BlueStreak Learning: 

Jeff Walter (00:00)

Hi, I’m Jeff Walter and welcome back to the training impact podcast. ⁓ my guest today is Jennifer DeVries. Jennifer and I go back a while. We’ve been, colleagues for many years. Jennifer is the president of blue streak learning.

 

She has over 25 years of experience designing, developing, and managing online programs that educate and certify external enterprise audiences with a focus on measurable impact on the bottom line of her clients. In 2010, Jennifer was named one of the top 20 most influential people in online learning by online university rankings. And in 2022, she was named an e-learning trailblazer by e-learning industry for her work in immersive virtual reality-based training.

 

Jennifer, it’s good to see you again and welcome to the podcast.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(00:48)

Thank you, Jeff. It’s great to be here.

 

Jeff Walter (00:50)

So, so Jennifer, you know, one of the first things I always like to understand is we all kind of have these interesting careers. 25 years ago, you started Blue Streak. How did you end up deciding to start your own business and end up where you’re at? And by the way, congratulations, 25 years going strong. That is an amazing accomplishment.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(01:11)

Thank you.

 

Thank you. Well, I started Blue Streak Learn. I worked for half a dozen other companies before I started Blue Streak Learning. And when I was at those companies, I went through 17 rounds of layoffs in the 16 or 17 years that I worked for other companies. And, you frankly,

 

What I found was that my job security was not in the company they worked for because the training people were frankly always the ones to get laid off first. My security was in my network of people that I knew and knew my work and wanted to hire me to do work. So after doing that with half a dozen different other companies, decided I actually got laid off twice out of the 17 rounds. The second time I got laid off.

 

I decided that I was going to take that severance money and start my own company. So that is what I did.

 

Jeff Walter (02:06)

And so it’s been 25 years, so obviously you’re doing something right. why do clients come to you? And what are they trying to accomplish when they come to you for services?

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(02:16)

We’ve focused our business on the external enterprise. So what that means is that we focus on organizations that are trying to train those who influence their bottom line, but aren’t necessarily employees. So it could be franchisees. It could be, when I was at IBM, it was our certified partners who were certified in our products and services. So it could be a business partner.

 

It could be a franchisee. A lot of our clients are membership organizations and what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to certify their members in a profession. And then those members have to earn continuing education units in order to maintain that credential. So we focus on, again, external enterprise and then also measurable. So anything that’s measured with a test or increase in revenue.

 

where, for example, when those partners, we can measure whether they’re bringing in revenue after they’ve been certified and trained.

 

Jeff Walter (03:18)

So, you know, we’ve been doing external learning. are focused as a software company at Latitude has been on external learning. I’ve got my, own opinions. what do you, in your opinion, what do you see as the core difference between, internal employee based training in that whole sector and, and external learning in terms of focus and what do you see as the key difference in the key challenges?

 

that faces a training manager or training executive that’s managing those programs.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(03:48)

So usually the biggest difference is that you don’t control the people taking the training. So when you have employee training, you can require them to take the training. there’s always a carrot and a stick in training. The employees often is the stick. you have to say you have to take this training, you have to take it by the deadline. And in many cases, you’re just measuring whether they took the training.

 

by the deadline. And also in many cases, they’re the employees, if they’re, if they have to take the training by the deadline, they’re just trying to get through the pages. So the big difference in the external enterprise is that usually there’s a more of a carrot. So there’s a reason that they want to be a partner or they want to be a franchisee or they want to be certified in a certain profession. So it, once they’ve decided that they want to

 

have that certification, they want to take that education. But you don’t control their purchase of it. It’s for sale in many cases. You don’t control it. So there’s got to be a marketing effort that goes with it. And you also don’t control. You can say, well, you have a year to finish this course, or six months, or however you say it. But you don’t actually, you can’t set a deadline.

 

for them other than the fact that maybe their course expires. those are some of the main things is that you don’t have any control over these people, but yet you still have to help, you have to make them want your product. So it’s more of a business than an HR function.

 

Jeff Walter (05:20)

And so what are, you know, from a challenge perspective, so a client brings you on, they’re like, Hey, we’re an association trying to train certified members or hey, we’re a franchisor trying to train franchisees or resellers or authorized service providers. What it’s interesting because those are in my mind, two of the big use cases in external learning.

 

So if we can break them apart, if you look at say the reseller, dealer, franchisee, you know, that channel partner that’s selling and servicing your products. I like the way you describe it as carrots and stick, whereas employee training, it’s a lot of stick. What are some of the most effective carrots you’ve seen trying to get your resellers, your dealer, like

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(05:50)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (06:05)

to get those channel partners, what carrots do we feed them?

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(06:10)

Well, okay,

 

so when you look at, let’s, you’re right, they are a little bit different. So when you talk about the channel partners, there’s actually, there is a little bit of a stick when it comes to the employees of the channel partners, because they’re employees, right? But what I’m talking about is the actual company managers, owners who want their, who want their dealership or service center to be certified in whatever product or service they want.

 

Jeff Walter (06:15)

All

 

Okay.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(06:38)

And what they’re looking for is they’re looking for an ROI. They’re looking for a revenue stream. Like if I become an ex certified partner, will that help me earn more money? Will I get more clients because, you know, because I’m certified. Now I’ll just give you an example from today. I’ve I’ve been updating my computer. So, and one of the things I was looking for, cause there’s a lot of people out there.

