Hello everyone and welcome to The Upstream Leader. My name’s Jeremy Clopton. Excited to be with you here today—we’re going to be talking about learning, creating a culture of learning, and how do we move out of the CPE mindset and more into the development mindset. And for that conversation today, I have with me Monika Turek, with HoganTaylor. Monika, great to have you.
Thanks so much for having me, Jeremy.
Yeah! I’m looking forward to the conversation. Before we get into learning, I’m going to start things off the way that I do every episode. Tell us a little bit about how you became the leader that you are today.
Alright, how did I become the leader I am today? I think for me it’s a willingness to be first, and it’s not really from the perspective of I have to be first, but just the willingness to go first. And I think I first saw this kind of unintentionally when I was going to school. So I went to Oklahoma State University, I was getting my degree in accounting and in my management class we broke up into teams and we had a team project, and I made the mistake of being the first one to introduce myself, and therefore I became the de facto leader. And I think we see that in many different areas, right? You go into a breakout room, the first one to talk—that’s the leader. And I think I have just taken that to be more intentional, right? It’s not that I’m not comfortable with silence. I often will wait, you know, 3, 5, 10 seconds, see if anybody else has something that they want to talk about. But it is that willingness to move forward, right. I’m kind of a nerd, so I’m going to nerd out for just a second.
Please do.
I like to play Dungeons and Dragons.
Okay.
And I think this willingness to go first, like feeds into that as well, right? And when you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, there are scary things happening and somebody has to be the first one to go to the room. And it’s not because you want to be the hero, it’s because you want to make sure that things are safe and comfortable and ready for your team to move forward. I think, you know, if I think about my CliftonStrengths, which is where we really pull leadership ideas from, my number one is harmony. So I am always looking for what is the right thing for our whole team. What’s the just thing for our team? But then that’s followed up by my analytical and learner, so I’m always keeping an eye out, curious and thoughtful and trying make sure that, as our team is moving forward, we’re moving forward with confidence. And I think we do that with our L&D program too, right? Like what we’re trying to do is help people build the skillset, the mindset, and the confidence to say, yeah, I’ll go first, and then they can move forward with confidence.
So let’s talk about that a little bit more. You’ve got a CliftonStrengths of learner, so obviously when we’re talking about learning, it’s easy for us. That’s one of my strengths as well, and it’s easy to think about that. Not everybody has that as one of their top five strengths. So when you’re thinking about, you know, getting people to want to go first and really embrace that idea of learning, especially in today’s business environment where everything is moving so fast and it’s no longer just, I’m going to learn to be an accountant. Well, that’s great, but that’s barely getting you to the table in 2025. Now you’ve got to be more than that. You’ve got to be, you know, a specialist in this area or an advisor over here, you’ve got to do all these things, which requires someone to go first and be that learner. How do you get folks on board with that, that don’t want to go first, that don’t have that learner as one of their core strengths, and instead they’re sitting back thinking, you know, I’m kind of good at what I do, I don’t really want to go be first at anything, I just want to keep doing what I’m doing where I’m comfortable. How do you get people out of that?
Well, that’s a good question. You know, I think, so we obviously use CliftonStrengths at our firm pretty significantly. And so I think through that we start to identify, how can we lean into development no matter what your CliftonStrengths are, right? And so I know that some of the people that really thrive in some of our classes, learners, they’re number like 34, right? And why do they enjoy it? Because when we are developing learning and development type courses, we’re thinking about, okay, these are adult learners. They learn a little differently and they need to know what’s in it for me? What am I going to get out of this and what is a practical takeaway that I can have? And I think we try to develop our program around that.
I have had people who have said, you know what? I am 65 years old. What more do I have to learn, right? Like, why do I need to spend 24, 40 hours doing development? And I think, you know, it kind of goes back to that Albert Einstein quote, right? If you’re not learning, you’re dying? We need to always be moving forward. There’s always things to learn, no matter how old we are, no matter if we are experts in our area, and especially in accounting, we know that things are going to change constantly, and so if we can’t develop that mindset of growth and learning, then we’re going to be behind, and we’re not going to be able to move forward confidently into those new things. And so, you know, sometimes it can be difficult, especially with more seasoned people, because you know, that’s how we did it last year, right? Same as last year. Keep going. I think the real benefit that we have at HoganTaylor is that we have leaders in our firm like Randy Nail, who are about that growth mindset, right? And he tells us, constantly forget about SALY, right? Forget about same as last year, we need to be, you know, looking forward. His big phrase is big days ahead, right? And so he’s always got that forward looking idea and I think that inspires our people. And so having a culture of learning kind of starts at this hop. It really does help to have leaders who understand the value of it and understand that growth and development and not necessarily just the compliance piece of CPE, is what makes our people better and what keeps our people at the firm. Hopefully that answered your question a little bit.
