Artwork for podcast Learning Matters
EP 33: Forget AI Hype — Here’s What Actually Moves the Needle in L&D
Episode 3317th April 2025 • Learning Matters • ttcInnovations
00:00:00 00:37:27

Share Episode

Shownotes

How do you turn learning and development into a business essential and not just a checkbox? In this episode of Learning Matters, we’re joined by Carrie Berg, VP of Learning & Development at Teladoc Health, to talk about what it really takes to build an L&D strategy that delivers real impact.

Carrie shares how she’s built programs leaders can’t live without, what metrics matter most, and why newer generations are reshaping the learning landscape. From building culture to leveraging tools you already own, this episode is packed with honest, practical advice for L&D professionals, people leaders, and business strategists alike.

🔍 What you’ll learn:

• Why most L&D strategies fall short, and how to build a better one

• How to prove ROI with data that actually matters

• What Gen Z expects from learning (and how to deliver it)

• The truth about AI in L&D — hype vs. real use

• How to stretch limited resources without sacrificing impact

📲 Connect with Carrie Berg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carrie-l-berg/

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.

💡 Looking for custom learning experiences without licensing fees? Contact us for a free consultation! https://bit.ly/4aOhPKq

🤝 Need extra hands fast? Try staff augmentation! Click here to get matched with experts in 48 hours - no job posting needed. https://bit.ly/3RiEfLT

🚀 Simplify outsourcing with our subscription plans - predictable pricing and limitless innovation. Book a meeting for your free first week! https://bit.ly/3RiEfLT

🎯 Boost results with serious games for optimal retention and results. Contact our Sales team to learn more: https://bit.ly/3RiEfLT

Transcripts

(:

Welcome back to Learning Matters. I'm Doug Wooldridge, your host. And today I'm very excited to chat with our guest. She is passionate about developing people and fostering a culture of learning and excellence through data-driven and people-centric approaches. She has more than 20 years of healthcare experience in sales, sales training, marketing, strategy, commercial effectiveness, L &D, talent and organization development, and leadership.

And she's the vice president of learning and development at Teladoc Health. Carrie Bird, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Today, as always, we'll be going over some of the most exciting changes and developments in the world of learning and development. I'd like to start with this, Kerry. What strategy matters most in learning and development today?

Well, I think the first thing is to have one. I think a lot of people think they have one, but they actually really don't have one. And so, like, are you really clear about what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish and where you're going with your training and who what's supposed to impact has to be, you know, super clear. So I think the first question is, do you have one and can you articulate it? Is it written down and is everybody on your team clear about what it is?

(:

I think I say this a lot, but learning and development, know, companies operate on what they must have to be successful and they operate on what's nice to have. And sometimes L and D and talent falls into that nice to have. So your strategy better make yourself a need rather than a nice to have. So whatever you're doing, you better be in demand. And the best way you can do that is like the third part of a strategy, which I call metrics.

And it's gotta be more than like, we had 50 people do this, you know, module. Like it really needs to be about, they learned something, they changed to behavior. People who attend our courses stay with the company. Managers who attend our courses have higher engagement scores on their team. You know, all of these things that prove like a real ROI, whether that's cash money or whether it's our talented people are staying and growing within the organization, your metrics need to back up.

the strategy that you have put together.

100 % agree. Has this always been the case or was there like an aha moment that brought you to this that maybe you walked into an organization and maybe they thought they had a strategy well defined, but they really didn't.

Yeah, I think there's been a couple aha moments because in my career, I've gone into companies and started training programs from scratch. Sounds scary. like, we need something and we need you to build it. And we don't really even know what that is, but we just need you to do something. Yeah. And then, and which is gravy actually, because that's like the opportunity to create a department from scratch.

