The Fabulous Learning Nerds

Scott (00:01.25)
Hey everybody, welcome to another exceptional episode of your Fabulous Learning Nerds. I'm Scott Schuette, your host, and with me, you love them, Dan Coonrods in the house.

Scott (00:14.87)
Daaamn.

Daniel (00:16.122)
Scott! So I gotta ask, did you say exceptional or egg-ceptional?

Scott (00:21.792)
I said exceptional.

Daniel (00:23.512)
I mean, that's good, that's true, but also I feel like the more fun choice would have been egg-ceptional. I mean, I don't know what it has to do with eggs today. know, we're recording, it's coming down the barrel of Thanksgiving, but just saying.

Scott (00:28.797)
Egg sectional.

Scott (00:38.028)
So, do know who said egg-ceptional?

Daniel (00:43.642)
Me? Just now? No, who?

Scott (00:46.914)
1966 Batman. I believe his name was Egghead. He was a villain on the original Batman series and he was played by...

Daniel (00:54.192)
my god.

Daniel (01:00.944)
I have no clue.

Scott (01:02.156)
Vincent Price. Thank you very much. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Original Batman, egghead. And he would say egg-ception all the time.

Daniel (01:04.086)
Noooo

Daniel (01:14.012)
So, trip down memory lane of how old I am. The last time I watched Batman the original series, that feels weird to say, I think I was maybe 13 or 14 and I was spending the summer with my grandmother and it was the only thing that came on in between episodes of Law and Order. So literally my afternoon watching was Law and Order, Law and Order, Batman the original series and then

because it was A &E in the 90s, there was some more law and order on.

Scott (01:46.85)
Okay, all right, quick question, and then we're gonna get somebody else's opinion on it, favorite Batmobile of all time, go!

Daniel (01:49.1)
huh.

Daniel (01:56.356)
Animated series. Boom. Not even a pause, not even a doubt.

Scott (01:58.146)
Okay, all right. 1966 Barris Batmobile, which if you have enough money, if you have enough money, you can get a replica made with the Batfire extinguisher in it as well. Absolutely. Yeah, George Barris, love him, love him, love him. And you know what? I want to know who else or what other Batmobiles are out there that we love. And so without further ado, let's find out.

Daniel (02:06.02)
That's a cool Batmobile.

Scott (02:25.75)
What the Duchess of Design thinks of this, Zeta's in the house.

Scott (02:37.9)
Zeta! How are ya?

Zeta (02:38.875)
Hello. Pretty good, pretty good, I would say.

Scott (02:45.506)
All right, fantastic. Favorite Batmobile.

Zeta (02:49.122)
Batman Beyond.

Daniel (02:51.546)
good one, good one.

Zeta (02:52.823)
It looks so slick. It's so futuristic. There's nothing else like it. Yeah.

Daniel (02:57.05)
I Batman Beyond 2. I'm so sad. They were gonna make a movie that was animated. They said that looked like the art style from the Spider-Man in the Spider-Verse movies and they didn't. And I saw some mock-ups the other day and it made me just go like, man, that would have been awesome.

Scott (02:58.718)
Yeah. Yeah.

Zeta (03:15.705)
Missed opportunity, definitely. Yeah.

Scott (03:17.388)
Missed opportunity. So we have a wide variety. We've got the OG Batmobile. We've got two animated Batmobiles. So that's kind of cool. Although you couldn't build one yourself and you certainly couldn't contract it yourself. So kind of up on you from that perspective, which is kind of cool. Yeah, which is great. You know what? We've got a real special guest with us today and I'm gonna want to find out what his favorite Batmobile is and we're gonna learn all about him.

Daniel (03:35.13)
Ha ha!

Zeta (03:36.453)
you

Daniel (03:45.052)
It's important.

Scott (03:47.146)
in a little segment that we call, What's Your Deal?

Scott (03:55.53)
Steven!

Stephen Rhyne (03:56.972)
Hey, Scott.

Scott (03:58.656)
What's your deal, my friend?

Stephen Rhyne (04:00.75)
What's my deal? Well, I'm gonna, I'm looking at them and I'm gonna go with Daniel. I think you said the animated series, the 1992, like the art deco looking with the gigantic hood. Yeah, that I'm gonna go with that one. I do like the Batman Beyond World from 1999. It looks like this really weird like fuselage thing. So that one's pretty gnarly looking, but the 1992 would be cool.

Daniel (04:08.89)
Yeah. Yes. Boom. That's the correct answer.

Zeta (04:22.469)
work.

