Chaotic Talent Development - Learning Experience Designer UKG Employee Review

- Management has allowed other teams to treat our learning experience designers as mindless robots that are primarily requested to “make things look pretty” rather than to provide learning design expertise and consultation throughout the development process as the role was actually intended. Even after months of discussing concerns with management, nothing has been done to improve how our team is utilized and we continue to get lip service. - Almost all of our training focuses on sharing knowledge and information rather than improving skills. Putting dry information in a “pretty” PDF or in a fancy webpage with pop-up screens will do little to help internalize what is being learned. Our talent development team should be relied upon to provide rich opportunities for learners to practice and apply critical skills, and we should not be focusing 90% of our energy on developing reading material in different ways. - We are paying for but are not adequately using platform subscriptions that would allow us to develop interactive and personalized online training with branching scenarios, quizzes, learner feedback, and reporting to track success. Instead, management is satisfied with primarily relying on dull PowerPoint decks, lengthy job aid documentation, and very expensive web design tools that are intended mainly for marketing but not training. - Regardless of the false impressions that management tries to maintain about being supportive, not everyone’s voices are heard and respected equally on the team. If no one else voices the same concern, you are simply told to be quiet and just deal with it. - 1-on-1 weekly meetings with management are intended to focus on providing you with the necessary support to be successful. However, mine went from starting 3-5 minutes late with some advance notice, to 10-15 minutes late with no notice and no apology. Many of these meetings were often rescheduled multiple times within the same week. It was evident after a while that these meetings were seen as an inconvenience and our discussions were not taken seriously. - Senior leadership insists on becoming involved very late in the design and development of management training. This can often lead to rushed and massive amounts of revision and redesign work that turns into a chaotic process to meet the deadline. This is analogous to having construction workers waste time building a home without an approved set of blueprints and a proper construction supervisor. Then when they finally get the blueprints and a supervisor, they realize the entire house was been built incorrectly and has to be torn down and rebuilt in a few days. So everyone chaotically rushes to do each other’s jobs (e.g., painters doing plumbing) without any time left for quality checks. - Management incorrectly assumes the chaos from last minute large scale revisions is reflective of an agile approach, when in fact the agile framework still requires advance planning that effectively prevents chaotic large scale changes from happening so close to the deadline. Given the risks associated with formal reviews that leadership expects very late in the development process, more advanced online training experiences cannot be successfully implemented until we use a more thoughtful approach to how we iterate and project manage. - Management is more concerned with making leadership happy and oddly insists on waiting for problematic projects to end before finally speaking up to address barriers that impede the success of our team. So rather than being proactive in addressing concerns when they occur, the vicious cycle continues from one project to the next. - I decided to leave the role as a result of being underutilized and unfulfilled professionally while also not having a voice. My projects primarily involved developing slide decks and job aids rather than more interactive and engaging learning experiences as I was originally told. Ironically, my predecessor was replaced because management felt she did not have the skills needed for developing the type of training they needed (though I suspect she too was unhappy). When management dragged their feet in addressing my concerns after months of the same conversation, I met with her to give my notice in a calm manner. Rather than showing respect for my decision, she burst into a temper tantrum and proceeded to criticize me by listing her opinions on why I was not able to “thrive” at UKG (one of which had to do with her perceptions of previous Fortune 100 companies I worked for). I was taken aback by her behavior and felt unsafe. But it further justified my reasons for leaving the role. So much for the UKG motto, “people are our purpose.”