Yeah, it does. And that compliance piece is such a challenge in our profession, and I would imagine it may be in other professions as well. I don’t know what all the CE requirements are in other professions. But when you think about it, most folks in our profession, they’re looking at at least 40-ish hours of CPE every single year. And for those that are not in the profession, that may be listening in, “continuing professional education” is what CPE stands for, in that context. I’ve long struggled with that because I don’t know that it’s always viewed as education as much as it is more of a compliance exercise, right? I sit in the room, we all signed in, and I’m going to probably get some other work done or whatever while I’m getting this course done so I can be compliant. So help me with how you’re overcoming that mindset. And I understand, and I totally buy in with leaders that have that growth mindset—and Randy is such a phenomenal example, and an outstanding leader in our profession—but if I’m an employee, let’s say I’m a senior or I’m a manager and I’m thinking, you know, I’ve got a bunch of stuff that I’ve got to get done. I’ve got deadlines, I’ve got 90 hours of work left to do this week and it’s already Thursday morning and here I got to sit in this class. How do you help people balance the idea or, or the busyness that our profession is experiencing right now with the need to truly disconnect from the work and grow? Learn rather than just get the hours and move on keeping doing the work.
Yeah. Good question. So I think like two things here. I think first, and this might be I have positivity in my top 10, so this might be a little positivity, but I meet often with learning and development professionals and not just in accounting. And so I think there is a little bit of a benefit of the compliance piece of, it gets our people in the door. They have get learning. There are so many professions that they’re not required to get hours and so therefore even getting them in the door is difficult, and so that’s my positivity. Leading with positivity, spin on it is at least we know we can get them in the door.
Then the question is, can we, uh, keep them engaged and can we get it so that they’re actually developing? Because there is a difference between development and CPE, right? Like there is a compliance requirement, that’s the bare minimum, but we want that time to be valuable and engaging, and we want them to learn something and grow out of it. And part of that, I feel like is on me to provide opportunities that are engaging, that they can have takeaways from. And part of that is of course, on the person to come into the training with this idea that I want to get better And you know, back to the leadership thing, you know, we have a get better mentality at HoganTaylor. So one of our core values is dynamic. And so we define that as getting better tomorrow than we are today. So if I start to find myself in a discussion with somebody that’s like, you know, I don’t have time to do this. Because, you know, I’m so busy or whatever, then I have that core value to kind of go back to and say, well, you know, at HoganTaylor, we want to get better tomorrow than we are today. That’s part of being dynamic and that’s part of what it means to be at HoganTaylor. And so I think driving it back to the core values of the firm can really help people recognize that.
I like that.
But I worked in the tax department before I came to L&D. I’m a CPA and an attorney, so I have had to get, you know, hours outside the CPA field. I do CLE in addition, so I have to get 52 hours a year, and I think that what makes it development more than just CPE, is that understanding of what is it that I’m going to take away from this, how is this going to make me better? And I need to present that to them. So we’ve been kind of toying with some different, you know, classes, and we recently did a little bootcamp with some of our internal facing folks and integrated services, so marketing it, HR, firm accounting, and we really talked about that busyness piece because those departments are also really busy, but they don’t have the same busy season necessarily. And in it, I kind of talked about this idea of “the red badge of busyness.” We kind of wear it on the sleeve like, “Hey, I matter because I’m busy,” and just trying to get rid of that mentality.
When somebody comes and they’re like, “Hey Jeremy, how are you doing?” And you always just answer, “Oh, I’m busy.” Right? Like that somehow is like increasing your importance. Like I think it’s important for us to recognize just how much work our people do, and really respect, you know, what they’re bringing to the firm. But sometimes we’ve got to take a step back and in order to make that busyness less pressure, we’ve got to learn new ways of doing things. Yeah. So that we don’t feel busy all the time. And so I think if we can show that benefit that by going to this class, we’re going to talk about how you can be more efficient, how you can take your 168 hours that you have in a week and make them really matter. And so, you know, I don’t do this perfectly all the time, but I think that is what I try to do is try to find ways that this training is going to help you take this one hour mental break from your client work, but you’re going to see the exponential results of it later, because we’re talking about something that really matters. And maybe that thing that matters is a wellness topic or maybe that thing that matters is you know, time efficiency, time management, or maybe that thing is about how to have better teams, and if your teams work better together, then all of you are going to be less quote unquote, “busy.”