Scott (04:24.214)
So animated Batman wins.

Scott (04:31.98)
All right, there you go, everybody. Definitive Batmobile. That's great. Steven, I know you have more important things to talk about than nerdy stuff like that. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got here.

Zeta (04:34.875)
you

Daniel (04:40.901)
Meh.

Stephen Rhyne (04:43.406)
All right. Thanks for having me on. So my name is Steven and I'm from the CEO of Convey Your. So we are a company that helps largely companies that are trying to grow a large amount of, you know, sales reps and technicians that will help them recruit onboard, train and retain more people. And we typically do a lot of micro learning and, mobile based learning where we deliver via text message and then help them build out all of their change management training.

you know, sales training, all sorts of stuff like that, especially early on in the reps journey is what we kind of specialize in. And originally from Seattle and we've been living down here in Texas for about 13 years now, but grew up there, went to University of Washington and rode crew there. So was on the UW team and enjoyed that. that's kind of my background.

Daniel (05:36.752)
awesome.

Scott (05:38.07)
That is totally awesome. That's great. And I love our topic today. I love what you're going to bring to the show today. So many people that I work with are really struggling with this. Right. And so, folks, know, buckle up in your animated Batmobile because we're going to go into our topic of the week.

Scott (06:07.894)
This week's topic is right sizing. Yes, I said it out loud. Right sizing your training. So Stephen, before we get going on this, I just have one question for you.

Scott (06:25.942)
Yeah, so what is right-sizing your training and why should we be talking about it today?

Stephen Rhyne (06:32.236)
Yeah, it's the best label I could come up with with this. Well, you came up with the label, but we just discussed it. But like, it's this, it's this challenge that I see over and over and over again, which is, yeah, Hey, we've got a topic of training, a new, new initiative in the company. you know, new big change management initiative, something like that. And he used to go out to a bunch of people, varied personas. like different titles.

We've got maybe it's like the same title, but then you've just got people that have been doing they're in that title for 10 years or and they're a veteran or they are You know really really new and so there's just this challenge of fitting Getting every single person what they need to get them up to speed to talk about the new new just talk about the new stock and It's like this I don't know I'm use big words that I probably don't know what I'm using them, right? But like it's like it can be orthogonal

to the person, you know, it can like come from, I always think of like, am I being obtuse from Shawshank Redemption, right? And it's like, it's just, there's so many times that this is scary for people in LND. You don't wanna bug the veterans, you don't want to break learner trust, you don't want to give them too much information. And so you...

Daniel (07:40.283)
Yes.

Stephen Rhyne (08:00.502)
go to the lowest common denominator, right? You go with the thing that everybody's okay with. It won't be too easy for the new people, but it also won't bug the veterans and make them their eyes roll because it's the stuff they've all seen before. And then they're always like, well, why couldn't you just give me the advanced stuff? Well, I didn't even know if you knew that. And so I just see that over and over again is the challenge. And just curiously Scott, like, you know, anybody like, where do you see those?

Those, where in the scenarios do you see this, this right fitting, right sizing problem show up most.

Scott (08:37.794)
I'm glad you asked that question, because I have a teachable point of view on it. So that's why I'm excited about this topic. One of the things that I believe most of the people that I associate with in our circle of influence, the learning people, you great people out there, is how do we define our value, right? So what's our value? Especially in an environment where, ooh, man, we got learning that needs to get done, and...

You know we have to provide value. It's got to create the results. looking for but honestly I don't have a lot of time to do it and unfortunately, I feel like in today's world our value has Kind of dropped to like you said that lowest common denominator of time. How fast can I get it done? Well, just because it's fast does it necessarily mean that it's good we are dealing with at least I deal a lot with the

Stephen Rhyne (09:26.158)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (09:33.996)
Generation Z, the alphas, they're a swipe right to complete their learning kind of folks. They want it quick and easy. It's got to be relevant. Give me what I need to know and I'll move on. And a lot of learning solutions, especially in the SAS environment, do exactly that. But I got a question. Is it really good learning? And I don't have an answer for that. But we were joking right before the.

Stephen Rhyne (09:42.734)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (10:00.77)
We started recording and it was like, you know, the problem with the race to the bottom, if it is just the shortest and simplest thing is that sometimes you win, right? And if you're going to go ahead and base your entire learning ecosystem around what I hate to say, and there are great companies that do this, right? No disparity on what they're doing. It's still a pretty decent solution when it comes to delivering some knowledge very quickly, but the swipe light to, excuse me, swipe right to learn in the environment.

