Intersections in Learning & Development with hosts Lisa Crockett & Monique St. Paul and guest Michael Merline

Monique St Paul  
Hello, everyone, welcome to intersections and learning. My name is Monique St. Paul when we have our producer Lisa Crockett and also my co host. But more importantly, we're going to focus on the Michael Merline, our guest for today, he is an instructional designer at Citizens Bank, as well as a voice over actor, we brought him to speak to you today just to understand his intersection is really to work with a variety and dry content. So he works in compliance and really just get an intersection for that and understanding how do you make that entertaining as well as some thoughts on adding sound to, to your learning. So Michael, I'm gonna actually let you introduce yourself. We met each other at ATD. But I've had the pleasure of speaking to you several times, and you've become a friend and definitely a mentor sharing lots to know. So I'm excited for you to talk to you the TL DC community. Tell us about yourself.

Michael Merline  
Thank you, Monique. And thank you, Lisa, thank you everyone for being here. The first work day of a short week. I know these type these types of days can be grueling, and you have to catch up with things you miss. But I really appreciate it. Michael Marlene, I have been in training for over 20 years I started off as a technical writer, then evolved into instructional design as I got received my master's degree in instructional design at UMass Boston, and started my career path for instructional design. along that way after that, and at Citizens Bank currently, before my path started there, I did work in radio, and a little bit in TV, on the back end side of it doing editing of audio and video, I never forgot that experience and that knowledge never left me. And that's what I do as part of my job as an instructional designer. Personally, I live in Foxborough, Massachusetts, go Pats. I don't live too far from the stadium. I grew up south of Boston on the south shore in Hanover. I'm one of four. I'm the youngest of four. And the reason why I'm like this, I want to show my father's painting of the Coast Guard ship that he was in when he was stationed in Boston and his knowledge and memory and the way he was as a parent and a father and a friend always stays with me when I see this. And that's his painting. He painted that among other paintings during his early life. And so I have this, you know, in back of me as as a memory of him, and as a catalyst and motivation to always keep progressing and learning. And I'll switch back to the center view here. So already throw everyone off like that, but just want to show you how important that is. For me on an everyday basis.

Monique St Paul  
That's actually an awesome story. Thank you for sharing that with us, Michael, I do you paint? Well, I'm curious now.

Michael Merline  
I paint a good picture with words and knowledge and narration and working with different subject matter experts and co workers. That's that's my artistic way of painting, things that I create and things that I do.

Monique St Paul  
Interesting, okay. And I would ask, as an instructional designer that can mean anything to anyone on this call. Does that mean for you? What does that mean for you at Citizens Bank? What do you do? Just you know, of course development, you do need to analysis Do you do editing on the background for sound? What is it that you do at Citizens Bank?

Michael Merline  
I do many things. It all depends on the situation, the project, the team that asks me to come in with them who have other skills and they like Michael, we need you for this, or another team will like Michael, we need you for this. So I'm always shifting from project to project and knowledge to knowledge. I could lend myself to needs assessments. I could lend myself to editing I could lend myself to course development. It's a variety of projects that determine what my influences and capability is. And that's always good because it keeps everyone on pace with the project and also helps other people learn from other people on the project.

Monique St Paul  
Gotcha. So instead of being a jack of all trades, I'm gonna call you a Michael of all trades. What is your favorite part of being a designer? So you like the variety. But if you got to choose one that you could do for most of your day, what part would it be?

Michael Merline  
It would be developing, because that brings it all together. You have you have, you have scripts, you have visuals, you have technology, you have an audience that you're developing for you have them in mind when you're developing. So everything I told you that I'm pulled onto a team with pulls itself into into development.

Monique St Paul  
Excellent. And then so the question for you, I know you like music quite a bit, and you'd like to incorporate that into your courses. Can you talk a little bit about and one, what type of courses do you build? Is it in person is elearning? And then also, how do you incorporate sound into that?

Michael Merline  
It's 99% elearning. And there's always music going on in my mind. When I'm developing, I'm listening to it constantly, whether I'm listening to it on my phone, online, on TV, or even in my head. And when I see something that's in the course, that's related to a song, or even just music, that without lyrics, I will do my best to implement that into the course or even into live training a virtual training session.

Monique St Paul  
Yeah, do you ever feel like because music depending on what generation you're in, some people really just listen to what's popular now that you might find some of your audience may not connect with it? Or do you think you're you're so good at choosing that they just like what's there.

Michael Merline  
I really value the input of the audience. And if it's a live Virtual Training, the first session will be a meet and greet, getting to know you, how are you I'm this person, I am that person, I will send a chat question for them to answer live, what kind of music do you like? And sometimes I'm surprised by age groups that will say, tell me a musician or band that I wouldn't think that age group would like, and I'll take the majority of the music that they like, and I'll put it into the virtual training or even even the course that they will access on our learning management system.