 

Jeff Walter (06:49)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(07:02)

who say that they provide services for your computer. But what I was looking for was a Microsoft certified partner, because the problem that I was having was with a Microsoft product. And so I wanted somebody who was certified in that product and not just, you know, Johnny come lately, who I don’t really know what kind of training or background to have. So those certifications lend credibility, which can increase your sales. And that’s the carrot for the person who owns that business.

 

Jeff Walter (07:31)

So, you know, so from the partner owner perspective or franchise owner or dealer principal or whatever the partner is named, which is another really interesting thing I found in this, in this extended enterprise industry is like, you know, nobody calls their partners channel partners. They all have different names, agents, brokers. I know, I, yes, I know it, but nobody thinks of them. It’s interesting. Nobody thinks of themselves that way. It’s like, I’m not a child partner. I’m a dealer.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(07:51)

but they are channel, they are channel partners.

 

Well, when I was

 

at IBM and that’s what I did was I managed the channel partner education program for the software group. So we called them channel partners at IBM. So that’s how I think of them too.

 

Jeff Walter (08:07)

Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah.

 

Yeah. I mean, that’s partners. What comes to my mind that’s the channel part, but it’s so many different, it’s so interesting to see all the different nomenclatures, but, you, but on the partner owner or that, that, that partner manager, uh, who’s responsible with the relationship. Um, you know, it’s, I, if I hear you correctly, if we’re talking about like resales or sales, the key thing is.

 

is revenue generation and to, to be that, you know, like a, a certified salesperson sells twice as many or twice as much volume as an uncertified or, or a certified partner sells X percent more than an uncertified partner. Is that, is that where you’re going? Yeah.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(08:54)

Yeah, that is. I’ll give you another example. So

 

one of the times I worked for other companies, worked for, well, I’ll just say I was responsible for the for the Apollo computer reservation system. The Apollo computer reservation system was owned by United Airlines and it’s the booking system that all the travel agents use. Some of the names have changed now, but anyway, I was responsible for training on their leisure products, which included tours and cruises.

 

Jeff Walter (09:22)

OK.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(09:22)

And when we created, and travel agents are, in my opinion, a channel partner as well. So when we created their training program, this was actually quite a while ago, the training program actually had the travel agents create some records, fake records in the system. And we could actually measure, like if they created this fake record,

 

how much revenue did they generate versus if they didn’t create this fake record, how much revenue? And we could prove that those who took the training sold more. They sold more tours and cruises than those who did not take the training.

 

Jeff Walter (09:57)

Huh.

 

Fascinating. Fascinating. ⁓

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(10:04)

Mm-hmm. You want to talk about, I don’t know if you know what

 

Kirkpatrick or Phillips ROI, yeah, right? I mean, that actually got to the ROI. Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (10:09)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Well, and that’s, and that’s one of things I mean, I, came to learning and development from a consulting background, you know, ⁓ IT consulting and, and what was drilled into my head at a young age was ROI. You know, I remember asking my mentor, why would anybody pay the silly rates that we charge for consulting? when they can hire guys like me much cheaper, you know, was just like, know, young out of school and he’s like, silly Jeff.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(10:41)

No.

 

Jeff Walter (10:42)

What do you think we do here? And I go, we solve problems. And he goes, uh, they go, what type of problems? I go, software problems. goes, no, you know, they, solve management problems. they could, if they could solve the problem on their own, they’d solve the problem on their own. But for whatever reason, they can’t solve it on their own. got a million dollar problem. We have, we charge half a million dollar solution to solve their million dollar problem that they can’t solve on their own. And your billing rate is just an easy way for them to give us the half a million dollars, but it’s all about ROI. so, and.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(11:09)

Alright!

 

Jeff Walter (11:12)

And, and I was like, ⁓ interesting. And he’s like, and if they were able to do that, they would have done that because they’re not stupid. Right. And, and when I came into learning and development, it was, it was interesting because it was the, you know, the, the, the, the general culture was more like, well, knowledge is good. I’m like, yeah, but I spent the dollar on training. Where’s my $2. Right. And I, it’s one of the things I really like about the, and so I found that

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(11:16)

Yeah, right?

 

Yeah, right.

 

Jeff Walter (11:37)

for as an L and D budding L and D professional many, moons ago, uh, a little disconcerting. And it’s one of the things I love the love about extended enterprise learning because you’re usually trying to train people on how to sell service or use your product. Right. And it’s so it’s either like the train guys outsell the non-trained guys by two to one or the service guys, you know, have lower warranty costs because there’s less rework or the customers, uh, know how to use the product. And so they.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(11:51)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (12:06)

They, they have higher attention and more upsell and, you know, greater utilization of the product, which leads to more revenue and all that. It was like music to my ears. ⁓ so it’s.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(12:16)

Right. Mm-hmm. That’s why

 

I went into it too, because I, after going through 17 rounds of layoffs, I didn’t want to be in a place where I couldn’t prove my Arawata.

 

Jeff Walter (12:26)

Right. Yeah. Well, the interesting thing is there’s so many and your example there, even in this space, and it’s one of the reasons I started the podcast was even in the extended enterprise space,

 

It surprises me that that level of a trained partner performs at this high level versus an untrained part. How often that is not tracked. Like, have you seen that?

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(12:57)

Yeah, I have seen that. That it’s

 

not tracked. Actually, one of my, I will tell you one of my biggest disappointments in working with external enterprises, we help organizations basically do their business plan for their e-learning and we do market research and we basically come out with a business plan and we say if you do and we come say if you do build this course and this course and this is how you charge for it and this is what you’re selling it to and this is what your marketing needs to say.

