Biography

Hello! Thanks for checking out my online portfolio.

Across my over 20-year career in adult education, I have had many opportunities to analyze program needs, manage multiple projects with short timeframes, manage and coach and mentor people, and provide just the right communication at the right moment. I appreciate you taking the time to read about these skills i my resume below.

Here is what my experience has taught me:

·      People come first: No matter their background or previous experience, training and retaining employees is about seeing them as human beings FIRST – perceive them with empathy, help them see others with empathy, let them know you see their strengths, and empower them to leverage those strengths for the betterment of the community. This goes for both training participants, managing trainers, or partnering with cross-functional teams.

·      Context is crucial: Adult learners will very quickly tune out the training they do not think is relevant or serves their career. Even the driest material can be made interesting if it is relevant to the audience. This is achieved by making connections between prior learning and new material to produce “light bulb” moments.

·      Continuous improvement (aka ADDIE) is a great model for program development: First, figure out how to measure success, measure it, see what needs tweaking, tweak it, start a new training cycle. Repeat. I have done this many times in many training scenarios throughout my career and it has worked well for me again and again.

·      Passion is essential: More than any other aspect, my focus to improve any training I have developed was driven by my passion to see my learners succeed. I help people become better. It has been the mission of my career and I love it!

·      Understanding is a good starting point: As a receiver of over 500 hours of training, and as an employee in several diverse contexts who understands how pain points and bottlenecks develop in both training development and organizational function in general, I increase ROI through creative, collaborative problem-solving. 

Outside of work I am also an accomplished singer-songwriter and published children's book author.