Episode 27: Lean L&D: Maximum impact,
minimum resources

Host: [00:00:00] Welcome to Talent Talks, the L&D podcast about the future of work and the talent driving it forward. The world of work is changing fast, from AI reshaping strategies to new definitions of success, and the push for people-first mindsets. Learning leaders are being asked to do more, do it better, and do it faster than ever before.

Together, let’s learn, relearn, and sometimes even unlearn what L&D can look like in today’s world. I’m your host, Gina Lionatos, and this is Talent Talks.

Talent Talks is brought to you by TalentLMS, the easy-to-use training platform that delivers real business results from day one. Learn more at [00:01:00] talentlms.com.

On today’s episode,

Michelle Parry-Slater: Content creation is gone. AI can do that for us in a heartbeat. What we need to do is make it context-rich to our organization, because content alone cannot build a learning culture. 

Host: What do you do when your company is growing and the need for training is increasing, but your training budget isn’t? Our guest today Michelle Parry-Slater has spent the best part of her career helping organizations solve these kinds of issues. She’s here to discuss what it takes to stay smart when scaling L&D, from choosing the right tech to keeping content relevant, and how to get buy-in when budget isn’t on your side.

Stay with us.

Michelle, we’re so excited to have you with us today. Welcome to Talent Talks.

Michelle Parry-Slater: I’m really honored to be here. Thank you for having me as a [00:02:00] guest. 

Host: I’m super excited. I think we’re gonna unpack some really valuable strategies to enable world-class training for those companies that have limited resources.

And let’s face it, that is a reality for many small to mid-sized businesses out there. So let’s start with a big picture view. Uh, Michelle, we’ve seen a real shift in employee expectations around learning over the last few years, especially as younger generations enter the workforce. From your perspective, how have these expectations evolved more generally speaking?

Michelle Parry-Slater: I think that the expectations are consumer grade, so we’ve always had a little bit of a disconnect, I think in, um, in work where we, perhaps since the iPhone came out, we’ve had better technology in our pocket than we have at work. And so the challenge that we have is technology that’s coming through for work needs to be of that consumer grade.

‘cause people’s expectations are, it’s instant. It’s when I need it. You know, no one’s waiting six months to get [00:03:00] put on that leadership course. They’re watching YouTube videos from people like, well, my favorites, David Marque, or maybe from, uh, you know, Daniel Goldman. They’re not waiting. And I think that type of, uh, approach cuts across all the generations.

You know, we, we’ve got the skills in our private lives to certainly use the technology and the expectations I think are higher now for learning and development teams within organizations, which can feel frightening for smaller businesses because we don’t have the budgets to match those. But there’s always something you can do.

Host: Of course, responding to these evolving expectations is one thing, and delivering on them with limited resources, as you’ve just mentioned, is another. And I think that kind of brings us to a real tension point for many SMBs, which is how to make meaningful impact without those enterprise-sized budgets.

In your experience, and I know you do have a lot of experience in this space, what is the first mindset shift that [00:04:00] L&D leaders need to make when they’re trying to create high-impact learning with limited resources. 

Michelle Parry-Slater: I think the mindset is that move from content being the king. For me it’s about context.

In the olden days, let’s say, when we used to just produce courses or we used to offer courses, or if you were lucky enough to have the budget to outsource to third-party providers and uh, send your people off on courses, then it was all about the content. But actually, it should never have been about the content.

It should always have been about the impact. It should be. Why are you doing what you’re doing in the first place? Why is there a problem? What is the problem that needs to be solved? Now, if you’re really, really clear on that, then you can be really, really targeted with your response. So some people might say in a small organization, well, I would never include coaching in my learning and development approach. But actually imagine this, you could put something together and target everybody because it’s cheaper and easier to [00:05:00] target, you know, a hundred people in your business when actually, if you really dig and you find the problem is five people, maybe you’re in a call center environment and uh, you’re taking orders on the phones and maybe, you know, most people are really great at closing the deals, but then five people are consistently not actually making the sales. So if you were to target those five people with a coaching intervention, maybe an internal coach, maybe a mentor from the pool who are really good at closing the deals. That seems like potentially an expense where you’ve got a lot of people, a lot of time invested, and if you are using an external coach, a lot of expense for that.

