New Grovo CLO SummerSalomonsen is an L&D industry veteran who has been appointed to lead thecompany’s content strategy, learning experience, and design teams.
Salomonsen began her career in public education, and spentseven years managing and implementing corporate learning strategy in thehealthcare space. Most recently, she served as principal consultant at IntrepidLearning.
Salomonsen, who won Brandon Hall’s 2017 Gold Emerging StarAward, is pursuing her doctorate of education in organizational change andleadership from the University of Southern California.
Learning Solutions recentlyspoke with Salomonsen about microlearning, her new position, and her vision for the future. Thisinterview has been lightly edited for length, clarity, and focus.
Figure 1: New Grovo CLOSummer Salomonsen
Susan Jacobs (SJ): Congratulationson your new position, Summer. Tell us a little bit about your background.
Summer Salomonsen(SS): I started out in public education. My undergrad was in English andSpanish education. The last 10 years or so have been principally in L&D andmid-market consulting with global firms.
SJ: Why did youdecide to join the Grovo team?
SS: Part of mymotivation to join Grovo was because they were the leader in microlearning.I intrinsically wanted to be part of the team that had spearheaded this termand had made such an impact broadly in the L&D landscape, and I wasthrilled to be part of the next iteration of that.
SJ: What is yourstrategy for Grovo moving forward?
SS: One of myinitial goals as we move forward is to focus on the building of a responsiveand connected Microlearning® library of content. So much of content creationpractices in the industry have been focused on dazzling you with numbers of howmany lessons we have. But my vision is: To be truly impactful and change reallearning work, it’s got to be focused on a library that’s alive and responsiveto the changing workforce; that is connected to learners in their roles; and isa proponent of Grovo’s values. That’s one of the first big initiatives.
The second is integrating testing methodology within what wecreate. Grovo recently trademarked the term Microlearning. Part of thatinitiative is meant to elevate the conversation and add validity to the termMicrolearning. We intend to back that up. Content cannot be created in avacuum; it needs to be learner-first from the moment of its inception to themoment you publish it. The only way to do that is to integrate testing intoyour content to validate that it’s resonating in ways you want it to.
SJ: Is this achange from what the corporate focus was before you came aboard?
SS: It’s less ofa change, and more of an enhancement. Our content is not individual bites ofcontent, but is nuanced to include personas that reflect critical thresholds ofan employee life cycle. We believe that when employees are new to the workforce,or the first time they are asked to lead a project or manage anexternal/internal relationship … those offer unique opportunities to beresponsive to learning. We have nuanced our content with a persona-based modelthat we believe brings greater impact for the learner.
SJ: Can youprovide more detail about that?
SS: I can giveyou a very specific example. We looked at content topically described as project management. Those early lessons had not been applied to different momentsof an employee life cycle. We said, this is going to be less valuable for thespectrum of learners if it is not nuanced to their situation, so let’s re-lookat 16 lessons on project management and align them more closely with theproject management that is reflective of the current workforce, which is muchflatter and more team-based, so can we empower people to manage projects evenoutside of formal roles of authority.
SJ: Is thereanything else new at Grovo?
SS: In August, wereleased a Microlearning authoring tool called Createthat bridges the gap between the off-the-shelf content, and needs thatorganizations have to fit that content into their life cycle. In the Createtool they can copy one of our lessons. They can add their company logo, a linkto a feedback survey they want at the end, or a video from their CEO welcomingemployees to complete that lesson. So it provides a tailored, customized viewof the content we create, which of course increases ownership and improves thattransfer of knowledge afterwards.
