From A(I) to X(R): A Technical Training Specialist Shares All

Shelley Pinder, Technical Training Specialist at ENMAX, started in Learning & Development accidentally. However, what has followed so far is a career full of innovation and a deep love of performance improvement technology. I caught up with Shelley to discuss her role, her current challenges, and her upcoming speaking engagement at DevLearn 2025.  

Q: What was your learning and development career journey? 

A: Well, it’s a bit of a lark. It wasn’t intentional. I finished my undergraduate degree in political science and history with the intention of taking a master’s degree in history and having a career in that field. But I decided to take a gap year and  teach English as a second language in Europe. 

What was supposed to be a semester ended up being six years. And in that time, I taught everything from kindergarten to university. I fell in love with the field of education, and I fell in love with training, teaching and helping, especially children, understand the way forward in life. 

What really changed the trajectory of my career was when I got a job in Continuing Education at a business school. The students had families, jobs, even their own companies, and they were in school on their weekends. The students had a clear idea of what they wanted out of school, and it made me understand, as a teacher, what my role was and how I could help them get there. And that’s where I really fell in love with adult education 

I came back to Canada, did a master’s in education and really got into technology and education. That’s what led me to corporate training and that’s really where my passion lies, helping adults navigate their way through the business world, getting the skills and competencies that they need. 

Q: What are your responsibilities in your current role? 

A: ENMAX is a diversified electricity company. It has a distribution and a transmission business, and a generation business with power plants and wind farms. I work on the generation side. My role as a technical training specialist is to make sure that folks are getting the training they need to do their job safely and correctly.  

We’re always looking at our training and asking, “How do you streamline it? How do you put it into the workflow? How do you ensure that people are still technically competent?” 

How can we ensure they’re getting the skills that they need while making it accessible and limiting the disruption to their work day. 

Q: If you had to pick from everything you do, what is your favorite part about being in L&D? 

A: It’s the innovation. I did a master’s degree in education with a  specialization in technology. I’ve always been an early adopter, I was one of the first people on what is now X,  at that time Twitter,  because a classmate asked us all to go on,-  nobody was there-  but it opened up a vast arena for us to discuss the potential of social media in learning and development 

The technology component in learning has always been of interest to me, and I am very lucky that one of the core values of our organization is innovation. So there aren’t many barriers when we want to think about how we can use technology, how we can be more innovative in the way that we do training and in the way that we disseminate learning. 

Q: What are the current challenges that you’re facing? 

A: Technology, the thing I love. I don’t just mean AI; the software I’ve used to create eLearning for years is now launching updates and addo monthly. And as an L&D professional, you have to think, is this worth my time learning? How will it help my development? How will it help my learners? So you’re always discerning, trying to figure out what is going to help us. 

And then, of course, there is AI. What in AI is going to help us? And I have to admit, I would have said five months ago, “Man, I’m still not scared of AI. It’s making images with six fingers.” But now, it’s unbelievable what technology can do, even in the XR/VR space. It’s a totally different space now than when we began our VR pilot four years ago.  

So we have to think about how technology is impacting what we do as instructional designers. And beyond that, what is the role of the instructional designer in this new world? Someone once explained it to me as a wrap versus a burrito. If you want a wrap, you can plug everything into AI and get a course. If you want a burrito, you get an instructional designer on board. We have to look at what is the value that we bring as instructional designers within and outside of that technology. 

Q: Without giving too much of a spoiler, what can attendees expect from your DevLearn session? 

A: Don’t expect to just be an attendee. Don’t expect to sit passively. What I am hoping is that this is the start of a real community. One of the things that we found as we’ve gone through this VR project is that we felt very alone as instructional designers.  

There arelots of companies out there that are in game design, and they know all about game design; . however, as instructional designers, we have feltvery unclear about our role in these projects 

I will step through each piece of ADDIE during my presentation. We did a lot of great things on our project. I think there were places that we fell short and places that we felt lost. So, I really am hoping that I have a group in the room that can talk about what the role of the instructional designer is in a VR/XR/AR project, because it looks very different than the traditional linear storyboard on a 2D online learning project.