However, what you haven’t got is you haven’t really frustrated and annoyed everybody. ‘cause most of the people are doing a really great job. There’s only a very number of people not doing such a great job. And so when you sheep dip everyone through what seems like a cheap intervention. The cost is not the pound, shillings, and pence, the dollars and [00:06:00] cents, whichever country you are in.

The cost is actually the cultural impact that you’re making, the annoyance that you are creating in amongst everybody because they’re having to do this e-learning, which they’re not interested in, they’ve got no need to do. So for me it’s not just about the monetary cost, but it’s also we need to look at that cultural cost as well.

Does that make sense, Gina? 

Host: It actually makes perfect sense, and I think this can make such a big difference in the two kinds of aspects that you’ve spoken to, which is firstly the impact and secondly the culture because these are two ongoing issues for small to mid-size businesses, right? L&D’s often seen as, you know, a nice-to-have.

It’s often the first thing to get cut when times are a little bit tough. But by being more targeted within the context of this is why you need this training, rather than let’s give everybody the same training, which in many instances they do all need the same training. There are some things that everybody needs to brush up their skills on or from a [00:07:00] compliance perspective, but I think that kind of targeted problem and solution approach makes a whole lot of sense to me.

Michelle Parry-Slater: It means that, I mean, if you imagine you’re one of those five people and you, you are being, you know, said that there’s a challenge here. How can we help you in a really personalized way? Perhaps it is get you a mentor. Perhaps it is get you a coach, and you’re thinking, wow, they’re gonna invest in me, the individual.

Then really, your motivation also goes up for that learning, and the engagement for that learning goes up, and therefore, you are more likely to take on board the messages that you shared. That makes better impact. And so I actually think targeting, using your spend, what little you have, spending it really wisely is the first lesson, so that we can make sure that we are getting bang for our buck.

You mentioned there about, you know, what ultimately comes down to value in these difficult economic times, if we can’t demonstrate our value, like you described, you’re the first thing to get cut because people think that, you know, training [00:08:00] is a nice-to-have when actually learning and development value, if you can demonstrate, I took these five people who had this particular problem, and we put an intervention in. This was the cost of the intervention. This was the uplift in emotion, in feeling, in cultural impact, and this was the customer impact; they made more sales. Who’s arguing with you then? Who’s telling you that you’re not adding value?

Nobody. 

Host: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it comes down to, as well, helping advocate for L&D. So I mean, in all honesty, when you are a part of a small team championing learning and development, and often you’re a team of one in these situations as well, it can really feel like an uphill battle. You’re not just trying to deliver impactful training, but you are often selling the idea of training internally.

So, as you said, when budgets are tight, L&D can easily be seen as a nice-to-have instead of a strategic priority, if it’s not being built into the culture and positioned in a [00:09:00] way that helps to position it as a strategic pillar. So I’d like to kind of dig into that a little bit more and get a little bit practical and talk about what it actually looks like to advocate for L&D inside an SMB.

So in your experience, Michelle, what are some of the most effective ways that small L&D teams have successfully gained buy-in from leadership? 

Michelle Parry-Slater: There are so many start points, so I’ll just pick one, but it might not be the listeners’ one. They might have to start somewhere else, but relationships are a good start point.

So building relationships in your organization, really understanding the organization that you’re working in. So I often talk about understanding the language of your business. So if you are starting to build relationships, go and have a coffee. In my book, I describe it as a strategic latte, which is an idea from Ian Pettigrew from Kingfisher Coaching.

And uh, Ian and I had a great chat about it in preparation for it being [00:10:00] included in the book. We in fact had a strategic latte, and that’s the whole point. You go and have a chat with somebody, not just in a meaningless way, not just in a chitchat type of way, but talk me through what the challenges are.

Talk me through what it’s like to work here. Talk me through what it’s like in your team, in your department. What would be better if the team was rocking? What you are doing there is you’re just gathering information that will help inform some of your later learning solutions. So definitely build relationships.

I think that’s one starting position. Another starting position is your strategy. So many L&D teams will have a strategy, and that strategy isn’t necessarily based around the organizational strategy. It might be based around, for example, how many courses we need to sell or how many courses we need to put on, or how many e-learning completions that we need, which are not metrics that add great value. But actually to say, this is the organizational strategy and this is how L&D can [00:11:00] support that strategy.