(:

and have it really mean something to the business and define what learning means to the business and be the one to do that is really a tremendous opportunity and great learning for everyone. And then I've gone in where I've had to rebuild. And most of the time when I'm rebuilding, is, they had no strategy. There's like nothing defined. And I think some of the aha moments were really around what is a learning culture and how do you define a learning culture and meeting with leaders. And they've got

different answer from, well, learning culture means we have learning here. No, dude, that's not a culture. Or, well, we hired you, right? So that means we believe in a learning culture. No, that's not a learning culture either. And so I think that was a lot of aha moments was meeting with senior leaders and talking to them about learning and getting such a different flavor on what they thought about it and their opinions and feeling like they

brought in learning because they had to, not because they wanted to. And so like, okay, if they think they're, I'm here because they had to hire me, I need to switch that line of thinking. And so that's where I really started to get creative around what is my strategy? What is my purpose? How am I moving the needle here? How am I getting these leaders to see like they can't live without me and they can't live without my team. And that has really shaped a lot of how I think about learning and development.

And I want them to be a crutch. We need to be a crutch that they need for a lot of things. And so that's really helped me think about strategy, getting buy-in from key stakeholders. But I will tell you, there are key stakeholders. If you have leaders who just don't think they need to learn because they know everything, it's really a struggle. It's a struggle to get them to see. So that's always a tough.

tough thing to do and I'm always trying to creatively navigate that.

(:

Yeah. Well, no matter the industry, the leadership has to be agile. They have to be changing with the winds because we know market changes can happen like that. how do you showcase that strategy to them and get buy in from, let's say, the leadership team that may be those type of leaders that really don't feel like they need to learn?

Yeah, I think so. I try to focus on what's critical to moving the needle and I try to keep the fluff behind the scenes. Sure. And so I do think that there is a lot to be said for keeping things simple and effective. And there's all sorts of flashy things that we can be doing. But I think what I've learned and seen a lot in this may be a little stereotypical, like a carry stereotype of leaders who don't like training.

But they tend to like not like process. They tend to, you know, want to be free flowing. They don't want to feel confined. They don't want to feel like, you know, they, you know, want to believe that the way that they're doing things is at the highest level possible. So therefore what could I get out of training and training is just going to modify everything. And so if I go forth with very simple strategic ideas on how to incorporate learning and how to get people to kind of see things differently.

and high impact things. So for example, 360s are a very high impact way to get people to kind of see something from a different point of view. Using any psychometric tools, whether it's Myers-Briggs or DISC or we like insights discovery in my organization, those tools kind of raise people awareness of who they are and how they come across. And sometimes those little effective training mechanisms can help kind of shift how people think about themselves and therefore think about.

training.

(:

And how do you showcase like or how do you get buy-in for learners that aren't in that leadership role? Learners that are just maybe doing let's say compliance stuff or just learning how to jump into their brand new role?

Yeah, compliance is always a spicy topic. But I mean, to me, we are in a compliant world. It's expected that you do compliance training. Sorry. But we have in the United States in particular, we have lawyers and lots of them and we have the government and lots of it. And so any organization has to do compliance training. So for all those people out there who are like, don't want to do it. We don't want to do it either. Nobody wants to do it. But we have to do it to make the business run and to make the world turn. And we have to be ethical people at work.

period. like, I get it. But also like, it's just the way that it is. So drag your knuckles on the ground. And how I think about compliance training. And then I got on my soapbox. What was the other part of the question?

You know, like on the job training or training that is specific to whatever their role may be in the organization.

I think, I mean, if you want to grow in your career, then you have to grow the skills that you have. So I think that the people that I've watched grow their career the most, and even my career has been all over the place, but it's been all over the place because I have a growth mindset and a learner mindset. And so not all jobs are about these specific tasks that you do. A lot of jobs are about the skills that you had and skills based.

(:

kind of job descriptions and learning are kind of an up and coming. That's our next buzzword in the L and D space is like skills training. But skills and transferable skills are legitimate things. Like I can tell you that I've been in sales, I've been in sales leadership, I've been in operations, I've been in marketing, but all of those things, I have transferred my skills and be able to demonstrate that I can transfer those skills to all of those things. And they're very basic skills, like being able to communicate.

having project management skills, being able to hold people accountable to what they're doing, being able to articulate what I'm doing and doing it well. Those are all like basic, what I would consider just fundamental work skills that everybody should have. So if you're in your career now and you wanna move ahead, you need to be able to say, what am I good at? And what am I not so good at? And what are my opportunities of weakness that I can grow?

