Improving Employee Learning Experience: Joe Deegan, Lending Club

As a senior manager of learningand development (L&D) at Lending Club, Joe Deegan is responsible fordeveloping and executing new learning strategies for Lending Club’s fast-growingworkforce.

Figure 1: Joe Deegan, senior manager of L&D at Lending Club

We connected with Joe tolearn about Lending Club’s use of technology and video in its learning and developmentstrategies, and upcoming trends around data that could change the L&Dspace. The interview has been edited for clarity.

Doreen Lorenzo: Giveus a little background for those people who don’t know what Lending Club is. 

Joe Deegan: LendingClub is an online credit marketplace connecting borrowers and investors.Because we are online and place a heavy emphasis on technology, we operate at alower cost than traditional bank lending programs and pass the savings on toborrowers in the form of lower rates and to investors in the form of solidreturns.

DL: That’sa new way of doing things. How does your instruction keep pace with that? 

JD: Yes, pace is a great term to use, becausethat is something that is definitely a challenge for us. As a company we aregrowing quickly, which requires that we place a heavy emphasis on onboardingnew hires. Week after week we’re bringing on a new group of employees who needto learn processes, procedures, and systems as quickly and effectively aspossible. We’re also helping the company navigate a high rate of change as weimplement new internal procedures, technology, and programs that help us to bemore effective as a company. On top of onboarding and change management, we arealso working hard to build scalable L&D programs and implement newtechnology that helps us to be more effective as an L&D team. When we areworking so hard to keep up with the pace of the company, it can be difficultbut necessary to prioritize building the long-term L&D strategy.

DL: Howdo you introduce the new technology? Are your employees all in one location, orare they dispersed?

JD: Forthe most part, we’re all in one location in San Francisco. We do have a smalleroffice near Boston, but most of the company is here in San Francisco. Thatbeing said, we still have the challenges of getting people together to dotraining, so we do lean on technology. Any situation where we can usetechnology to provide self-paced learning opportunities that doesn’t requirepulling large groups of people into the classroom helps the company be a lotmore efficient and helps keep our service levels high. On the operations sideof the business, we have to walk the line of providing as many trainingopportunities as possible while maintaining high service levels for our customers,which is always a challenge.

DL: Areyou using video technology?

JD: Wehave a very young workforce that prefers to learn through video over readingabout the topic. They don’t get excited about reading long pages or flippingthrough PowerPoints. They’d much rather watch a video. Video is great for thequick hits and change-management-related training needs. Every week we arecommunicating changes to procedures or following up formal training throughdepartment-specific newsletters. We are working toward heavily leaning on shortvideos to make these newsletters easier to retain and more appealing to our Millennialaudience. If we’re trying to get people excited about something—like teachingthem a new procedure—then, when possible, we’re going to do that through video.If there’s going to be written-out procedures, we would like to accompany thatwith a video, because we’ve seen that video can be more effective and it’s whatthe audience is asking for. The biggest challenge for us is prioritizing theadditional development time required [for] a video when we need to get word outquickly.

DL: Doyou generate the videos yourself, do you make them, or do you buy content?

JD: If wecan buy content that meets our needs, then we’ll do that, but most of our needsare for internal procedures that you can’t go out and buy a video for, so weare forced to create in-house. I’ve got a great instructional design team whospend the majority of their time working on technology-related projects, so ifit’s not an eLearning class built with Storyline, then we’ll lean on Camtasiafor a quick video. That’s something we want to do a lot more of, and we get alot of requests for that. When we send out surveys or get feedback, people askfor more video. I think our biggest challenge is the amount of time it takes tocreate a video versus writing out instructions. When you’re juggling projectsand trying to determine what the highest priority is, a video project may notalways make the cut although it can be the most effective method.

DL: Doyou ever use user-generated content?

JD: Notoften enough, but when we have it’s been highly successful. We recently had agreat example of this from our member support team. They have weekly meetings,and they decided to add a little variety to the meetings by replacing theirsupervisor giving a presentation with videos of team members covering a topicfrom the agenda. I saw one where they actually turned a boring meeting agendainto a hilarious song. They got the point across, and everybody was reallyengaged in the meeting because it’s funny, but they’re also learning at thesame time. Something that goes a little unseen is how much more of the contentis retained when learners create the content themselves. You’re going to learna lot more if you are the one teaching or creating the content, and we willtake advantage of that whenever possible.

DL: Whatdo you see in the market that gets you excited about learning and development?

JD: Somethingthat I’ve been happy to see more and more of has been the focus on analytics. Ilike to see that the learning and development world is focusing a lot more oftheir time, doing things like making data-driven decisions, rather than beingorder takers and getting requests to create some kind of training and going anddoing it without doing the up-front analysis to determine if they are going toachieve an ROI. I love reading all of the ATD, CLO Magazine, and LearningSolutions Magazine articles abouthow we need to be using data to make those decisions, and I think the industryis getting much better about taking a step back and diving into the data todetermine what the highest-value project is.

DL: Doyou think that L&D fuels that innovation process?

JD: Yes, I think we could be doing an even better job ofit. It’s in how you position yourself in the L&D world. If you positionyourself as an order taker, like I just mentioned, stakeholders will come toyou and say, “Susie did this wrong, so we must need to train them on how to dothis right.” I think that’s where somebody in the L&D world needs to put ontheir performance consultant hat and really do an in-depth analysis todetermine if training is going to be the best solution or if there is somethingelse that’s more innovative. I believe that taking this kind of strategicapproach will help to drive innovation in the organization.