careers
Each month e.learning age talks to someone carving out a career in the industry. This month Peter Williams talks to Sam Taylor
way of being up to date. She describes her first meeting as a Eureka moment and went to virtually every one after that. “After five minutes in an eLN meeting I was getting more ideas than in the office in three or four months.” She was voted on to the board three years ago and now finds herself chairing the organisation after a period as vice-chair. She will be in post until November 2014. Taylor says that, as for many others, her entry into e-learning was a random event. She intended was to leave university and work for a year before starting a master’s. But, as she put it, the salary became addictive. Her second job was with FT Knowledge, part of Pearson, as a PA and her responsibilities included working with the online education team. In 2000 FT Knowledge was working on some of the first executive education e-learning courses with
The low-down
l Sam Taylor warns against managing an LMS – they can take over your whole life. Concentrate instead, she says, on e-learning
l Used to evangelising about e-learning: it doesn’t have to be dull nor painful
l “If I can do myself out of a job because people know what they have to do going forward, then I’m happy”
l Mobile has finally come to life after people talking about it for years
l E-learning is less about formal learning and tell and more about creating performance support
l At one time a three to four-hour course was perfectly normal; now a course can last five minutes.
A job like mine S
am Taylor first become involved with the eLearning Network when moving into an e-learning role at Barclaycard. Immediately she found it a perfect
Sam Taylor: getting ideas
institutions such as Wharton, Judge (now Cambridge Judge), University of Michigan business school and INSEAD. Not content with her PA work, while Taylor was there she taught herself skills such as web design and Flash and gradually took on more roles including editing, project co-ordination and establishing project management.
She then moved to a sixth form college and led a three-year JISC project in further education and higher education looking at how to upskill lecturers in their use of information and digital technology as well as creating digital assets for reuse in the classroom. Her role went from the basics to implementing an LMS to looking at content such as NLN material (
www.nln.ac.uk).It helped her broaden her L&D knowledge and consolidate her experience of e-learning as well as online marketing. Moving from corporate education to higher
education is quite a move and then moving sectors again to financial services could be seen as even more daunting, but Taylor appears unfazed by her switch to Barclaycard. When she arrived, e-learning was largely uncharted territory for the credit card company: there was content but no LMS. Her role was project management and analysis for a competency framework and it was three years before she resumed her dealings with e-learning when the
e.learning age february 2014
company introduced a learning management system. She had missed involvement in e-learning and admits she made ‘a nuisance of herself’ with the people setting up the system, telling them they weren’t setting it up right. In the financial services environment there was an explosion in the volume of mandatory compliance training but resistance from users, who saw the training as poorly done. Taylor’s interface role turned into a six-month secondment to the central learning team where she was responsible for the LMS and e-learning and tasked with turning around the reputation and perception of mandatory training. She faced hostility to e-learning and a disbelief in the validity of the reporting systems. Working with all the compliance stakeholders, she took two hours off the annual training time required and created a calendar that ensured people knew when the training had to be delivered and completed and no user had to spend more than half an hour a month on it. It was a big success for Taylor with savings running to £2m. The six-month secondment turned into four years, with the role including looking at using Yammer within the business, and mobile learning on the iPad with game-based learning using the 70:20:10 model.
After a restructuring she joined Tesco in April 2013 where she now works in its Academy team, helping to blend their learning solutions, introducing standards and best practice for e-learning, consulting about what great e-learning looks like and continuing to evangelise. Her biggest challenge is to ensure mobile learning lands well within the company and in many ways that involves putting traditional views about e-learning to the back of her mind. “It is not about taking a traditional e-learning course and dropping it onto a smaller tablet,” she warns. Over her time in the industry, Taylor has seen
changing attitudes, witnessed the bubble, the collapse and the gradual return. Perhaps one of the big changes is how the length of an e-learning course is shrinking. In relation to the eLN she sees a trend where the role of the organisation is moving towards supporting L&D generalists who are being asked to produce a piece of e-learning and require some support with that.
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