 

And we come out with this business plan and actually in many cases we’ve been in front of their boards. So we’ll say to the boards, here’s your ROI. You’re gonna build this, you’re gonna pay this much money to build it and within two to three years, you’re gonna more than recoup your cost. If they’re a non-profit, that’s actually what they’re looking for in many cases. One of my biggest disappointments is that after we go through that, in many cases they don’t ever…

 

really care or look at the ROI, ⁓ which surprises me. Like you would think that if we sold them saying you’re gonna have this ROI, they would want two or three years down the road to look at that.

 

Jeff Walter (13:52)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. You know, the interesting is, that’s one of my clients, ⁓ in the automotive sector, one of the big car companies doing dealer training. the, guy, the folks running the dealer training program, one of the things that they track. Well, it’s amazing how many people don’t do this. This particular client did do it right. And they tracked it on, on service tax with their fixed first visits scores.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(14:21)

It is.

 

Jeff Walter (14:29)

And they, and they tracked it with the dealer sales folks and they boiled it down to trained, you know, the performance of trained versus untrained people, which as you stated earlier, was like train meant they were certified. Right. And so that’s another interesting difference is you don’t certify employees. You create certification.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(14:45)

which is level two

 

in Carpatric. Certain flight is level two, right? Go ahead, yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (14:51)

Right.

 

Right.

 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Once you get past the smiley sheets and, ⁓ and, but, but the cool thing, well, that’s a whole other thing too. It’s like, like, this is what blows me away because of that other, let me finish this story. but, ⁓ before I go down another rabbit hole, which the listeners have tolerated. Yeah. Well, the, well, the interesting thing is they, they would, they would calculate that and publish that every

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(15:02)

Mm-hmm.

 

You have trained techs, you go on, tech.

 

Jeff Walter (15:20)

year and it would viral through the organization and through the network. And so everybody knew that a trained salesperson sold twice as many vehicles as a train as an untrained salesperson, uncertified and a trained tech. You know, has a 15 point higher, fixed first visit score than an untrained tech and everybody in the organization, whether they’re on the fleet sales side, the dealer operations side.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(15:26)

Mm-hmm.

 

Bye.

 

Jeff Walter (15:49)

whatever, everybody knew what that meant. Everybody could calculate in their head, that’s worth X hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for that one certified person. Right. And then an interesting thing, and these guys will go unnamed, but another large, vehicle manufacturer, ⁓ and this was a few years ago. I went out to visit them at their head of international dealer training.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(16:08)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (16:17)

And they had just, had gotten a recently gotten a new CEO and, ⁓ and, and, and, and the, set of training dealer training was saying, man, we got this great new CEO. Everything’s very, you know, ROI driven. This is great. And I said, man, you you see, like you sing them, I’m into that. And he’s all, so, you know, what’s your, what’s your, you know, have you fit in with your dealer training program? And he goes, well, we charge for training. So as long as I don’t spend more money than I collect, I’m good.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(16:45)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (16:45)

And I’m like, you just missed the whole point… the whole plot!

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(16:48)

Totally missed the whole point. Right. The whole point

 

is the profit margin. I mean, I guess they want their training to be the nonprofit, which in a lot of cases, Jeff, mean, in a lot of cases, what we’re working with is organizations who don’t really see their training for as being a profit center, even though they’re selling it. They don’t see it that way. They see it as they want it to break even or a little better, you know.

 

Jeff Walter (16:54)

I know, he’s like, well as long as I know-

 

Yeah. Well,

 

well, well, and, and, that’s, I think, you know, from a franchise or training program or a dealer training program, I think, look, if you want to run the training program break even, cause you’re charging for training, I think that’s great. But I think he missed the entire opportunity of exactly what you said earlier, which is like, Hey, certified people sell more than X percent more than uncertified people. Certified technicians repair, you know, they’re

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(17:39)

Yeah, right.

 

Jeff Walter (17:44)

Your repairs are higher quality and that saves, that either makes the company, the corporation X millions of dollars or saves them X millions of dollars. And not whether or not your training is breaking even or making a nickel or losing a nickel. Cause even if you’re losing a nickel, like a lot of franchisors, they’re not charging for their training. So it’s a cost center, but yeah.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(17:51)

money.

 

Well, they charge their

 

franchise fee which includes the training. It’s a bundle.

 

Jeff Walter (18:12)

Well, I mean, yeah, but it’s, I mean,

 

it’s, it’s, it’s baked into the franchise fees and, and, and all that. It’s not a separate line item, like you might see in some other organizations. ⁓ so, you know, so, you know, it’s included, but, it’s not a separate and distinct thing. And, but, but again, it’s, there’s such an opportunity in the Kirkpatrick. Like I, when I first came across that years ago, I was like, ⁓ man, this is the thing. You just got to get up to level three, four or five and.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(18:16)

Mm-hmm. Right.

 

Exactly.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (18:39)

And

 

so many folks are stuck at level one. Even in, even the extended enterprise space. was really shocked. Yeah. Yeah. And like,

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(18:45)

Right, or not at all. Right. No evaluation

 

at all, which to me, so let’s define what defines training versus education. So to me, a minimum of level one is what defines, so if you’re an education, well, the difference between, I should say content, all right? All right, because education does have measurement. What I should say is,

 

What’s the difference between a web page and training or learning, right? The difference is that is measurement. So when I talk to clients about, what’s the difference between content and training or learning is that it has objectives and then you measure whether the objectives are met. And that measurement may be at the different levels of Kirkpatrick, but

 

The measurement has to be there. Otherwise, it’s in my opinion, it’s not training or learning. It’s just content.