Monique St Paul  
We have a question here in the chat. I want to make sure to answer for Kim. Yep. are most of your courses for employees? And is there anything that is customer facing that? You do?

Michael Merline  
Yes. Most of them are for employees. Very rarely do we have customer facing training? But I believe that's that's another department. But most of the training we do is for employees only.

Monique St Paul  
And just to piggyback on that, is that mostly compliance? Or what else are you doing for them? What are you doing regulatory, because you're working in finance. So

Michael Merline  
right? 95% is compliance, but the other 5% is, strays away from that new new employee onboarding, training, which is all all video based and online based. If there's something that's of urgency in the company that the message needs to get out very quickly. We'll go on to that project, just as an informational training, rather than knowledge based training. And we have the resources on our team to put it together fairly quickly and fairly efficiently.

Monique St Paul  
Gotcha. And I would say, how do you make compliance training entertaining? So you talked a little bit about the music? I don't know what system you're using to build your elearning courses, but are using animations what what things are you incorporating to help make it something that I imagine is yearly, if not more often than not?

Michael Merline  
compliance courses lend itself to looking at other other banks and other news about banking. And if we see something that's related to the specific compliance course, that's in the news, or from another bank or from an industry, we'll find a video about that information and put it at the top of The course. So Well, the first thing a learner will do is hear a realistic viewpoint of instance, in another bank or from a, from an industry, they're in the court. See how important that topic is?

Monique St Paul  
Well, that's good. I mean, that's interesting, and also gives you a chance for them to do a little bit of research while they're learning about their own information. I'm going to switch gears a little bit. Sure. I talked about being in radio before. So how do you feel that background has influenced what you're doing and learning.

Michael Merline  
Most of the time, in the background of being in radio, it's about being creative about being knowledgeable, and about being flexible to switch from one topic to another, or one song to another, or to be knowledgeable about music or anything else happening in the music industry, even the radio industry. And that was learned at an early age. And it just transferred to instructional design and course development to be flexible, to be knowledgeable. And to be creative. In in as an instructional designer.

Monique St Paul  
What would you encourage people to know like in terms of like cutting sound, and being able to know when to flow it in, so it doesn't sound like abrupt, you know, cut off? And then the next thing starts? Or what would you recommend to people to either use it or to get rid of sort of background noise, things like that?

Michael Merline  
Yep. I can give a tech simple technique to progressively introduce the music, and to end the music, it's a simple option on most audio editing software is the fade in and fade out option to slowly bring up the volume to a full level of the music and then fade it out. The noise cancelling. And those options are all available on many audio editing software. And it's just a matter of getting the balance right of canceling the noise, but not cancelling the audio, not just music. But even if it's a speaker, to focus on the speaker, if it's someone talking about something, and not to drown their natural speaking voice tone out with noise cancelling.

Monique St Paul  
Gotcha. And what system or software do you use to? To work on sound?

Michael Merline  
We use a few software programs Camtasia from TechSmith, and power director from CyberLink. Those are the two main software files or types that we use. PowerDirector is a little bit more cam complex than Camtasia. If we need to edit something complex, we'll use PowerDirector. If it's something straightforward from point A to point B, we'll use Camtasia.

Monique St Paul  
Excellent. So when you're not doing this for work, you do it on the side. So what have you done it for? Do you change your voice at all? Or what do you do?

Michael Merline  
There's some people who are good voice actors, their voice can go up and down. It can even go this way. It can even go out of the world to sound like a totally different person or character. My voice and my brain doesn't lend itself to that. So I consider it straight voice narration. And what people like about my voice narration style is the inflections that I use for different words the emphasis that I use for different words to get the keep the attention of the viewer or the listener.

Monique St Paul  
Yeah, and what about speed so I'm very comfortable listening to the way that you speak. I'm a very fast speaker. I'm trying to slow myself down. What What do you think is typical speed that someone has to like, focus on to make sure that most people are hearing what you're saying.

Michael Merline  
I slow my voice down when I'm recording, but then I do it at other speeds. So I think the speaking voice that I'm using right now is a little too fast. So I will slow it down to put an emphasis on different words, just so it's clear, but not too many spaces between words. So I, and then I record it, slowly, middle range, and then fast and try to listen and see which one is the best out of all of them. And the great thing about technology and software and editing and deleting and hard drive space, you can do it 1000 times differently and pick pick the best one.

Monique St Paul  
Do you think you can do it? 1000 times Do you ever get into? How many times do you actually do it? If you're against a deadline? You saying five times you do it at certain speeds? And then listen to it?

Michael Merline  
I usually do it maybe two or three times at maximum.

