In this episode of Learning Matters, we sit down with Marla Franklin, Director of Learning & Development at a major home care provider, to discuss the strategies reshaping training in 2025.

Marla shares powerful insights on:

✔ Customized and interactive learning design

✔ Training across 420+ agency locations

✔ Building scalable leadership models (including her Pieces Model)

✔ Transitioning from live to virtual training in healthcare

✔ Using AI as a first-draft partner in L&D

✔ Creating community and reducing learner isolation

✔ Saving organizations hundreds of thousands through better program design

Whether you’re in home care, corporate learning, or leadership development, this episode delivers practical tips you can use right away.

📌 Connect with Marla Franklin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marlafranklin/

At ttcInnovations, we help businesses create lasting change with immersive learning experiences. Through instructional strategy, design, and content development we empower employee confidence, performance, and results.

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Working in home care and we have over 420 different agencies. Every agency does it a little bit different. So it's important that we shared, okay, here's some training, here's a couple of models, here's some vignettes that show how to have a crucial conversation and specific examples such as, the person was

late one time, all right, well now the person's late three times, that's a different conversation or has a poor attitude. So we use a conversation model that I created and built vignettes based on that conversation model to show, okay, this is what a successful conversation looks like for these different examples. Now talk to your team and add any agency specific information that applies to your specific agency.

I will say that I was at a learning and development conference, a chief learning and development officer conference earlier in the year, and it was very AI heavy. So this one company said their challenge was is that they had a hundred new hires with 20 instructors that they had to certify. And so they did move to a AI based platform to do that, to certify them. And

They saved about $25,000. The people were just as qualified. So that's obviously a paid AI program. I mean, your basic AI tools are okay, but you can get pretty robust with some of the paid AI.

Welcome back to learning matters. I'm Doug Woldridge, your host, and I'm very excited to be speaking with our guest today. She has extensive experience in program management, training delivery, and implementing cornerstone LMS, including leading a company wide mobile learning strategy. In a previous role, she oversaw onboarding training for all new hires, achieving ratings of 4.8 out of five from associates and 4.7 out of five from managers.

And she successfully transitioned the program to fully remote in 2019, which is impeccable timing. She's developed and implemented management training models for coaching and corrective conversations, saving $500 per person in training costs company wide and negotiated a 55 % reduction in sales training program costs, delivering significant organizational savings. And she's director.

Learning and development at a major home care provider, Marla Franklin. Welcome to the show. It's my pleasure. As always, we like to discuss the latest and greatest of the world of L and D. I like to start off with this. What strategy do you think matters most in learning and development today?

Thanks for having me.

strongly believe that really a customized interactive learning approach paired with high impact reinforcement activities, whether it be virtual, blended, self-paced, social, all of that really is critical not only for the participants growth and development, but also for the business in terms of engagement, retention, and it can have an impact on revenue as well.

Like you just said, there's so much that goes into how you need to mold training programs because to your point, the age, we have Gen X, Gen Z, we have millennials, we have the baby boomers and so Generation Z and millennials, they need more feedback than maybe a Gen X and a baby boomer need. And so you need to take that

those things into consideration. You need to take into consideration the way people learn, the way people learn. Some people learn better self-paced and online. Some people learn better in a live environment. And so really a good story about how you really do need to differentiate is I heard a story recently of a colleague of mine and

He was during, right before COVID was trying to get certified in IT certification and you had to get 80 % or better to achieve that certification. And he would get 60%, 70%, just not the 80 % and it was all live training. And then COVID happened and it went to self-paced. In his learning style, he was able to benefit from a self-paced program because

There were some areas where he needed to spend a little more time on and basically passed him his first try on self-paced versus live. He went through two or three different programs and couldn't pass it. So you're exactly spot on. It's not a one size fits all.

want to get into interaction just a little bit. So when you're developing programs, how are you trying to make sure that there's interaction to keep the learners not only engaged with it, but so that they can retain any of that information coming in.

