Key takeaways

Created by Cleanvoice

• The importance of embracing public work, such as sharing knowledge and contributing to the broader learning and development community, as an independent L&D professional
  
  
• The challenges of maintaining a healthy work-life balance and the need to adapt to the changing demands of the modern workplace
  
  
• The value of self-reflection and continuous learning for independent L&D professionals to stay focused on what truly matters in their careers and personal lives.

Podcast summary:

Created by Cleanvoice

The speakers in this podcast episode share their reflections on contributing to a series of articles called “Week in the Life,” where they provided insights into their work roles, thought processes, successes, and challenges. Kim Ellis, the CEO of L&D Free Spirits, was initially nervous about revealing her “scatty” and fast-paced thinking style, worrying that people might judge her unconventional approach.

Rob Clarke, the owner and managing editor of Learning News, was concerned about sounding overly critical of L&D’s alignment with business needs and its focus on creating more courses. Sheridan Webb, the Community Manager at the Training Designers Club, was open about automating certain administrative tasks to maintain a personal service, and shared her flexible work schedule, acknowledging that running her own business allows her to work in a way that suits her best.

In this podcast dialogue, the speakers share their experiences and insights on the role of technology in the workplace. Sheridan emphasises that automation can free up time to focus on more impactful work, while Andy discusses the challenges of accurately describing his role in learning and development.

Kim reflects on the significant time commitment required for managing her social media presence, and Rob acknowledges the unpredictable nature of his work week. Overall, the speakers highlight the nuances and complexities involved in their respective roles, emphasizing the importance of continuous learning and adapting to the changing demands of the modern workplace.

Sheridan shares the challenges of balancing event coverage, editing, and responsive work that often disrupts her carefully planned schedule. She values the time spent watching, listening, and connecting with her community, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into her to-do list. Kim is inspired by Sheridan’s approach to structuring her days and hopes to try a similar method, while Rob appreciates the similarities in how the group manages their diverse community-focused roles, and is reminded of the value in seeking diverse perspectives on his own work.

The discussion highlights the challenges and rewards of being an independent L&D professional. Kim Ellis’ community provides a supportive space for freelancers to share their experiences. The speakers were inspired by how Andy and Kim balance strategic thinking with hands-on L&D work, and how they adjust their environments to suit different tasks. The discussion also touched on the importance of people in driving solutions forward, and the value of constantly reflecting on one’s role and how to improve it going forward. The speakers reflect on the joys and challenges of their work, emphasising the importance of work-life balance, prioritising tasks, and building a professional profile.

They advise aspiring professionals to embrace public work like blogging and speaking, while cautioning that building a successful community is far from passive. Overall, the discussion highlights the value of self-reflection and staying focused on what truly matters, both in one’s career and personal life. The speakers highlight the importance of building a thriving community, rather than just a membership-based resource. They advise starting small, engaging with a core group, and iterating the offering based on their needs.

The speakers also highlight the value of being honest about one’s strengths and weaknesses, seeking external support, and maintaining a clear business focus. Additionally, they encourage avoiding self-limiting labels and instead shaping one’s role to align with personal goals and a broader strategy. Kim emphasises the importance of nurturing your network when building a community, working as a freelancer, or as a self-employed professional. She advises not to work in isolation, but to cultivate a community of peers, mentors, collaborators, and potential clients. Kim’s network is her biggest asset, as it has provided her with work opportunities through recommendations. She encourages giving back to your network by providing value, time, advice, and insights to help others succeed.

Speakers:

Kim Ellis⁠

⁠Rob Clarke⁠

⁠Sheridan Webb⁠

⁠Andy McConville

Links from the podcast:

A week in the life of: The Editor of Training Journal⁠⁠

⁠⁠A week in the life of: The CEO of a learning business community and Learning Network board member⁠⁠

⁠⁠A week in the life of: A Leadership Development Manager⁠⁠

⁠⁠A week in the life of: A Learning Community Manager⁠⁠

⁠⁠A week in the life of: The Editor of Learning News

Transcript:

Created by Cleanvoice

Jo Cook: This episode, I’ve asked the authors that have launched a new series of articles, their reflections upon contributing. Each person has written an account of a week of their working life, giving us some insights into their role, their thinking process, success and challenges, as well as getting to know their perspective a bit more.

