Learning and development (L&D) leaders are responsible for helping others build the skills they need to move the business forward. But who helps learning leaders grow?
In this episode of The Business of Learning, learning leaders Brandi Smith, CPTM, director of operations, and Sarah Hughes, CPTM, currently an instructional designer at STIHL, Inc., share how they have leveraged professional development to strengthen their skills, advance their careers and grow as L&D professionals.
Check out the episode now for insights on:
- Real-world L&D career paths
- Building senior-level L&D skills and capabilities
- Advice for L&D leaders considering professional development options
More Resources:
- [Quiz] Is CPTM Right for Me?
The transcript for this episode follows:
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Sarah Gallo: Hi, and welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, a senior editor here at Training Industry.
Michelle Eggleston-Schwartz: And I’m Michelle Eggleston-Schwartz, editor-in-chief. Today we’re excited to bring you an inside look at how two learning leaders have grown their skills and invested in their own development. To facilitate the first part of this conversation, we have Marisa Shapiro, a certified professional in training management, and a director of professional development at Training Industry. Marisa, I’ll let you take it away.
Marisa Shapiro, CPTM: Thank you, Michelle and Sarah. Yes, so as mentioned, today’s conversation is how experienced L&D professionals have grown and developed in their own roles to help shed light on their career journey through L&D. Today with me is Brandi Smith. Brandi is a director of operations in the insurance industry with decades of experience in her role. In fact, Brandi, you’ve had quite a progression in your career from starting on the front line and currently you’re in your role as a learning director. So when you and I first met, you were considering a credential even though you’d already been an experienced learning leader. So can you give us a brief reintroduction to your experience and share what made you feel that building the formal foundation was important at that point in your career? And now that you’ve progressed even further, how did your experience earning a credential prepare you for that next step?
Brandi Smith, CPTM: Sure. Happy to share. So, you know, when I started, I was in the contact center, right? I was on the front lines answering the phones, answering questions. And I remember sitting in the training room and thinking, “You know what? I kinda like that. Like, I think I could do that. I think I could be good at that.” And so you go on about things, you know, and you get really good at your job and that’s a lot of times how people are selected for training roles, right? And so that was a piece of it. I had demonstrated the ability to be able to support other people and help them learn. And I was interested in the training role, right? So I applied, you know, I landed the job, but I didn’t have any formal education in teaching.
And so for me, it was really important to build that foundation when I moved into the management role because a lot of the learning consultants come from the business and they just, they know the role, but they don’t necessarily know learning delivery. And so I really wanted to be able to set my team up for success, and to be able to ensure that they had what they needed to be successful and to move beyond that point of we’re really great at our jobs and we have a passion for teaching others, but actually giving them that foundation that they needed to really be successful and take it to the next level.
Marisa Shapiro, CPTM: Now as you’ve moved on from managing the work to leading at a more senior level, what are some of the skills or perspectives that you’ve realized you need to develop beyond the technical side of learning and development?
Brandi Smith, CPTM: That’s a really good question, and I think it’s something that we don’t really think about sometimes until we’re in it. And so what I would say is that there’s definitely a level of negotiation, influencing, politics, all of that type of thing, and I’ve actually been able to participate in the Senior Leaders Learning Program, and that has really hit on a lot of that. So I’ve just experienced, you know, so much growth through the programmatic work here.
Marisa Shapiro, CPTM: Have there been particular concepts from the program that you have or are currently taking that are resonating with you right now?
Brandi Smith, CPTM: Yeah, definitely. You know, the one that I’m in right now definitely has that aspect of influencing and negotiation and, also, we’re getting ready to work on return on investment, and so that’s something that I think too is really big, where we start talking about how the work that we do brings value to the business because it’s so important, and that’s something that sometimes can be really difficult to quantify. And so really having the tools and the resources and support in doing that has been really helpful.
Marisa Shapiro, CPTM: Yeah, I totally get that. It is one of the hugest challenges. It’s something that we hear all the time. And actually, it’s a great segue into the next one. You work in insurance. This industry has a ton of complexity and intersects with areas like legal and finance and compliance. So how have you found that the competencies and best practices that you’ve learned through these programs translate across the different areas and into the broader business?
Brandi Smith, CPTM: You know, simply put, learning is learning, right? And so I think sometimes you might think that it doesn’t translate, but it absolutely does. I think every concept that I’ve learned has been applicable to all of the programs that we run.
