Every learning intervention you design should be award-worthy
Why industry awards are useful, even if you don’t enter them.
Back in my student days, I edited the film section of my university newspaper.
It was a fun job because I enjoyed writing, I enjoyed movies, and I enjoyed not having to pay for cinema tickets. It was particularly fun during awards season, when the studios would release their ‘prestige’ movies in the hope of winning an Oscar.
Before writing about film on a regular basis, I’d never given much thought to how Oscars were awarded, or what went into winning one. All I had was a vague notion of ‘the Academy’ as a supreme, all-knowing arbiter of cinematic taste, and a naïve belief in meritocracy.
In reality, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is simply a group of people who work in the movie industry. These people decide who wins what at the Oscars, and studios spend millions on campaigns to sway their votes. Despite appearances, the likes of Warner Brothers, Universal, and Disney don’t simply produce movies and ‘let the awards fall where they may’ — they’re strategic about winning them, and think about them early on.
This brings me to L&D industry awards.
While less glamorous and less well-known outside of the L&D community (an SME I’m working with recently remarked, ‘I didn’t know they gave out awards for such things’), events like the Learning Technologies Awards and the Learning Awards are not so different to the Academy Awards.
Just as the Oscars are not purely about recognizing outstanding cinema, L&D awards are not purely about recognizing outstanding learning design. Both are influenced by commercial incentives, and both are determined by the campaign you run — the narrative you can spin.
So, if all of that is true, why should you pay any attention to L&D awards, to say nothing of entering one?
There are a few reasons.
🏆 Awards criteria should guide YOU, not just the judges
In the first Dispatch of 2024, I shared that one of my goals for 2024 is to put a project forward for an award. The purpose of this goal isn’t to feed my ego — at least, not entirely. Rather, it’s about adopting the mindset that every project I work on should be award-worthy, whether I choose to submit it for an award or not.
So, what does an award-worthy project look like?
Thankfully, there are clear criteria to answer that question.
Let’s take the ‘Learning Impact’ category at the Learning Awards as an example. According to the criteria, the winning submission in this category should provide:
‘clear evidence of improvement in before and after metrics that can be correlated directly to the learning, a thorough evaluation plan beyond learner satisfaction surveys, a demonstrated return on investment (ROI) not exceeding the cost of the learning programme, and voluntary user engagement metrics for interventions not deemed mandatory by the enterprise.’
If, at the end of a project, you can’t demonstrate improvement against a baseline, prove correlation with your intervention, and calculate ROI, these criteria tell you that you shouldn’t bother submitting your project in this category. But the criteria aren’t only useful at the end of a project — they’re also useful at the very beginning.
When pitching to prospective clients, we often encourage them to think about awards submissions upfront. This can feel premature when we haven’t designed anything yet, but it helps focus the mind. At the end of a project, it’s too late to think about measurement and impact, because you probably haven’t bothered to baseline performance.
The point here is that awards criteria can guide our approach to learning design. Even if we choose not to submit our project for an award, we should be confident that it meets the criteria.
🔍 Awards submissions can help you evaluate your practice
Earlier in this article, I disparaged the Academy as a ‘group of people who work in the movie industry’. But, of course, if you’re going to award cinematic excellence, you would struggle to find a more qualified judging panel than the directors, actors, producers, cameramen, and other professionals who have made the movies we know and love.
As daunting as it can feel, there is great value in sharing your work publicly, and having that work judged by your peers.
When I won Bronze in the ‘Learning Designer of the Year’ category at the Learning Technologies Awards in 2022, I was honestly a little disappointed. Mostly because that scoundrel Ross G had won Gold back in 2019.
But after the initial disappointment had worn off, I started to look critically at my own practice as a learning designer, and identify areas for improvement. I’d like to think that this process has made me better at my job.
🤑 Being able to build a narrative is a valuable skill
Lastly, while winning an industry award is partly about spinning a narrative, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I’d argue it’s an invaluable skill in L&D.
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, chasing ‘pure’ learning impact can feel like a white whale. You can gather various types of data to support a thesis, but you still need to be able to join those dots together in a way that’s compelling for your audience — whether that’s a judging panel or a group of senior leaders in your organization.
The ability to tell persuasive, data-backed stories about our interventions is critical to building our reputations, winning the trust of learners, and securing the resources we need to support performance. Submitting a project for an award is great practice for this.
Need help developing an award-worthy learning experience? Get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
As experts, managers or leaders, we often seek to help others by talking, talking, talking. But what if we didn’t talk and just listened?
In last week’s podcast, Gemma and I were joined by Georgie Rudd, an executive coach, to discuss the trials and delights of listening.
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
What methods do employees rely on to support their development? (Spoiler: It’s not your LMS.)
According to preliminary survey data from RedThread Research, shared by Dani Johnson in a recent post on LinkedIn, seven of the ten most popular methods are relationship-driven, with manager feedback claiming the top spot. Courses and classes don’t make the top ten.
As Dani points out, this raises a number of questions for L&D:
1. Are these the most relied-on methods because they're the most available?
2. Are L&D functions leveraging people and processes already in place?
3. Do we adequately support managers for their huge role in development?
Another interesting finding is the fact that respondents also rated performance management (goal-setting and formal reviews) highly in the survey — processes outside the regular flow of work.
This makes me wonder to what extent people’s perceptions are colored by their understanding of what ‘development’ looks like, and the settings in which it occurs.
Is formal performance management actually effective? Or do employees just feel like it is because it’s time that is set aside for them to reflect on their development?
👹 Missing links
If you’re interested in finding out more about all the behind-the-scenes machinations involved in winning an Oscar, this piece from Vox will be right up your street. In it, journalist Alissa Wilkinson takes a deep dive into the world of awards campaigns, the money studios invest in them, and what Oscar winners can tell us about the industry’s values.
🤖 Are AI chatbots getting boring?
Last year, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose had a conversation with Sydney (the AI alter ego tucked inside Bing), in which the chatbot professed its love for the writer. Since then, LLM developers have put additional guardrails in place to make chatting with AIs less… potentially weird. But have they made them boring in the process? In this article, Roose asks whether the sanitized chatbots of 2024 are what we really want from AI.
😴 How long is too long to stay in bed?
In this week’s instalment of ‘Stuff on TikTok I’m too old to know about’, it appears there is a trend around the Scottish phrase ‘hurkle-durkling’. As a Scot, I have never heard of the phrase, though apparently it refers to spending idle time awake in bed. In this article, Elizabeth Passarella explores why it feels so good to lounge around, and considers the consequences of too much time in bed.
👋 And finally…
As Ross G shared last week, my wife and I recently adopted two cats, Pepe and Bailie. Our mornings now look a lot like this.
👍 Thanks!
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