Right. Well, I like—that mentality plays to, and it’s a book that I’ve referenced on the show before, Daniel Pink’s Drive, the intrinsic motivators that we all have of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. When you take the learning and you make it to where it’s going to help somebody become better at what they do, it’s going to help connect to their work, it’s, as you said it, it’s making it something that they want to be a part of rather than something that they have to be at. But I do love the positivity approach at the start of, but they do have to be here, so that’s actually half the battle. You’re right—in some industries that’s hard, which is, it’s interesting. The Gallup organization who does CliftonStrengths, they have the state of the Global Workforce report that comes out, I think annually. One of the number one drivers of retention is professional development. It’s helping people be the master of the craft that they’re in. And I feel like as a profession, we almost take that for granted because we are forced to get so many hours that well, like many things in the industry, we focus on the hours, rather than what we’re doing with them. And what I like about what you just described, Monika, is it’s no longer about the hours. It’s, yes, you’ll have to be there for that purpose, but we’ve got to make it something bigger. We’ve got to make it something better than that so that they want to truly engage and develop. I really like that approach.
The next direction I want to go with this, and I’ve got a quote that I’m going to read here in just a little. I’m going to work it in, but I’m going to tee it up first. So you get people in, you get them on board with the development, you get them bought into, “I’m going to learn, I’m going to just consume all this information and I’m going to be smarter, be better, be equipped to perform at a higher level.” How do you drive action? And is that the L&D department’s responsibility? How do you inspire others to take action? Because I’m a believer that you can get people to learn all day, but they’re the ones that have to truly apply it. Like we can’t care more than they do about their application. So how do you do that? How do you help them take the jump from learning and development to application and growth?
Yeah. That is a hard one. And in our learning and development, our, so we call it HoganTaylor University or HTU. We’ve set it up with kind of this competency model with skills under it, and one of those skills is accountability, right? It’s that idea of how are things going to be actionable? And I think—
I love that that’s a skill by the way. I love that you call that a skill, because it really is.
It is! And we try to focus every month on a particular skill and kind of eed some information out. There are things that are on demand. There are, you know, articles and then there are live classes related to it. And so I have taught some classes on accountability as well, but just kind of keeping it forefront for our people. But I think ultimately it is that personal accountability, right? Like I can only change one person in all of the universes that there may be, right? And that’s me. And I think having everybody understand that personal responsibility of if I want there to be change, if I want to be better tomorrow than I am today, there’s literally only one person that can make that happen. I really see my role in L&D as a trusted advisor, right? Like, and that’s how we teach all of our people. We want all of our people to be trusted advisors to their clients. I’m a trusted advisor to my client, which is the firm, and my role is to elevate them and make sure that they have what they need to get to that next level.
But ultimately, they have to make a choice, that “I want to change. I want to develop.” And that can be a hard lesson because when you are bombarded with all the business of life, change, which was already hard, is even harder to want to do. And it can be easy to get in that rut and just be like, “You know what? I’m good at this thing. I’ll just keep doing this. And you know, then after a set amount of time I’ll get promoted and then I’ll do that.” But not really thinking about like, if you want to be promoted, shouldn’t you be training someone to take your job? And I think Upstream has a course coming up on that actually, of training somebody for the role that you’re in. And I think that’s so important. And I think people don’t really think about it because a lot of times we think about promotions as kind of a passive thing and that it’s just going to happen to me and I don’t have any control over it. And I’m probably, you know, like going way down a rabbit hole here, but I think ultimately it comes back to learning and development and the idea that if I want to grow up in the firm, then I’m going to have to take some personal responsibility for how I develop. And so at HoganTaylor, we kind of call it like, “Be the hero of your journey.” And so like in that case, like each individual person is the Luke Skywalker and I’m Obi-Wan, right? So like, the story’s not about me. The story’s about them. And we really want to make sure that, you know, they’re owning those decisions that they make when it comes to development.
