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June 8, 2023 • 15 mins
How do you build an L&D team from scratch? Tim Barnosky of Innovative Solutions is currently in the process of answering that question. Today's podcast revolves around his vision and the challenges he anticipates.

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(00:09):
Welcome everyone to another episode of TrainLike You Listen, a podcast about all
things learning and development and bite sizechunks. I'm Brian Washburn. I am
the co founder of a company calledEndurance Learning, and I'm also your hosting
and today I'm joined by a highschool friend of mine, Tim Barnaski,
who is the manager of training anddevelopment at Innovative Solutions. We'll get to

(00:31):
Tim in just a second. Today'spodcast is really part one and what we
hope to be a two part serieswith Tim that is going to follow his
path as he builds out an internallearning and development function from scratch at his
organization. Today we're going to talkabout his hopes and dreams and his vision
for that function, and we'll checkback in with him toward the end of

(00:51):
the year to compare what he hasto say with how things actually go over
the next few months. Before weget to any of that, I do
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(01:12):
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(01:33):
him or through all the formalities.I'd love to introduce you to the world
here, and how we normally dois we let our guests introduce themselves.
You seen exactly six words, sohow would you introduce yourself in six words?
I would say for that, Ihave a unique set of skills and

(01:53):
it sounds very Liam Neeson from Pacan. You know I have a very you
know, a unique skill that.So I'm curious before we get into the
actual questions here, what are someof those like what's been your career path
to getting you to designing a trainingprogram internally? Yeah? Sure, so
you know it's an unusual pathway forsure. The high level, the ten

(02:15):
thousand foot view as I went fromlive concert production to broadcast journalism to instructional
design, certification, exam development,and now I am building out an entire
L ANDG program from the ground up. And you know, I fully understand
that that's atypical. It's actually afavorite SME story at our dinners during development

(02:37):
workshops. But the audio production workedvery much fed into shooting your own video
and tracking your own audio as abackpack journalist and you know, using that
technology to help tell your story right, deliver really important information in a way
that makes sense to people and ina way that lets them know why it's

(02:58):
important to them and how it affectsthem. And that experience rolled into E
learning development quite nicely. You know, you're writing for the ear, you're
delivering content, You're delivering the youknow, the with them, the what's
in it for me and why thismatters? And you know, from there
I really kind of took hold withjust the content development side of things,

(03:19):
moved into ilt development, custom coursewaredevelopment, and then you know kind of
got pulled sideways into certification and youknow, this unusual or unique set of
skills has really been helpful the entireway. And so now you've been brought
into an organization to build out thelearning function. Before we get into that,
you tell us a little bit moreabout what Innovative Solutions does. Yeah,

(03:43):
sure, so. Innovative Solutions theRochester based company that we've been here
four round thirty four years. Effectively, we are a managed services provider and
an IT consultancy. Our main focusis in the areas of cloud migrations,
managed services, so you know,up to anything including fully managing the IT
infrastructure for our customers, and wedo a lot of software development. Our

(04:08):
big focus now is of course thecloud migrations are a huge part of that,
and through our partnership with AWS anda strategic agreement we have with them,
we are pursuing a pretty bold goalof bringing hundreds and hundreds of new
customers onto the AWS cloud. Froma consultant perspective, so in a nutshell,
that's what we do. They startedliterally with phone systems and mainframes and

(04:31):
have sort of grown and evolved withthe technology over the years. And you
know, again now very heavily focusedin the cloud and the training that you're
building out. Will it be customerfacing or will it be internal or will
it be both? So for nowis entirely internal training. Right. With
this collaborative agreement we have with AWS, we are going to experience a lot

(04:54):
of growth over the next three years. We have to build out our service
delivery teams, our tech teams obviously, have to build out entering, the
sales teams on you know, prettycomplex technology, as well as structure a
formal like onboarding program that's going totouch every department in the organization. So
for now, it's you know,entirely internally focused, but we support customers