I don't know how effective that is, but I'm just kind of dumping my bucket.

Daniel (10:36.892)
You know, I wanna...

Stephen Rhyne (10:36.93)
You know, I like hearing this because yeah, go ahead, Daniel.

Daniel (10:40.124)
I was going to say, just wanted to, I also love this topic just from like personal experience. Years ago, I was working for a company and we were, we were making a big culture change, moving from a service culture to a sales culture. And you know, we're, building personas. We're building, okay, like who's going to get this training and what does it look like? And what's, are all these paths? Because, you know, we're going to take 15,000 people and we're going to move them. You know, the whole business needs to move to this mindset and you know,

one of, we were talking with them about like, Hey, like this group needs this kind of training and this group needs this kind of training and this group probably needs this kind of training. And you know, this level is going to need to know this and this level is going to need to know that. And just for time constraints and just for resource constraints, they're like, well, let's just build like one experience and we'll just make everybody go through it. Yeah. What's, what's the easiest we can get done. And, you know, we did it, we pushed it out and we did a good job with what we had and

you know, lots of good feedback. But sure enough, it was weeks later that the fires began. Hey, this person took this training and they want to know why, you know, as a director, they're having to go through this stuff. And hey, this frontline person took this training and none of these examples really sing to them. And it was it was like that for months. It was like that for months. And in the end, a year later, what we had done was built a bunch of individualized

like learning paths for these different groups to support them in different ways. And so the whole first experience, it was good, but we ended up going the route of building something for this level, for this group over and over and over again. And there were problems that cropped up for the rest of the time we were on that project because of that.

Stephen Rhyne (12:29.582)
Where do you think are, do you mind me asking, I'm gonna flip it around here. So where is most of the friction? Is it in individual personas or is it an experience level in that persona? We're both.

Daniel (12:44.053)
I would say for us, was an experience level. And like, we would see that happen like so often where general training goes out to everybody. Everybody must take this training. know, if, if you want to example, I think that can resonate with, with more people here. A lot of like human resources training is built the same way. Like, Hey, everybody has to take this training. Everybody has to this experience.

Stephen Rhyne (13:05.678)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Daniel (13:08.576)
And you as a frontline person take this training that's like, Hey, don't take any bribes. you're like, okay, not a problem. You know, nobody's offered me any bribes. And, know, but like your directors are like, okay, like when am I going to be like talking to customers directly? Why does this matter to me? And I think it's at that level where we see the most separation and where we see most of the scenarios we build in the training, like fall apart, the wheels come off and because it doesn't apply to you.

because I've wasted your trust, you brought up a good point trust by saying like, hey, if anybody ever offers you a bribe, don't take it. And you're just like, okay, whatever. Nobody's gonna offer me a bribe. I'm checking out. How much time's left in this training? know, 33 minutes, I'm done, bye.

Stephen Rhyne (13:49.036)
Yeah.

My experiences, I only have my experiences and my experiences have been mostly training 1099 based roles where there's very little built in compliance. Like there's very little built in, I don't need to do this, you have to prove it to me, you have to reiterate why this is valuable to me and I will complete it, otherwise I'm gonna nope out of the process. And where I've seen...

Daniel (13:59.856)
Okay.

Scott (13:59.916)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (14:19.574)
The biggest correlation with this right. Sizing stuff is in the, know, with them and what's in it for me at each persona. So, because like, I honestly believe there's maybe first principles. If you could get someone, if you get the right persona with the right wording and the right, what's in it for me, they don't need the rest. mean, don't get me wrong. Like good training is good training, but if they were so bought in and then so jazz, they would go to YouTube to learn about it.

Okay, meaning like that the buy-in where it connects to that person, that persona is more important than the actual content itself. And that's what needs to be right fitted the most is like, for example, you were talking about like the, what was the scenario you used for harassment or which was it you were talking about? Yeah.

Daniel (15:13.317)
yeah, like HR training, like I brought up like bribes and stuff like that, yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (15:17.282)
Yeah, bribes, right? So maybe it's more like, okay, for this manager guy, I'm going to spend time talking more about, this is what it looks like when you don't ask your people about bribes and what happens to your role when your people don't understand this and how it's going to affect your review and like things like that, right? And if you can put that context, then now they're bought in and now they want to listen to the rest of the content, which leads back to what Scott, you were saying about how do I...

take content that they expect to be short and sell it to be bigger. You know, like if you get the, you know what mean?

Scott (15:53.087)
yeah, for sure. We tend to do the opposite though.