Marisa Shapiro, CPTM: Awesome. And you’ve also taken the philosophy of development and brought it to your own team. Including having some team members participate in some of our programs. When you and I discussed your team and their development needs, one thing that stood out was the different levels of experience on your team. So how did you take that into account as you kind of considered their development and why a program for all of these levels might be a fit?
Brandi Smith, CPTM: Yeah, absolutely. And that was definitely something that we talked through because I had some folks on the team who have been training for years, right? And then some who had just been training for a couple months. So I knew that we had different levels of experience. What I did want, though, was a unified language amongst all of us and a framework that we could all use to speak to each other and understand that we’re looking at problems the same way. And so I did make the decision to have everybody on the team participate. And I think that was the right call, you know, because now we do have that. And it’s part of our onboarding process now when we bring on a new learning consultant, to make sure that they do have that foundational knowledge and that we set them up for success.
Marisa Shapiro, CPTM: I love that. And everyone coming in is really relating to everyone that’s there. Everyone has the same thread. I love that. Aligned! Our favorite. I am gonna jump into our last one. We’ve got some time. So, you’ve had the opportunity to grow from the front line. You’re in a senior leadership role. You’ve continued to invest in your own development along the way. You understand the importance in your team. So for the learning leaders listening, and are somewhere along the same journey, what advice would you give to them? Are there any tools or practices or resources that you found particularly valuable that you’d encourage other learning leaders to put into practice?
Brandi Smith, CPTM: Sure. I mean, I think, we spend so much time pouring into other people as learning professionals that we do have to remember to pour into ourselves. So I think that’s my biggest piece, is that, continue developing yourself, right? The consumer is always changing, the business is always changing, the technology is always changing, so you have to keep up, right? So continuing to invest in yourself and in your team and in your own development is really paramount to your success. From a standpoint of resources, one thing that I’ve really enjoyed here is the community that I’ve built. So in every program that I’ve been able to attend, I meet new people who are experiencing similar challenges, who have a similar background, who, you know, For right now, actually, my team is doing a book club based on a recommendation from somebody else who was in the program with me, right?
Marisa Shapiro, CPTM: Oh, I love that.
Brandi Smith, CPTM: So you start having these conversations with people, and it just, you know, really supports your growth and your team’s growth.
Marisa Shapiro, CPTM: I love that it also aligns to the learning is learning across industries, across the network. There are so many similarities, so many differences. And reach out to the network. I love that as a piece of advice. These are all the questions that I have, and we went through. I really appreciate your time. I really appreciate the input. There’s so much good information here, so I just really wanted to thank you for coming out and joining us today.
Brandi Smith, CPTM: Well, thank you for inviting me. It was great to be here.
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Sarah Gallo, CPTM: Thanks, Marisa. Thanks, Brandi. It was great to hear a little bit about your story, and totally agree with what you said. L&D spends so much time investing in others, so have to invest in yourself as well. Well, next we have Peter Bodine, a Certified Professional in Training Management and a director of professional development here at Training Industry, and your alumni advocate. Peter, I’ll let you take it away.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Thank you, Sarah. And I am with Sarah Hughes today, the director of professional development at the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council. And so hello, Sarah, first off.
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: Good morning!
Peter Bodine, CPTM: So I wanted to ask you about the brand tagline for the organization you work with. It says accelerating government, and the thing that I find interesting about that is that for someone who doesn’t work in government, they tend to think that government is really, like, the one that should be the accelerated entity. So it’s interesting, and then we’re all just kinda catching up to that. But that’s not necessarily the case because of your organization’s around. So could you tell us a little bit more about what ACT-IAC does?
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: ACT-IAC is a nonprofit that is adjacent to GovCon and we host forum and conferences, and we have something called Communities of Interest where our industry folks and our government folks can collaborate with each other with white papers and projects to accelerate government. Everything is based off of moving the needle with government forward. We also have FIEs, which is our Federal Insights Exchange, which is, like, for Department of Transportation, Department of Health, USDA. So we have all of these things that basically are collaborations between industry and government so that they can move the needle forward. Sometimes government and industry aren’t exactly on the same page. I always use the highlighter example. You have a highlighter, and industry folks will call it a highlighter, but in government they will call it, like, a marker. And it’s a marker across the board for, like, Sharpies, highlighters, and it’s teaching a lot of what I do. A lot of what I do is, within the PD programs, we have a one-to-one ratio, and you’re put into pods or flight crews or teams, and you learn from one another. We have our fellows, our alumni community comes and speaks to our current cohorts that we have that this is what is happening at the Smithsonian, this is what’s happening at Treasury, and it’s a really unique way of learning. None of the people that go through my program are actual employees of ours. They’re all members, kind of like your guys’, like the training model. But with that it also goes into, we’re volunteer based, so all of our leaders, all of our board members, all of our governance board are all volunteers.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Interesting. No, that’s cool. And so you have a degree in sports management, though, and then found your way into the position that you’re in now. So I’m kind of curious about what led to that transition. And then once you were established in L&D, or at least working towards kind of establishing yourself in that space, when was the moment that it was like, “You know what? Let me start looking at different certifications and think about maybe something that can kinda help me in my role”?