 

Jeff Walter (19:41)

so, you know, let me understand, help me understand what you’re talking about, difference between content and training. And I was setting up a thought in my head. So how’s that sound?

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(19:52)

Okay, do you have the thought to come back to?

 

Jeff Walter (19:54)

Yeah. Well,

 

the thought was you have a piece of content, right? And there’s some knowledge in there that you want somebody to acquire. And so, so you, would lay laid it out. I was, well, I was, I was trying to do my head and say, okay, so like, I got a piece of content that has some information on it. And it’s just some information I want somebody to acquire. so help, you know, uh, so run, how does that, how does education and training and con you were talking about the difference to education and learning.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(20:05)

You worked. Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (20:21)

And yeah.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(20:21)

Education and

 

now we call it learning. We don’t call it training, but I still think training is still a better term in many cases.

 

Jeff Walter (20:25)

I

 

I like, I like training.

 

Although I did hear one person say, well, we train, but they learn, you know, actually, know, and, uh, you know, so I was like, okay. But anyway, who, what, uh, yeah.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(20:35)

Okay.

 

Yeah,

 

I could learn. I could live with that, but you know.

 

Jeff Walter (20:44)

You know, but

 

I’m like, yeah, so we’re still the training department, right? ⁓

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(20:49)

Yeah, an hour though. Yeah, we’re either education or we’re

 

workplace learning or talent development.

 

Jeff Walter (20:59)

Yes. Okay. All right. Let’s, let’s get back on track

 

in three, two, So Jennifer, that was interesting. You’re, you’re talking about the difference between education and training slash learning and then content. So help me if I have a piece of content, you know, whether it’s a video or PDF or something or a webpage, it doesn’t matter. And I want, and somebody consumes it.

 

Walk that through me again, the difference between what you would think of as education versus learning. You know, there’s something in there. want them to, you know, there’s a piece of content. I want the viewer or the student or the learner, depending on, you know, what day of the week it is, we pick a term. But I want the person to look to acquire some knowledge from there. So, so because it’s interesting when you said the difference between education and learning. So.

 

How, in that case, because you brought it in with measurable outcomes. So if I got a piece of content and there’s something in there that I want knowledge that I want somebody to acquire, how do you separate those definitions?

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(22:04)

So first of all, the content is only one component of, right? So the content is a component of learning or training or education or whatever it is, it is one component. The other component is measurement. So if you have content without measurement, then it’s just content. It’s one way communication, a webpage, a video, an infographic.

 

Jeff Walter (22:07)

Okay.

 

Okay.

 

Mm-hmm. Right.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(22:33)

All of those things are, they can be content. The difference is when we get into education, learning, training. Now when you get into education, typically education, they measure only levels one and two. They might do the smile sheet and they typically do level two, which is a test. They wanna know whether you’ve memorized it. So typically in education, that’s where they stop, is that level two.

 

Jeff Walter (22:57)

And

 

when you say level one, we’re talking about, and two, we’re talking about the Kirkpatrick model where level one is, um, well, if you can, well, if he, it level one is did they, um, enjoy the training or, you know, they went through a training process. Was it a positive experience for the learner is this a little, right. Right.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(23:01)

We are talking about perpactric, yes.

 

Smile sheets.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Right, it’s a survey. Level one is like a survey.

 

you, you know, did the training meet your needs? Did you like the training? Were you happy in the class? You know, I’m kind of joking, but that’s, you know, what we call smile sheets. Level two is where you actually test whether they learned what was in the content. Right? And so typically when you get into education, typically they stop at level two.

 

Jeff Walter (23:35)

Okay.

 

Right, so they’ve acquired, so that would be, the way you’re using the word education, they’ve acquired some knowledge. Okay.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(23:48)

They’ve acquired some knowledge.

 

Right. Where, you know, we, try to differ and I, I’m going to use the word training here because that’s where, when I started in this industry, that’s what we called it. And, and what the differences between, you know, content and education and training is that we now start to get into levels three and four. Level three is, is can they do it? Can they, can they, can they use, can they apply?

 

Jeff Walter (24:10)

Okay.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(24:14)

what they learned. not only did they memorize it, but can they apply it? Actually, if you talk about level four, it’s can they do it in level five might be the ROI, depending on which model you’re using, right? So, you know, what I was saying is like, well, the difference between learning and training, and like education, or even just content is getting into those levels, the three and the four, can they can they use what you gave them? Can they use it on the job? And are they using it on the job?

 

⁓ Can they do what you taught them to do? That’s training, very clearly training. Can they actually go out there and do the job that you taught them to do? And then ROI is, well, what is the benefit of the course or the training intervention that you did? What is the benefit to the organization? do we, and that’s when I went, if we go back to that example with the travel industry.

 

Jeff Walter (24:43)

Okay.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(25:03)

the agents who took the training booked a lot more tours and cruises than those who didn’t take the training. And then that equals a benefit to the company that gets paid by the booking.