Stephen Rhyne (15:57.431)
Yeah.

Scott (15:58.572)
We bring a bucket full of our stuff and our learners have a little Dixie cup, right? They've got a Dixie cup, but here's my bucket full of stuff and we just pour it in a Dixie cup. So getting clear on what it is that I really want to convey in a way that's smart makes sense. I love the example. The best compliance training I have around those things like bribery and all that other good stuff.

Stephen Rhyne (16:01.484)
Yeah.

Daniel (16:01.606)
Ha ha ha!

Stephen Rhyne (16:04.492)
Yeah, exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Scott (16:26.208)
It's just kind of, I hate to say it, test out of it. Because a lot of it's common sense, right? And if you don't have common sense, then we have a bigger problem.

Stephen Rhyne (16:32.428)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (16:39.212)
Yeah, exactly. Or testing assumptions.

Daniel (16:40.24)
I mean, HR trainings are pretty big industry. I mean.

Scott (16:43.412)
No, I'm not saying that it's not important. So don't think that it's not important. there are certain things, there are some table stakes that we expect from the people that we hire to have. One of those things is common sense. And if you don't have common sense, it will show up right away. In my humble opinion, my experience is it shows up right away. They grab the electric fence and they're gone. I certainly want to avoid that, but that's been my experience, right?

The same thing we were talking about, you know, journey lines for leadership training. And one of the first things that, that, that we were taught is like, well, how to write a good email. Okay. Is that really worthy of leadership training? Or should that be part of competencies that we make sure people have before we hire them?

Stephen Rhyne (17:35.886)
Yeah. What do you see as the first dividing? you're drawing, you're pouring the marbles at the top, the content marbles at the top, how do they do one of these paths? I would say you have to start with persona first because persona is going to have the largest deciding factor on the format of the content and how much content, how much training.

Scott (17:44.354)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (18:01.814)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (18:03.534)
So you got to start with some level of division in, you know, seniority or role or just job to be done. Like maybe jobs to be done is the first, first, you know, separating segmentation.

Daniel (18:04.124)
You know.

Daniel (18:17.82)
Steven, could you maybe talk about just personas a little bit more? I know it wasn't, like a lot of time when I was just a corporate L &D person, we didn't spend a lot of time with creating personas. And so like, I just want to make sure that like we're touching on that, touching on like how they're being used.

Stephen Rhyne (18:28.364)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, when I talk about persona, let's switch persona to jobs to be done. Because personas turn into like ideal customer profiles and ideal learner profile and all this stuff like that. What about just job to be done? how different the training is to... Reminding customers by the bank teller about the importance of having a minimum...

Daniel (18:45.892)
Yeah

Stephen Rhyne (19:02.754)
balance or something like that, right? And so what's in it for, like that's a job to be done. The job to be done is by the actual person reminding the customer. So that's a training experience. So that's the job to be done of actually doing the work of reminding the customer, which is done by the teller. So what's in it for them? What's in it for them is...

Well, have you ever had a really, let me describe to you a really stressful conversation where the customer comes in confused why they get charged for being over the balance or, know, stuff like that. I would say like that's a channel that you need to like develop for and segment on. And then the front, the bank manager that manages tellers, that'd be a persona, the job to be done is training my people on this. And then that's what I'm talking about with the job to be done.

So how many layers of jobs to be done are there to enforce, not enforce, but to get this initiative to work at every level. And so I would think that, is that how you guys approach it? Like you guys are the corporate trainers. Like I'm trying to think about how you guys break it down.

Daniel (20:07.366)
Yeah, a hundred percent. like I'll, I'll, I'll, yeah, I'll, I'll talk to you just a little bit more about like the students I brought up with like, building, you know, sales training. Like that was probably for me, I'd been in the industry for a while, but probably for me, was the first time I'm going to say personas. It probably was first time that I really got nitty gritty with personas. used to build, I'll say like knowledge trees. Like, okay, here's all the facts. Here's all the things. Here's all the processes that this group needs to know. And you'd build out this big tree and you're like, okay, cool.

Stephen Rhyne (20:30.51)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (20:35.46)
In order to do this, they need to know this, this, this, and this. order to do this, they to this, this, and this. And I really, again, just positive experience, like building personas and deciding like, okay, cool. This group, this is who the average person in our group is. This is what they look like. This is, you know, why they're here. Here's like their own, here's their whiffums. Here's why they need to know this stuff. And...

just how useful that is to know. And so like we're talking about stuff like that and we're talking about like, how do we decide, you know, who knows needs to know what and why do they need to know? I think you're bringing up like a bank teller, like, hey, like, hey, you need to remind people like, hey, here's your, here's how much balance is left and why that's an important training for them. So.