And then going back to your learning and development team and saying, okay, I need help with this and I need help with this or I need help with this, or do you have a program and look at what they've got? And a lot of our learning and development programs are intended to be broad and to serve a broad population of people to help them with some of those fundamental skills like communication, like accountability, like delegation, you know, being able to give feedback, all of those things that everybody needs to have to do the job.

And then of course, you've got all these other little things that mean the most, like engineers need specific training on things. The finance team needs specific training, legal, things like that. But I think where the L &D team really excels is this category of business acumen and knowing the business and dealing with all of those things and then the people side of it. And how do you work with people? How do you be a better people person and all of those things? And those are skills that will follow you anywhere and everywhere you go.

into retirement. So those are the things that you need to focus on and that's what people need to focus on in order to move up in their jobs. And I think L &D programs in general are remiss if they don't focus on some of those core skills.

(:

Yeah. Do you find that there's, with the new generation of workers coming in, do find that there's a little gap there between how they learn as opposed to how millennials or how Gen Xers learn?

Yeah, think, well, actually, I think the newer generation of people have very high expectations out of what they're getting out of learning in their company, and they expect it and they want it and they demand it. Whereas I think Gen X and I can say this because I am part of Gen X, we're a little like, well, you know, I'll do it if I got time, you know, I'm so tenured and experienced, you know, I learned to drive a Pinto, like I know all the things. You know, and so I think over time,

It's really changed where this newer workforce coming in actually wants to learn and they expect you to provide it. And I'm actually seeing this a lot more in new startup companies that are being started by this younger generation and they're bringing on learning talent early. Like they're not waiting until they're hundred or 200 person company. That learning person is being brought in when they're 25 to 50 people. And it's because they want...

this talent and learning to be built into the culture of the organization as it grows. And that's how critical they see it. And honestly, I think it's super exciting to kind of have this generation that's like, give me more, let me learn, let me tap into whatever it is that you have. And also kind of pushing some of us old stodgy L &D leaders on how we think and the learning that we provide and like, give me something more. And so I think it's great.

So why do you think that it took longer for major established corporations to dig into the necessity for learning as opposed to the new generation who's just ready and eager to embrace it?

(:

When I think about, even if I just reflect on myself, in a lot of ways, we were just expected to learn on our own. You'll figure it out. You'll figure it out. It'll just happen. You stumbled and you fell, but you just figure it out. And so I think we are this generation that, well, I don't know how to do it, but I'll figure it out somehow. Whereas the younger generations coming in are like, I don't know how to do it.

And by the way, I need you to help me figure it out. You know, and we were more like, no, I don't need those IKEA instructions for this furniture. I'm just going to put it together. Like, I don't need that stuff. And then we put it together wrong and then we take it back apart and then we put it back together again. we just keep, we, we, we became our pride gun in the way. And I think in my generation we were, it took us a long time to learn stuff and then, but then we lean on this crutch of like, but you have to learn by doing. And the reality is, is like some of that is true.

There is a lot, there's this 70-20-10 role in learning, right? 70 % of what you do, you're gonna learn on your job and you're gonna learn by doing and you're gonna learn the hard way. That's a fact. But I think what the newer generation wants is more guidance and more walls and blockers to how they do it. They wanna be in the bowling alley and they wanna be assured that that bowling ball is gonna hit a pin.

And they want less gutter balls. so like, you know, whereas Gen X was like, whatever, I'll just keep bowling. Like, I don't know, I'll just keep bowling. And if I get six gutter balls in the role, eventually I'm going to hit a pin, you know? And so it's just a different way of thinking that, you know, not that it was bad for Gen X to be that way, but I just think we've evolved. And I think technology has made it a lot easier to get access to all the things that I didn't have. I had a bag phone in college and, know,

I had worked when there was pagers and stuff and I thought it was so cool having a pager with a keyboard on it, you know, so like. It was, by the way. It was cool. It was cool. It was legitimately cool, but it's just, you know, we've evolved and technology's evolved.