 

Jeff Walter (25:18)

Right. Right. That’s sort of revenue

 

generation right there. That’s the, the trained agent generates X dollars more in revenue than the untrained agent type of thing. And I, you know, I, I, like I said, I’m a big ROI guy. I’m also a believer in education, just period, generally across the board. You know, I’ve seen what it’s done for me, my family, uh, come from humble beginnings and it’s, and it’s all, you know, what you can get in your head and then what you can do with your hands.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(25:27)

Exactly. Yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (25:47)

Right. Like it’s that knowledge acquisition and then that skill development, you know, ⁓ that you can apply it, apply that knowledge. It doesn’t have to be necessarily mean, know, manual craftsmanship, but you have to be able to apply it. I think that is like using your hands.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(26:04)

But where we came from was, Jeff, was we came from the statement about all education is good. All education is good education and you should learn as much as you should. Well, you know, is that really true? Is that, you know, I think learning is good. I agree with you. I mean, I think education is good. I think learning is good. You know, yes, I think we should learn, but I don’t know if all education actually has a significant benefit. There’s some things that you learn that, you know.

 

Jeff Walter (26:13)

Right.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(26:33)

might not.

 

Jeff Walter (26:34)

So we talked about more of couple of things. You talked about certification. What do you generally see as the components in a, when we’re talking about channel partners, the components of certification? know, lot, usually people, they think about certification in terms of these required courses, these elective courses. What have you seen from highly effective, impactful training programs for channel partners?

 

What does a certification look like? it elective, required courses, does it go beyond that? What do you see is most effective?

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(27:07)

It goes beyond that. ⁓ Well, at least when I worked at IBM and we certified our channel partners, yes, they had to take certain courses and yes, they had to pass the test on those courses. But typically there was also, there were hands-on workshops. So it was a blended approach. And actually we were one of the first ones to use that blended approach way back when. I’ll tell you one of the mistakes we made was we didn’t have a learning management system, so we couldn’t.

 

Jeff Walter (27:09)

Okay.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(27:31)

get certified that somebody had actually taken the e-learning and people would show up to you know, to the actually the hands-on and they hadn’t taken the base courses. So it actually really drove home the need for the learning management system because we had to make sure that people took those basic education before they came into the session because the session assumed that they had finished the basics.

 

before they came into the hands-on session where they actually had to do use the material that we were teaching them.

 

Jeff Walter (28:02)

So if you were,

 

and I’d like to get into the VR and then the member side, but if you were ⁓ one of those executives in charge of training for a small or even a large channel, right?

 

What, what would you, what would you do? What, what would you counsel them as what works? What’s the best approach? You know, I’m starting from scratch. I’ve got maybe a library of content, right? If we go back to your, you know, I like the way you put that out is there there’s content and there’s content consumption. And then beyond that, there’s education where you’re confirming that, know, and then there’s being trained, which is you’ve, can now apply what you know, which is a kind of nice maturity model.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(28:38)

Yes.

 

Jeff Walter (28:46)

going on, but so let’s assume, you know, you, uh, I, I just took over, uh, you know, training for somebody that’s got 500 units, you know, franchise or 500 units scattered across North America. And I’ve got a lot of content. Right. And it’s been sitting there. What, what, what, what should I do next? And what would, and what should I try and do a year or two for now that would be highly effective? You know, I basically got a lot of.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(28:47)

and do a job.

 

Jeff Walter (29:15)

content that people coming in and they’re reading, viewing whatever they want to view and they’re getting something out of it. It’s not bad, but they’re just consuming content.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(29:26)

Yeah, I actually think so the content, well first of all, the content needs to be digestible. Let’s just put it that way. When I, we called it chunking, but it’s chunking and sequencing is basically making sure because, you know, from a cognitive psychology perspective, we can only learn so much at a time and sometimes, and it is also more efficient to learn some things before other things.

 

Jeff Walter (29:44)

Okay.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(29:49)

So if you assume that, the first thing you have to do is you have to take your content and you have to organize it in a way that makes it digestible and sequenced in a way that it builds. So you have, you start at one, but you get, or you start at A and you get to Z. So it’s not just like take A to Z any way you want, any time you want. It’s, you know, it’s first you take A, then you take B, then you take C. Okay, now that you’ve taken A, B and C,

 

let’s put those together and D, you know. So then you have, but okay, so now I don’t think, there’s always been an argument about whether somebody can do a job just based on any learning course. And the answer actually comes down to like how well you can simulate the job that they have to do on a computer. And that’s where some of the virtual reality stuff that we did came in.

 

But okay, going back to a franchisee, I actually think that there is some sort of a, they might bring them into a workshop, but they could also, I think one of the most effective ways would be to have a mentor. And many franchise programs have that, where they have somebody who comes out to that store, you know, that helps them get set up, helps them, you know, make sure that all of their processes are in place and that their people are trained to their processes.

 

so that they get that consistent output every single time. When you’re a franchise, that’s what you want. And I’ll just use, well, and I don’t know if I want to use an example, but any franchise restaurant, Whether you’re in Michigan or whether you’re in Florida, you want the product that the customer gets to be the same. Well, the way that you get there is that your businesses are set up the same, your processes are set up the same, and your people are trained the same.

 

So anyway.

 

Jeff Walter (31:34)

And

 

with the VR work you’ve done in the last, you know, one of the things I think with AI and with simulation is I think it has the potential to really drop the cost of doing virtual reality or simulation or stuff like that. What, you know, the VR work you’ve done, how have you seen that be highly impactful? And have you seen that evolve? How have you seen that evolve over the last couple of years?

