#colearning

A part of the role of Program Manager for coLearning is to connect with people in the community. I’ve attended numerous events in an effort to meet some great new people, and I haven’t been disappointed by what West Michigan has to offer. It can be tough to make every Meetup or event, and even tougher still to make sure I’m being as effective as I can in making connections and representing coLearning. Now that I’ve hit a good stride, I’m happy to share some of the strategies I implement that can be replicated by others who network either for work or just want to meet great people.

Schedule your events ahead of time

One helpful starting point is mapping out the coming events that would be relevant to you or your cause. Some of this requires a little bit of research on what’s coming up. A good resource I’ve used to help know what’s coming is meetup.com, a website that lists local gatherings by location. Meetup is a great resource for anyone since it can show you groups getting together regardless of your location. While it covers a large number of events, it would also be helpful to check out the calendars for organizations in your area that align with what you are looking for if they are available. Some great examples for us are Creative Mornings, AIGA and WMCAT. They hold or list events that help us connect with the creative community in Grand Rapids. I try to have a monthly map of events where I’ll check at the beginning of the week to see if anything has been added to keep up with last minute changes.

Come with a plan

I find that I’m more effective when I come to an event with a set of goals. Those goals can include an aim of the number of people I want to connect with or even a short list of people who I want to meet before the event is over. If you have trouble setting these goals try asking yourself a few questions:

What are your company’s goals?

What are your personal goals?

What type of person can help you achieve them?

What would be helpful for you to learn more about?

What questions can you be prepared to ask?

Meetups have a list of attendees who show an interest in an event or may even list that they are coming. This can be a good reference point to see who you might want to connect with. Even if they don’t come, you can know who they are and maybe follow them on social to see what other opportunities you have to meet them if you don’t feel comfortable reaching out directly.

Bring business cards or leave behinds

This may seem like a given or even a little cliche but there have been a couple times where I met someone at an event and had nothing to leave behind so they can remember me. You’d be surprised how many people keep business cards and will stumble upon them later when a need arises. It’s always a good idea to keep tabs on these when they are running low so you don’t miss out on a chance to leave people with something at events.

Talk to learn

You’ve probably heard before that people love to talk about themselves, and that hasn’t changed much over time. Connecting with someone involves getting to know them and genuinely caring about who they are and what they do. It can be hard when you have a goal set for the evening, but you want to be engaging in every conversation you have because you never know when the person you’re talking with can be helpful.

A big part of this is asking questions. It helps to have a great conversation that is interesting to both parties and feels organic, but I think we’ve all been in plenty of conversations that feel off or awkward to navigate. That’s why it can be helpful to have a list of general open-ended questions in mind before events that can help bring out the personality of who you’re talking with. You can find some great suggestions for questions just by Googling, so I’d recommend checking out specific ones to what you want to learn from that person. Some examples I find myself using often are:

Tell me a little about what you do at X.

How did you get involved in Y?

What are some major changes that have taken place in X industry over the past few years?

What do you love/hate the most about working in X?

After asking these questions, it’s important that you are actively listening and not just trying to think of what you’re going to say next. The best compliment I’ve received from people I connect with is that I’m a great listener, because at the end of the day people love to be heard. You can still be passionate in sharing who you are or what you represent, but I’d even suggest taking more time to listen. If you open up the conversation with good questions, show genuine interest through active listening, and still have trouble with the conversation, it might be a good sign that you should try connecting with someone else.

Note who you met

You often hear people say they’re terrible with names. I think it isn’t so much that, as it is when you meet a lot of people at once, it can be tough to recall all the information you need. One way you can help yourself with this is to try to save time after an event to take some notes on key meetings or conversations you had. It doesn’t even hurt to make a quick note or two on a business card while you’re there.

People often will be flattered that you show you truly care to remember your interaction. As long as you don’t take too much time to the point of being rude, you can gain a lot from noting the interaction and even reviewing it if you think you’ll see them again.

 Nos llega una comunicación NO OFICIAL, a la que no podemos darle el 100% de veracidad, pero  que publicamos para quien lo quiera intentar, pues nada se pierde.

A couple weeks ago, we welcomed 40 new coLearners to The Factory to start their journey to grow new skills in programming, modern web, or design thinking. For me, it was an amazing night of new beginnings and realized potential from a group of people I had the privilege of getting to know over the past couple months. I see so many gifts and strengths in each person and it’s been fun to get started with courses.

As we concluded orientation, we asked our coLearners three simple questions to reflect on the evening together. We wanted to understand their experience, find out what questions still remained, and gain feedback to improve orientation.

