Training Industry Quarterly - Winter 2009 - (Page 33) 1 10 QUESTIONS WITH DEBORAH MASTEN friends. Previous to my coming into this role, there were some great leaders in learning that I certainly learned a lot from. In terms of technology, it’s probably Elliott Masie. What’s most important to a learning professional — classroom/training experience or business experience? Business experience, hands down. I want them to really thoroughly understand the role that they’re training, and the only way to do that is to have actually done it. I can teach people how to design and develop training programs and how to be an instructor in front of a classroom, but what I can’t teach people is the actual context that makes the learning so rich. So for example, I have a trainer who designs, develops and instructs for our allocator population, the associates who actually say what store the merchandise is going to go into and when it’s going to arrive. He was a senior allocator and now he’s training the young allocators. He brings a business experience that you can’t teach. 5 What are the most pressing issues on your professional plate now? I guess it’s the economy. Our chairman has said that training can’t suffer, so it’s up to us to design our training so that it can be done more affordably at the store level. Obviously we have to pay the associates to take the training, so it has to be designed and structured in such a way that it can be done economically and affordably. I think with these economic times you really don’t have the luxury of putting a lot of the fluff into training, but at the same time you need to keep it engaging. What’s your preferred training methodology? You have a preferred and you have what works best for you. I think everyone who’s a trainer prefers classroom training, but when you’re the size of JCPenney, classroom training is not effective. So my preferred would be classroom training, but I believe very much in blended learning. I believe very much that you can do satellite-based “live” training in an interactive classroom, with one-touch keypads that allows the participants to answer and ask questions making it totally interactive. We can have classes of 30 at a time or we can have classes of 200, 500, 900 and still be just as effective because it’s interactive. We can take that same classroom experience and digitize it and make it available on what we’ve branded as Jlearn (from Helius Company), which is a digital video recorder but it has the one-touch software built into it. If we issue questions during the live broadcast, when it’s on Jlearn (Tivo-like environment using an interactive keypad) you still answer all the questions. You sign into the keypad and you answer all the questions as if it were live. That really helps us because not everybody can attend live training. What’s your most memorable training experience, good or bad? I guess my most memorable training experience was one of my more recent ones. We have 53 stores in our company that are our largest volume stores. We developed a training program for the next generation of top-volume store managers and we brought in 16 who were identified as having the potential to lead a top-volume store in the future. We brought some incumbent store managers who are currently running some very large boxes and they played the role of giving some context to the training. It was a very engaging threeand-a-half days. I think that’s been a very rewarding experience for me. Another one that really comes to mind as being a memorable training experience is that we brought all of our store managers together last February. We rolled out CustomerFIRST training that all the managers took back to their stores, and they ran it personally, sending every associate through it in small groups of eight to 10. It really did ignite our customer services scores. If we give the customer a good experience, they spend more. Who would you consider your most valuable role model? I guess from a role model perspective, it was a woman who was in associate development when I was in stores. I would receive training programs and it would identify the developer as Ida Andolina. I always said I wanted to be an Ida Andolina someday. Then I actually had the opportunity to work as a peer with Ida, and we’re still very, very close 2 What’s the most challenging aspect of your job? JCPenney has a lot of businesses. We support all the different business. I think that the challenging aspect is juggling all the different businesses and making sure we’re driving the company’s long-range plans and the company’s strategies. That we’re really keeping our training focused on the things that will make the biggest impact on sales and profit. What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job? I think the most rewarding is to go into stores and see associates living our CustomerFIRST focus. It’s very rewarding to go in and see them doing what you’ve trained them to do. Also what’s personally rewarding is the people I’ve developed in my shop who are now out running districts and stores and contributing to the company in a larger role. It’s rewarding in a large sense to see the difference that my team makes on the company itself and on an individual basis, it’s rewarding to know that I’ve personally developed some of the leaders in the company. Do you find the time to continue your own professional development? I’m a Masie Consortium member. Elliott holds monthly conference calls and I try not to miss them, because I always learn. I do a lot of reading. I continue my professional development in many ways. I think it’s critical. You can’t be stagnant in any job. Any recommendations for folks out there – books, partners, resources, etc.? One of the biggest things I do for my personal development is I try to participate in operational reviews or semi-annual business reviews with our merchandise partners. I sit in on store leadership meetings so that I stay connected professionally into the business. That would be my biggest recommendation. I love to read and I have some really great books that I recommend to my peers in JCPenney, but more important I think people in my job, in my role, need to be seen in the business and need to stay involved in the business. If someone wants to follow in my professional footsteps, I’d tell them to be sure to… Understand the business, every piece of it, every part of it. When I have people come on my team who haven’t actually worked in the store I send them out to a store manager who I’m very proud of, who came from my shop and who understands training. They spend a week in his store doing every job in the store. You can’t appreciate how hard some people work and why you’re doing the training for them if you haven’t actually done the job yourself. 33 6 7 3 8 9 4 10 Training Industry Quarterly, Winter 2009 / A Training Industry, Inc. ezine / www.trainingindustry.com/TIQ http://www.trainingindustry.com/TIQ
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