(:

That's cool.

(:

Yeah, just seems like the new style of learning and the new folks coming into the learning pool allow for companies to grow just much quicker because there's so many less gutter balls and that you can find success early and often. And I just think that that is such an exciting opportunity for companies to grow at a much faster pace. Are there any top trends that you're super excited about in the world of learning and development right now?

Mm-hmm, yep.

(:

God. Well, I will just tell you that I'm tired of AI. And I know that sounds really weird, AI is necessary. It's here. It's here to stay. Everybody's talking about it. It's the buzzword. Just like four years ago, we were like, gosh, are we going to train in person? Are we going to keep everybody online now? We're going to do hybrid learning, hybrid learning, hybrid learning. And now it's AI, AI, AI, AI, AI. And then I see skills-based learning is going to be like the next big thing that we talk about.

Look, I I equate AI to Google. At one point we had Google and then you Googled it. Just Google it. Like it's now in action. Like you Google it. Now you're just going to chat GPT it. And it's all about what are the right questions that I asked Google and now what are the right prompts that I asked chat GPT. And so like I think AI is critical. I think it's going to change how we work. But everybody is talking about it in such a nebulous way that

you know, nobody has really been able to articulate. It'll make you more efficient. Okay, how? It'll make your job easier. Okay, how? Like, so when I'm making a training module, you know, we would make a training module and then we might Google something on the side. Okay, so instead of Google something on the side, I'm going to chat GPT it on the side. And then you have LMS systems coming in and say, well, we'll build AI into your tool for you. Well, that's interesting.

Yes.

(:

but then you're going to charge me a ton for it when I can still just chat GPT and on the side for free. And when you put the AI into the LMS, it's not actually looking at all of my content and letting me use AI between my existing content. It's still a thing. So until somebody can tell me that AI can work within my existing tools and integrate and pull from my existing content,

and really make things efficient where my instructional designers or even myself don't need the second screen. And we're asking our questions on the second screen while we're building our module here. It's just a thing. And I know plenty of people will disagree with me, and that's OK. But when I think about the practicality of it, I loved it for telling me what restaurants to eat out when I was recently in Melbourne, Australia. was great. Perfect news case. Yes, and I love it.

you know, for, you know, telling me like, why is the fan and my stove still running even though it's been off for like two hours? Like it's great. But it isn't going to dramatically change how I'm doing my business until some of our vendors and all of that can really incorporate AI and tell me what it's supposed to make me really efficient on, the day to day. And I will say that, you know, we're a Microsoft organization and I use copilot all the time and I have found ways to use copilot.

very well, and how to do certain things and have leveraged copilot even in leadership training courses, because copilot can pull from your internal source. So you can ping copilot as a manager and say, give me an evaluation of the emails I send, how is my tone of voice? is my emails clear? And copilot will tell you. it'll tell you. So that's great. I love that. But are people actually taking that feedback and writing emails differently? I don't know.

think where it gets real sticky is when you start having subject matter experts review your training that you've built using AI and they're like, this information is wrong. So when you start leaning too heavily into AI and then you're not doing the due diligence to go back and check your work, well, check its work, you just end up having to do a bunch of rework anyway. And also now your subject matter expert is upset and they have

(:

taking an hour out of their time to review it and their time is valuable. So those are biggest issues I see is that oftentimes folks are just like, no, this is the end all be all. This is the greatest thing ever. And then you look into it, you're you're right. It is great for finding restaurants and stuff and little things. But when it comes to the big decisions, and I think learning is a big decision and a major factor in what

can make or break a successful organization, is it really worthwhile to use it? Are there any projects or initiatives that you are super excited about for this year?