At coLearning, we love Post-it note activities, so we asked our coLearners to jot down their thoughts about three prompts on post-its. coLearners were asked to complete the following statements:

I like; I wish; What if...

After organizing all the answers in affinity groups, we noticed a few themes and common questions from the evening:

We Like: the activities, the interaction, the community,

We Wish: more snacks, food, and drinks!

We Like: building new connections and relationships!

Common Question #1: How can we be most successful in class?

Common Question #2: What can I expect to learn from class?

In hindsight, a few things are clear. We probably need to add some snacks and drinks next time. And we loved getting to know one another and building new relationships.

What about those two common questions that remained for our coLearners? As we move into the weekly rhythm of coLearning courses, I am constantly talking with our instructors and coLearners about the “coLearning way” of creating a learning community that answers those two foundational questions; How can I be most successful and what I can expect to learn?

How can I be most successful in class?

Be Curious

I shared last time that curiousity is the foundation of coLearning that includes clarifying your goals, valuing diverse perspectives, embracing failure and risk, and engaging in purposeful activity. The start of success in class is embracing curiosity and beginning to ask deeper questions to discover the answers and solve problems. I am already seeing our coLearners creating their own goals and valuing the perspectives of their classmates. It is really fun to see curiosity blooming in each class.

Take Ownership

We encourage our coLearners to take ownership of their personal success by pushing themselves to learn what they need to accomplish their goals. When we take personal ownership, we drive toward mastery of a subject vs. performance that is based on external criteria and evaluation. We resist giving “grades” in coLearning and focus on deliverables in the form of projects and portfolios. What does success look like? Your future employers should be able to see it in your work.

Be Resourceful

The first night of class, Kendell and Alison shared a small four-part process of discovery for coLearners to find answers to their questions. They encouraged each person, when faced with a problem or question they didn’t know the answer to, to follow these four steps:

Step 1: Google It!

Step 2: Ask the person next to you

Step 3: Ask the entire table

Step 4: Ask the instructor or entire class

coLearners will find success by being resourceful and recognizing the knowledge around them. When this happens, you learn how to learn well beyond the class so you can keep growing and learning when the formal classroom experience ends.

What can I expect to learn from class?

Level Up your Hard Skills

What’s beautiful about adult learners in their focus on learning the right skills for the right task. When you enter a coLearning classroom, you can expect to learn the essential hard skills to help you level up in your career or launch your new career. You are surrounded by people with great life experiences and instructors who work in the industry every single day. We want you to leave with a solid foundation of hard knowledge and skills.

Level Up your Soft Skills

Beyond the essential hard skills, we want you to continue growing the essential “soft skills” vital to being a helpful contributor to a team and organization. It doesn’t matter how amazing your hard skills are if no one wants to work with you. In class, you will grow in your ability to communicate, show empathy and emotional intelligence, work collaboratively, lead effectively, and value diverse perspectives. Most coLearners come with many of these skills, but it is so important to leave with a clear understanding of how to use these skills in your current and future work.

To be a professional, you need to gain the competence in the hard skills and the capacity to work with others through the soft skills. We want our coLearners to leave feeling confident and empowered to make a great contribution and a team to find ongoing success in all their life pursuits.

Hello world. I’m Matt and I am new to Elevator Up, The Factory, and coLearning. I grew up in West Michigan and migrated back to Grand Rapids two years ago after spending most of my adult life in Los Angeles. #GoDodgers

When I started exploring Elevator Up for the first time, I loved stumbling across our values that includes the importance of curiosity. I spend most days talking with people to uncover their interests, passions, goals, and to connect them to the powerful network of coLearning. I believe our courses can provide a subscription to curiosity.

But really, what is curiosity?

At Elevator Up, we talk about curiosity as "learning new things and growing to be a better you." I spent some time in grad school exploring the life experiences of highly curious people as part of a research study led by Eileen Hulme. We found that curious people drive toward personal goals, embrace failure and uncertainty, value diverse perspectives, and engage in purposeful activities.

Ok, that sounds cool, but what does curiosity look like in the real world filled with adult-like responsibilities? Who’s got time for that?

Good questions hypothetical blog reader!

We designed coLearning as a way to develop a learning community that integrates curiosity into busy lives filled with bills, jobs, family, and friends. Our 12-week courses meet for 2.5 hours each week. A schedule like this allows maximum flexibility for busy people to continue learning the same way in which you’d grow a garden, slowly and consistently over time. Beyond class, coLearners gain access to a network of creators, companies, and community events to engage as time allows.

So, how can coLearning help me grow curiosity?

When you enroll in a coLearning course, you enter a learning community that fosters your curiosity in several ways.

