efforts that resulted in great overall feedback from both the Sales Leadership team and at the participant level.

Köln, germany

This traveling launch project for Ford, gave me the opportunity to work alongside a small group of very talented individuals in Köln, Germany. Two of my participants had a combined tenure of 38 years working for the Ford Motor Company.

This learning migration project was slightly different from the other regional programs I had launched and facilitated in past years. What made this training unique was the way they interacted with one another and how they adapted to a fully English written curriculum wherein German was their first language. Immediately on the first day of on-boarding introductions, I knew this would be a tightly knit team. I spent two weeks facilitating a robust curriculum which included culture, history, values, communication, systems, tools, process flows and product specific modules.

This snapshot was from our final day, right after the final assessment. Another successful launch and more connections with amazing people.

BRAMPTON, ONTARIO

My most recent Instructional Design endeavor brought me to work alongside the Learning and Development team at Loblaw Companies Ltd., one of the biggest grocery retail chains in Canada.

I started as an individual contractor from November 2019 to August 2020, working solely on an instructional design project for the Supply Chain line of business developing blended learning learning assets in both eLearning and instructor-led format for 5 different business units. As an avid and loyal customer of anything Loblaw branded, this was a really fun project to work on, especially because I was extremely familiar with the products and services they offer.

Once my contract was complete, NIIT Canada brought me back to Loblaw a few weeks later as part of their dedicated team, to provide continuous learning design consultation, learning strategy solutioning and instructional design work across multiple other lines of business such as IT-system implementation/migrations (SAP, Blue Yonder/JDA, High Radius, Salesfloor to name a few), Marketing, HR (Workday), Data Management, Compliance Training and the like, as well as some of the other Loblaw entities (PC Financial, Shoppers Drug Mart).

In February 2022, I was moved into the Project Manager and Lead Sr. Instructional Design Consultant role, and led a team of five onshore Content Developers, and two offshore Media and Technical Developers that solely supported a multitude of Loblaw learning asset development needs.