Yeah, and, and you mentioned, you know, some of our programs, that’s a philosophy that we’ve built into everything that we do, whether it’s Emerging Leaders Academy, Advanced Partner Academy, New Manager Academy. From every level we can help teach you, your guide can come alongside you, help you select great goals, select meaningful projects, depending on the program, and you can come together in person and you can network with others, and you can practice the application. But at the end of the day, the program is most successful for those that are willing to be the hero of their own journey. I love how you said that, and that they’re willing to let upstream come along as a guide, let their guide come along as a guide, let the peers and the colleagues that they meet come along as a guide, and then they take control over their career. And as an aside. We are actually in enrollment season for all of those programs, and enrollment ends June 1st. So if anybody’s interested in learning more about those, you can definitely visit our website, UpstreamAcademy.com. We’ve got information on all those there.
But it is so important to keep the individual, as you said, as the hero of their own journey, because otherwise it feels like, well, I’m just waiting for somebody else to tell me what I can do in my career. And I feel bad when I see somebody that’s taking that approach, because every firm in our profession that I’ve ever worked with, they want to hire those that are the best and the brightest with the most initiative and the drive. I always am a bit sad when I see somebody that has decided, well, then I’m going to outsource my career success to somebody else and I’m just going to wait. I think we’ve all probably gone through that experience at some point, it’s just, how quickly can you get out of it? When you think, oh, well the system isn’t designed for this, until you finally realize you have somebody come alongside you and say, no, the system is designed for you to take control, that’s the beauty of our profession, you have that.
So I’m going to read a quote to you. And I love this quote, though. I struggle with this quote at the same time, and it’s from Sahil Bloom, and it says this: “Your entire life will change the moment you stop looking for more information and start acting on the information you already have.”
Ooh. Yeah. That’s hard as a learner, right? Because you’re just like, “Hey, I want more information!”
It is, yes! I don’t know about you, but I do find myself another book, another podcast, another book, another podcast, and I’ve had years where I’ve been like, oh, I read 50 books. And somebody’s like, great, what was the most meaningful thing out of it? And it’s like, uh, that’s a phenomenal question. What’d you do differently as a result of any one of those books? I don’t know! So how do you, in, in your mind, your reaction, you just heard the quote possibly for the first time, how do you balance the learning with the action, and not just becoming, the phrase that I think I’ve heard is “content zombie,” right? Where it’s just more, more, more, more and more, but I’m doing nothing with it. But at the same time, getting enough, more, of the right things to take better actions. How do you view that as a balance?
Yeah, so you know, like I said, as a learner, I always want more information. I think there’s a little bit of my analytical that craves that information as well. And there can be slowness that happens whenever you’re just like, oh, I just need a little bit more time for research. That probably comes from my law background too, just a little more research. I think that one thing that, you know, I suspect most firms do is goals, of course. And so we do goal setting at HoganTaylor. Everybody sets goals and they meet with our talent advisors around those goals. And I think that has helped me in getting that, what do I need done by when idea. And you know, when I first started out and I made goals, you know, I always made them do like December 31st, because that’s a super arbitrary end point, right? And I think as I’ve developed, I’ve learned, you know what? In order to really feel that progress, that moving forward with confidence that we talked about earlier, there needs to be stepping stones along the way so that you’re seeing actual progress as you move along. And I have responsibility in my top five. So it’s, if I’m going to set a goal, I’m going to meet the goal, right? And so what I need to do is set myself these little check-ins so that I know that things are moving forward and maybe I don’t have as much of the research done that I would like to do, or as many books read, or as many podcasts listened to, but I know that I’ve got a goal that’s coming up, you know, at the end of the month, and so now I need to start making progress.
I think the other thing that has helped me—we recently had Robert Wagner kind of step in as a service area lead over integrated services, and he has really talked to us a lot about moving forward and taking sprints and really starting to see that progress. And I think, you know, kind of the awesome thing about that is that if you look at his CliftonStrengths, you see he has things like deliberative in there, but as a leader, he has figured out, you know, that you don’t have to be at a hundred percent as a learner or even an analytical, I might want the information to be a hundred percent before I move forward, but even like I talked about at the beginning, right? Sometimes leadership is about taking that first step. You may not have all the information you need, but you have enough to take the first step. And if you can take the first step, then the people behind you start to feel confident that they can start moving forward, even if they don’t have a hundred percent of the information yet.
