Meet Matt Donovan, 19-year e-Learning veteran who’s now Vice President at GP Strategies Corporation and who’s an all-round expert in everything from e-Learning to performance improvement, experiential learning events and Instructional Design (ID), and usability. As someone who has personally led the production of more than 400 custom online courses for Fortune 500 companies in everything from sales to ethics, Matt is perfectly placed to give us a view from 30,000 feet on all things L&D, and in our verbal journey we go from his decision to not pursue his original career of teacher to:
- a day job that encompasses leading a team of no less than 1400 learning professionals
- the (disruptive) forces at work on the ID community; aka ‘the app-ification’ of the learning industry
- the central place of empathy – What are you trying to achieve with all this?
- what it’s like to be a ‘recovering’ Instructional Designer, and the six Design mindset ‘shifts’ that we should look to encourage
- what the example of the Microsoft Hackathon can mean for us all
- why Waterfall can still make a contribution
- the GP Strategies’ ‘Innovation Kitchen’ and what it’s trying to do.
Resources
Check out Matt’s LinkedIn presence here and his employer’s here.
Matt recommends the work of Will Thalheimer, whom he jokingly calls a ‘learning curmudgeon’
He’s also got a lot of value out of The Checklist Manifesto (2011), in which surgeon, writer, and public health researcherAtul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives – and how we can better deal with it.
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