Zeta (21:24.723)
If I can just jump in because I had to look it up. Orthogonal. means involving right angles. It's a mathematical or mathematic adjective. But I think it's very applicable here because when we're talking about training and the whole idea of one size fits all, when you talk about having these personas, you're basically

Stephen Rhyne (21:25.132)
Yeah, go ahead.

Daniel (21:30.648)
Ha!

Zeta (21:51.023)
getting like a model to be able to fit and tailor that training to better utilize your learners time, their attention, and be able to help them. But I'm curious, when it comes to tailoring the training, once you have that persona kind of like nailed down and like, hey, this is our target audience, this is the prior knowledge that they have, how do you then take that next step and then tailor that training to make that right fit?

Stephen Rhyne (22:17.356)
Yeah, so Zeta, the way I thought about this is like, so first I start with job to be done. So with 1099, it's like, they're gonna leave as soon as they hear something that's not applicable to them. They just don't care. And so I can't even build like comment, like Venn diagrams of personas and like, where's the knowledge between these two? You just have to build each one as a separate channel, okay? So like in solar sales, there's setter and closer. So you build.

Scott (22:28.053)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (22:42.892)
we have like kind of if this then that logic to release an entirely different version of the training for setters versus closers, right? And the whole experience is that. once you get into, now it's the experience level. So now it's like within that job to be done, what level of experience do you have doing that job? And what I try to do is like this idea of, let me throw you out in the deep end.

and ask softball questions and hardball questions on the topic, and then build a score on you and then take you down paths to brush you up on stuff. like, if you get a really low score, take them down, like, let's, you don't know this thing. Let me brush you up on this. And then, then you jump them to the main line once they get better at that. And that's technology, you know, like we have with Convayware, but,

You know, I've seen other people do this, like even in marketing and sales, the same thing. So, Hey customer, you're, you're unaware of our consulting capabilities or, even the whole concept of what we do. Let me describe that for you. You should watch this video first. Once you understand that and have context, then it can give you the new, new. So that's what we do is like, we try to build a profile for this specific job. Does this person know very little? Do they think that they knew a lot?

even if they are a veteran. we don't, they're not a respecter of persons. like, even if they say they're a veteran for this specific job, if they're still in their veteran, there'd been 10 years, they could score low. And it's like, I'm sorry, but you really need to go through this again, because things have changed since 1989, you know? I gotta go through it again. And then, and then pop them. And then what I think that does, back to you, what you saying about Scott, Scott, you were talking about with like swiping left is I think that if you approach it that way,

Zeta (24:24.477)
yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (24:35.382)
and you set the context of, hey, we're gonna tailor this to you, we're gonna test you first, then if they end up with 28 swipes instead of two, that's on them because they were aware of, like they are now aware of why they need to go through more of it. And I think that it gives more, like learners delivering, or learning,

Scott (24:47.522)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (25:03.16)
creators can be more intrepid about what they do and what they give if they at least first have a dialogue with that person about what they know.

Zeta (25:12.089)
Yeah, and it also helps establishing what they know so when they do learn how you improved. See if it's effective. Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (25:18.528)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. Like there's a delta. Yeah.

Scott (25:21.546)
Let me see if I'm picking up on what you're laying down. So instead of a pre-learning assessment, we are going to go ahead and assess throughout the learning with the opportunity of, okay, well, you don't need to watch this video. We're going to want to go on to the next thing or yeah, you know what? You're going to need to watch this video. and I've experienced that myself, like with a lot of really great compliance training where you've got, you know, the assessment. And I think I know.

Stephen Rhyne (25:26.851)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (25:47.875)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (25:51.456)
the right answer, but I didn't. And now I'm going to learn the right answer. I'm much more invested because I've discovered in that journey that, something's changed and I need to pay attention and it's much more impactful to me.

Stephen Rhyne (26:06.284)
Yeah. like the learning assessment, what I like is the idea of compacting both the learning assessment and the training together. instead of the gestation period, the period of like receiving results, segmenting the learners based off of the results that came through, putting them into separate buckets and then reissuing that training, that might take a week and a half, two weeks, maybe a month to do that, right? And then after a month,

Scott (26:16.118)
Yeah, exactly.

Scott (26:26.198)
Exactly.