All the links are in the show notes, or if you go to trainingjournal.com and search for Week in the Life, you’ll find the articles. What everyone shared was a little personal, even though it’s about our work. It’s detail of what we do, why and when. So I wondered what people might have been nervous about in contributing to this series. Kim Ellis is the CEO of L&D Free Spirits and starts us off with something she was nervous about sharing.

Kim Ellis: This is a really hard question because I’m kind of an open book. I’ve even been accused of oversharing at times. I think, for me, the letting people in to see how scatty my brain is, you know, I’m constantly jumping from one thing to another, I’ve constantly got a million things going on in my head and, you know, I don’t have to-do lists, so I have to, you know, keep it all up there and keep everything remembered. I don’t know that…

Am I nervous about sharing that element of myself or is it more thinking that people are going to judge me? Should I be doing something differently? Should I be doing something more streamlined? But you know what? The way that I work works for me. It might not work for everybody.

Jo Cook: Kim, I love that you’re an open book, and thank you for your honesty about how you work. As you say, everyone’s different, and it’s nice to find people that may think a bit like we do. Next up is Rob Clarke, the owner and managing editor of Learning News, and he was nervous about something different.

Rob Clarke: I was nervous about sharing what I hope doesn’t come across too much as criticism about L&D’s alignment with business and just making more courses. There’s a lot of history here about why L&D works the way it does and it’s complicated. Things like everyone’s experiences of how we all learnt in school and the effect that has on what the people we work for expect. This huge change from what we used to call L&D going from training and development to now learning and development.

And all that is bringing with it, injecting L&D into every aspect of learning, which is so much bigger than just training, performance, learning in the flow, personalization and so on. People like me and throughout our industry often talk about this and it can seem like I’m being constantly overcritical. That’s not my aim. I don’t want the badge of the person constantly whacking into L&D. There’s too many good things about this profession and it’s given me everything in my career, so much to be thankful for.

Jo Cook: Great reminder for us all about the importance of our work in L&D for our organizations. Sheridan Webb is Community Manager at the Training Designers Club. And her take on this question is about what she shared is more about the service of the company.

Sheridan Webb: Being open about the fact that I have to automate some things. I do pride myself on offering a personal service, but I can’t remember to do every little thing. And even if I did, I’d be spending all my time doing admin, which is not where I had value. So, for example, when an annual member is up for renewal, they are sent an email to let them know that comes from the system. When people become a VIP member, they are drip-fed emails, so they are given information about their membership in bite-sized chunks. I’d get in an awful muddle if I tried to do it all myself.

I wondered if I should share that I take two half days a week for me, one doing my voluntary work and the other for Zumba. But I do tend to start work at 7.30am each day. And what’s the point in running your own business if you can’t run it to suit you? I think it’s important to show people that a flexible business can still be a successful business.

Jo Cook: I don’t think automation in this day and age is anything to be worried about. I’d be more worried if you weren’t automating things Sheridan. Freeing you up to focus on what really helps people is the point of technology, I think. Now to Andy McConville, who is Leadership Development Manager at ResQ, and his worries were about his take on work.

Andy McConville: So I wasn’t really nervous about sharing. I’m more nervous about audience reaction or lack of reaction. Also thinking that, you know, these roles in learning have labels and titles, but they mean very different things to different people. So I guess I’ve got this whole paranoia about somebody looking at it and going, no, that’s the wrong way to describe the role. But it’s mine. It’s how I do it. And really the helpful side of it would be to see other people’s perspective on it, so I can learn from it as well. So yeah, not nervous in that sense about the content I’ve shared, but it’s receiving of the message, I guess.