Everyone wants to talk about that, that’s way more interesting to the wider business. So I think relationships initially then we’ve got strategy is another area. Um, I could go on and on with these, so stop me when you want me to Gina.

Host: No, this is gold. Please keep it coming.

Michelle Parry-Slater: Uh, so another idea, another area is start with what you have.

So there’s often this sense that we need to run out and buy the latest shiny thing. We don’t, we always will have some technology in our organization, and obviously I would like to hope your listeners have got TalentLMS. Start with what you have, because what you have is what potentially people know, but also find out where are the conversations happening?

Now, you mentioned stories, and I love telling this story that years ago, I was invited to come and do a leadership program with a retailer, and we asked the question, um, because I always try and blend my programs across face-to-face and across digital depending on [00:12:00] what the client actually needs for the problem that’s to be solved for the audience that you have. And they said, um, there’s no digital here at the organization. We don’t have any digital learning. There’s no access to digital learning. It all has to be face-to-face. So I was quite surprised to hear that because it wasn’t that long ago. And, uh, we go along and we’ve got everyone in a room together, and they all know each other even though they’re from all over the UK.

So we sort of asked the question, you know, how do you guys all know each other? Like, you folks are living in totally separate places. And they said, oh, our WhatsApp community. Of course, they’ve got a WhatsApp community. Of course, they have. But learning and development team had no idea. And on this community they were sharing photographs of gondola ends.

You know, this is what’s worked, sold really well for us this week, and this is how I’ve displayed my windows. And they were sharing all of these really good practices with each other. That social learning really, really worked for them, and I was really surprised that the [00:13:00] learning team had no idea that that was going on.

So definitely, you know, when it comes to technology, use what you have and find out where they are. Go to their playground instead of trying to make them come to yours. So we lent into that WhatsApp community. We gave them activities that they could discuss and talk about after our sessions, um, to give them that opportunity for that social learning.

And I just really love that story ‘cause it reminds us that we don’t know enough about our business if we don’t ask the right questions. So I guess that that’s my fourth, and I’ll stop there. But my fourth is asking good questions. Questions are free, you know, so we can all ask good questions in L&D.

And sometimes the question we need to just ask is, why do they need to go on this learning program? You know, people are coming to us and saying, we need a learning program about X, Y, or Z. If we could just ask the question why. Now, sometimes why is too confrontational. You mentioned being the sole L&D practitioner in an organization, [00:14:00] and in that regard you are, you are often not with that seat at the table, you’re often not at board level, so why could be quite confrontational if you go for a little bit more of a gentle approach and perhaps ask what does it look like if this learning intervention was to work well? What would change? What behavior, what skills? And if they can start to describe that future, they might not be able to describe the exact skill or the exact behavior, but they would be so sort of often saying things like, well, my team would feel really connected, or customers would be giving us higher scores.

Or they might say that, um, the team would feel more satisfied in their work. They’re the things that we can hold onto, and they can become our metrics. 

Host: And I think, you know, we are seeing this trend more and more now of learning becoming decentralized, and becoming part of every function within a business, and learning coming through [00:15:00] different touchpoints.

So, you know, your example of that WhatsApp group is absolutely amazing because it just shows you that actually learning is everywhere,

Michelle Parry-Slater: uhhuh,

Host: And we don’t want it necessarily to just be part of, you know, a 30-minute to 60-minute program on the side that people need to struggle to find time for, you know, once a week or once a month.

I think that social learning aspect is really key, and you’ve touched on it quite a bit, but I’d just love to know a little bit, digging a little bit further into the social learning concept. What are some other practical or proven strategies that companies can use to kind of surface and scale that internal expertise?

Michelle Parry-Slater: I think you describe there, one of the biggest problems, the biggest barriers to entry when it comes to learning and development is people perceive it to be a thing we do. Therefore, it’s on the to-do list. Therefore, it’s got a time allocation, and often it gets bumped for something that’s seemingly more urgent.