Stephen Rhyne (26:35.906)
the, I know why I'm going through this bigger experience is gone. Like they've lost context as to why they've been issued this bigger version. And it's also just hard, like more admin work to like remember which ones to deliver to whom. So.

Daniel (26:53.82)
So I love this, like individualized learning paths make my heart sing. But like, how, how are you guys and how would you, how would you, how are you guys handling where let's say you've got a time sensitive rollout and you've got group a and here's the training rollout for group a and you've got a couple people in group a who are just sailing through it. They're getting done fast. That's great. They're going back to their jobs. I've got the training done, but maybe you've got like another, like, I don't know, we'll say like

Stephen Rhyne (27:09.282)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (27:17.741)
Yeah.

Daniel (27:23.868)
18%. That's a weird number to pick off top of my head. But it's the first one that bubbled up. you've got like 18 % of your groups are taken way longer because they're like, crap, you know, the new new is catching me. I didn't know all this stuff and I'm going through like, how are you still with individual, these individualized learning paths, like moving groups of learners through on a timely basis?

Stephen Rhyne (27:26.666)
I like it.

Stephen Rhyne (27:34.167)
Yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (27:43.994)
right, because you've got this issue where the very act, it's kind of snowballing for some, whereas other people are going through it faster. so issue more training to the veterans, I guess. So by and large, you're gonna, well, I mean, like a veteran should be able to take more content than, like you should be able to throw more at that experience level and they should be able to take on more because they actually are only shaving off the, this is my theory. Okay, I know I'm talking in theory.

Daniel (27:56.695)
Ha ha!

Daniel (28:05.683)
yeah.

Daniel (28:12.412)
Yeah, theory's great.

Stephen Rhyne (28:13.622)
They should be shaving off, they're like sipping the new new because they can test out of these things. And then the, like I see you're saying, you're gonna have to release less to the, this is a challenge. This is a challenge you brought up because if I'm releasing to that persona the same, you're gonna have veterans that are done quicker. And that I will, okay, so Daniel.

You solve that with creating, you can take the same course that can do this stuff and put them on like a daisy, like a daisy chain. So if you can create a journey for those to release like lockstep them. So if you could release that first one and only then let them release, then, you know, release the next one once they finish it, that might help. Although that creates some organizational timing issues, right? Cause if you're trying to release all of this.

Daniel (28:50.748)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (29:12.62)
all at the same, like the actual physical in the real world initiative has to be done by a certain period of time. Then the veterans should be caught up way faster than the, this is hard. I was wondering about you. Yeah.

Daniel (29:24.764)
This is hard. just so you know, and like, this is something like I asked this question because for real, individualized learning paths, here's the nerdiest thing I've said all day. Individualized learning paths, we were talking about, make my heart sing, they really do. I remember I was working in a call center environment and we really wanted a training thing where we could get people to come in at any time, sit down and take the material. Instead of like dedicated facilitators, we'd have like...

Stephen Rhyne (29:30.232)
Yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (29:35.884)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (29:40.238)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (29:46.958)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (29:51.908)
remember the right word here, like basically like learning coordinators that would help them get through the material and and basically instead of like huge blocks of like hey we hired 60 people this week in two classes and we expect them to be ready in three weeks. We wanted to get to a place where we'd say okay cool you had you know three terminations this month we're gonna hire three people they're gonna start and you know they should be all ready to go within the next little bit of time.

And so I love this and I only asked because the question I asked you is exactly the question that got thrown back on me. Like, hey, like what, what happens like if person.

Stephen Rhyne (30:28.494)
You have, you essentially have like a percentage, let's use 18 % or no 20, I'm going to 64.1 % that are not, that didn't make, they're like, need more time to actually learn. And so this comes back to like the whole lowest common denominator doesn't really serve everybody. Everybody got it. Everybody completed it. It's checked off. But how many of those actually applied it?

Daniel (30:32.464)
Yeah.

There you go, there you go. Gotta be specific.

Stephen Rhyne (30:55.758)
But you know, we have to march on because there's a new thing coming. think the only thing to do is like, what we tell, because our business, because it's 1099 a lot is like a game. So it's like, what can you, what do you not give the person is just as important as what you give them. And we really trying to give them only the things they need to be, to get to the aha moment with that job, that job, to then be interested in actually learning more and nothing else.

So it's like, it's very like spoon fed. And so like the idea might be is that you have to front load the things that must be learned first. Even if it's just like, you got to mock this, this behavior. You have to do the, the behavior of just like, what do they call it? Like the rhetorical phase or like, you just got to be able to say it and do it. And then you'll learn the underlying principles of it later on your own time. But this has to be done by this, you know, this timeframe. So just.