You have to look at several things and you have to get, you had to, you need to get feedback from the stakeholders as well. And luckily, a lot of times stakeholders will want to have an manager involvement that I've worked with or participant involvement with the training. So for example, just rolled out a, couple months ago, a training program where

It was for our customer care managers. And one of the big asks was that there be, it was a self-paced program, but they wanted leader check-in throughout the program. So I was really excited. You aren't always asked to get that type of involvement. And so literally when we rolled out program, we really made a dedicated effort to not only provide participant resources,

It was self-paced, so they would take, they would log into the LMS, take the self-paced course. It was about a four hour course. And there were about six or seven activities built in throughout the whole self-paced course. And after each activity, the user was prompted to talk to their leader about their learnings how that applies to them at their agency. And so the agency could

could really mold it a couple of different ways. They could have them complete all the activities and sit down and talk about it at once, or some offices prefer to do it after each activity. Because in working in home care and we have over 420 different agencies, every agency does it a little bit different. So yeah, so it's important that we shared, okay, here's some training, here's...

a couple of models, here's some vignettes that show how to have a crucial conversation and specific examples, such as, okay, the person was late one time, all right, well, now the person's late three times, that's a different conversation, or has a poor attitude. So we use a conversation model that I created a while back and built vignettes based on that conversation model to show, okay, this is what a successful conversation looks like.

for these different examples. Now talk to your team and add any agency specific information that applies to your specific agency.

Would you be able to build that type of a program? Let's say 10 years ago.

So that's a great question. This is actually one of my biggest accomplishments, I would say. So at my last company, my last life, and you mentioned it at the introduction, was we saved $500 per participant book because we were doing manager training with a vendor, a third party vendor, and each participant book was $500. And so I was, yeah, it a lot. And not only that,

But the way that it was developed was too complicated. It just, could be more simplified. So the way that it was developed is you had six steps for giving somebody recognition, a recognition conversation. And there was five steps for a coaching conversation. And if it was corrective action, there was six steps for corrective action. And to be honest, and I struggled with, I mean, it all makes sense.

But I struggled with remembering the order and it was, I had to go back and forth between recognition steps. And so I was tasked with determining, can we create something internal for my last company? And I did. So I created a model for having productive conversations and I had it so that it could apply to you're giving recognition to all the way to it's a corrective action, a really serious conversation. And so

at the end of the day, you're having a conversation and there are steps of the conversation, know, the beginning, the middle, the ends and so forth. And so really the only thing that differs is some of the words, different, maybe the tone might differ, some of the questions are gonna differ, but at end of day, it's a conversation. So it's called the Pieces Model. I'll just tell you just a little bit about it and then I'll get into more of your question. But the Pieces Model is basically,

At the end of the day, you have the pieces of that all. So first is, if you can plan, P for plan. Plan and prepare. So you wanna do your preparing, you wanna pause too, right? So you wanna make sure that it's a good time for yourself as well as the person. There's not that many conversations that have to have been right there and then, except for if it's illegal or a safety you have to have. So make sure it's a good time to have a conversation. So that's the P. The I is initiate the conversation.

You're not usually going to jump right into the weeds of the problem. You're going to set up the conversation. And then E is explore, ask open-ended questions to draw out whatever is happening, why it's happening, whether it be good or not so good. And then the C is clarify. that is identify any obstacles and challenges and, okay, what are we going to, now that we know this, what are we going to do about it? And how are we going to

move forward. And then it's E is end with action. What's either the manager going to do? What's the employee going to do? What are you both going to do? And then moving on to offer support. So that's is support. And that's a step that often gets missed, but it's important. We're very positive and we want to make sure that we're people centered and offer our support. So offering support.

It could be just thanking them for the conversation. It could be letting them know that if they have any questions, you have an open door policy. So what I did is I created that model. The organization senior leaders loved it. And then what I did is create training around it, created scenarios. We did some role plays. And then I also infused some examples of...

of how to handle those situations at that organization. But then what I did was I also involved senior leaders and asked them how they approach conversations. How do you approach conversations and what lessons do you want to provide to our managers? Because at end of the day, the senior leaders are having these conversations quite often and they can't be in the training, every single training.

But let's be realistic here

Yeah. So it was, it was, it was a very well received program. And then from there, I moved on to the organization I'm currently at and they liked the model. So I then took, so this is a long standing model that's kind of, shown it's test in time, proven it's test in time. And I did the same thing. I tweaked it based on.

the needs of the new business, but we rolled it out. But instead of it being alive, this is post in the middle of COVID, we rolled it out self-paced. And so it's really just continues to morph.