Monique St Paul  
Okay, that's not too bad. That's some terrible question about flow. Anytime you're working, whether that's in audio or doing for instructional design, what is your process to get there? Like what gets you into the state of mind?

Michael Merline  
I have to say that once a project starts, and I have an idea of what the end goal might be, or needs to be, I tap into my co workers as sounding boards to say, Hey, I have the situation. What do you think? What do you think the best approach is? And that that gets me started. But then after that, I do a an official needs analysis. And maybe what we're brainstorming might not be what comes out after the needs analysis, it might, it might be different, but that brainstorming gets my thought process going and evolving and then attack the needs assessment right after that.

Monique St Paul  
Gotcha. And then you mentioned earlier playlists, do you have a playlist that you listened to when you're working to keep you focused? Or are you just you sit down and you start working cranking it out?

Michael Merline  
I had to take a pause there for that question. There's actually like a playlist in my head actually. Some people might think that's like, oh, his head is talking to him his brain is no but that's that's how it that's how it works as a playlist in my head, then if I really want to hear that song, rather than Sing, sing, not singing it to myself, but singing it in my head. I'll go to the actual song and I'll say yes. Or even say no, let's try another song. So that's that's how I approach that.

Monique St Paul  
Gotcha. I have to say, my neighbors must hate me. I listen to the same music over and over again, so they know exactly what I am in a state of flow. You worked from home way before the pandemic, what would you say works best for you in terms of working at home.

Michael Merline  
It's getting up early in the morning, preparing my workspace area, getting a nice hot cup of tea, I'm a tea drinker looking out at the view that I have which is a great view of the woods, which inspires me and just starting working from there

Monique St Paul  
Okay, so you're early morning person me and Lisa as well often shooting emails off at 630 you tell me something new every time we talk to each other in the last year, what is something that you've discovered that you really appreciate and learning and think oh my god, my life would be different if I didn't have this now, or I didn't know about it.

Michael Merline  
Oh, boy. I think the connection to people either talking on the phone, or when it's available to meet them in person talking about different topics, not even just work topics, but you know, things that are going on in life maybe some struggles that my friends and family might be having. We'll we'll talk about that. So that's that's what I missed a lot. And I tried to replace that by online. videos, video chats with friends and family or a phone or even a message. Good morning. How are you? So that's what I missed. During pandemic, and I'm out there in full force now making up for that.

Monique St Paul  
That's good. That's good. Can you? Um, so how do you conduct design sessions you talked a little bit about asking people ahead of time electronic music is, what else do you do to sort of get to what you're going to be creating for learning.

Michael Merline  
I like to do rough drafts. And I maybe may do two or three rough drafts. And I'll run them by not just the same people I brainstorm with, but other people to get their perspective and different perspectives. So I do two to three rough drafts. And I do it directly in the authoring where, and I also look for ideas that already exist, and ideas that already exist and doesn't even have to be in the training industry. ideas could exist from advertising marketing, every day websites and social media that I look at and get inspired that way for for my design.

Monique St Paul  
Excellent. And then is there something that people will be surprised to know about you that you do? It doesn't have to be about work, but it would somebody to be surprised about? Michael does that like,

Michael Merline  
Well, actually, I when I sent this information out to my friends and family, they responded back, like, I didn't know you did voice narration so that they were like, completely surprised, you know, like, I, you know, I would, we would spend time, you know, go out to for a meal, you know, go to a restaurant, go to a concert, and we talk about other things. And they were like, so totally surprised. Like, Oh, my gosh, Michael, tell me more. And I'm more than happy to tell more about this part of my profession, to anyone who's interested.

Monique St Paul  
Certainly, at least if you don't mind dropping his LinkedIn there, I certainly would say if you haven't met Michael yet, please reach out to him. He's an awesome, awesome, man.

Michael Merline  
Oh, thank you so much.

Monique St Paul  
I have one of the questions where I switch over to a speed round for Lisa. But that is every job needs to show proof of effectiveness. How do you show that your compliance courses, people are actually learning it.

Michael Merline  
Once my man current manager joined us close to eight years ago, her first and one of her first initiatives was to get data and show data and prove that data amongst people who really weren't using a lot of data to show completion of compliance courses and satisfaction. So we built a really big set of data from different types of software to tell a story about our compliance courses more than satisfaction, dissatisfaction or a number of people who completed number who people who didn't complete. So we show a really big set of data to the executive committee during when she gives a quarterly summary of compliance training department. Right? What

Monique St Paul  
kind of points of data do you think are important when showing that it's not just they've completed the courses or they liked it, you don't obviously get too far, right? One or two points that they might be focused on.

