Learning & Development

Introduction

Welcome to the Learning & Development (L&D) page at Bramble! L&D is an essential part of any organization’s growth, success, and overall business strategy. We want to support the growth of our Bramble team-members' competencies, skills, and knowledge by providing them with the tools they need and the opportunities to progress their own personal and professional development.

Mission

Our mission is to provide resources to enable our team members to enhance success in their current roles and develop new skills to further their professional and personal development. We provide adaptive and blended learning and growth opportunities, including skills building, career development, and technical training that aligns with our strategic priorities as an organization. At Bramble, we are cultivating a culture of curiosity and continuous learning.

Handbook First Training Content

All material in the handbook is considered training. The leadership team pulls content from the handbook to build handbook first learning content. We encourage everyone to strive to ensure that content lives in the appropriate section in the handbook.

Bramble Learning & Development Principles

1. Meaningful and relevant content. We deliver learning solutions that drive team member’s development and growth to enable professional goals.

2. Values aligned. Our learning solutions reinforce Bramble’s values, and foster continuous learning and curiosity.

3. Diverse approaches to learning. We apply a blended learning model for learning solutions that adapt to various learning needs.

Learning and Development Responsibilities

• Set learning strategy to develop and attract Bramble talent through a blend of immersive learning experiences
• Identifies and develops strategic relationships across the organization to motivate and develop team members
• Demonstrate thought leadership and subject matter expertise in learning while applying adult learning theories
• Design learning solutions and experiences in support of organizational values and culture, leadership principles, people manager core capabilities, career development, and more
• Deliver and develop training content to meet our strategic goals
• Perform learning needs analysis with leadership and e-group to understand and execute on learning and development opportunities

Career Development

Everyone’s career development is different, but we have outlined what it can look like at Bramble. Career development also includes our Bramble coaching framework to support managers in holding coaching discussions with their team.

Developing Emotional Intelligence

Whether you are a People Manager or an Individual Contributor, being skilled in “emotional intelligence” (also referred to as EQ) is a key attribute to interpersonal effectiveness. We have outlined the definition of emotional intelligence, how to understand your own EQ, how to develop your EQ in a remote setting, and building an inclusive environment with EQ.

Another strategy to improve emotional intelligence is to apply the Social Styles framework within your team to increase interpersonal interactions and team dynamics.

Language Courses

Please review language course opportunities covered by the Bramble Growth and Development Policy for more information.

There is also a way to practice foreign languages and ask for advice in several Slack channels, each dedicated to a specific language. You can find all these channels by searching for channels starting with #lang. If you’re missing a channel for your target language, feel free to create one and mention it in #whats-happening-at-Bramble so that fellow Bramble team-members can join too!

Manager Enablement Programs

Bramble has a growing resource to enable all team members transitioning to a manager role. It contains a link to a checklist, readings, and a form to help learning and development customize your development as a manager.

The Manager Challenge is one of the first steps to building out a comprehensive manager enablement curriculum for People Leaders. We use daily challenges and the Bramble tool to facilitate async learning in a remote environment. We encourage new and tenured managers to sign up for an upcoming program to develop their ability to lead remote teams while learning from others in a collaborative setting.

Top five training content development principles

If you are developing content to meet your learning needs or partnering with the L&D team, here are five key principles to consider when formulating a learning session:

1. Know Your Audience - Analyze and assess the course audience. Ensure that all audience needs are accounted for at every level in the organization you are delivering the training too.

2. Define Learning Objectives - Highlight the learner outcome. Consider developing two to three broad overall statements of what the audience will achieve.

3. Break Down Complex Information - Consider breaking down complex information into easy to digest visuals or text. Reference the handbook but do not be afraid to create a visual representation or use storytelling for the audience.

4. Engage the Learner - Adults learn through practice and involvement. Consider using tools to engage learners in a virtual setting like Mentimeter or Kahoot to stimulate interactivity. Ask the L&D team for more insight on learning engagement tools. There is a lot you can leverage!

5. Implement Blended Learning Course Content - Give the audience some pre-course work to read and review before the learning session. Use off-the-shelf resources and ensure the content is applicable to what will be covered in the session. Follow up with the audience following the session to gauge how they’ve applied what they’ve learned on the job through surveys and questionnaires.

Application of Adult Learning Theory

Adults learn differently in the workplace than in traditional learning environments or how they learned growing up. If you are developing training, consider applying principles related to Adult Learning Theories, those include:

1. Transformative learning: The learning experience should aim to change the individual through transformative learning approaches. Start with learning experiences that appeal to your specific audience, and then move to activities that challenge assumptions and points of view.

2. Self-directed learning: Most of the learning that adults do is outside the context of formal training, so there should be an emphasis on augmenting those informal learning experiences. Infuse applications of pre-reads and post-course follow up. Have the participants bring up examples of self-directed learning that they have taken that is related to the training course.

3. Experiential learning: Adults learn through experiences and by doing. When designing a learning experience, apply activities to stimulate learning by doing through role-playing, simulations, virtual labs, case studies, etc.

4. Andragogy: Recognize that adults learn differently than children. Design learning experiences with the assumption that your participants will come to the table with their own set of life experiences and motivations. Adults tend to direct their own learning, tend to learn better by doing, and will want to apply their learning to concrete situations as soon as possible.

Developing Learning Objectives

If you are developing training, add learning objectives to the beginning of the content to state a clear training outcome. A clear learning objective describes what the learner will do upon completion of a learning/training activity. Good learning objectives are what you want team members to learn or achieve.

Steps to creating learning objectives:

1. Identify the level of knowledge necessary to achieve the aim of the training. Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to assist with writing practical learning objectives.
2. Select an action verb.
3. Create your very own objective
4. Check your objective. Make sure it includes these four pieces: audience, behavior, condition, and degree of mastery
5. Repeat these steps for each objective

Sample learning objectives:

• By the end of the session, team members will be able to describe the steps taken to address underperformance
• Team members will be able to apply the GROW coaching model framework to coaching sessions with members of their team
• After learning about the high-performance team-building model, team members will be able to determine the steps needed to reach high performance.

70-20-10 Model for Learning and Development

The leadership team uses a formula to describe the optimal sources of learning at Bramble. It shows that team members obtain 70 percent of the knowledge from job-related experiences, 20 percent from interactions with others, and 10 percent from formal learning events. The model is intended to show that hands-on experience (70 percent) can be one of the most beneficial for team members because it enables them to discover and refine their job-related skills. Team members learn from others (20 percent) through a variety of activities we offer every week. Lastly, the formula holds that only 10 percent of professional development comes from traditional live learning and eLearning events.

Compliance Courses

Bramble has several compliance courses and resources. Explore the Compliance Courses page to learn more.