What do you think the challenges or the, maybe just the differences of training is like for healthcare or home care, as opposed to other industries like finance or sales?

So historically, many, many companies have been in healthcare. It's been a live in-person format training. mean, obviously, if you're creating a doctor, you're learning skills to be a nurse. If you look at other industries besides healthcare, if you look at mechanics, things like that, some of that has to be in person.

But a lot of what we are teaching is some best practices. And so we're not teaching nurses how to do things in home care and healthcare. We're hiring nurses, but we're hiring caregivers. And so it's best practices, it's business information, there was sales information there as well for our sales directors and we have operations.

directors that have to learn how to run payroll and to do scheduling of caregivers and things like that. A lot of it can be online. at first when I came in, it was everything live, live, live. We did switch to COVID. During COVID, we did switch to 100 % virtual. But after we came out of COVID, it went back to 100 % live. And yeah.

I know. And so I challenged the team. said, have, I can get a master's or PhD online in various competencies. There's nothing that we're teaching that can't be taught virtually. So last year we did offer the programs twice, twice throughout the year virtually. So I was, I was happy about that. And I convinced them too that this year.

we're running the programs once a quarter virtually. So because there's going to be some people you have to take into consideration. There's working moms, there's people who can't travel. And so they should be able to receive that type of training. And then there's some people who just want to come in and do live training. Great, we have that too. it's to your point, it's not a magic bullet. It's being able to offer

different ways for the user to consume the information. And I'm happy that we're able to just reach more people.

I'm curious since you've now done this for a few years, you, what differences do you see in the live training versus the, the virtual self-guided type of training?

varies to be honest. So I will say that we are still working on the virtual experience. I think we've created a very well run live training and we've been doing it for years. So it's a well oiled process. Everyone knows their parts. With virtual, we're getting better for sure. The challenge does come in with some role playing.

and interactivity. However, I often say that if you should be able to do it virtually still. And so if it's not working, your role plays aren't working virtually, then there's, it's not a problem with the material. It's the pro, there's a problem with the setup. And so you need to set it up so that you can do role plays and debrief from those role plays. So, we're still fine tuning that.

And I think that we recently switched to Teams and if everybody is on Teams, then it's great. If the whole organization isn't on Teams, then there's some technology challenges. But in best case scenario, if everybody's on the same platform, you break up into breakout rooms, you would have to assign, the facilitator would have to have very clear instructions for the participants and potentially a moderator.

So maybe more support from the organization, a moderator in the breakout rooms. But then they could provide feedback and you should be able to simulate a very similar experience to live. I will say though AI is also coming into play with virtual simulations and role plays as well. So that's gonna help make things more consistent.

Yeah, are you all utilizing AI tools?

We're looking at some AI tools now. We're curious. Yeah, we're definitely curious. I will say that I was at a learning and development conference, a chief learning and development officer conference earlier in the year. And it was very AI heavy. So this one company, and they were in healthcare, said,

I'm curious, just not sure yet. Yeah.

Their challenge was, is that they had a hundred new hires with 20 instructors that they had to certify. And so they did move to a AI based platform to do that, to certify them. And they saved about $25,000 and the people were just as qualified. So that's obviously a paid AI program. I mean, your basic AI tools are okay.

pay, but you can get pretty robust with some of the paid AI tools.

What would be your leadership's approach to adopting AI? And is there any fear of losing some of that human touch, which is so important for home care?

Yeah, that's a great question and a question I get asked very often. So AI is it stands today and I really just had a ton of experience with the free version. So it's very transactional. it learns but it's transactional and it's a lot of times it's right, but it has to be vetted out.

by somebody because there's been errors. I've used it and you get errors. So it should be considered as a first draft. It's really, yeah, like a first draft or a starting point. It's a starting point and it saves, it could save you a ton of time. The other day I was just playing around with it. I'm like, create me an onboarding training program, given this information and talk about our...

our core values, talk about benefits, and a couple other criteria. And it created me an outline, it gave me the slide docs. I said, create me an instructor guide, create me a participant guide. And one, two, three, within less than five minutes, I had a whole program. Now, it didn't exactly have all of our benefits and values correct, because it was pulling whatever was off the website. And it's based on...