(05:18):
and one of the ways you dothat is helping them learning these technologies as
well. So I certainly anticipate that'sgoing to evolve into a part of this
program over time. And so,and I think you're starting to answer this
a little bit, but let's answermore completely based on what you know so
far. Why did the company decidenow was the time to build out an

(05:39):
internal learning function? Is the companygrowing, doubling, tripling in size,
and are you designing learning for theentire organization or is it just one specific
part of the organization, Like isit specifically for leadership development or sales enablement
or something specific like that. Yeah? Sure, So the reason why now

(05:59):
is the right time is because ofthe anticipated growth. Right, this strategic
agreement has some pretty lofty goals,some pretty ambitious, bold goals, and
that will effectively more than double Idon't think it will triple the size of
the organization in the next couple ofyears, but it's certainly going to more
than double it. And the training, the learning and development has just been

(06:20):
organic so far. It's a smallenough organization currently around one hundred and twenty
people, but if that grows thecloser to three hundred, just that sort
of ad hoc one to one interactionor you know, occasional meetings where you
know, a more senior person willget two or three other folks up to
speed or help them prep for acertification exam or something like that isn't going

(06:42):
to cut it. It's not goingto be scalable, it's not going to
be consistent, you know, acrossdelivery teams, across the technical teams,
and you know, so the needis very clearly there, and I think
now really is the right time tobuild a more formal, structured program.
And this will touch everybody in thecompany, right, Like I already mentioned
a formal onboarding program. You know, it shouldn't matter if you work in

(07:05):
finance or IT or sales. Youknow, that first introduction to the company
and the who we are and whatwe do, you know, right from
that first day, that should beconsistent, right, and that should be
delivered in an engaging manner. That'sgoing to help get people excited about the
journey that they're on right the paththat they just started. But it also

(07:28):
has to be really informative and thereis a lot to learn when you come
on board somewhere, So just makingthat consistent in getting people familiar with where
to go, where the tools are, what they use, will be a
really important part of it too.And then I'll just continue to work with
all of the managers of the variousfunctional teams throughout the organization to support them

(07:49):
in any way that they need.And one of the first things we're going
to do with that is define reallyclear development paths, career journeys, career
paths regardless of role. And sothat's very clearly you know that's going to
be touching every single department pretty regularly. Absolutely, So if you think about

(08:09):
what you're doing right now and kindof the vision that you have, and
then if you put yourself into atime machine that goes to a year from
now or two years from now,what would indicate Yep, the organization made
the right call and building out aninternal learning function and it's been successful.
Because how'd you finish that sentence?Yeah? So that I think it's pretty

(08:30):
straightforward, right. If we areachieving our strategic goals and we are reducing
ramp up time for service delivery teamsor team members or folks on the sales
team to the point where they're reallyproductive and can jump in and help push
us in the same direction with theseprojects. If we established KPIs, you

(08:52):
know, for these timelines and productivitylevels and sales numbers, and we're hitting
the goals that we've established for ours, I think it's going to be pretty
fair to say that, you know, it was a successful program. And
honestly, I think feedback from theteams, from you know, the folks
I work with is going to beimportant too. Yes, I now see,
you know, a future that's clearlydelineated, and I know what I

(09:16):
have to do to work toward eithermoving into a different type of role or
advancing in mine, and they're ableto do that. And we're promoting people
and we're growing the number of skillsthat we have in order to support our
customers. I think those are goingto be the key indicators for us that
you know it was the right thingto do to bring this in house.
Yeah, and now you have ablank slate in front of you. What

(09:37):
are you most excited about when itcomes to this opportunity. Yeah, so
the blank slate is the most excitingpart of it for me. I've really
been fortunate enough multiple times to eitherbuild something from scratch, as you know,
a one man band really just bymyself, or getting in really early
on a team that's about to rebuildthe program and grow, and that's incredibly

(10:01):
energizing. So just in and ofitself, the opportunity to do it again
is wonderful. But you know,beyond that, it's really freeing. Right.
There isn't anything to fix or reviseor kind of the momentum that something
existing has. If you want topivot, if you want to shift,
you have to nudget, you know, in more to the direction that you

