Student Story: Lucy McCann

My name is Lucy McCann and I work on the Learning Design Team at Indeed. I’ve been with them for just over five years. My role as a Strategist on the team focuses on the planning, implementation & design of all the training content for our sales and client success rep. Once they’ve gone through their initial onboarding and they’re continuing to develop themselves in their role, we would support them with everything from processes, product, reinforcements, system updates, and anything that we need to help them do their role as best as they can.  

Indeed is a global recruitment advertising company in the tech space and we offer products & solutions to clients who are looking to make hires. Our mission statement is “We help people get jobs” and our main goal is to get recruiters or direct employers as close to the hire as possible and then we help them along that entire hiring journey, while also helping job seekers to find the best fit for themselves. Our sales and client success teams help manage all those clients, give them the best experience, and find the best solutions for them. We have a range of different products that we offer, and our role is to create the trainings that gives them the skillset on the product knowledge and system knowledge, to be able to best serve our clients and on our job seekers.  

My team focuses very heavily on our reinforcement trainings, and we are currently trying to switch over into the culture of that collaborative and social learning space. We create a lot of on demand content, whether it’s self-driven e-learnings for them to come up to speed on a new product update, peer support guides or job aids & infographics that help them to understand new future processes for our systems or even practicing client conversations and trying to help them understand either the sales process or the service we’re providing to our clients. We range from virtual instructor led trainings, self-driven e-learning and then that leadership led or peer support guide space where we get them to come in & we hold a think tank for them to learn from each other.  

Because we are a global team, when we all left our offices back in 2019, we had a very big switch straight away from in-person workshops, bringing directors & managers in to brief them on how they can train their teams, face-to-face meetings with teams… and all of that got taken away. That switch to a completely virtual or on-demand world was a challenge we faced.  

Also, consistency plays a big part in our company because if we have something rolled out in the U S, then 2 weeks later, it’s rolling out in France. So, we also have to make sure that any training we offer, is not only localized, but also that we’re giving every sales rep that same experience globally. As we create eLearning content, or creating job aids/ infographics, we have to ensure all information is up to date, and that we are providing a consistent experience.  

Due to that big shift in our culture, our team’s skill set itself had to change as we knew there would be a big move to the digital space, and I think many companies in general got forced into that. Beforehand, primarily my role would have been to design a lot of in-person content, working off slide decks or creating things for that in-person environment.  

When that wasn’t feasible anymore, for myself personally, I wanted to develop my skills so I could stay up to speed with what was happening in my space, my industry and in my role. For the company, they’re very keen to have us grow as people but also grow within indeed. They were very keen to push us to get our skill set up to where it needed to be and ensuring that were keeping up to speed with those changing trends.  

For me personally, it was great to take a step back. I found I was doing everything on the job all of the time, so it was great to take a step back & really focus in on theoretical side of things, why we’re doing them and pause for a moment to put more thought into how we’re getting our learnings to our learners. Figuring out how are we making it stick? What’s the best modality for them?  

I think in such a fast-paced environment, you can sometimes end up just going straight in and doing… but this course allowed me to really think about the why behind, why I’m sending something to the learner and how it’s going to make the most impact. I think for my organization and my direct team, it was a great opportunity for me to be able to take that knowledge back to report to my team. Some of the processes that I learned or ways of doing things, we’ve already implemented across the team. That’s been a huge help, especially in keeping that global consistency. We have some of our team in Japan, some in Dublin and some in Stanford. So, it’s really good to be able to share those ideas and take a consistent approach.  

Overall, the DLI have given our employees that additional skillset they needed. I have done a lot of learning by doing and learning on the job as I’ve moved through different roles throughout Indeed. So, to be able to get more specific knowledge around different digital means or modalities that we can use, it’s allowed us to be a lot more innovative in what we’re offering to our learners. We can already see the positive impact on that from other employees now opting to go through the course and take that up as well, people are keen to get that skill set themselves and to be able to spread that out through Indeed and our team.  

Since coming into this virtual space, we have definitely had a big switch more so onto the measurement & impact side of things, as we don’t have the pleasure of being able to ask people after a session, how they felt it went. In general, it’s been quite a positive shift because we had the ability to turn our instructor led trainings into the virtual space and make them work quite well. People especially in Sales love that collaborative environment. So, we do try keep the opportunity for them to get together and learn from each other as much as possible by offering things like virtual panels and virtual success stories.  

With that, we’ve had to build a lot more digital content and the feedback from it overall has been great. It’s given us the opportunity to have a more blended approach. We have incorporated self-driven work that they might do prior to coming to a workshop, then we’ll use that workshop to express their learning and actually practically apply it. I think that shift has been a benefit for Indeed because we’re able to offer them more than just the opportunity to come into a classroom and sit there for 60 minutes with us. We’re giving them something to focus on before while still allowing them to socialize and collaborate with each other. There’s so many follow up materials that we’ve been able to design and share with them, which they can reference back to as well.  

I think over the next 12 months it’s going to give us the opportunity to be more innovative and further use what I’ve learned and now, what I know my peers are learning as well. There’s so much great content within the course, especially within the toolkits, of all the different training modalities that you can consider. What I love the most about it is that we have the opportunity to dip back in and out of them. I feel like we nearly haven’t scratched the surface with the innovative opportunities that we could have.  

I think over the next 12 months, we will be focusing on those different modalities and take better advantage of them. Interactive videos are a huge focus for us, were also looking at podcasts as a new way of getting information across to our learners and trying to make the most impact, but also what’s most engaging to them. Over the next 12 months, the above will be a big focus for us, the innovation of how we’re getting the learning out to them.  

I had originally heard about the DLI from my management team, and it got sent out to a few of us on the design side of things to see if it would be of interest to us. From reading through the course description, for me, everything that’s in those modules stood out to me straight away as places I wanted to develop myself in. Also reading previous testimonials on your sight from people who had gone through it, it definitely felt like the right fit for me. And I had looked at other courses before that cover a much broader range of L&D topics, but I think this really pinpointed for me where I needed to develop myself and where I wanted to excel. So definitely I was interested from the get-go of reading about the course itself.  

I loved the mix of what the course was offering, as well as the flexibility that it gave. The virtual classrooms that happened biweekly were a great opportunity for us to get together as a group. I met people that were working in completely different L&D spaces to me, yet we’re all working towards the same goal. Being able to share our experiences, I have really learned a lot from even those small breakout rooms. That was definitely something I loved. I think it also gave a lot of structure to the course, that you knew every two weeks, that’s what you were attending those sessions. I feel like that really helped me stay on track with the self-driven work.  

In addition to that, the great thing about the self-driven work is the flexibility to be able to do it around my working hours. The project work meant that I could apply it directly to what I do every day. I got the opportunity to use a project I was working on and make that my assignment, which meant that I left the course, not only with more experience, but also something tangible to actually be able to implement into my job. Being able to do that while learning was a huge benefit to me and the ability to dip in and out of those toolkits meant it was very hands-on, being able to apply it to what you do every day.  

I would say, definitely go for it. I took so much value from this course and I’m using all of the resources. I’m still learning from them, even beyond the course ending. There’s a great sense of community as well in the course, which helps you learn from other people and their experiences. I would definitely say, go for it. Any advice on this would be use it as much as you can in relation to your role right now. You have the opportunity to take something that you’re currently working on, and I would say do that as your focus point and know that you have ample opportunity afterwards to explore all aspects of the course, but I find it most beneficial, being able to take that practical element from it.