It's based on how the user prompts AI, what information it provides. So it's only as good as what the end user provides, but it is, so it's transactional, but you still need the human side because the human side is the relationship side. And so it might be able to create a course, but it isn't yet a hundred percent great.

coming up with use cases, examples that fit the organization's cultures and needs and expectations. It might be a starting point, but I don't know that it's completely, it's not replacing the person. It's just we're working with, AI is like another employee.

And that's what I think people are so scared about AI replacing everything, but that's just, while I'm positive, there are a lot of higher ups and organizations that would be like, yeah, great. We can, we can drop some salaries here and there. Well, it's just not going to do that. It's, it's just going to help you. And like you said, be a good first start for things. I'd like to transition to learn a little bit more about you.

take me back to younger days. What got you into the world of learning and development? Why, why was this a career path that you chose and how did it lead you to being a director of learning and development?

Yeah, so I graduated with an accounting degree, so my first job-

Ha ha ha!

My first job out of college was I was working at a bank teaching. Well, first I was an auditor, so auditing defined benefits and defined contribution plans. And then as anyone you look at, see how can I progress within the company? And I started helping out the training team and I applied to the training team.

And I didn't, I wasn't accepted my first time. They're like, go ahead and continue to help us. And I continued to help the training team. And I was a subject matter expert at the time in calculating rates of returns for defined benefit and defined contribution plans and making sure that the information was correct. There wasn't anything missing. So they asked me to teach that class. And so I continued to teach the class and then I applied a second time and the second time I got it. So.

I will say my favorite quote is, quitters never win and winners never quit because you got to keep. I have a lot of those one-liners from growing up. My father's introduced some of those messages into my brain. so, and I'll say that actually with the, in that first job out of college, I just was so impressed by just how they welcomed, how the company welcomed their new hires and their onboarding process.

I literally remember myself saying, I see myself doing that. Like I can do that. And so then I've been in learning and development and I was an HR journalist for a couple of years, but pretty much my whole, my whole working career. really just really love to see processes improve, make them more efficient. I like to see accelerate the performance of associates. And, you know, it's that one nugget, that two nuggets of information that

that resonates with that person and then they understand the concepts. It really excites me.

Yeah, I think that that would be my favorite part about the learning and development industry as a whole is that it always comes down to the learner and being able to help folks that are just starting out in a new career or advancing in their career and just watching the progress over time. It's, it's like being a teacher, but for adults.

Exactly. you know, just seeing it continue. So back to that self-paced customer care manager training that I created that used the pieces model. We identified that because we had such remote agencies, 420 agencies across the United States, that people felt very siloed at their agency. so socialization was huge. I went and I

sat with a couple of different agencies to hear the problems that they were having so I could build out some useful real life case scenarios. And part of it is they just want to build, they don't have that like 911 button to talk to somebody because their agencies are, they might be the only customer care manager at their agency. So we created a, we called it the CCM Connect Group and it really,

got a lot of traction because now the 420 agencies, all the CCMs could hop onto the call and just ask what's working, what's not working, share best case examples. And then last week, what I was really excited about is I talked to a customer care manager and she said, you know, I was so inspired by the socialization of the CC Connect Group and being able to bounce off ideas.

off the larger group that our agency create our own CCM connect. and they morphed it a little bit differently. They decided that they were gonna have the CCM lead the call and have all their caregivers just join for half an hour. awesome. Yeah. So.

And now, so they do it once a month with their caregivers because their caregivers are also on an island by themselves at different people's houses, caregivers and nurses. And so now just to get that connection once a month on various topics, I was really excited to see that grow.

Yeah, that's incredible. mean, I, I just think that because we're such social creatures, overall, if you don't have some type of social networking built into your training or at least followups or just building a community in general within your organization, you're just not going to make it in this world. Once people feel siloed off, it's tough to bring them back. And so I think that's incredible.

Well, before I get you out of here, where can people connect with you?

You can connect with me on LinkedIn. So Marla Franklin, Illinois.

Thank you so much, Marla, for coming in today and sharing this incredible insight and congratulations on the success of your programs. just think what you're doing is incredible. So thank you. If you learned something new or had a laugh, share the show with someone you know. And this has been another episode of Learning Matters. As always, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't hesitate to hit us up here at TTC Innovations for any and all of your training needs.

All right, thank you so much for having me.

See you next time.