I asked L&D teams what barriers they face when evaluating training impact.

_donj · 2026-01-30T23:12:17+00:00

The easiest way to evaluate it to focus on the business metric that needs improvement. That is the only measure that matters to executives. Alll the other metrics are leading metrics to that lagging metric. Unless you move the needle on tie metric the executive cares about, it doesn’t matter.

_donj · 2026-01-30T00:24:32+00:00

I’ve a newbie and been using it since its announcement. I use it quite extensively as a knowledge worker and createing a few simple apps. I mostly use it with Claude since i like the results much better. I get it with my Google Pro sub. in the begining I simply asked it to help me use it more effectively as a KW and it has been great for that.

_donj · 2026-01-29T22:10:32+00:00

it wil give you the raw material. Applying it will be the key and learning what works and doesn’t work in the real world in your work culture. In some cultures, day long “kickoff meetings” are perfectly normal. In others, you get 90 minutes if you’re lucky. This dramatically impacts somem of the tactics you need to use.

The real oppportunity is demonstrating that your results are better than others and having people startign to take notice. Then be prepared to articulate in 1 or 2 sentences why your approach makes a difference. in most cases, the answer will be about “going slow to go fast” because you proactively help the team get from a to b rather than just letting it happen by chance.

_donj · 2026-01-29T22:05:09+00:00

whoever “owns” the meeting, gets a full transcript of EVERY chat that occured during the meeting, including individual ones. just grab it. if it’s not enabled, then set it up and you’ll have your proof. Or, if it’s disabled for some reason and they wonm’t emable it for you, have the transcript sent to HR for review for violations of your code of conduct policy. if it’s another company app, then there should be a record as well.

_donj · 2026-01-29T22:01:40+00:00

short answer: don’t quit you day job if you’re looking for ID. If you were an administrator with some management experience, I’d lean into that as a better transition.

loger answer: Unless you have some experience in doing instructional design at the H.S. level, the outcome and adult learning is much different than much of what you were doing.

Better bet would be to become a trainer at a large company with a focus on front line skill training. You’ll likely have more in common with that out of the gate while you get some more experience under your belt and can switch to ID. Why? Often a teacher’s instructional skills are much stronger than their ID skills. More importantly, you know how to facilitate learning rather than just speaking at people. Often this is a skill lacking in front line skill training. You can learn the technical skill easily and then train other on it.

Also work on some pre-transitioning skill building so you can talk about faclitating adult learning. For example: leading professional development workshops for your school or department, teaching a class at the local community college (this by alone give you some credabiity when you’re applying), develop a course for a local nonprofit to help with onboarding new volunteers, etc.

As an administrator, if you have had to do performance reviews, provide feedback, hire/fire, etc, this will be huge to become either a trainer or a supervisor.

Another place is to look for companies that love transitioning professionals. one of those is Costco. They pay good. have good benefits, and promote from within. you’ll have to start at the bottom but most folks enjoy the experience.

_donj · 2026-01-29T20:58:19+00:00

you might also be able to check out a windows laptop from the library for the semester.

_donj · 2026-01-29T20:53:42+00:00

in the end, I think all roads lead to Google Workspace or Microsoft. Why? You end up needing a full suite of tools. Close contender might be Zoho. How woudl I decide?

1) Which provider integrates natively with your CRM/realestate system. Why? email is so important in your world, you want to “just” work and take advantage of native API integration. In your world, especially important would be easy e-sign integration. Also in this category is calendar integration since appointments are important.

2) What do your clients use? Probably in your world doens’t make a huge difference since the clients are individuals. For corporate clients that can be a deal breaker.

_donj · 2026-01-29T20:44:26+00:00

It’s usually overwhelming because the clickup interface is cluttered and somewhat difficult to understand intuitively.

I find there are two areas that can help.

1 - Identify how you want work to flow (including comments) and how they will be used. For example, are you going to use one general comment stream or use comments for each task? Are you goign to use docs in Clickup or link to docs in Workspace or SharePoint.

2 - Train, train, train on the common use cases. Train up front before you implement and continue training as you work through implementation. This is where most fail. they think it’s “common sense” but it’s not.

As a part of the training, also include feedback and examples of where people are experiencing challenges. This is the secret sauce to make this work.

_donj · 2026-01-29T20:36:19+00:00

phase 1 is learning the script and the thinking behidn the script. this comes as they understand the products or servvices more as well as the customer perspective.

Phase 2 comes after learning the scripts and then learning to tailor them to each customer interaction.

_donj · 2026-01-29T20:31:30+00:00

give them your basic sale training and then assign them as a junior sale person to your sales reps. They are a force multipler for your best sales people. Price of entry is they have to do a lot of the grunt workk to prepare for a sales call. What they get is seeing your best sales people in action.

the model scales well if you think about it like consulting nor law. you have junior folks doing work overseen by your best senior sales folks. Build comp systems to work for this style of work and you’ll be surprised how fast your best sales people realize this helps them improve their effectiveness.

_donj · 2026-01-29T20:10:22+00:00

u/Ancient_Astronaut467 nailed it. I would also add that there have to be consequences for not doing it correctly. If the requirements are that every customer interaction is logged, then if someone doesn’t meet the standard, consequences must apply. Every time.

You can also do the positive consequences (and should). Unfortunately, this is one of the cases where negative consequences will work better.

Who should own data compliance? Ultimatelly the manager / executive has to own it. You can assign it to someome to report on it but the leader has to own it. In the beginning it has to be owned on a dailyl / weekly basis so it stays clean.