And so [00:16:00] using the power of social learning, um, the power of the stories in your organization is a massive crossover here with culture. So whoever owns culture in your organization, which ultimately is everybody because you are part of the organization, but somebody’s often got responsibility for, um, monitoring it or minding it or having policies about it.

Often HR. Partnering alongside with them is a really useful place to start. Because what are the stories that are told in your organization? What does it feel like to work there and leaning into those stories, leaning into those feelings, um, helps us to build a culture of learning. I think when organizations have learning as the everyday.

When learning is just something we do all of the time, then it’s not that separate lit thing on the to-do list. So how do you go from the to-do list to learning is every day? So some simple ways you can do that are, as I say, make friends with whoever owns culture [00:17:00] and then get some influence and infiltration there.

Adding learning to the everyday. So this might be your team meetings or if you are a sort of do standups, you know, what did we learn yesterday that we can use today? What did we learn last week that we can use today? Who’s doing your staff culture surveys? What’s in your staff culture surveys that you can learn from? What’s in your customer surveys that you can learn from? Another rich vein of data, exit interviews.

When people are leaving the organization, why are they leaving the organization? They are the problems that learning can come to solve. So getting better data, getting a, a sort of better grounding in what it is that this organization is, and getting learning on the everyday agenda. If you can influence, um, your senior team and find somebody who’s a learning advocate.

Sometimes you like to lean into the ego a little bit, but do they wanna be the first to, for example, offer a blended program or [00:18:00] offer a digital program or offer a video-based learning program? If you can get sort of somebody to be your advocate, who’s got voice within your organization, and they can be vulnerable, talk about what they learn, talk about their favorite book, which leads me onto another idea, which is to have a learning library.

I’ve seen this work really well, and it sounds really old-fashioned, but people still really like books, which I’m glad about because I’ve written one, so I’m glad people are still reading hard copy books, but have a learning library and when people check them out, then you know they need to give you a little review that you can pop on on the shelf.

Now you might be thinking, well, how does that work in a dispersed geographical, remote workforce? Everyone loves getting post. We don’t get very much good post anymore. We just get the bills and the rubbish, stuff like that. But if you can post your books out to people, it’s a really lovely gift. And with that, if on a, you know, I’ve done this before where you’ve got a bookmark [00:19:00] when they’ve read it.

They write their little review. I liked page 86, and then it’s in the book. So then the next person receives it and they can check out, you know, what did Gina like and what did George like and what do I like? And they can add to that. Social learning is the oldest form of learning because we’ve done this forever.

This is stories. This is how we learn as children. This is how we’ve sat around campfires and learned from each other. It’s what we do when we go to the bar with our friend. We tell the stories of the day. So we’ve all got the ability to learn socially, all of us. Does all of that make sense? 

Host: Oh, absolutely.

I’m kind of getting lost in the thoughts actually. I’m loving it, and I think for a small to medium-sized business where you know, they’re growing, they’re scaling, things kind of have to happen a little on the fly, a little less structured than perhaps a larger-sized business. The environment is so ripe for this kind of learning and this kind of collaboration, and I think, you know, that L&D specialist within the business kind of being [00:20:00] everywhere really works to their advantage.

And I think that, yeah, this kind of business size is the perfect environment for this kind of approach. Now, obviously in smaller organizations, even in larger ones, let’s be honest, there’s often pressure to show results fast, right? But proving the impact of L&D, doesn’t have to mean spreadsheets and dashboards.

And I’m really curious because some of the learning that does happen in small to midsize organizations is more unofficial. So, some of the social learning aspects or some of the learning that people are doing of their own volition, and kind of doing their desktop research, and they’re learning outside of the structured programs as well, right? What are some, you know, a few simple and meaningful metrics that small teams can track? 

Michelle Parry-Slater: They’re the KPIs that they would already have. And I think that some people are often quite shocked when I say that because if your KPIs are rolling out of your organizational strategy, and I don’t care if you’re a [00:21:00] startup, or you’re a scale up, you have a reason to exist, you have a plan, you have some thoughts that you’re gonna, I don’t know, create a hundred of these things and sell them. Uh, you’re gonna create 50 of these things, trial them, make 50 better things, and sell them. Learning needs to be super connected to what is the purpose of your organization so that the KPIs that you are tracking are the same KPIs as the organization’s.