I think sometimes that’s scary, but it helps me to set those intermittent goals. Even when I was working in the tax department, I was doing tax returns, I would have goals that weren’t, you know, April 15th or October 15th for all of my clients, right? I’d have them physically on my Outlook calendar saying, “I’m working on this client. I think it’ll take this many days,” and that at least helped me focus in on what am I going to accomplish this week? And do I need to adjust things? Because I mean, when you’re doing a tax return, you kind of do need all the information. But it helps you adjust and see And like, if I move this, then what’s going to happen to my next week? And where am I going to adjust? Because the one thing we all have is a finite amount of time every week. And you know, we’ve got to use it well.
So I’m going to go back to another topic that you introduced briefly a little bit ago, because as you described the intermittent goals, it comes to mind and I wonder if this structure, what your thoughts are on whether or not it helps to balance more information, take action, more information, take action, and that’s your learning paths. Because learning paths, as I think about them, are that incremental, “Here’s where you are.” You figure out where the you are here dot lies on the path, and you put yourself there and then you figure out, “Okay, where do I want to get to on the path?” And you put the little, you know, the whatever the icon you want to be for destination is out there. And then you’ve got to take incremental steps, many of which I would imagine build on one another. And it’s, you’ve got to learn and then do and then learn and then do. Would you say that having learning paths in place helps individuals balance that content consumption and learning with taking action on what they’ve got, even if maybe they don’t have every piece of information they could ever want?
Absolutely. And I promise I’m going to come back to this, but I’m going to kind of zoom out just a little bit first. Yeah. So we also use Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni at our firm. And so as we’ve started going through Working Genius, what we’ve identified so far at our firm, and we’ve probably tested about half of our people, and what we’ve identified is about 40% of our people have enablement and tenacity. So the loyal finisher as their unique pairing. And that’s not surprising to me. This is an accounting firm. Those are kind of the thing, like if you were to read job descriptions that would pretty much stand out to you. That’s the type of people you’re attracting in. But what they really crave with this loyal finisher is the idea of clarity. I will say, I’m not a loyal finisher. I have invention and discernment, and so what I crave is freedom.
And so our, you know, uh, when we starting our learning and development. And Hogan and Taylor in general, we talk about this idea of one size fits one. And just like you were talking about this idea of here’s where I am, here’s where I want to go, and you know, there are many paths to get there. There’s some freedom to how you get to those paths. But I think what learning paths do is they kind of narrow that down and they say, “You know what? If you direction, you need some clarity, here is a path that is set out for you.” And it doesn’t have to be like you have to do A, B, C, D in that order, but there might be some freedom to, like, there’s multiple versions of B, right? Maybe you prefer live, in-person classes, or maybe you prefer on-demand classes so you can fit it into your schedule. There’s still freedom there. I mean, you still have the ability to, like what niche group? Are you going to be a nonprofit, oil and gas? So on and so forth. So there’s still some of that one size fits one, but with the bumper rails that help you feel comfortable as you’re moving forward.
You know, I’ll be the first to admit, we don’t have this all figured out yet, but I think we’re getting there. For me, it starts with new hires and really providing them a little bit more clarity on like, well, what do I do? I show up the first day, like what happens next? And I think we’ve historically done pretty good with our assurance and tax folks because they have very specific levels training, right? That’s something that has been in our industry for a very long time. And so there’s a little bit of like, there are building blocks that everybody needs to know as you’re developing in these technical areas. But then it starts to open up into all of those skills that we talked about and how we develop those skills. And if you use the Pareto principle—you spend 80% of your time on the 20% you’re best at, and you’re going to get really great at those things that you are already naturally inclined to. And so we want you to focus in on those. I mean, sure you want to develop things that, you know, maybe you’re not great at, so that you can get to a good level of proficiency in them. But you could spend all the time in the world on something that you’re not great at, and you could just get marginally better, right? Whereas if you spend time on things that are your natural strengths, you are going to become exceptional. And we want our people to be exceptional.
And so we really encourage them like, pick three to five of these skills that you really enjoy and start developing in those, right? Not everybody is going to be your rainmaker business development person. Not everybody is going to be super talented at developing other team members. You should be proficient in those things, but you’re not going to be the best at those things. Find the thing that you can be the best at, because that’s going to feed your energy and that’s going to make you love your career, and really focus in on that. Because sure, when you’re staff and you’re a senior, there are those kind of direct paths of you’ve got to understand the basics and the intricacies of your service area, but then as you become a leader, that door kind of opens wide and it’s like there are all of these different ways that you can be a leader in the firm. You need to kind of figure out what path makes most sense to you.