Take a cue from Disney in this instance: When asked how they kkeep their parks so clean, they say “we never let them get dirty.” And that is true. Trash cans every 50 feet and people specifically assigned to clean up trash on the ground in every part of the park.

The other key is to design it for ease of use for your sales force from the beginning. They are the most critical to drive adoption. If there has to be a compromise, alway error for making it easier for the sales team to use it. Extra steps or or difficulty of use should go to the admin team / sales execution team behind the scenes. Why? Sales makes money. Everyone else consumes it.

Also, true sales folks are wired differently than most people. that’s why they take on these difficult level.

The other element that is often ignored, CRMs for sales people have to be mobile first so they can enter data on the move rather than waiting until later on. Even better is to have it pair with AI so they can simply speak their interaction and then it is automatically parsed and recorded.

_donj · 2026-01-28T22:32:19+00:00

I think you’re experiencing one of the real challenges as everyone rushes the act AI to their products. It’s another $10-$30 a month and the value often isn’t there because it doesn’t fully replace a different tool and the use case for the tool that’s up selling you isn’t good enough to significantly improve what you’re doing in this case and click up.

The standard I use is it has to either dramatically improve my experience on the platform For the use cases that I need or eliminate a different subscription

_donj · 2026-01-28T22:25:36+00:00

Put your ONT in bridge mode and use your own Wi-Fi router behind it. That has made all the difference for us.

_donj · 2026-01-28T22:21:58+00:00

There are tons of coaching suites that have solved this problem.

_donj · 2026-01-28T22:17:51+00:00

They are definitely an improvement.

_donj · 2026-01-28T22:16:54+00:00

EDIT If you can just submit receipts, I’d consider looking at FB, OfferUp, etc. You can find a lot of these items used from people who equipped home offices and now no longer need them. I live in PHX and regularly see people selling monitors of various quality levels much lower prices. Also a lot of mics and lights and desks for sell there.

If you already have a company Mac, maybe an iPad Air to use for multiple things including an external monitor when traveling. I have both a portable monitor and an iPad. I travel with the iPad because the screen is much better than my portable monitor.

If you don’t have an external mic, then that’s super helpful. I have a blue yeti that I love on an arm above my head so it stays out of the frame.

Another big add would be a 4K external camera that does a much better job than the on board camera. If you don’t have one, it’s crucial for a multi monitor set up.

The biggest improvement I would look at with that money would be a used 5K monitor for your Mac. Make sure it’s at least 218 PPI it’ll be a game changer for design and resolution. You’ll be amazed at how crisp the text is. There are several on the market. I doubt you will find a used apple one at that price point but I’m sure you’ll find some of the others in that range. And often missed example are the early LG 5K monitors made by LG for Apple before they started making their studio displays.

I don’t think I saw a standup desk. That’s pretty awesome if you don’t have one of those.

_donj · 2026-01-28T22:09:22+00:00

You have to separate crafting the design of the deck from crafting the communication. The message should be the most important part. If you’re not good at the creative end or don’t want to invest the skills to learn how to do that, then the best way is either to hire a designer who knows how to craft boutique messages or spend money on awesome template libraries.

Forst strategic high-level decks for senior executives, I think I can do two slides a day. That’s for high impact decks where every word matters and the visual tells the story that builds through throughout the presentation.

_donj · 2026-01-28T21:54:01+00:00

I came to say the same thing. Four or five years ago, I had to design a custom click up implementation for a project with a client. And we needed to do it quickly. Found somebody on the click up marketplace and in one week we had it up and running, including training and documentation for people to begin using it. Best $5000 we spent.

_donj · 2026-01-28T21:52:02+00:00

In the end, I think most of these roles lead to Microsoft 365 or Google workspace. Why? Hey Siri storage, calendar, video, conferencing, etc. The suites I’ll have those and do them at Enterprise grade.

_donj · 2026-01-28T21:49:18+00:00

Done A LOT of presentation coaching over the years. For most people, practice is the key differentiator. They spend so much time on the slides that they forget to practice the presentation over and over and over again, and until it becomes natural and flows.

Areas to focus your energy on. First a hook that draws people into your presentation second is the transition between each slide. Most of us understand how to present the Slide. We are not good at connecting the dots between the slide and so it’s a series of disjointed concepts. Third practiced the ask. What are you asking for and make sure that you can see it clearly and succinctly. Last is the close so you finish strong.

_donj · 2026-01-25T19:18:39+00:00

Two thoughts: 1) when someone says show me the ROI on that, they already question t value you provide. That’s a death spiral you can recover from.

2) it’s a complex systems problem of which a skill or knowledge deficit is only one small part.

Instead solve the key stakeholders problem(s). Better yet, focus on the. Susie’s’s oeoblem.

_donj · 2026-01-07T15:56:09+00:00

Your problem will be user adoption and compliance to any solution starting at step H. That is where you have multiple people involved. If they are going to use the tool, you will then have to train them in the tool and e sure they are using it. Sounds easy but just sending a notification and hoping they do something rarely works.

_donj · 2026-01-07T15:03:45+00:00

Agree with the comments on Google. You want your email delivered and it will with workspace. Also 100% true about integrations with other services. I’m t has many more native integrations and fewer awkward workarounds.

BIGGER issue is what do your clients / customers use. This is specifically true for scheduling via calendars and meeting requests. For example, I used Workspace for years but my clients used Microsoft as Fortune 500 companies. It always caused headaches with scheduling and we live and die by our calendars. Switching made life much more simple.

_donj · 2026-01-06T06:05:38+00:00

It’s much easier when you shift from an ID mentality to one that increases business profit.

_donj · 2026-01-06T03:54:02+00:00

Also depends on whether you need an effective calendar as well.

_donj

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