Jo Cook: I had kicked off the whole series with my work at TJ, and what had sparked the series was two things. One was how many people asked me questions about how things work at Training Journal, and the other is my own curiosity about other people’s work and what they actually do. I think I was worried about sharing how many emails were overflowing my inbox, 634 as of the writing, but a mere 396 today. I didn’t want people to think that I wasn’t approachable for ideas and contributions.

My next question was about something that people didn’t actually share in their account of their week, and maybe should have. Andy wishes he’d shared a bit more about some specifics of his work.

Andy McConville: I think I’d like to have focused a bit more on what we’re doing with some of the embedding strategy that we have, the how we’re trying to keep this alive and how that’s kind of demonstrating a real strong knowledge base in the fluctuation and behavioural change, which is always interesting to me. Also, I think the knock-on effect of helping people to help other leaders. So the unintended consequence of some of the training team getting more involved in what I do and then being able to support what I do.

It’s been quite a nice evolution, I suppose, in the skills there. So I’m helping develop a training team. They’re certainly doing a lot to develop themselves. And that’s coupled with trying to do something robust with the embedding side of things. I think embedding often gets left to the businesses in previous roles that I’ve had. Now we’ve got a kind of a hands-on approach and we can play data back on the back of it. I think I would like we’ve done a bit more on that if I’d rethought this.

Jo Cook: I love the idea of helping people to help other people. I think that describes an underlying ethos for my work at TJ too and probably everyone in L&D. I think I could have shared a bit more about some of the media elements or events that I go to, why they’re important to everyone and some more behind the scenes or imposter syndrome incoming. Maybe that’s just not too interesting for people. For Kim, it’s all about a time admission.

Kim Ellis: I would say probably how much time that I spend on LinkedIn because you need to be proactive with it. It’s not just about posting, it’s about commenting, it’s about liking, it’s about checking how previous posts are doing, how they’re performing, and if you have paid posts, promoted posts, is it worth the money, all of that kind of thing. So I spend up quite a bit of time on LinkedIn and I’m kind of embarrassed about how much, so that’s probably why I didn’t actually quantify it in my article.

Jo Cook: I think it’s good you shared you shared that, Kim, and I bet you aren’t alone. Rob highlights how a week doesn’t really flow all that well.

Rob Clarke: I think perhaps what might not come across in my piece is how unstructured the week can sometimes be. When you read my week in the life piece it comes across like everything runs to a nice plan but the reality is not this. My week almost never goes to plan. I frequently underestimate how long it takes to produce programs and how many other things arrive on me every day to respond and react to news.

I end up working sometimes very long hours to get everything done. I’m filming at the upcoming Learning Network Connect event in November and in my diary I’ve blocked out the following three days to edit all the interviews and produce all the programs that will get made. I can tell you now this will probably take more like five or more 12 hour plus days once everything else that happens in the week starts to impact on it. That’s always the case following an event. I enjoy the events, but they’re a lot of work and it’s not possible just to have a nice plan for editing the programs. Too many things will happen to disrupt it and it will all take a lot longer.

Jo Cook: Great point, Rob, about what comes in delaying planned work. Some people would suggest that good task management wouldn’t allow for that. But the nature of some work and roles and businesses is that you need to be responsive. And I think news definitely counts as one of those. Sheridan continues this point about productivity.

Sheridan Webb: I seem to spend a lot of time watching, listening and thinking. Maybe that’s just me procrastinating, or maybe it is an inherent part of what I have to do. If I’m to offer a responsive service, I do need to keep an eye on what’s going on. It’s not a specific task, so it doesn’t feature on my to-do list, and I am heavily driven by my to-do list. But I probably do spend at least half a day in the week joining dots, sharing opportunities, and just building connections. That includes alerting people within my community when I notice something that might be of interest to them. It’s not part of the service that I promise, but it is something that it just feels like it’s the right thing to do. And to be able to share with people who I know, like and trust is so very pleasing.

Jo Cook: Your point about building connections is so important and something Kim picks up on later on. Now, what are some of the things that our authors appreciated or were inspired by from someone else’s account of their week? Kim continues this thought about timing and productivity.

