Brandon Carson

Starbucks

vp of Learning, Leadership, and Cultural Experiences

L&D Cares

•	Lead strategic planning and direct programming for nonprofit dedicated to offering no-cost coaching, mentoring, and resources to talent development professionals, empowering them to grow and thrive.
•	Guide volunteers to provide services directly to 1,000 members. Enabled 100+ individuals to land new jobs.

Founder

Walmart

• Execute responsibility for global leadership development, executive coaching strategy, and team effectiveness.
• Develop strengths in corporate leaders by driving leadership development consulting and executive coaching.
• Lead global oversight, strategic direction, and business planning for Walmart’s Career and Opportunity platforms.
• Build skills, boost retention, and increase promotion potential through the Live Better U Program, an expanded education and credential platform available to all U.S. frontline associates from their first day on the job.
• Ensure successful integration into Walmart by new officers through Officer onboarding and cultural immersion.
• Support >15,000 corporate new hires each year with 12-month engagement program and leadership development.

Vice President, Global Leadership Academy

•	Headed talent development strategies for the U.S. segment, providing strategic direction and business planning.  
•	Championed Walmart’s involvement with the OneTen coalition of companies focused on developing equitable hiring, retention, and advancement opportunities for one million Black people in 10 years.
•	Formulated workforce and learning strategies to meet future needs and capabilities. Executed the transition to digitally driven talent planning, identifying and implementing skills needed to support business transformation.
•	Stewarded significant, multi-year investment in education and skill development for the Live Better U platform. Partnered with external providers to promote short and long-term learning paths aligned with business and associate needs, resulting in substantial year-over-year program growth.
•	Mobilized the transition to skills-based hiring and development through adoption of an enterprise skills and credentialing strategy aligned with a broader talent marketplace initiative.

Vice President, Learning and Leadership

Delta Air Lines

•	Oversaw the learning organization for Delta’s Airport Customer Service and Cargo business, supporting 30,000 global employees. Steered leadership development, customer experience training, and compliance training.
•	Drove strategic alignment between learning and the business. Represented the learning organization with internal and external stakeholders.
•	Managed multi-million-dollar annual budget, including all vendor partnerships.
•	Redesigned the learning organization to boost efficiency, effectiveness, and operational performance.
•	Partnered with corporate and field leaders to realign learning operation to drive business impact. Integrated new learning management system, near-real-time learning analytics and reporting, and role-based task analysis.
•	Spearheaded new Leader Development Academy, the first Delta program designed to develop leaders through work-based action-learning activities, coaching and peer discussion, and comprehensive leader assessments.

Director of Learning

The Home Depot

•	Led Home Depot’s learning transformation, heading a team of 40+ staff and contractors and a multi-million-dollar budget.
•	Headed Center of Excellence and L&D design and development enterprise-wide. Stewarded executive and leadership development, first-line management skills training, and sales and compliance training for associates. 
•	Launched an L&D Program Management Office and dedicated media team to drive efficiencies in L&D resource allocation, forecasting, financial reporting, and content governance. Managed vendor agreements.
•	Modernized the L&D function by incorporating adaptive learning technologies and developing a game mechanics strategy.
•	Steered all aspects of enterprise rollout of mobile learning to U.S. sales associates, including content and experience design, technology infrastructure, reporting and metrics, business justification, and ROI reporting.
•	Significantly reduced training design and development time and increased productivity and learning effectiveness.

Microsoft

•	Provided strategic consulting on learning innovation and creativity to dramatically improve quality and sophistication of training design and delivery for Xbox, Windows Phone, and Surface lines of business.
•	Promoted consistent messaging and best-in-class customer support and service across thousands of call agents by designing the learning strategy for technical and sales training.
•	Reduced new hire training time by optimizing content and designing blended learning solutions.
•	Accelerated design and delivery by driving instructional design standards for eLearning and ILT design.