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(32:00)

I did the first virtual reality-based training program in the 1990s for Motorola. So that’s one of my career accomplishments. We were written up on training magazine. were on the cover that year. And the way that we used it, and I still think that in many ways it still applies is so Motorola had manufacturing. They were manufacturing circuit boards for their cell phones, right?

 

Jeff Walter (32:04)

Uh-huh.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(32:23)

So we had these manufacturing plants and there were manufacturing lines. If you took down a manufacturing line for an hour, it would cost Motorola $250,000 even back then. So they couldn’t stop the line to train people. And it was exorbitantly expensive to buy that equipment for that manufacturing line. They wouldn’t like be able to set up a training manufacturing line and they couldn’t stop them. Right.

 

Jeff Walter (32:47)

Yeah, that’s so expensive. Still is. It’s getting more expensive all the time.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(32:51)

They couldn’t stop the line to have the training. So what we did was we created models of the machines. We actually got the manufacturer specifications for the machines that were on those lines and we created models of them. And we had our trainees learn the process of what they were supposed to do on that machine, on the models. The other thing that we had them do is we had them, like we were able to fly inside the machine, which they couldn’t do in real life. Yeah, but they could fly inside the machine. So

 

Jeff Walter (33:17)

Aha.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(33:20)

we would set up problem scenarios so they would be able to fly into the machine and then we would teach them like a troubleshooting procedure where they could actually see inside the machine what was wrong, why it wasn’t working and why it was stopped. And then they would know what they had to fix or what the problem was. But anyway, that program was worth it because they could, when somebody came through that program, they were…

 

they were ready to use that piece of equipment, maybe with a little supervision, just to make sure, like there might be a trainer who made sure that they were doing the procedure right. But if they did the procedure wrong, they could bring down the whole line. So there was a very high risk there. so the even back virtual reality was very expensive back then, which now, okay, so you talk about, well, what’s the use case now? Well, now it’s actually less expensive to create these models than it was in the nineties. And

 

Jeff Walter (33:59)

Right.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(34:15)

But I still think that virtual reality works best when you’re trying to train somebody to use something that’s in the physical world. I’ve seen some really good use cases. Like I’ve seen like emergency, one that I saw with like ambulances and training people for emergencies. That’s another reason like you don’t really want to train somebody in a real fire.

 

Jeff Walter (34:39)

Right.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(34:40)

or you don’t want to train somebody like in a real, this person, was a mass casualty event. You don’t want to train somebody for a mask, you don’t want to have a mass casualty event to train somebody for a mask. Well, that’s another scenario where you would use like a virtual reality simulation to train people. I mean, they do use them also in the military. You know, that’s another place where they use them. So those types of things that you wouldn’t want to do in real life.

 

Jeff Walter (34:51)

Bye.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(35:07)

but you still have to train people to be ready for them.

 

Jeff Walter (35:09)

Yeah, I, uh, last spring I was down at the, uh, ASC training managers council, uh, conference down in, Georgia. And this one firm had put together this, uh, great, was VR, but it was AI enabled VR and of, of training automotive technicians to do.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(35:31)

yeah, are you talking about the one, it was actually, it’s augmented reality. ⁓ is it? Okay.

 

Jeff Walter (35:35)

Well, it’s both. it’s, it, yeah,

 

it will. and, ⁓ and it was cool on the learning side, like going through your, your education on the education side, you know, you, you learn the basics through e-learning. Then you, then you, ⁓ you, you start doing it in the virtual reality in a virtual world to like do a break job, let’s say. And the eight, but the cool thing is the AI would sit there and go, Nope, you did it out of sequence. You did ask you could see, I’ll do this first.

 

And then the neat thing is once you did it so many times without any proper, you know, you did properly in the virtual world, you get certified. And then the cool thing is then you went from the goggles that had the VR to glasses that had the AR.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(36:20)

okay, so now you’re bringing in the, I’ve seen the AR part.

 

Jeff Walter (36:20)

And yeah. And then,

 

um, so now, now you’re actually working on the brakes and, and, and because the God, glasses have two cameras and the microphones and speakers, you could actually ask the AI as an assistant, as a, as a, as an assistant, but instead of typing, you’re asking it and they can see what you’re seeing. And you can sit there go, Hey, you know, what’s the, what’s the calibration on the gap of the brake or blah, blah, blah, blah. And, or they’ll.

 

It would also, the AR would also say, you’re doing it out of sequence. You don’t go that, put that back on, tweak this down to so many foot pounds and take this other thing off first before you do that. That’s really fascinating. And the, the, the cool thing was. And this is why I like what you were doing with the VR. See, I thought, I think as an industry, we’ve already done, we’ve done a really good job of knowledge acquisition, you know, that education, right? We know how to sit there and go, I want you to know your times tables. This is how they work now.

 

Tell me back the times tables and you go, okay, you know, your time stables, right? Memorization you’ve acquired the knowledge, you understand it, but it’s the application that we’ve always struggled in because that requires practice and coaching. And in the past practice and coaching has been really expensive, right? Either need what it’s like you were saying with that Motorola, you didn’t need to spend a whole bunch of money setting up a physical facility and then pay a whole bunch of money to have a mentor or a coach coach you.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(37:22)

Right. Memorization.

