Now that I don’t work, I come across people who are still working and hear some horror stories of what is happening in their place of work.

A few have mentioned to me that they’re simply “going through the motions”.

There has also been a couple who (once they found out what I used to do), blast their mandatory compliance learning they have to do as part of their annual performance review citing the content to be a waste of their valuable time, boring and the LMS (learning management system – the platform the content is hosted on) as unintuitive, clunky and annoying.

When I hear such comments from people, I’m actually EMBARRASSED that I used to do this line of work. That I was in a field that essentially ADDED ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE to an organisation so I keep quiet now when meeting new people never mentioning my corporate learning and development roles. I keep quiet that I had to design and develop these “boring as bat shit online courses”. 💩

I do however mention my work in the Navy which I loved, my role with the Virtual Learning Team at NAB, my client work when I had my own business Activate Learning Solutions because I loved working with clients who sought me out to create and collaborate on novel learning ideas and of course my work at a small company called Adopt and Embrace, a B-Corporation where I felt our small team were genuinely supporting and helping companies and their employees with virtual meetings and virtual communities.

In these three roles, I felt the one thing that linked them all was that the people all “walked the talk” or had “skin in the game.”

As such these then presented great opportunities to work together, collaborate and build novel solutions that worked.

These teams all took risks to offer clients solutions – and clients were open to it.

Outside of these roles, I actually feel embarrassed about my other corporate learning and development roles because for all of them, there wasn’t any risk taking on part of the L&D management, instead we created solutions that only frustrated our internal business clients and frankly, we didn’t listen to their feedback.

We kept creating the same L&D solutions as nauseum because it was the template. It was cheaper. It was easier.

When people in an organisation are frustrated with L&D teams, when they cheat on their mandatory online compliance training because it’s so boring and wastes their valuable time and then L&D management and teams do nothing to change this, then, I agree with some who say, “get rid of L&D as they add absolutely no value to an organisation.”

So for now, in my social circles, I keep quiet about having worked in the corporate roles. I keep quiet about having anything to do with L&D.

That part of my life is just a chapter that has closed.

I’m embarrassed to have been part of a team that organisations thought negatively about. Treated like a joke.

However, if I’m entirely honest with myself, I did enjoy the above roles mentioned so much and felt in my “element” working with particular teams and people and as if I was meant to do this in my life. In my quiet reflective times, I also felt that I did provide some value to others despite the frustrations.

As I think of any other job I could do now, (if I wanted to re-specialise in a different field or industry), there is none that attracts me as much as roles that involve a learning component to them.

It’s “my thing”. It’s “me”. Continual and lifelong learning is…”me”.

It’s such a pity that I didn’t see it earlier and had to let everything go in frustration. It was a lesson to me when I walked away from it all in disgust. Maybe I should have hung on a bit, and like others, just “play the game”. 🤔

I was Samuel Hamilton in a world of Will Hamiltons. (For those who read East of Eden, you’d understand this reference).

It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.”

I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one to make a living in these times.