Kim Ellis: I really appreciated reading Sheridan’s account because what she does over at the Training Designers Club is more aligned with what I’m doing and with L&D Free Spirits. So she’s years ahead of me in running this community. So I think that I can take a lot of learnings from her account. You know, she segments the days for specific tasks, whereas I just do everything as it lands on my desk. And, you know, I don’t really segment out specific times to do things, unless I’m doing the captions on videos, then I block time out. So I’d say that I was inspired by the way that Sheridan structures her days. Whether or not it will work for me, I don’t know, because I’m a little scatty, but I’m going to try it, you know, I’m going to try having specific days for specific tasks and we’ll see how we get on with that.

Jo Cook: Rob looks at similarities and viewpoints at similarities and viewpoints.

Rob Clarke: So much here, Jo. It was fun to read about the other’s weeks and see in many ways, despite our different kinds of jobs, just how similar we all are. Sheridan, Kim, Andy, and of course yourself doing a very similar job to me. How we’re all working in communities, writing, blogging, running webinars, social media, and so on. If I have to pick out one thing that’s inspired me, I’m going to pick Andy McConville talking about how he learned to look more outward to the L&D industry and how other people in other industries are solving the same problems he has.

So I work in a one-person company, there’s just me, so it’s easy to feel alone and challenged by whether I’m doing the right thing. It is quite nuanced. I mean, I spend my whole day talking to people about L&D, but I don’t always talk often enough with others about my own challenges. And it was nice to be reminded how important it is to get diverse opinions from others about the work I do and talk to other editors about their work and their challenges. And Kim Ellis’ whole business, supporting freelance L&D people, is about this too. A place for people who work on their own to share their challenges and feel supported and learned. So lots to be inspired about in all these Week in the Life pieces, Jo.

Jo Cook: Strategy is always a great topic to look at, either the detail within your own organisation through to a more abstract concept.

Sheridan Webb: I was pretty inspired by how many times Andy shifts between doing strategic work and really getting his sleeves rolled up and getting involved in day-to-day L&D tasks. Now, I do have a number of employed people in my VIP community, so I know that this goes on, especially if you’re a big chunk of the L&D team. But to see it laid out was quite the eye opener. I was also interested to see how Kim changes her environment to specific tasks. Now, Kim and I do similar roles, but we do approach it slightly differently. And I love the fact that she moves to the lounge for some tasks like writing more reflective pieces. It made me realise that I do sometimes change my environment, so I move to the kitchen when I need to be creative, so that the computer can’t distract me. So it made me think, is this something that I could do more of? Definitely food for thought there.

Jo Cook: Lastly, Andy is very kind.

Andy McConville: One thing I was inspired by, such an unfair question Joe, I’m going to sound a little bit cliche but I’m going to go with you first. I think you’ve always inspired me to look at learning differently, look at my role differently and particularly with that external research and understanding more about what the industry’s doing, I mean the learning industry, but also what are other industries doing in general. And it’s that sort of supporting that, you know, everyone has opinions and views and you can kind of pull those all together and form your own strategy to move forward.

So that’s that. And I really like in Rob’s article, the bit about it’s the people, the people make the news. And if I kind of nick that and say, you know, steal with pride, it’s the people that make the solution work and the solution practical and move it forward. So without them, you wouldn’t be doing anything in the space that I work in. So yeah, so a couple of inspirations there, but I thought really all of the articles are interesting.

Jo Cook: I love how everybody’s taking a different lens and a different view to it. As everyone said, all the accounts were interesting and I learned from all of them. As a small business owner and independent worker, I loved how hard we all work, but also the different ways that we do, and the similarities in wondering if we’re doing the right thing. For what it’s worth, I see people doing great things. I found it an interesting activity to decide what to write and share with everyone, to explain some of the things I do and how it shows the variety of the work that the TJ role has.

What did others find that writing this article helped them think about? Andy starts us off this time and verbalises something that drives a lot of L&D people.