Yeah, I'm always really excited when my team comes up with unique programs internally for the organization. And I think it's fun. know, we've been doing a lot of, you know, meet how to connect, how to conduct more effective meetings and meeting magic and leading with executive presidents as one of our programs that I really has evolved over time, but it's really focused on executive development. I think those are great. And

You know, I think that every year we're evolving our metrics. kind of going back to the strategy piece and thinking of how can we encapsulate everything that we're doing in a way that's really powerful. So, you know, for us tying, you know, employee engagement to customer satisfaction and seeing how those connect, I think is a really powerful metric. And then taking some of those engagement metrics and tying them to manager efficacy and

things like that, I think are great. The other thing that I...

(:

I'm really, really excited about is every year it's a challenge to the team to figure out how to use our existing tools in a different and better way. And so are we really using this feature of this LMS that we have in the best way possible? Are we really using this feature of Smartsheet or Excel or whatever tool that you have at your hands? Are there things we don't know about it that we could be leveraging?

you know, having my team kind of teach themselves a little bit more about these tools that we're using and realizing, we bought this tool or this tool is part of the suite in the organization and we're only leveraging 20 % of it. But like we could be doing this, this, this, and this. And so it's a, it's a nice stretch project for any L and D leaders out there to figure out, okay, how do I better use Teams? How do I make Microsoft Teams more effective for meetings and trainings and you know, all of that stuff? How do I use the notes feature, the, you know, transcribing?

Co-pilot for notes, all of these things, I think is a fun project that I like my team kind of hopping on every year. And we always learn something different, pull in a different tool that makes us more efficient. And it's not AI. so I think it's a good project to get the team wrapped into.

I wish more organizations would do that because oftentimes you're spending so much on tools that, you know, either a salesperson sold you on or you just thought it was a great idea. And then you kind of forget because there's so many different options of tools that you can use within your organization. So having a full team of folks be like, let's, let's make sure that we're actually using these tools and if not, we'll get rid of them. If we are using them, how can we use them better? I think that's really awesome.

Is there a challenge that you and your team had recently that you're most proud of?

(:

boy. You know, it's always a challenge. So we tend to kind of go through our calendar year of programming and then we spend January and February reflecting on what did we do the last year? What was good? What was bad? What do we want to modify? I think any good learning and development program is always redoing and updating their content. And I think that in an organization that's gone through a lot of change.

and had a lot of, you know, moving pieces and things like that. think it's the challenge has been how do we keep these wide variety of clients happy and satisfied with low resources, low money and all of that. And we're always trying to creatively solve for that challenge and all by, well, all still by, by trying to be seen as a need.

you know, it's just an interesting exercise to go through as far as, you know, who are our programs reaching and how can we broaden that scope, but we're not gonna get any more money and we're not gonna get any more people this year. And it's a legitimate challenge that I think everybody encounters in learning and development. And so, you know, I think we came up with some different programs and we flexed some of our existing programs to try to,

to get to more people. And we also have a large international presence and it's been, we don't have an international learning and development team. And so like, how can we better engage that international group with what we have? What can we throw up and offer up with more translations or to better suit time timelines because, or, you time zones, because it's extremely difficult to run management training here and where I am in Chicago in the central time zone and keep somebody engaged in Spain when it's

at the end of their workday. And I'm going to make them sit through two hours of management training. So like, how can we better, you know, kind of reach those groups? So I think a good challenge is we've come up with some new ideas this year for how to reach those groups. And it's a challenge we come to every year. And it really requires you to think differently and be ready to kind of like reflect and give yourself some hard feedback, but keep things moving. Yeah.

(:

And that's, you hit the nail on the head. Keep things moving is I feel like a lot of what folks, their main focus in an organization, but they don't have the reflection point beforehand. having that and spending the first two months out of the year working on reflection of last year, I think is incredibly important. And I would imagine you have, it's much easier to find successes and keep the train moving as opposed to, you know, a couple months down the line being like,

whoops, we forgot to think about this. Or maybe this didn't work last year and we were just kind of hoping that this would work this year and it just didn't.

