Learning at Work Week with Lora Kyle of Chegg

At Uhubs, we’re all about learning, so for Learning Week, our co-founder Ash was lucky enough to lead two interviews with Coaching leaders.

To celebrate Learning at Work Week, our co-founder Ash caught up with Cheeg's learning and development director Lora Kyle. Here, Ash and Lora talk making learning work for the learner, how Chegg has adapted onboarding and development to remote settings, and the importance of performance intelligence.

Watch the full conversation below, or read on for a quick written summary. ‍

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Remote working has changed a lot of things. What's exciting about learning development now in this new era that we're in? Are there any areas which are exciting to you about how people learn now?

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Yeah, it's become more about learning on your own time. I personally know from my own experiences as a single mom, that I don't have that much time in the day to get things done. I'm a night owl. I like to work at night. So anything that I can access at midnight works for me. So it's like outside of that traditional nine to five. I do think the world has gone the way that I've been feeling for the past five years where I need to learn when it fits my schedule.

I also love that I work for an edtech company that really has that same drive mission, which is that learning needs to work for the person. The person doesn't need to work for the learning. It needs to be available and be there when the person's available. So that's the way it's been trending, the way it's going to continue to trend for change for our employees.

We have created and built a whole program around onboarding employees.

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How do you deal with new people coming into your organization from the learning & development sector?

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We have grown through acquisition, so we are lucky that we get to have lots of people joining Chegg from various ways. I'm going to give a shout out to our onboarding team. We have an amazing, cross-functional onboarding team.

We have created and built a whole program around onboarding employees. We went through a huge refresh because we were doing onboarding mostly in an office setting. So we really had that experience of welcoming them at the front door. And now it's totally changed too on zoom.

So how can we have this amazing onboarding experience, when everybody is little squares on a zoom together. We put a lot of thought into coffee chats with senior leaders, we do “ask me anything” with a CEO and our new hires. So really just giving people a really cool experience as they join our company.

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How do you go about showing the impact of the work that you're doing here with senior people at Chegg?

That's always the hard point of learning and development or HR programs is getting that number of saying we move the dial. Something we've looked at as well as the future of also working with Uhubs around a pulse. So getting a performance pulse.

When someone joins, getting a dialogue and some feedback from managers on their competency. And then having a midpoint and and then after-program check-in and then seeing three, six months later after the program if there’s been a change, what has this person provided, what have they done?

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I do think the world has gone the way that I've been feeling for the past five years where I need to learn when it fits my schedule.

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There’s a lot of talk in the industry right now about growth mindset. How do you incorporate that growth mindset into Chegg? ‍

One of the things that we offered in 2020 was what we call EDU for you. And it is a learning stipend. I pushed hard for it to be learning in the broadest sense.

So if you are a finance director and you want to go learn SQL or you're in marketing and you want to, learn how to code, and it's not job related, it’s just a skill that you want to pick up that you want to learn, that's going to be of interest to you. We will pay for that.

So if that is something that you want to just learn for fun, or if perhaps you're thinking, “Hey, I want to try to get in to engineering, or I want to do a little bit more technical side of marketing”, this is a program for you, so we're going to be supportive of that as you go on and progress.