So we get our, we get our 50 things that we’ve made, however, we’re monitoring those, whether they’ve worked or haven’t worked, what learning needs to happen? What did you learn from that? So, going back to some of the examples you gave, people are doing their own desk-based research. This is where I’d be leaning into what have we learned this week?

Just making that a really standard conversation. So every single standup meeting you have, every single team meeting you have, people can demonstrate they have learned something in the past seven days. That way, we move away from this sense that learning is only formal [00:22:00] or only happens in formal spaces.

Learning happens all the time. You have a bad phone call with a customer, you’ve learned something from that if you reflect on it. So I think one of the metrics that I love to measure is reflection time and how people are capturing those reflections. So giving everybody 30 minutes a week, often on a Friday afternoon.

Not always the best time. Sometimes they might wanna do it on a Monday morning, depending where their rhythm is. But what did we learn from last week that we will do this week, that we won’t do this week? And what is next for us? I often use the acronyms, what went well, even better if, and what is next? So W-W-W, E-B-I, W-I-N win.

So measuring those, thinking about how people are capturing those, giving them a space. I love to do that in a public space. And why public? I mean, obviously internals public because when we make a public commitment to each other, [00:23:00] we’re more likely to follow through on the actions. And these are not your traditional bums on seats learning metrics, because that does not demonstrate whether learning has happened, whether impact has happened, whether behavior change has happened.

That impacts really only how many people went through an intervention of whatever description that might be. This is why I really like linking culture impact, value, and learning, because those are the things that actually are living and breathing. If you think of a business and organization as an organism, those are the things, culture, impact, value, and learning.

They’re absolutely interrelated. 

Host: Culture, impact, learning and value, and for teams that don’t have those formal programs and certainly not a ton of resources, from your experience, what are a couple of things that they can do to start building that genuine culture of learning from the ground up [00:24:00] or from the top down if you think it’s more important.

Michelle Parry-Slater: I think it depends on the context of your organization. So let’s go back to that word, ‘cause it’s a super important word. We can get content from anywhere. Nowadays, content’s not the key. What is the key is how do you as an L&D practitioner, how do you help people to make sense of the content? How do you help people to synthesize that to your reality?

And this is where we become much more of a curator. Uh, much more of a facilitator. These are the skills I believe of the future of learning and development. Content creation is gone. AI can do that for us in a heartbeat. What we need to do is make it context-rich to our organization. Now, why is that important when your question is about building a learning culture?

Because content alone cannot build a learning culture. It can’t make sense of it. But what can make sense of it is how you curate pieces of content, and you weave the story from your organization. So when you think about company culture, [00:25:00] all it is really is the stories that we tell ourselves in the organization and the people who are living and breathing the behaviors in that organization.

And so when we can make something that’s really context-rich, then we can start to gain some traction. People are interested in that because it will help them to do their jobs better. It’s particularly key when you move from startup to scale up because as startup, everyone knows the culture. We are all bought in.

We all get it. We’re all part of the story. We are writing the story together. But then when you get to that size, that tipping point size, and it’s a different size for different organizations, but you get to that sort of tipping point size, when people don’t know the origin story, then L&D need to share that origin story.

They need to keep that story alive. This is why you might get the best learning program. I’ve seen this happen so many times. Really fantastic, award-winning learning program. You lift and shift that learning and development professional [00:26:00] into your organization because they’ve won some award or they’ve done some really fantastic work, and they try and apply the same program to your context.

And it flops because different culture, different behaviors, different stories, different people, and so the context piece, the facilitation of that context is super, super important. 

Host: I think, yeah, you’ve touched on something that I did wanna ask you about, which was that kind of curation versus creation, because it’s something that really resonates with us at TalentLMS.

We’re big believers in helping SMBs jump straight into training with zero downtime. I mean, that could be by accessing ready-to-use course libraries and kind of curating what’s already available within the platform to your, you know, context. And as you mentioned, course creation now is becoming so much more accessible.

So even on our end, you know, we’ve kind of created an AI-powered course builder that makes course creation so [00:27:00] much faster, so much easier. So that L&D professionals actually now have the ability to take that step back and look at the context and look at the curation of content, not the creation of content.