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: So I was… I had a, I was working at a golf club at the time trying to get out of sports, and there was an owner of a company that was like, “You should really come to GovCon. It’s great.” And I’m like, “Okay, tell me more. Hire me. Here we are.” I was working with that company, and they went from a small, service veteran, women, disability-owned to a full large company. And with that, there are challenges of growing. I took the entire company from about 53, 52% having certifications, because the government loves certifications, PMP, ITIL, scrum master, scrum master second degree. You name it, the government loves it. And I took the entire company to about an 85% within 18 months. So it was just doing trainings in-house and the facilitating of that, and I really did enjoy, I did enjoy that.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: So it seems like there was definitely a culture though where it was like get some type of professional development, so that kind of helped you in your movement towards that more—
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: Peter, the GovCon industry is so, like, “What are you learning? What, where are you going? What are you doing?” Like, master’s degrees. It is a very smart industry as a whole, but they also are big on learning and moving forward as well in their careers.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Yeah, I, and I remember, so we connected back in, I think it was 2024, March, around March, was the first time we connected. And one of the things that we discussed, you were a little hesitant because you had dyslexia and you wanted to talk a little bit more about what the certification process looks like. And I don’t know that I remember at the time. I feel like we didn’t have… Because, so in our course curriculum we have, like, a reader now, like a computer voice that will, like, read the materials as you go through it. I don’t think we had that then.
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: No. Y’all didn’t have that, because my little dyslexic brain was like, “Oh, this will be great.” I was thinking, like, videos and, like… And that also did make me nervous, too. I remember that conversation. I was on my way back from Richmond, we had an offsite and I’m like, “What do I do about the test?” Like, I’m not a good test-taker. And you’re like, “You can take it over again, Sarah. ” You’re like, you really eased me into being like, oh, okay, it’ll be good. I did pass on my first time, which I was very… It’s hard having dyslexia and ADD because, like, I passed and everyone’s like, “Oh my God, that’s amazing. Congratulations.” And I’m like, “It’s done. The task is done. I can highlight it off. Send it over to, the people that need to know that it happened.” But it really, that would’ve been amazing because I was taking the topics to do the pre-work, putting them into YouTube and finding videos on said topic. It took me, like, twice as long. But yes, the reader would’ve been amazing, back then. But I did it and, you know, there was a lot of people when I took over to this position that was like, “You’re not qualified, you’re not this, you’re not that, you don’t have, like, GovCon experience.” And at that time, I think a lot of people forgot that I’ve already been in GovCon for, I think six years, five years at the time. It also created this whole other wealth of knowledge and people that you can communicate with and talk with. And going to the first conference, I realized, oh, everyone has a little baby team. Like, we’re not, like, this robust teams of, like, four and five and eight. We’re teams of two and one running entire professional development programs. Whenever Aarti and I sit down to do our year calendar, I say, “Hey, when are we doing vacations? What are we doing here so we have time?” Because we are on the road, like 75% of our weekends are gone. We have… I’m on the road 75% of the time, but our weekends, we lose 23% of our weekends because of our off-sites. And we do over 180 events. Next year it’ll bump up to, like, 205 ’cause we’re adding two new cohorts.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Yeah. Well, so we at Training Industry, we have two events. So one of the ones you were talking about was TICE, the Training Industry Conference and Expo. And that is a great way for learning professionals to connect with other learning professionals. And like you’re saying, those small teams like one and two, that is the case. A lot of the people I connect with, and discuss courses with are people who have, for one, found their way into L&D from like a different background, kind of like your situation. And then they’re the ones who end up being responsible for managing the entire training function. So having those events and things like that are definitely helpful with connecting other learning professionals with each other so that they can kind of build this community and kind of maybe see what others are doing. Like, “What are you doing?” And you know, we do see a lot of government agencies, so it makes sense when we talk about, like government is all about certifications. Yeah. We do see a lot of government agencies who send their learning professionals through our programs, and that’s one of the things you mentioned. So you mentioned Aarti because, so she’s going through the certification program, so she’s… I guess you oversee Aarti, is that correct?