Yes. Yeah. think too, I'll just say in reflection, know, it's really important for L &D teams to be gathering feedback all the time and getting some of that data that they can use to support the debrief and the reflection. I think it's also important too, to not just take a, if you have one bad comment, then that changes everything that you do. It's just one bad comment. you know, being

very practical about the feedback that you're getting and being really understanding about what's coming in. And just because one person didn't like it doesn't mean you have to redo your whole program. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and so I think it really is like it's really taking it all in and having this balanced approach and being willing to hear kind of the critical feedback, but also the positive feedback and being able to balance both of those things the right way in order to kind of reflect, identify the changes and move forward.

Before we transition into kind of some more personal side of things, I want to dig in a little with data and metrics and how your organization is gathering the data and then how are you processing that data. obviously going from just the idea of like, how many people passed this? How many people failed this? And really getting into the nitty gritty of what you're learning from someone from a learner who is going through the training.

(:

So I think partnership with key stakeholders in the company that manage data is critical. So we have an amazing data analytics team, and they manage our HRIS kind of data. So they're able to connect. Who completes our programs gets put into people's profiles. we can track who, when you look at an employee, you can see what programs they've done.

And that allows us to pull out all sorts of data about them and compare it to demographics and how long they've been with the company and what team that they're on and all of that kind of stuff. so it's really kind of a talent kind of portfolio of stuff that we're able to pull from not only our learning management system, but we can combine that LMS data. We can combine the program data we have from participants and then we can combine it with their employee data and kind of whirl it all together and come up with really effective reports.

And I really credit our data and analytics team that's able to do a lot of that work, but also my L and D team that knows what data is relevant and what we need to pull in to make that all come together. But I think like, if you're starting from scratch, the best thing you can do is to become friends with whoever is on your data analytics team and be really clear about the story you're trying to tell. You know, you know, it's like,

I'm meeting with my data person and I'm like, this is what I'm trying to figure out. I want to do more than just they've done these courses. Like, how do I prove that these employees are completing the training and they're actually staying here? How do I prove that they're completing this training and they're actually getting like promoted over time? You know, how, how do I prove that like, this is benefiting them and making them a better employee for the organization and partnering with them because they know.

what other data they have that you may not be privy to an L &D that can help you tell that story and help weave it all together. So it's not just me in a silo. It's not my team in a silo. It's really leveraging my talent brainiacs in the company to help me kind of put it all together. But I do think that you have to focus on if people do my programs, are they staying?

(:

If they're doing these programs and their managers, are the people staying on their teams, like low turnover from managers? If managers are doing my programs, are they more engaged in the company? Are they participating in other efforts? Like if they're doing learning programs, are they also part of DE &I or BRG programs? Are they attending volunteering events? Are they doing other things in the company? What is their general performance? Are they meeting expectations or exceeding expectations?

You know, looking at all of those things, I think, you know, because at the end of the day, you start to see trends. People who exceed expectations are invested in developing themselves. And that's a great story to tell. yeah, I think have a partnership, find out who your data folks are and develop a connection and get used to each other and how you think and what you need. Be a storyteller.

And that will help you kind of get some of these powerful metrics into place.

Are there things that you do while designing and developing the training that help pull more data that you can that you can then look back on?

Sometimes, mean, you know, like if we see that we've got a growth of people being promoted to manager level, that's like, okay, we need to do, we need to design the management training to be a little bit more nuanced for newer managers. we ended up creating just a separate program for new managers because there was so many people getting promoted into that new manager role. And so we were able to kind of.

(:

do that. And then what we're seeing too, is those people that are doing the new manager training are quickly coming back for the next phase and the next up level of management training. And oftentimes they're coming back again for the third level, you know, and they're so they're kind of going through like our step by step process and they're sticking with it. So that means that they benefited from it, they see the value in it, they want to be better people leaders, they're learning how to be better people leaders, and they're leveraging our programs to get there.

So I think that's a good example of kind of using that data. And then we have some people who take the class and then they want to take it again. So I think that also says a lot too about the quality of the program.