And that kind of brings us to another idea that I love, which is something that’s not specific only to L&D, but in any creative discipline really. And that’s the notion that constraints that are often faced by businesses of this size can actually drive innovation, right? So we often hear that smaller companies may not have the same resources as their larger competitors.

But they absolutely have the potential to outsmart them. Have you seen this play out in real life? I mean, in your wealth of experience, perhaps you’ve seen a client or read about another company that’s done a great job of taking their limitations and kind of turning them into a superpower. 

Michelle Parry-Slater: So many, so many charities that I’ve worked with have done exactly this.

It’s particularly about leadership. So leadership, you know, [00:28:00] billions and billions of dollars, pounds are spent a year on leadership training, because the problem we have with leadership is that if you are a technical expert, the way to get more status, knowledge, power, whatever it might be. A pay rise essentially is to then become a manager of other technical experts.

They’re totally different skill sets, people management, and whatever technical expertise. So leadership is a typical one where people will spend a lot of money or a lot of time. When you think about this, in the third sector, in the not-for-profit sector, they don’t have the big budgets. But the content on leadership is all over the place.

You can go to YouTube, and you can grab some stuff from there. You can go to books and grab some stuff from there. You can go to TikTok and grab some stuff from there. I’ve seen it so many times where, particularly that creativity comes through because you are constrained by not spending money, and I challenge every one of my clients.

What would this look like if you were to spend zero zero [00:29:00] pounds, zero? What can happen, of course, is we then get our subject matter experts, because if your recruitment team is doing the right work, they’re hiring good people. So if they’re hiring good people, they’re knowledgeable, they’re intellectual, they’re, they’re good at their jobs, they have good things to share with your organization.

Another skill for us in learning and development is how do we get that knowledge out of their heads and into the wider organization in a way that people can understand? Because that brilliant person who’s been hired, that brilliant subject-matter expert is not a teacher. But that’s where we can come in. So it might be a beautiful talking head video where you, you know, you, you put a video camera in front of a lot of people, and they just clam up.

So don’t do that. You know, put your phone on the table in front of them where they’ll probably not notice it’s even recording, and tell me, tell me about, you know, your role, tell me about your job. Tell me about what’s important. Tell me about how your job links to other people’s jobs. You can create a [00:30:00] podcast like that with your subject-matter experts, and it’s the story of your organization.

So I keep feeling like all I’m going back to is personalization, that context-rich personalization, because that’s what people want. That’s what’s in our private lives, and that’s where we started this whole conversation. 

Host: Absolutely. Um, no, I really love that actually. And I think there’s just so many ways it can go, and I think sometimes it’s just finding the starting point.

That’s the biggest hurdle. Now, I do wanna slight, just quickly touch on tech actually, because it’s often seen as the answer to scaling L&D, especially for small teams that are trying to do more with less. But the sheer number of tools out there can, you know, often make it hard to know what’s actually going to be useful.

Any advice you’d kind of share with smaller to mid-size businesses who are looking at learning tech solutions with the goal of saving time, streamlining delivery, supporting a lean, effective learning strategy, [00:31:00] almost all large organizations have a learning management system. Only about half of smaller organizations out there do. For TalentLMS our ethos is making enterprise-grade learning accessible to SMBs. It’s always been at the heart of what we do, but aside from that, where else do you think that the companies of this size can best leverage tech to help them get more out of each day? 

Michelle Parry-Slater: There are two answers to this. One I said earlier, go where they are.

So find out where your people are playing at the moment and see if you can’t leverage some of that technology. Um, oftentimes we’re ending up in learning, not using appropriate tools. So Teams is a classic. Teams is a communications tool. It is not a learning tool. And time and time again, I see organizations trying to shoehorn learning into Teams, and it doesn’t really have the functionality to make it a seamless experience. And so looking [00:32:00] for a new digital tool, particularly a new learning tool, you need to be super clear, super clear on what do you want it to do? Now, for me, that’s rooted directly into your strategy and your corporate strategy.

Why you would be doing learning in the first place. Why would you want social learning? Why would you want digital learning? Why would you want blended? All of those reasons. If you’ve thought about those, then when you go to market, you’ll be much clearer on what you’re trying to buy. Otherwise, it’s,it’s a little bit going to the supermarket without a shopping list.