Daniel (31:28.55)
Love that.

Stephen Rhyne (31:53.374)
mimic it and here's the script and then you'll understand the concepts a little bit later on your own like past the deadline you know in terms of the way you lay out the training what do think of that?

Daniel (32:07.898)
No, I love that. I, so, and I'll tell you, think, you know, years ago when this problem came up, there wasn't any like really good solutions. And I really think just as we're getting just even present day, but even as we're getting closer and closer to like, you know, like artificial intelligence and all these other methods, being able to like build individualized learning paths and being able to like properly schedule people, like when they roll out and just be able to like,

Stephen Rhyne (32:18.21)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (32:23.266)
Yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (32:27.714)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (32:38.214)
To your point, like, hey, just say the words, just let's get the actions, the kinetic actions forward, and then you can learn the whys later on. I think it's a good first step.

Stephen Rhyne (32:48.844)
Yeah, it's not, we are not far off. Like we do it, we do it imperatively. mean, like an imperative programming language, you have to, you put in your logic, you say if they get a score this way, take them down this way, then jump them to this main line, then jump them over here. So we, but we're not far off from like each individual learner getting dispatched, a fully contextually aware,

AI that agent that has what they need to train on and also remembers every, every has individual context for each individual learner. And then can even be aware of like, when this is supposed to go down for the organization and be like, Hey buddy, you need to speed up on this. and let me truncate some of the things I tell you just to get you over the finish line faster. and so that's gonna, that's, that's happening. That's coming, where we're going away from setting up all that logic to actually saying,

Scott (33:20.352)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (33:48.14)
This is the context. This is the ultimate goal and desired outcome for this person. Figure out the stuff in the middle.

Scott (33:58.754)
So while we're waiting for the genie to fully come out of the bottle, right? Because he's about halfway out, the genie is, right? So just thinking about our designing folks out there, what are some tech options that we have that can help them with this process and right size their training?

Stephen Rhyne (34:02.038)
Yeah.

Daniel (34:03.418)
Ha ha!

Stephen Rhyne (34:08.407)
Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (34:21.09)
Yeah, I mean, do you wanna go first? You some that you found?

Scott (34:26.196)
No, I was gonna ask you.

Stephen Rhyne (34:28.064)
Okay, I'll go. I mean, we do this like convey your yeah, it's we haven't done as much as I want to, but we are our thing. We have a tool called workflows, which is essentially like you take micro learning. Okay. And you you show them a, you know, a micro learning experience. We retract every single thing kind of like X API, but we track every single interaction into that learning experience, including every poll, every question, the answer. And we could score every single.

interaction. And then we build up a profile on your score on that initial lesson where you kind of throw hardball, softball questions, and things like that. And then we have conditional. So you say, the score is this great, go down this path. If the score is this, go this way. We can also wait for conditions to be met. So nudge them, like, hey, you didn't finish the lesson. And text them back. Get back in there and do it. So it combines email, text, and a micro-learning tool to build out these like

very marketing automation looking, you know, adaptive training experiences. And so then like they'll go down, let's say somebody didn't know that contact at all, they're brand new and they're getting this new thing. They'll go down the main, like the side, sidecar thing, learn there, and then you can jump them to other sections. So instead of like one large SCORM file, you're, you're left with like a lot of these little Lego bricks that are individually like little small chunks and dependencies of your training that are put into a graph.

And then that graph is visual and you're using them for different people depending on how much they know. So I'd love to show it to sometime. But I think it's really helpful for that common denominator busting situation where you've got to send it out to 10,000 people in the organization and especially like change management stuff. Like you don't have a lot of time to...

Daniel (36:06.62)
Yeah, that sounds awesome.

Stephen Rhyne (36:25.314)
build out individual SCORM files, separate those, deliver them, track the metrics on all of them. We allow you to kind of just say, let me build one experience, but that is relatively gonna have maybe up to five different paths that can be composed to ultimately get person at the bottom of the workflow.

Daniel (36:51.778)
nerdy question and you don't have to go ahead i'm so sorry okay i was gonna say nerdy question you don't have to answer because i don't want you to reveal the secret sauce but are you guys able to track like time to answer as like a confidence measurement

Zeta (36:52.091)
That's awesome. That's awesome.

Stephen Rhyne (36:54.423)
Yeah.

Zeta (36:55.747)
No, just said that's awesome.