(10:24):
want that heading. So not havinganything there to fix is really refreshing.
Being able to design an instructional designmodel in a way that's going to be
super effective for this company and focusfor the various team. That's really exciting.
That's really interesting getting to pick thetooling, you know, deciding how
we're going to do rapid e learningdevelopment, how we're going to host this

(10:46):
content, how we're going to tractpeople, and being able to pick something
that again is really going to workfor the organization and ultimately our customers,
because that's the end goal is youknow, where there to help them transform
their businesses through technology, and youknow, I get to play a pretty
big part in picking the tooling andthe instruction and how we're going to deliver

(11:07):
that, and you know, howwe're going to incentivize it, how we're
going to you know, really beable to make every decision or influence that.
It's an incredibly energizing thing. Howabout on the flip side of it,
when you think of challenges, whatdo you think they are going to
be some of the biggest challenges forme? I know that when I have
a blank slate, it is exciting, but it's also incommodating, right,
It's just that blank piece of paperand then I sit there and stare at

(11:30):
it, and then I start scrollingthrough social media because I'm not sure what
to do with this blank slate?What do you think are going to be
some of your biggest challenges as doyou build with an eye towards showing the
organization that they made their eight callby investing in training? Sure? Sure,
no, great question. So yeah, the blank slate really can elicit
a sort of paralysis response, right, I mean where do you start first?

(11:54):
And it is a challenge, right, and that will be part of
what's tricky here. But we havesome pretty clear priorities or around what we
need first, what we need second, and so there's a little bit of
direction there. I think the realchallenges are going to be that I really
do need to start building in parallelcontent for a pretty disparate group of teams

(12:15):
that do very very different things.So managing the balance of you prioritizing the
top one or two things that weneed to work on the training programs that
really need to push forward first withnot leaving anybody out or behind, and
building in parallel with some of thesereally really big priorities. What we really

(12:35):
need to have a smooth, youknow, from day one onboarding to proficient
kind of process and ramp up intimeline. So that's going to be one
of the challenges. But you know, this is it, and this is
the clouds. Things change quickly.We want to grow quickly, and the
people that we need to train arevery very busy supporting customers and selling and

(12:58):
keeping the of the operations going,including internal I T folks who may not
directly be supporting customers, and totake them off of the floor for any
period of time, you know,has a consequence, right, it's a
tradeoff. There is you know,some balance that you have to find when
everybody is very very busy all ofthe time. And so if I think

(13:20):
the challenge there is in how wedecide to structure the content to chunk it
into really really digestible, manageable bitesthat still leave the learner with something they
don't forget because they were only ayou know, an e learning or watching
a video or reading something for tenminutes and then they get back right back
on the floor and start helping acustomer or making calls. So that part

(13:43):
of the strategic design is going tobe very very important for a company like
ours. Yeah, I mean fromsomebody who just takes a look and read
through all of the stuff. Whenit comes to learning, and development.
I'm jealous because, I mean,you have this blank late and you're talking
about doing all the right things.I'm really excited to see how this goes.

(14:03):
I think that we should check backin maybe in November or so,
once it actually starts, to getoff the ground and see how it goes.
Yeah. Absolutely, I'd be honoredto come back. Well, Tim,
good luck with this. Thank youeveryone for listening to another episode of
Train like You Listen. If youknow of somebody who might find today's topics
about building out an organizational learning functionto be helpful and important, go ahead

(14:24):
and pass along a link to thispodcast. If you are interested in learning
more about a broad range of learningand development strategies, some of which Tim
even touched on in this podcast,you can pick up a copy of What's
Your Formula Combined Learning Elements for ImpactfulTraining, written by Yours Truly. You
can find Amazon dot com and untilnext time, happy training everyone. This

(14:46):
week's podcast is sponsored by Subbox.Sign out today for redable assaboxufly dot com.
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