You know, you’ll get some lovely stuff, but have you got a meal, or did you just buy a few veggies and some meat and a few sauces or whatever? You know, did you actually buy a meal? You wouldn’t do that necessarily and waste your time shopping in that way for your food, so you shouldn’t be doing that for your learning programs and your learning systems, you should be really clear what is it that we want it to solve?

It’s much easier from a vendor perspective as well to sell to that, isn’t it? 

Host: Oh, absolutely. And I must say side note, I just love it whenever guests make food [00:33:00] analogies. This really speaks to me. Um, it’s not the first time on our show. I think something that I’m quite curious about, I kind of wanna shift the lens forward now, the L&D space and the world of business and the world itself is evolving very quickly.

For small businesses and mid-sized businesses. That brings, I think, both challenges and opportunities, right? What’s one trend you are seeing in L&D right now that you believe could be a real game changer for this type of business size in particular? What can SMBs start doing now to stay ahead of that trend or the curve of that trend?

Michelle Parry-Slater: I think a trend, is it still a trend? I’m not sure because I think this started in COVID. I always say when people are coming into the profession, what you know, and they say, what should I do, Michelle? And I say Network. Network. And what I love particularly since COVID, is how good we are as a community and how communities are really taking hold and how we are [00:34:00] connected to each other.

Oftentimes, you’re the sole practitioner in a business when you’re working in learning and development, and that’s been certainly my experience. I was global head of learning before I started my own organization and that team of one. Um, I had a couple part-time people in different locations around the world.

So where did I get my energy, my ideas, my thoughts? Um, my director was excellent. Big shout out to Catherine Marlowe, but I got a lot of that from the community, the wider L&D community, and I think as a profession, we’re really giving. So get yourself to, there’s so many different communities in the UK.

Shout out my own community, L&D Co-work, um, across Europe, L&D Shakers. Give a shout out to Crackin’ LnD down here in, um. In the south of the hemisphere. Um, there are so many communities out there, um, as well as all of the professional bodies as well, and all of those. So get yourself connected because it can be really lonely.

And where do [00:35:00] you find the new info? Where do you sort of find out what the new stories are? And of course you can go to things like my book and all of my contemporaries from Kogan Page who’ve all written fantastic books on learning. But the community is where those stories in our books will come to life.

Host: Yeah, I think that’s a brilliant piece of advice because as a, you know, often a team of one in this, in, in these instances in businesses of this size, it can be kind of daunting, and it can kind of, at some point you hit walls, right? In any profession. So having a community where you can, you know, just check in, uh, you might read something without even having to post a question that instantly, uh, sparks an idea or inspires you. So I think that is a really key piece of advice. If you had to give just one piece of advice to an L&D leader at a small to mid-size company who’s trying to scale learning, they have limited resources, what would that one key piece of advice be? [00:36:00] 

Michelle Parry-Slater: Try something new.

Try something new. As scary as that might be. And that’s really the sole reason I wrote my book, because I’ve been that person. So that would be my one piece. Try something new. Does that make sense? 

Host: Yeah, it does. Absolutely. 

We’ve pretty much come to the end of the conversation, unfortunately. I’m actually having such a great, a great time.

I’ve enjoyed so much the insights you’ve been sharing, Michelle. It’s been a real pleasure to have you with us today on Talent Talks, and I think. I feel really confident that we’ve uncovered some really practical down-to-earth insights that are perfect for those small but mighty L&D teams who are looking to make an impact.

So, thank you for joining us today. It’s been a real joy.

Michelle Parry-Slater: What an absolute pleasure. Yeah. Lovely to speak to you, Gina. Thank you.

Host: Both your time and your money matter. According to G2, a leading software review site, it typically [00:37:00] takes up to 18 months for most LMS platforms to show a positive ROI. But TalentLMS stands out from the crowd where users see a positive return in just 11 months. That’s seven months sooner than the average.

This means you can prove the value of your training to senior management way sooner. Choose TalentLMS and take pride in faster results.

Thanks for tuning in. In the next episode, we’ll be looking at how to use AI to optimize your L&D workflow. You can find Talent Talks on all podcast platforms. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode.

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