Andy McConville: I think writing the articles helped us reflect on the varied nature of the role and that if I was writing this as a role writing the articles helped us reflect on the varied nature of the role and that if I was writing this as a role profile, if I included everything that I actually do, it would take forever. But it’s still got this sort of core principle of that it’s about the people, it’s about their It’s about leader of leaders, and that’s what I get a real kick out of helping people help other people. So it’s been a quite nice reflection.

And it also is a bit of pride, I guess, in seeing how much I do and how varied the things are that I do. And then as I constantly reflect anyway, I’m thinking about, well, what’s next? How do I shape it going forward? I’ll reshape it. What does the next sort of stage or phase look like? And what I’m doing, the more formal, but also the informal side of it. So yeah, constant reflection, constantly looking at. how can I do better but not beating myself up when it’s not going so well, because I’ve learned that as well, so that you don’t kind of get down on yourself too much if things don’t quite go the way you want them to, as fast as you want them to. But yeah, I just kind of watch this space. I think there’s a lot more to more to come, I guess.

Jo Cook: Pride in our job leads us on to Sheridan.

Sheridan Webb: Writing this article really brought home to me why I love what I do. I sometimes complain that I don’t earn as much now as I did when I was doing corporate consulting. But the fact is, this is my choice to do this work. Nobody is forcing me to do it. And if I really wanted to, I could go back to that corporate consulting role. I’m so fortunate to be doing something that I love. But it also made me think that I could perhaps be a little bit more organized and deliberate with how I spend my time. I love having the flexibility, but work does expand to fill the time available. And I could perhaps be more effective if I had just a little bit more structure to my days without imposing false restrictions.

Jo Cook: That productivity element comes up again and Kim highlights the usefulness of recording what you’re doing.

Kim Ellis: I’ve never journaled before. I’ve never kept a diary, even when I was a kid. And so when Jo asked me to do a week in the life of, I thought, well, this is the time to actually take stock and to analyse, do I have a work-life balance? And yes, I do. When you’ve read my piece, you may think that’s nuts because I’m always working, but the way I work works for me and writing this article actually solidified that for me because I was picking out different areas and then thinking, well, actually, that day, I could have been a little bit more productive. I could have done this, I could have done that, I could have done whatever.

Now, you may be reading that thinking, well, where would she have the time to do anything extra? But when I’m looking at what I achieved in each day and what I did, there are still opportunities there for me to be more productive for me to do more things.

Jo Cook: Something that will strike a chord with lots of people is the prioritising of tasks and knowing where the balance should be with life outside of work.

Rob Clarke: So, just how hard I work, and am I always doing what’s most important? Life-wise, it’s been a tough year for me. My family has lost elderly relatives, and other life challenges that come along, and so on. My sister said to me recently, we need to pull together more as a family. And writing this got me thinking about whether I’m too distracted by things that don’t matter so much. Am I focused enough on doing the things that really do matter? So yeah, doing more of what’s really important and less other stuff is something I’ve been reminded about by writing about my working week, Jo.

Jo Cook: All useful reflections on our jobs and lives. If you’ve been reading the series, I wonder what you’ve taken from the articles and how it’s made you think about your own work.

And lastly, we couldn’t be L&D folk without considering helping others. So what advice can we share if others are aiming to do what we do? From my perspective, I highlighted in my article the importance of doing public work, blogs, writing, podcasts, webinars, conference speaking, and more, I’m sure. I feel that having a professional profile has helped me in all sorts of ways. It’s not easy to put yourself out there, and that’s something I want to help people with by encouraging everyone to have a go at that through TJ.

Sheridan highlights important elements for business owners, and those are career crossroads.

Sheridan Webb: I think the biggest piece of advice I can give to anybody who is thinking of starting a community is don’t think for one moment that it’s a great way of bringing in passive income. There is absolutely nothing passive about it. There’s a reason that I do extremely little corporate work now, and it’s the old Chinese proverb, isn’t it, that a man who chases two rabbits catches neither. And I learned that very early on, that if I’m trying to keep a foot in both camps, I’m not doing either thing well.