 

Jeff Walter (37:50)

⁓ you know, that’s, it’s not cheap, but, but, but digitizing all that. And, and with this stuff, just think we, I, I think we’re the next 10 years is to be so cool because we’re going to be able to more rapidly give people the opportunity to practice and get coached by, you know, in VR with an AI assistant and get them up to speed. one of the things they were talking about doing with the ASE

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(37:51)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (38:17)

for ASC certification, they, you know, they’re still, they’re still figuring it out, but part of getting your certification and it’s interesting way that they have handled it is you got to pass all these tests, right? So that’s the knowledge acquisition, but then you got to be an employed automotive technician for two years. And there, and I was talking to the president there is like, well, we haven’t been able to test the do the application. So we use years of service. If you’re employed.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(38:41)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (38:44)

for two years, you’re probably pretty good at the application, right? So that was always a proxy. And they were looking at this AI and the AR going, okay, well, the cool thing now is we can actually go from saying, okay, time served, here’s your certification because if somebody gave you a paycheck for so many years, you probably know what you’re doing. To now we can actually test you and three months, six months in and say, yeah.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(38:48)

Mm-hmm. All right.

 

Jeff Walter (39:09)

you know what you’re doing and do it at scale. It’s really cool.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(39:12)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

And you know, going back to the franchise model, you know, we, had talked about, think you should have like a mentor or a coach go into the store and that’s typically, a lot of them do that, you know. But I mean, it is possible to like do on camera stuff like zoom and, know, and walk around the store with a camera or laptop and show them like what’s going on. And, you know, it is possible to do some of those things remotely now where, you know, it wasn’t maybe 10, 15 years ago.

 

Jeff Walter (39:22)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, I

 

think it’s exciting because I think it breaks open that whole skill development thing. know, again, to your point with the Motorola, we’ve only historically been, they’ve been so expensive that we’ve only been able to do it in really high stakes environments. You know, whether it’s like flight simulators or, or like, Hey, it’s going to take us $5 million to set up ⁓ a practice line. Right. Like, and

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(39:44)

Yeah.

 

Right.

 

Right,

 

for the military, you know.

 

Jeff Walter (40:01)

or the military exactly. Yeah, same

 

thing. We’re very high stakes. And now we’re going to be able to bring it down to things that I do for a living. Not so high stakes. No, no, but bring it more generally applicable.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(40:10)

Well, you know, we have

 

not saying, I mean that, but there is a shortage of a lot of the trades. Now there’s a shortage of people who know the trades. And I think that doing some of this virtual reality stuff in within the trade associations could probably really help them get some people, at least the basics up to speed on like HVAC systems or

 

Jeff Walter (40:22)

Yes, yeah.

 

What?

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(40:37)

plumbing or those types of things.

 

Jeff Walter (40:40)

Well,

 

exactly. And that’s where, uh, the folks over at the ASE on the automotive tech. And I’m talking to Matt Shepinack in a couple of weeks about, about it, but it’s, it’s that exact reason there’s such a shortage of skilled folks. How do you get them certified quicker with less, you know, uh, and, give them the environment to be able to do that, but yet maintain the quality. And, and I feel like we’re in that. Like it was so cool.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(40:57)

Mm-hmm, right.

 

Jeff Walter (41:09)

Back in the, you know, uh, when I first got started, when blended learning was a thing and, uh, Chrysler was my client and they baseline that performance. And it went from a 80 % in, you know, in classroom to 80 % e-learning and.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(41:21)

Hmm.

 

Yeah,

 

was probably about the same time that we did that at IBM.

 

Jeff Walter (41:30)

Yeah.

 

And they, but they baseline the, they had the, the trained person outperforms the untrained person or the cert certified person outperforms the uncertified person by X percent. And then they did the blended learning and the numbers stayed the same in terms of who you know, trained versus untrained, but they were, they were able, it was a quarter of the, it was a quarter of the expense to certify somebody. And, and they ended up.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(41:49)

right, which showed you could do it quicker and cheaper and get the same result.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (42:01)

certifying twice as many dealer personnel. like, so they certified twice as many, the costs were half and the performance differences stayed the same. It’s really kind of, I feel like we’re just about to go through that same type of thing on the skill development and being able to do like virtual reality or simulation at scale for, you know, reason for at a reasonable cost for things that aren’t so high stakes.

 

You where, you know, the cost of failure is either just so catastrophically high from, from a cost standpoint or from a human, you know, human standpoint. Right. And, uh, yeah.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(42:39)

⁓

 

You and I have talked about like there’s levels. So you have your first level, which is like your content. You’re just, you’re getting the basics down. And I actually think a lot of the streamlining happens there. I think a lot of times we, know, organizations think that they, that somebody needs to learn everything all at once. And, you know, from an instructional design perspective, it’s that cognitive load theory or that.

 

You know, so it’s a good design of having somebody learn just what they need to learn to get them into the simulator. That’s where I’m kind of going with this. Like you don’t need to tell somebody everything about everything to get them into the simulator. You need to tell them enough that they can start in the simulator. And then actually after they might do some failure, they learn enough that they know they need to know more. And then you can like start to put in, this is where sequencing comes in. Then you can start to put in that next chunk.

 

Jeff Walter (43:11)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah. Well, I like that. Well, I like the chunking the break, breaking it down into bite-sized pieces, the whole micro learning thing, both from the knowledge acquisition side and then from the skill development side. And, and you don’t have to knock out all the knowledge before you start on your first skill. It’s like knowledge, skill, knowledge, skill, knowledge, skill, knowledge, skill, you know,

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(43:31)

that they need that next little chunks, right?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Knowledge skill, knowledge skill.