Yeah, it sounds like an incredibly healthy organization. Well, I'd to get into a little more personal side of things. So tell me about you, Carrie. Take me back to little Carrie days. What led you to become the VP of Learning and Development at Teladoc Health?

my gosh. Well, growing up, I had no idea what I wanted to be, which I know is really weird, but my dad was a teacher and he always said, you're going to be a teacher someday.

How did he know?

(:

I have no idea. think, you know, there must be something about talking and talking a lot, maybe, I don't know. you know, I went into the healthcare space because I really, you know, had some health issues and I changed those and I fixed those and I really wanted to be a healthier person growing up. And I started working in the hospital setting and I realized that like,

healthcare was really important to me, caring for people, making sure they were living, you know, their healthiest lives and whatever way I could connect to that. I wanted to be a part of it. And then I kind of got pulled into this medical device space where I could still help people with their healthcare, but get paid a little bit more and be a little bit more involved, you know, in a more challenging space. And once I kind of gone into medical device sales,

I was busy training all of these people that had no health care background. And that's where I realized, I'm actually good at teaching people complex concepts and dumbing it down for them. And that's kind of where my being a professional teacher evolved. So my dad was right. What he told me as a kid is that I'm going to be a teacher someday. He ended up being right. And over time, my career has just kind of evolved into

You know, being that sales trainer to kind of spending time in marketing and doing time, spending time doing physician training and then kind of landing in, in L and D because I was at all these little companies that not only needed sales training, but they also needed just general learning and development. And, know, here I am, but I think if I looked back on my childhood, I would have no idea I would landed here doing this. But I think it's been, I think I found my sweet spot. And so.

that it just took me a little bit on where I need to be.

(:

It's funny how often I hear very similar stories of folks just finding themselves in L &D and they just kind of fell into it. But it does seem like the right place for a lot of folks who just have that ability to go into a room with confidence and be able to teach people what they need to move on in their career, move up in the world, and even just get their foot in the door.

I think it's a special skill set that not a lot of people have, but when you can really change people's lives like that, it's powerful. If you could go back in time, let's say just out of college days, what would you tell yourself? What would you need to hear?

Yeah.

(:

Well, I think the first thing that comes to mind is like, it's all going to be okay. You will make money someday. You won't have to keep working three jobs and eating ramen. You're going to be fine. Yeah. You're going to have health insurance someday. promise you. know, I think that would be, you know, one thing. But I think that the second thing is, is always be open to learning and

appreciating the other perspective. so I think I had to learn through some tough career lessons that people don't think the same way that you do. Everybody in this world comes from their own bubble. And then they go to college and they meet everybody else who just came from their own little bubble. And that bubble shapes how they think and how they act and how they do things. And at one point I was like, I think I want to break my bubble and I want to

learn more about the rest of the world and all of that. And I think that's what's led me to be and have a traveler and exploring other cultures. And also has led me a little bit to the learning and development space. it's that like learning to work with all sorts of different personalities and people and figuring out what makes them tick and why do they have that thought process and where did that come from? And, you know, really appreciating that. I wish I would have learned it earlier.

in my career, I'm glad I know what now. But I think if I could go back and say, just just knock, knock, knock, just be open to other people's bubbles, you know, and all of that, I think.

(:

I could be a little bit further along in my career than I am now.

I love it. Well, before I get you out of here, where can people connect with you, Carrie?

I'm on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find. There's not a lot of Carrie Burgs in the world. Thank you very much. So feel free to find me on LinkedIn. I love to connect and learn so much from other people and where they are. And I think, you know, we're very interesting time right now in the professional workspace. So I think connecting is more important than ever before.

Couldn't agree more. Well, thank you, Carrie. This has been a wonderful conversation. Really appreciate you coming on today. And thank you listeners. If you learned something today or had a laugh, tell someone about the show. Thanks again, Carrie. This has been another episode of learning matters. As always like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and don't hesitate to reach us out to us here at TTC innovations to learn more about how we can help you with your training needs. See you next time.

Thank you for having me.

Links

Chapters

Video

More from YouTube