Overcoming Setbacks in Learning & Development Careers
Embarking on a journey in Learning & Development often involves navigating through challenges that can shape one’s career trajectory. Season 1 of EdTalks has encouraged seasoned L&D professionals to candidly share their experiences, revealing moments of setback that ultimately became defining chapters in their professional growth. From global expansion pitfalls to tech failures and personal transitions, each story reflects resilience, adaptability, and the transformative power of adversity within the dynamic field of L&D.
Trent Draper
I remember back in Australia, many, many years ago when I was working there, we actually decided to go global. So we just moved from an Australian presence out to a multinational presence all throughout Asia primarily, but even the Americas as well. And then we were trying to deliver the same training that we did in Australia to everyone around the world. And we failed miserably because… While we did a little bit of focus on language, we didn’t fully understand the differences between Australian English, where I’m originally from, but also the culture of the way that people learn. So we really had to invest in the management teams around the world to make sure that we understood how different people learn, but then also take into the language considerations as well.
Olga Filipova
When we started Workademy, we still have been working on our full-time jobs. And at some point, I said, enough, because while I’m in my well-paid full-time job, I will not dedicate all my power and resources to Workademy. So I had to leave the job and go all in. I left my job, I ordered a bunch of visit cards and I thought okay now I will start going to all the events in Berlin all the L&D, learning, e-learning, whatever edtech events and I will show my face. I will give visit cards so people get to know our academy, people get to know me and my visit cards arrived on the evening before the day when the full lockdown started because of COVID.
Valeriia Forostianova
A few years ago, I had a career change. And back then there was a position in the company I work for, a position of learning and development specialist. So it was like a sparkle for me, you know, a light. And I already built dreams of how I’m going to proceed in the role. And then there was thunder in the light of day the minute my manager told me that I was not mature enough to proceed and there was someone stronger candidate so it was a good lesson for me and even though I decided still to proceed and take this experience of applying and what I got in the end first I didn’t get the role, but what I got was experience, goosebumps during the preparation for the interview. And that was a clear sign for me that that’s the path I need to follow as my career navigation. And after that, I was investing time, effort, resources and in developing skills that can help me to become the person within the L&D world I want to be.
Christian Bjerre Nielsen
In both cases, we were really unfortunate that I was about to launch one of the first learning platforms in Denmark and our provider, was hosting it out of Singapore, but unfortunately, a fishing boat tore up the internet cable from Singapore to the rest of the world. And we only had sort of, you could sort of see the bits and the bites dripping through. So it was simply impossible to launch it and do our first test course there. Well, there was nothing else to do than wait. Uh, because you were like, you know, you were at the mercy of a fishing boat that tore the internet cable. And then a few years later, I was in Abu Dhabi and we were in the middle of a training session. Everything was going fine. We had everything up and running and then suddenly it slowed down and nothing worked. And it turned out that once again. A fishing boat tore the cable from the Emirates to the rest of Asia. And again, we were sitting there and could do nothing. So I didn’t really overcome it, but it showed that when you work with technology-based training, you have a couple of things that are simply outside your control.
Anna Liashenko
I would say the start of the L&D journey, it wasn’t really a failure setback, but it was… challenging because I was in Ukraine at that moment and L&D was not the most widespread career that it would go for so I didn’t even know that my job was called instructional design I think we called it something else so I had to learn a lot about instructional design myself and because I didn’t know how it’s called it was really challenging to find any helpful resources And at some point I stumbled across instructional design as a job and I realized, oh, that’s what I do. And that really helped me speed up in my upskilling and learn the basics of the job. But if you don’t know what the job is called, then that’s kind of challenging to learn.
Ross Stevenson
There are probably so many. And I would just say, look, failure is the… It’s very corny to say failure is probably the cure to getting better all the time and finding success. I think… One that probably stands out specifically for me is underestimating the power of a strategic marketing plan for L&D projects. So when I was much, much younger, probably about 10, 12 years ago, I had the wrong mindset of just creating a great product or a great project and people will just use it because it’s The L&D team has spent all this time doing this thing, putting it out there. And of course, people are going to use it because why wouldn’t they? But that’s not how life works. So we really live in an attention economy and need to understand what… How do you engage people? The ways you can do that? Why does it work that way? What’s the psychology around that? Because you can have the best product in the world, but it could hit the graveyard quite quickly because you’ve not actually thought through, well, how do I get this to people? How do I connect this with people? So I think for me, that was probably one of the biggest setbacks that not only did I learn from, but it’s definitely propelled what I’ve done over the next decade because I got really clear on why that’s important and how to use it.
Jyotika Pruthi, Ph.D.
Yeah, so I think a major setback occurred when I made a transition from being a university professor for seven whole years to a learning experience designer and that too in the K-12 segment. So, of course, I was very, you know, accustomed to teaching adults. But then understanding the needs and preferences of young learners was altogether a very different game. So my initial attempts at creating learning experiences for six and nine-year-olds just fell short of expectations. The level of scaffolding particularly was mismatched due to their age. developmental stage or learning styles. So this was definitely something I call or I see as a setback. And if you ask me, how did I overcome this? Then honestly speaking, theory didn’t help me at all. I simply took two approaches. And one was that I, you know, started sharing my designs with the K-12 experts. And then I also started integrating their feedback on a very, very serious note. And secondly, I used to test out my designs by delivering them to a group of four to five kids just to observe and understand, you know, their learning styles and their overall reactions to my designs.
Bill Sodeman, Ph.D.
Oh, we had a rocky rollout with our new LMS a couple of years ago. It was a rushed implementation because we needed to sunset our legacy LMS quickly. That was a tension-filled few months because, for many of our employees, the previous LMS was the only one they knew. And all of a sudden, they were in a new site, new user interface, and different content And fortunately, I’ve got a really good team. They provided and continue to provide a lot of support as we keep adding features and making reports and dashboards. So it’s been really fun.
Rita Azevedo
One of my very first projects when I started working in L&D corporate, in the corporate world, was to purchase a learning platform. And I would say I started with one of the biggest failures and I learned it fast. But essentially, we looked into a lot of different tools. We spent months doing this work. And only at the end, when we had already selected a tool or we had already a preferred tool, we went to our leaders in the company. So this was a very IT-strong company. And we quickly realized that this would never work for them. And I think my main learning from this that helped me overcome was the fact that I should never assume that my customers, aka my learners, actually are aligned in what I believe in. So from that moment on, I made sure to always be a partner, no matter what.
Lavinia Mehedințu
It was the time when I became an L&D manager. So I was basically promoted from an individual contributor to an L&D manager. And I was promoted because I was a very good L&D professional, not necessarily because I was such a good leader. And the first few months in the role were a mess. I’ve never done that before. I was not naturally a leader and how I overcame that. with therapy and I would say with a lot of patience and an open mind.
