Learning Insights: Chantelle Nash pioneers the modern learner experience

Chief Learning Officer’s “Learning Insights” series is dedicated to showcasing the thoughts and career journeys of chief learning officers and learning executives — the tireless trailblazers who are transforming the landscape of corporate learning and workforce development. In this Q&A series, we garner strategic insights, innovative approaches and challenges overcome from visionary leaders worldwide.

What initially drew you to a career in L&D, and how have your experiences evolved over the years?

Writing and speaking always came naturally to me, and I was going to school for business communication while also working my first job in college. At that job, I realized a lot of the mistakes and lack of performance were essentially the result of a lack of communication (in a broad sense) around job responsibilities and standards. Learning and development rose to the top of my priorities as the perfect way to address inefficiencies in the workplace; I declared it as my minor and started learning whatever I could to begin implementing strategies into my role at the time — which was at a local veterinary hospital where I initially just cleaned kennels.

Of course, over the years it became clear that even the best L&D initiatives do not end with “perfect” results. Organizations are complex. I’ve since worked with a variety of global companies and honed a wide range of skills that are critical for success as part of L&D initiatives — change management, product management, marketing, technology and data and analytics, to name a few.

What key initiatives have you implemented as a learning leader to drive employee development and foster a learning culture?

During my time at GE, we created a platform for digital learning to scale the best-in-class leadership development experiences employees traditionally received on the Crotonville campus. This was a really hard sell because, of course, you can’t replace face-to-face experiences with virtual ones. But that was never the intention; it truly is not which format is better, but what is most effective for the needs of the employee at a given point in time. Our digital learning strategy became all about a culture of continual learning and supplementing learning “events” with “learning every day,” with the same access to quality resources you would expect in a classroom. We also aimed to instill a mindset of being the architect of your own career and empowering employees to take a growth mindset to develop themselves and find solutions to everyday problems.

What is the most impactful learning program you’ve introduced in your organization, and how has it contributed to employee growth and business success?

The CORE community has been the most impactful for Baker Hughes. It combines a self-directed, digital and social approach to employee development, centered around the company’s values and behaviors, and has really helped Baker Hughes grow both current and upcoming leaders. The accessibility we’ve been able to provide through virtual live events has even resulted in employees working offshore being able to participate. Others have shared their community projects with their teams and the results they had on their business. Employees are earning badges that they share publicly, which strengthens Baker Hughes’ brand and leadership in the employee development space. We are making true progress toward becoming a learning organization, and additional programs are starting to be conceived as a result.

What is a common misconception people might have about the L&D function, and how do you address it?

One: That L&D is still a “fluff” function, makes things “pretty,” you don’t need a lot of experience to be an L&D professional. I hope that misconception is dying, but I think it still exists.

Two: That L&D is only about objectives, instructional design, and other traditional elements instead of expanding it to include technology acumen or communications.

Three: That L&D initiatives can and should always be tied to hard business results to be valuable (revenue, cost savings, etc.). While you absolutely should focus on business issues to solve for, sometimes you cannot quantify it in business terms. For example, creating guides for employees to know how to easily navigate a system could help improve productivity and save overall time costs related to that process, but that’s not accepted as hard business cost savings. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile! A holistic approach to evaluating L&D needs to be adopted to truly understand the full impact beyond traditional business metrics (engagement metrics can be fantastic leading indicators for where to focus internal development strategies next, for example).

What excites you the most about the future of workplace learning, and how are you preparing your organization to adapt to the changing landscape?

I’m excited for workplace learning to be so integrated and streamlined as part of the employee experience that it doesn’t have to even be called “learning.” It will simply be how we work, the process of finding information and solving problems that inherently uses learning behaviors and skills — just like how we adapt and make micro-decisions in our daily lives outside of work.

I’m preparing our organization for this by pushing our teams to think holistically about our projects, how they each impact each other and how to think from the employee’s point of view, whether it’s developing a UI or communicating a change. For example, employees don’t know (or care) that maybe three different teams support the intranet, the helpdesk and the learning site. But they know when that journey feels disjointed or confusing as they move between tasks, and it’s our job to work as one and deliver a streamlined experience.

What essential qualities or skills make a successful L&D leader, and how do you cultivate these traits in yourself and among your team?

Having a multidisciplinary skillset and being able to work cross-functionally, not just because of the relationships you’ve built, but because you have an understanding of others’ goals and processes. Cultivating these traits is very simply a matter of curiosity. If someone is pushing back on you, ask questions. What does their workflow look like? What constraints do they have? Who do they have to answer to? This type of collaboration allows you to become well-versed in a variety of business processes even if you’re not the expert, which means: A) you can better consult and advise on solutions with others requesting your support, and B) you can start to see around corners and better prepare in advance to work more effectively.

What game-changing advice would you offer if you could go back in time and mentor your younger self?

This is a tough one because the things I learned over time and through mistakes made me a better version of myself today. If I had to say something, it would be to get more technical expertise early on, knowing now how technology-driven the world is. I know enough to be dangerous, but I’d like to add more value there. The only problem is that I want to do it all, and there isn’t enough time in the day (or cells in my brain!)

What do you feel is currently the single biggest challenge facing L&D professionals and the industry as a whole?

As I mentioned earlier, the value of L&D is measured in multi-faceted ways, but companies run on money. There needs to be a much bigger focus on how employee engagement, streamlined employee experiences and a positive employer brand add value and make a company successful, even if it’s not “this L&D solution made us X dollars.” We all know that brand strength matters, but how does one quantify the “it” factor that causes someone to choose Starbucks over a local coffee shop (or vice versa)? Is it the location, the quality of the product or the price? It’s usually a lot of things that are continually tracked over time to provide insight into the directional strategy, which ultimately works in concert with operational excellence and your traditional business processes to be successful.

We’re always looking to showcase innovative tools and technologies. Can you share one work or learning tech product or platform that has significantly improved your work processes and why you find it valuable?

Airtable! The way it has helped us automate workflows is so valuable. We created team directories where managers receive an e-mail when someone’s birthday is coming up, tracked steps of a process and ensured that team members were notified when it moved to the next step (like an editorial calendar, for example), managed a complex budget by tagging spend to categories, creating reminders when renewals are coming up, tracked user research interviews, managed editorial process and communications publishing calendar, documented test cases and results for new system implementation, complete with a site map we were able to generate through the tool and even creating event calendars with specific views so back end staff could simply mark something as “ready” to make it public to a user.  The efficiencies it has provided us have made our teams so much more productive.

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