 

And you keep their attention more and they learn better that way. They actually, it’s called encoding. So when you have, from an instructional design perspective or a cognitive perspective, it’s called encoding. So you only learn so much by reading, listening, all of that. When you actually do it, starts to encode the stuff that you’ve read and listened to. So, yeah.

 

Jeff Walter (43:57)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. That’s cool. That’s very cool. Yeah.

 

Right. just listen, I was, I was listening to this podcast. forget which one was, but it was really cool that they were, they were interviewing a guy that was, you know, a master special forces trainer type guy, like top, top, top, top level expert. And he’s a trainer and, and they asked him, how do you, you know, you’re at the top of the field, right? Like you’re the, you know,

 

Five X black belt. How do you, um, how, how do you, how do you keep learning? No, but there’s nobody there to teach you. How do you, how do you learn? Um, and he goes, Oh, it’s the, you throw in the rookie and the, and the, and the interview was like, Oh, like they throw in a rookie and all of sudden they have some insightful thing you’ve never thought up before. And he goes, no, no, you throw in a rookie and you let them fail. But then he does one thing wrong, but you don’t correct them.

 

Then she does something else wrong. You don’t correct her. Then she does something else wrong. You don’t correct her. And he does something else wrong. You don’t correct her. And then next thing you know, she’s created a situation that you never imagined would ever happen. And now, and now I got to figure out how to get out of this situation. And so, and he goes, so I used the rookie that the compound, a bunch of mistakes to create a scenario. would have never imagined in my wildest dream.

 

And now I got to apply all that expertise. And that’s how I keep my sharp, my saw sharpened. I thought that was like.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(45:38)

Okay.

 

And you have

 

to go back to the beginning of the fork in the road where the first mistake was made to teach them, right?

 

Jeff Walter (45:48)

Yeah. Well,

 

there’s the teaching the rookie, but this was how the master kept learning. was like, had to figure out how to write because I would never imagine somebody would make that many wrong turns down the path. thought it was really, anyway, it was just something I just picked up. when you were talking about it, I thought it was really fascinating.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(45:55)

Learns, Yeah, because I never imagined that scenario, yeah.

 

Right. ⁓

 

And failure is one of the ways people learn. mean, it is one of, it’s actually one of the most effective ways that people learn. So one of the things we do in our programs is we actually create what’s called a leading question. And if they get it wrong, your brain is like primed to learn the answer. It’s, know, again, get going back to cognitive psychology. When you see that you failed, then you’re like, okay, well, now I’m ready to learn.

 

Jeff Walter (46:35)

Right. But yeah, well, it’s, you know, it’s a cognitive psychology because the, the, the failure is a, it’s a failure in your map of the world, right? You’ve, you’ve got an abstracted map of the world in your brain and, reality will poke a finger through that map and say, no, you’re wrong right here. And that’s the failure. And then you’re, then your brain, yeah. And your brain is primed for, I better, I better remap this zone because my map is wrong. And, and, that’s

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(46:36)

Mm-hmm.

 

Right, exactly, yeah,

 

better fix that. Yeah, and I’m ready to learn how to fix that.

 

Jeff Walter (47:05)

Yeah, better fix that. That’s very cool. yeah. Hey, lesser person.

 

Maybe they had a little humble pie and now they’re ready to learn. ⁓

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(47:17)

No, I mean, we create those

 

in a good learning program. We actually create those where they, you know, where they’re likely to fail so that because it primes them to learn the next lesson. So we’ll create scenarios where they’re more likely to choose the wrong answer. So and we do that too, because the way that we do that is we interview, when we interview our SMEs, we ask about the most common mistakes and we then build those in to the program.

 

Jeff Walter (47:28)

Yeah, very cool.

 

so that, so that the, the rookie will hit those common mistakes, make the mistake and then be prepped for learning how to, how to, how to reverse the mistake.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(47:51)

Mm-hmm. And then learn from you. Mm-hmm.

 

Again, encoding the learning because they’re primed and ready to learn.

 

Jeff Walter (47:58)

Well, Jennifer, it’s been a blast chatting with you and we’ve known each other for a long time, but it’s always fun to talk to you. Is there anything before we go, ⁓ how folks can get a hold of you or anything you’d like to leave everybody with?

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(48:07)

It is.

 

Well, our website is bluestreaklearning.com and there is a form on the website, a Contact Us form. So if anybody is interested in working with us on their e-learning program, we do, ⁓ like I mentioned, do strategy, we do learning strategy, which is basically like business planning for ⁓ learning programs, mostly external facing learning programs. We do instructional design, you know,

 

course development and we help with learning management system when organizations need a learning management system. of course latitude learning is one of the ones that we look at, but we help organizations write their LMS requirements, find the right learning management system, and then implement that. So if you’re interested in any of those services, please go to our website bluestreaklearning.com.

 

Jeff Walter (49:02)

And I just, you know, I’ve known Jennifer for a while now. and she is just excellent at what she does. And, I appreciate all the, insights you give my staff, you know, get that whole like, no, we never planned for that. So, I appreciate all that. And you’re just, ⁓ I really enjoyed this session and learned a lot. So thank you, Jennifer, for your time. greatly appreciate it. Yep.

 

Jennifer De Vries of BlueStreak Learning(49:27)

Thank you for having me.

 

Jeff Walter (49:28)

And to everybody out there, thank you for listening. We do this, we appreciate your time and energy and we’re having a blast and fun. So thank you for joining us. Have a great day.