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: I do. She’s my direct report.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Yep. So she’s your direct report. You sent her through. But you’ve also done a product demo with us in the past. You’ve gone through our AI for a Training Manager certificate. You were one of our subject matter experts in a recent alumni roundtable which was really cool. You know, we mentioned Aarti going through, and then you submitted a request to speak at TICE. What is it about all these different opportunities that keep bringing you back to Training Industry? And what have you continued to find valuable about being part of the CPTM and the Training Industry community?
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: How everyone is going through almost the same thing, just in a different manner or a different way. It’s really nice hearing from other people like, “Oh, we’re dealing with this, we’re dealing with that,” and you’re like, “Oh, well, I solved it this way,” or, “I solved it that way.” And you get like this fun little collaboration that most L&D professionals love to sit in, but we don’t get to sit in it a lot because we don’t have those other like-minded people that are surrounded by us. So what keeps on bringing me back is the fact of being like, “Ooh, tell me more,” like, “How are you doing this?” And everyone’s so welcome, and I bet you if we would do a DiSC of TICE, like the conference, we would be mostly in that like the yellow, the blue… The blue. The red section, like the I, IDs, DIs. And the dots would be like just on the line. Because we all have that similar drive, like let’s get it done, let’s move forward, you know? But we do like that collaboration, and that is something is hard to do when you’re just in the middle of three programs, launching another, applications are opening, and you don’t get that a lot. But that’s what keeps on bringing me back, like the community.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Yeah. And one of the things that, whenever we connected previously, you had mentioned that, in government things are always changing. So you’re always having to change. And so even with a new administration everything changes. Like you have to completely, maybe wipe out entire, you know, language you use to accommodate different changes that are done in government.
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: In this past administration, we had to do a lot to keep up to par, or compliant, if you so mean. I even was in the middle of a women in leadership program called Glow that we had to shelve until further notice. And it made me… That really hit hard. I have my minor in women’s studies, so, like, it’s really important, and there is different collaborative discussions when you have a room full of females talking about the same industry, setbacks or move forwards or, you know, just collaboration. There’s a different level of support with that. And it is kinda saddening that we had to, you know, shelve it. But we’ll bring it back, I have redeveloped almost the same program, and we just launched it this week. It’s called Lead Forward. So it’s based on emotional intelligence with a little bit of history sprinkled through that.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Okay, cool. So, has anything, has the certification at all kinda helped you navigate changes, rapid changes, whenever these pop up?
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: More so than I had anticipated. It gives me the, like, the knowledge, the backing of being like, “Yeah, this is, this is the right move. This is how we need to move the program forward or adjust it or, you know, just redevelop it in its entirety.”
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Okay, cool. As we kinda come to a close, thank you for spending this time with us. But I do want to ask you one more question, kind of in the spirit of the month. And if you don’t have anything, you know, L&D related, feel free to choose something different. But, what’s the scariest moment you’ve experienced in L&D? And if you don’t have an answer for that, what is your favorite horror movie, book or story?
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: I read a lot of dark romance, so that’s not the proper answer for me to throw out there. But the scariest thing that’s happened with L&D, probably not so scary, but I left our toolbox in the office one day, and we were at an off-site in Valley Forge, so we didn’t have a lot of technology. That toolbox holds, like, everything. So, while not scary, we just did without things for a while.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Yeah. That’s funny. So what happens in that situation? Like, if you leave it there, will somebody bring it out, or you just make do with whatever you have at that time and just coming forward?
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: No, Peter, there is no one to bring it from Fairfax to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. I just rented a projector from the property and just move life along. Do we need sticky pads for this? No, we don’t. And there was a Target run in the mix of things.
Peter Bodine, CPTM: Yeah. I can understand how that would be kinda nerve-wracking. Well, thank you, again, Sarah. I think that’s all I have now, and we’ll just continue to stay in touch and move forward with everything.
Sarah Hughes, CPTM: Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Sarah and Michelle, too.
Michelle Eggleston-Schwartz: Yes. Thank you both for being here, and thank you so much, Sarah, for sharing about your professional development journey. We really appreciate that. To find more resources to support your L&D career, check out the episode description or visit the show notes on our website at trainingindustry.com/podcast. And don’t forget to rate and review us wherever you tune in to The Business of Learning. Until next time.