So I had to make a choice, and I have chosen to focus on my community. If you want to create a real community, as opposed to just a membership, sort of a resources membership, which I think is slightly different, you do have to put the effort in. It takes a lot of time, and I would recommend that anybody thinking of doing this starts small and builds. Until you have people in your community, you can’t really know what it is they want.

So, if you spend six months creating something that’s got all these whistles and bells, and you launch it to a great fanfare and then there’s either tumbleweed or the people that do join it say, actually, that’s not what we want. That’s going to be really, really disheartening. So definitely start small, get a core group of people and then build your community and build your offering with them. Because also if the offering is too big, it can be overwhelming. Other advice I would give is When I set up my community, I thought it was going to be to help people with their training design. And yes, it is that to a certain extent, but actually it’s far more to do with helping people with their creative ideas. I think something else you need to think about when you are changing direction in your career is being honest about your strengths and where your shortfalls are.

Now, I’m a middle-aged woman and I’ve learned loads about systems and tech. but I am absolutely not a techie. It is not my happy place. So, I’ve learned what I need to learn to do the day-to-day things that I need to do, but I still use help. It’s absolutely not where my zone of genius lies. And the other thing I would say is to get a coach or a trusted person that you can talk to. I use my friend Bex McNeill, who helps people set up memberships, and she helps me no end, not just with the technical stuff, but also to act as an impartial sounding board to make sure that I don’t wear myself out or give too much away for free. But she also keeps me focused on my core purpose. and challenges me on a regular basis to make sure I am still adding value to the people in my membership.

Jo Cook: True to form, Rob highlights the importance of the business focus.

Rob Clarke: Working in the media is rewarding, but hard working. Don’t get the violins out, it’s not like I’m working in a hospital or a school where it’s really hard work. But there’s lots of stress, lots of deadlines, commercial pressures, and anyone working in the media, it won’t be long before all this becomes apparent. Perhaps if you work in a large media group, you can focus on one job, your job. But the reality of what I do in a small company, well, a very small company, is I have to do every job. I have to get the balance right between doing what I like doing and what pays the bills. My advice to anyone starting Learning News 2.0 is to understand the commercials. Know your market, know your audience, know your customer.

Jo Cook: Helping us not to overlook our own development, Andy has this to say.

Andy McConville: So the advice that I would give somebody that wants to do what I do or is doing what I do is quite broad, I guess, to start with, in that don’t label yourself. You might have a job or a role title, but don’t label yourself. There’s a bit about being selfish. While you’re developing leaders, what are you doing for yourself to develop? And it’s things that you want to do, not necessarily the things that you have to do to stay ahead of the game, I guess.

So yes, there’s a bit of it about being selfish and getting something out of it. and avoid the labels of what everybody else is doing. It’s like make it and shape the role to be your own because leaders change in shape going forward anyway. So I think it’s really important to kind of roll with that. But all in all, sitting behind all of that is a good core strategy of what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it by. Kind of obvious, I guess, for some people in the project worlds, but it’s important. So you’ve got the fluidity of the role in itself, but it’s linked to a kind of a core strategies moving forward that you’re not afraid to change if you need to.

Jo Cook: And I’ll leave the last word to Kim with some sage advice.

Kim Ellis: If you wanted to work the way that I work, Whether it’s building a community, membership group, or being a freelancer or self-employed professional, the main advice that I would give you is to nurture your network. You cannot do it by yourself. You need to have a community. You need to have not only a community of peers, but mentors, collaborators, potential clients as well that you can bounce ideas with. You need to have people. You cannot do this alone. You cannot do it in isolation.

My network is my biggest asset. And that’s not just from the L&D Free Spirit side, but also from the GoGinger Learning side. I’ve got work from recommendations in my network. And with your network, don’t just take. You’ve got to give. You’ve got to give value. You’ve got to give your time, your advice, your insight to members of your network. Because the people within your network, some of them may be just starting out, some of them may need the golden nugget that you’ve got in your brain to be a success. So give as much as you receive.

---

Follow the Training Journal podcast on your app of choice, or sign up to the newsletter to always be in the know!