So one thing that we’ve done to kind of help with this, we have a learning experience platform called Thrive. And it has all 15 of our skills built into it and leveled in six different levels. So it goes from new hire up to strategic partner, and you can go in and you can say, “I want to work on this skill of inclusiveness.” And you can say, “Here’s where I think I am right now, and we’ve got, you know, a guide that says, here’s what we think that means and here’s where we want to get to.” And if you do that in the system, it’ll say, “Here are some classes that will help you get there.” And so, you know, that’s not a defined path because everybody’s path will be just a little bit different once you get to a certain level, but I think we could do a lot better on providing some more of those, like, you know, just little bumpers like when you’re bowling.
And it sounds like, and this kind of brings the conversation full circle about making it meaningful to each individual is even from a learning path—and so often when we talk about learning paths in the profession, we kind of get stuck into the, okay, this type of a, you know, audit has this path, tax has this path. But what I’m hearing from you is it’s, I don’t know, the analogy that comes to mind is it’s less of a chapter book and more of a Choose Your Own Adventure. Yes, it’s guided, yes, there’s no blank pages. You don’t necessarily have to write the story. But you do have to make key decisions along the journey. You’re not just following “the path.” You’re, you know, coming up on forks in the road, or, you know, roundabouts or whatever, different path-based analogy you want to go with, where you’ve got to make a choice that makes a difference for you, rather than just doing this other thing.
And that would then provide agency to the individual, which to me is synonymous in this context with autonomy, meaning that they have control over their success. So you’re providing them autonomy and figuring what they going to master. And you tie it back to their career again, purpose, now we’ve hit the trifecta of intrinsic motivation, which arguably gets people to want to take ownership over it because now it’s them making learning choices rather than learning choices being made for them and then directed to them. Is that fair?
Yeah. I love that analogy as a D&D nerd. I think the Choose Your Own Adventure, you know, fits completely within what we would like. And I like how you described it as, you don’t have to write it yourself. It’s written, it’s just, you’ve got to choose the way that you’re going to go. Yeah, I love it. I think that’s perfect.
That’s awesome, Monika. I appreciate it. We’re coming up on the end of the discussion here, but before I do, I want to ask, when you think about resources, we’ll do a Choose Your Own Adventure version of this, I guess. So resources, whether it’s for an L&D professional, trying to figure out how do they build a more impactful L&D department, whether it’s for an adult learner, trying to figure out, okay, how do I take ownership over my learning? What resources, knowing that you like to learn, right? Whether it’s a book, an article, a TED talk, a course, what do you find impactful that you would recommend for others?
I think one huge area, like I could never be successful as an L&D person if I didn’t have the peer groups, right? So the Upstream Peer Group—we’re involved in other peer groups like, you know, Boomer and Prime Global—that ability to work with other L&D professionals. The accounting profession is so valuable because many of us start out as a solo person in L&D, and that silo can sometimes feel very lonely. But whenever you have these peer groups, then you start to get ideas from other groups, you get support. Everybody has been so open about sharing in those groups, and so I think that is vital for anyone that is working in l and d because a lot of us don’t have a huge department of people.
I think obviously books, I mean, I love books. We use Patrick Lencioni for like everything at our firm, and that has been a value add. And then I think the third leg of it, I recently joined the local chapter of ATD, and so that’s learning professionals from many different industries. I think that what that does is it broadens my perspective and gives me, like, what are new creative ways that I can do adult learning that maybe we haven’t been using in the accounting profession yet? I encourage people to look for a local chapter. They’re pretty much everywhere. And then even just the national ATD, so you can go to TD.org. They have a lot of resources and training resources for L&D professionals, so if you’re looking for that kind of like, targeted training and even certifications, you can find that there as well. So I think those, you know, three things are so valuable when you’re building your department.
I appreciate you sharing that. And I love the fact that two of the three are actually building connections with people. It’s such an overlooked area of learning. Seems like we always want to talk about books and courses and all the different things, but to your point, being able to get together with other people that are wanting to do the same thing, and just learn various perspectives and, you know, learn from one another, support from one another—so, so valuable. Monika, if somebody wanted to get in contact with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out?
Yeah, absolutely. So I am on LinkedIn, so happy to connect on LinkedIn and then I’m always happy to talk with other people, set up a meeting, or shoot me an email and I’m happy to do that as well.
Very good. Monika, thank you so much for the conversation. I’ve enjoyed it and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