Michael Merline  
One of the main goals those many years ago was to reduce the hours of training for employees, but still have them assigned different courses. And we were able to reduce the number of hours down but still have the same number of courses assigned to the to the co workers and we did that by reducing the length of a course and also doing an assessment of the courses that were too long and possibly decided that this course has been assigned for five or six years. Let's move on to a different course similar to that, but not exactly like that. And let's have that course have a shorter amount of time for completion.

Monique St Paul  
That's That's excellent and micro learning at its finest, I think and also just making sure people are getting Something that they didn't see before even if Exactly, yeah, I'm gonna pass it off to Lisa. She's masking a couple more questions. They're a little bit shorter. off more, a little bit more about you Lisa. What you got?

Michael Merline  
Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  
So what do I got? So Michael we call this the speed. I just love this round so much. I really do. What's the last book you read?

Michael Merline  
Okay. Quick tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Unknown Speaker  
awesome book I love that book. Okay, what last movie read last movie read

Michael Merline  
this past Saturday night.

Unknown Speaker  
Hold that is a guy's dad is a phenomenal

Michael Merline  
I got it on Amazon Prime Amazon. And it was all filmed in Massachusetts and there will be a knives out to next year. And the knives out three coming out.

Unknown Speaker  
The movie is so funny guys. like totally you have to you have to see it. It's surprisingly hysterical. Oh, that's awesome. Okay, now. So your favorite form of entertainment live

Michael Merline  
concerts for two or three a week.

Unknown Speaker  
Wow, what was your two or three? If I get two or three year,

Michael Merline  
what was the last in Boston at a club called city winery? a solo musician. Her name is lady lamb. And she grew up in Maine. very introspective singer. And beautiful at the same time.

Unknown Speaker  
Love it. How about your first one

Michael Merline  
Tears for Fears. And they have a new album coming out this year. Their new single came out last week. very underrated. But very well. Well, good songwriting and lyrics and presentation, and I thought you never knew you'd get additional information with these questions.

Monique St Paul  
I actually really liked it.

Unknown Speaker  
I love this. Um, I yeah, totally, totally loving him on he just, you know off the cuff. What was your first I want

Monique St Paul  
to say probably in sync when I was in high school. I'm gonna guess.

Unknown Speaker  
Nice, nice. Awesome. Awesome. Let's see. What else do I have for you? Oh, who do you fanboy Michael?

Michael Merline  
Gosh. I think by my silence. I don't fanboy many, many men. You can ask me who I fan girl. I can definitely tell you that.

Unknown Speaker  
fan girl, Fergie. Oh, yeah.

Michael Merline  
I'm the lead singer of no doubt. Gwen Stefani, Jennifer Garner, and lots of other lead singers of bands.

Unknown Speaker  
You grew up in you were a teen ladies, weren't you? You and I have too much in common late,

Michael Merline  
late teen

Unknown Speaker  
late. Okay, here's my favorite question. While we have all of two minutes left. If we were to ask your partner, spouse, best friend, what you do for a living? how accurately Do you think they can answer us?

Michael Merline  
not accurately enough. Because when I'm with my family and friends, we talk about so many other topics, about our family about our lives, about our experiences with everything we do outside of work and even 85% of it is humor.

Unknown Speaker  
Humor go round. Yep. I think we got to wrap it up. Monique, Did I miss anything before we close our session?

Monique St Paul  
No, but I feel like Michael, if I ever have a trivia team, I want you on it. Oh, thank

Michael Merline  
you know a little bit of everything. I have a favorite quote to share if I can leave, by all means do. And I just sent it to everyone. The capacity to learn is a gift. The ability to learn is a skill, the willingness to learn is a choice. And I take that from our parents, all four of us going to further education after high school. And even going even further than that, with masters and doctorates and other professional education. That's that's very special to me, and I'm sure it's very special to many people on the crowdcast.

Monique St Paul  
I really appreciate just you talking about the connection with your coworkers, obviously your family is very important to you and sort of the inspiration of the painting behind you the woods in front of you. It seems it's just part of who you are. Learning is just always there. And it's fantastic that you were able to take the time today to speak with us. I'm very happy to be able to share you with others. So again, if you haven't met Michael, please hit him up on LinkedIn. He's fantastic to talk to you. We talked about a wealth of topics today. I think Thank you for listening. Our next guest on October 26 is going to be Nicole Thomas, who is a coach, author and l&d leader. So it's going to be same time still right? Am

Unknown Speaker  
I right? Actually, we're going to be four o'clock that afternoon. We're gonna support serving on the Pacific Coast this time.

Monique St Paul  
But Michael, thank you for being here today. Lisa, thank you for producing today. We appreciate it and hope to talk to you all soon. Have your day.

Michael Merline  
Thank you, Monique and Lisa and thank you everyone. It was a sheer pleasure. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  
Thanks, my girl. I'm gonna hit you up soon.

Michael Merline  
Okay.

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