By Kristy Rydz
Jenn Reid’s career has been full of well-timed coincidences. “It’s been opportunity meets preparation,” she said. “And being ready for them.”
The first opportunity for the now senior learning consultant, Change Management, Project Management and Technology with BMO Financial Group, came while sitting in an 18th century literature class in the last year of her honours bachelor degree at Queen’s University. Reid was beginning to question what she would do with an education in English and classical history, when a librarian from the special collections library came to show off some first-edition texts.
Listening to her speak, Reid was hooked. She approached the woman after class to learn more about her job and by later that year, she was pursuing her Masters of Library and Information Studies at Dalhousie University.
Shortly after graduating in 2006, while working as the training and reference librarian at a law firm in Toronto, she found herself falling in love with training students and new associates how to do legal research and access information.
Following her passion, she pursued a certificate in adult education and spent five years honing her organizational and change management abilities at HORN Training and Consulting, a company that specializes in solutions for corporate performance.
Another serendipitous moment popped up while Reid was talking to a friend she met through The Institute for Performance and Learning about being ready to take on more responsibility.
“She told me, ‘I have a job [at BMO] and I want you to come over.’ It was one of those happy accidents. One of those fortuitous moments,” said Reid.
Since joining the BMO team in June 2014, she has excelled at helping the company identify their training and educational needs and making them happen.
HR Professional chatted with Reid, who holds project management and certified training and development professional designations, to learn how all these fortunate instances have impacted her work today.
In your current position, what are your main responsibilities?
Jenn Reid: In a nutshell, it’s working with partners within the business at BMO to develop the right learning strategies for their teams.
Specifically, my portfolios being change management, project management and technology, it’s looking at those from an enterprise perspective as well as the wants or needs of individual groups and seeing how those might be the same or different from the rest of the enterprise, and how to meet them while still focusing on the overall organizational strategy.
What does a typical day at work look like for you?
JR: We have a fantastic training facility, the Institute for Learning (IFL), and I’m there probably one or two days a week. Sometimes I’m observing training sessions that I’ve helped to make happen in some way – whether that’s designing them myself or working with vendors or other instructional designers from within the organization. I’m there to watch them come to life and make sure the content and activities are landing while I’m evaluating the programs. I’m also meeting with other folks at the IFL to make training happen and make sure we’re coordinating across different teams in the organization.
When I’m not physically there, I’m usually working directly with teams that are looking at a specific training or strategy need. I’m helping them to assess what that need actually looks like, what it is, who the people are, why they need it, where we’re going to find the budget to make it happen, whether it’s going to be an in-house solution or external – all of those decisions we have to make together and try to arrive at something that makes the most sense for that particular group as well as BMO as a whole.
What do you love about your job?
JR: I love the moments when I see light bulbs going off, when you know that what you’ve designed is going to have the impact that you want it to have. I love to hear people starting to speak the change management language across the bank – and then seeing the actual results. Like when you go into a branch and you see what you were talking about in the classroom with that particular business group and you see it happening with the customers. You see how those interactions are happening and how it’s making us a better bank overall – it’s exciting.
What are some of the day-to-day challenges you face in this position?
JR: When you’re looking at 47,000 employees and you’re looking at something like change management, which is somewhat decentralized since there are pockets of people that work in change management all over the bank, one of the biggest challenges is seeing why those differences exist and trying to pull things together. We try to make sure that what we’re doing from an organizational and strategic standpoint makes sense for the whole bank. It’s tough when you’re dealing with different geography, different time zones, different languages – you have all kinds of different factors at play.
What skills do you possess that make you a great fit for your role?
JR: There are a ton of skills from my library and information studies education that I rely on regularly. Things like information seeking and retrieval behaviours – how do people look for the information that they need, how do they want to retrieve it, how do they want to interact with it. That has huge transferability in training and development.
Also, relationship management skills, like knowing how to ask really good questions to get at the heart of things. It would be really easy to be an order taker and have someone come to me and say, “We need a one-day program on ‘X,’” and I say, “Sure, we’ll make that happen.” But it’s about asking really good questions to make sure that you’re understanding the underlying need, and not just providing a Band-Aid solution.
What are your ultimate career goals?
JR: I can see myself in three very different end-states for my career.
I could see myself leading a training and development or change management group – having a team of like-minded professionals working within a big organization to drive great learning experiences. I could also see myself eventually, closer to retirement, setting out on my own and having my own consulting practice. And third would be leaving the training and development role somewhat behind and looking more at the talent side of things in terms of HR management.
I’d be happy with all three of those, so it’s really a case of when and where I end up making my next move. Maybe I’ll have a great conversation with someone that’ll make me say, “Oh, that’s what I want!”