Stephen Rhyne (37:05.74)
that's a good question. We track like a log. So it's kind of like a CX API, but I've never had somebody ask me like, well, we have a, we have scoring based off of the time it took you to answer. so we do, we do like on the one, we have a challenge question format where you like, we time it. And then if you're slow, it takes points, shaves points off how slow you are. So if you have a, you know, slow confidence, so yeah. Yeah.

Daniel (37:17.977)
Okay, okay, so yeah, you guys are.

Scott (37:23.756)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (37:28.571)
Love that.

Scott (37:29.768)
It's bar trivia. Right there. It's exactly how bar trivia works.

Daniel (37:31.984)
Ha ha ha!

Zeta (37:33.083)
You

Scott (37:37.056)
This is totally amazing. I love it. I'm thinking a lot about work that we've done in the past and this whole idea of right sizing. feels very build your own story to me as well, which is incredibly effective way of learning, just a lot of time that's involved with it. But I think you're doing some really great stuff and I love the solution isn't.

Stephen Rhyne (37:52.517)
Yeah, it is. Choose your own adventure. Yeah.

Stephen Rhyne (37:59.533)
Yeah.

Scott (38:04.468)
as in a one size fits all, whether it's too big or whether it's too small or whether it's too fast or it's too slow, but it's really just kind of, you know, it's it's that porridge that's just right for us. So I think that's really great. So as we begin to wrap things up, are there some topics or some ideas that you want to share with our audience that we didn't get a chance to talk about, or maybe it's just an opportunity to kind of wrap up this main idea.

Stephen Rhyne (38:09.966)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Rhyne (38:30.956)
Yeah, mean, wrap up the, I would just, I want to go back and just harp a tiny bit on, I always like to share with L and D folks that are mostly working in a corporate environment that don't work as much with this kind of like crazy pace, high churn, you know, direct sales space that I'm in, that try to think, just imbue a little bit more marketing and sales tactics into your sales and training.

or into your training than you would expect and spend a little bit more emphasis. Like I go hard on the belief building context, hyping, what's in it for me, that sort of stuff way more than I do on the actual like, what am I learning? Because that's what's gonna get them to like reopen that email, re get back into it and learn it is when you can align with their interests, whether that's like pleasure or pain. think pain is okay to highlight.

And I don't think L &D sometimes wants to paint pictures of pain, but they're legit. There's legitimate pain if you don't do this, or in your role there could be pain. Let me give you an example. And so I just think that, I'll get off my soapbox, like marketing, focusing on marketing and sales and treatment, like we're all trying to, in sales and marketing, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to educate a,

Daniel (39:49.114)
great soapbox.

Stephen Rhyne (39:56.84)
a person that doesn't need to do anything. Like they won't lose a job if they don't use your product. And if we can get them to buy, we can try to take the same tactics and get them to buy in to doing the thing that the corporation wants them.

Zeta (40:13.656)
Love it.

Daniel (40:14.972)
Yeah, 100%. Love that.

Scott (40:20.578)
Steven, thanks so much. Really amazing things. I'm gonna be thinking about that the next time I put together our learnings, and I would hope our audience would as well. Could you do me a favor? Could you go ahead and let our audience know how they could connect with you?

Stephen Rhyne (40:35.438)
Yeah, then connect with me. Just by going to our website, you can actually book a time with us if you're interested. It's conveyyour.com. it's just like, it's not Convair, it's conveyyour.com. And C-O-N-B-E-Y-O-U-R.com, and you can go there and there's actually a book a demo, you can schedule some time. And yeah, that's the best way to get a hold of me.

Scott (41:01.484)
Go check them out everybody, really great stuff, really great solutions, love it. Thank you so much for being on the show, I really appreciate what you had to share. Daniel San.

Stephen Rhyne (41:10.136)
Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Dan.

Zeta (41:12.346)
Thank you.

Scott (41:14.028)
Daniel-san, could you do me a favor? Could you go ahead and let our audience know how they could connect with us?

Daniel (41:14.098)
Yes, Scott.

Daniel (41:19.468)
Absolutely. Guys, you guys know the drill. We bring this up all the time. We could almost just record it, but then I won't have a chance to tell you about it. If you haven't already, email us at nerds at thelearningnerds.com. I think this week, what we'd love for you to tell us is how are you fighting lowest common denominator training? Are you looking at personas? Are you building training paths? What's that look like? We'd love to know more. If you're on Facebook, you can find us at Learning Nerds.

for all of our Instagram peeps, fablearningnerds, and lastly, for more information about us, what we do, and updates, www.thelearningnerds.com. Scott, back at ya.