First, we start the process by clarifying your personal goals and aligning you with a course that can help move those goals forward. Start with a course that interests you most! Investing 12 weeks in a subject will help you accomplish a learning goal. The affordability of our courses gives you the opportunity to either deepen your learning in design, technology, or business or learn something completely new every 12 weeks.

Second, you’re naturally able to diversify your perspectives because you’re able to connect face to face with a peer group eager to learn together. For example, you will meet people who work for large corporations, mid-sized nonprofits, and startup ecosystems. When you surround yourself with new people who experience the world differently, the chances of your curiosity naturally growing are much greater.

Third, throughout each course, coLearners are tasked with a project that relates to the course. This helps you solidify the skills you're learning as well as helps you add something unique to your portfolio. coLearners grow personal curiosity by engaging a purposeful activity that creates an actual product, applies new learning, and moves past theoretical concepts and ideas. We focus on mastery over performance (#nogrades) so you can focus on what really matters, delivering an amazing product, experience, or solution.

Fourth, our industry leading instructors spend their days solving complex problems and working with real-life clients to achieve results. Their support and guidance from experience and wisdom guides coLearners to embrace failure and uncertainty. coLearners have freedom to try things in a safe environment via this instruction and learning community, coLearners are able to receive instant feedback and learn the tools they need to become more resilient and resourceful.

I love being a part of growing curiosity and connecting people with opportunity in West Michigan through coLearning. Learn more about what we're up to by visiting our website  or scheduling a time to meet up. I'd love to chat with you about your interests, passions, and goals.

In my last post I walked through the first step of the process of mentor exploration to apply it to our Creator program. Now we will take a look at my approach for answering questions about promotion, execution and retention.

How do you promote it?

Our Creator network wouldn’t really be much without the network part, so we needed to be able to recruit experienced professionals in the community to join in on the fun. Luckily, The Factory inherently connects us to a network of professionals doing some great things. We gathered our first group of Creators just from having conversations with people at The Factory and Elevator Up. From there the challenge shifts to getting the word out beyond our four walls. We have a number of resources we are using to tackle this.

Social media

Attending community meetups and events

Print materials

Email outreach

This part of the process can move slower, but we are already noticing growth every week we put these tactics into practice.

How do you connect the Creators with the coLearners?

I discovered a few common approaches to this question. The most common was to have an administration or staff deliberately match the mentors with the mentees. In certain environments this would appropriate, including youth mentor programs like the one I work with. The other involved creating a physical or digital environment specifically designed to be the setting of those interactions.

In the case of coLearning, we try to empower coLearners to take the initiative to dive into the community with any opportunity that they get. That same initiative works even more so when making an impression on the Creator you hope to emulate. Having coLearners reach out to the Creators also gives them the freedom to hone in on what specific areas they feel they need to grow in most. This requires them to build their self-reflection and targeted networking skills.

As for the environment, Slack served all of our needs for digital communication channels. We created a channel specifically for Creators and coLearners to connect. We also already have our weekly Coffee with Creators <link> event where the Creator network can connect with both coLearners and local professionals in West Michigan. Moving forward, we will consider what other events we can host to provide each side with flexible opportunities to connect.

How do we keep Creators engaged?

I think Elevator Up’s CEO Aaron said it best when he said, “It’s pretty common that people can forget that they are even in a program like this if they don’t have anything keeping them engaged.” Retention is an issue that didn’t come up a lot in my research of sources, so I was able to get the most out of this by actually asking people who have been mentors in other programs.

Jim Smith, a developer at Elevator Up, shared an experience he had with a mentor branch of a bootcamp program. His insight showed that engagement can mean different things for different people. In his case, seeing that his guidance actually contributed to a project or goal for his mentee kept him interested in the mentor relationship.

Another important piece of retention is right in the benefits listed earlier: The Network. The network not only gives Creators a chance to connect with coLearners, but also have a finger on the pulse of other great industry people and what they are working on.

To apply these concepts, we keep Creators plugged into coLearning events like orientation and graduation so Creators can see the progress made by coLearners over time. Creators are also invited to see individual or small group project presentations for our courses. Throughout the duration of the courses, I’ll connect with Creators to get their feedback and see what we can do better so they have a consistent voice in the program. After all, it takes a village to provide the growth that our coLearners are looking for.

We're so excited to be relaunching our Creator network. As time goes on, we're excited to tweak it where needed and to continue to make it better as we learn. If you have any tips on what you've done to create a mentor network, I'd love to hear it. We are always looking for new Creators. If you're interested in learning more, send me a message or find more info on our page here.