Chief Learning Architect

Yahoo

•	Built a highly skilled, globally distributed L&D team. Led design and implementation of L&D strategy for the company’s Products Engineering, UI Design, Marketing, and Operations, reaching over 6,000 employees.
•	Transformed organizational culture by establishing a foundational global competency framework for engineers and product managers, including business-focused engineering curriculum, and talent management processes.  
•	Designed and developed a comprehensive Mobile Learning Academy for engineers company-wide and launched a New Engineer Boot Camp for all new engineers.
•	Created and managed delivery of targeted learning solutions for classroom, online, and mobile formats.

Sr. Manager, Learning & Development

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

•	Directed design, development, and execution of internal and external training initiatives across the company.
•	Designed several learning tools and programs, including the Sun Sales Academy, and the game-based Sun Open Learning Center for System Administrators.
•	Pioneered use of collaborative learning by leveraging social platforms and game-based learning for Sun’s award-winning New Hire Experience.

Senior Manager, Learning and Development

•	Managed a cross-functional team of learning designers and developers, contractors, and vendors.
•	Oversaw a media shared service group supporting a multi-million-dollar global learning business. 
•	Drove significant annual revenue for the customer eLearning business.

Manager, Learning Media Design Team

With over 20 years of experience in creating and scaling global strategies for learning and development (L&D), I am a passionate and innovative leader who drives business impact, talent growth, and organizational excellence. As the VP of Learning, Leadership, and Cultural Experiences at Starbucks, I oversee the design, delivery, and evaluation of learning solutions that enable the success of more than 450,000 partners worldwide.

I am also the founder of L&D Cares, a nonprofit that offers no-cost coaching, mentoring, and resources to L&D professionals, empowering them to grow and thrive. As an entrepreneur and published author, I have a proven history of building and expanding L&D solutions that leverage cutting-edge technologies and methodologies. I have pioneered award-winning learning program initiatives and large-scale organizational transformation for major companies in the technology, transportation, and retail sectors. My mission is to modernize and elevate L&D strategy to meet the needs and expectations of the age of immediacy.

Many of us in L&D are sharply focused on recognizing and implementing the changes our practice needs to ensure the workforce and business we support are able to navigate this era of rapid change. I created this document as a guide for recognizing L&D's current state, the potential future state, and the potential impact of the change from current to future state. Feel free to review and download if you find it useful.

https://lnkd.in/gydexasB


We are excited to announce a new opportunity for Arizona State University students to learn about coffee and sustainability at Hacienda Alsacia Starbucks Coffee Farm in Costa Rica. The program will be offered through the School of Sustainability within the ASU Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. The program is especially well suited to Starbucks partners participating the in the Starbucks College Achievement Plan through ASU Online. Thanks to Lauren Bataska, Laura Wapelhorst, Sina Rojas, Emily Wong, Katie Hogan, Brian Grant, Deanna Chaney, and Maria Lugo for helping design this amazing experience!

news.asu.edu • 3 min read

Starbucks partnership offers new global experiences for students to study coffee, sustainability in Costa Rica

Everybody is talking about AI. And many are saying it will have significant impact on humanity. Well, we all know the impact of the printing press. It ushered in the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and began the advent of global literacy and education. Maybe not as big an impact as AI?

I am a fifth generation printer. Our family business had letterpresses which I operated. I was also trained to be the typesetter. In this photo, I'm setting type on a Linotype in 1980. I would take those "lines of type" and place them onto a letterpress and print cards, letters, documents, whatever the customer wanted one by one. 

I miss setting type, arranging it in the chase, mixing the ink colors, and printing using the Chandler & Price letterpresses we had. I could print 500 business documents in about four hours! That was VERY productive for us then. Before Gutenberg's press was invented, a worker could produce only about 40 hand-printed documents per day!

All to say... we've always been seeking productivity and performance increases with technology. Today's AI may be another productivity enhancement. But, that's not new. Humans have been doing that since we've been around.

It was great connecting with both Kelly Palmer and Mike Pino today. We talked about skills and underemployment, AI, the Reformation, Mussolini's great-grandson's football career, and the link between them all when Mike had a great point: "When is HR going to talk more like Finance? And when is Finance going to talk more like HR?" A great convo about the state of our world today. And here's more about Romano Mussolini... ;)

footballtransfers.com • 3 min read

Who is Benito Mussolini’s great grandson at Lazio?

The one glaring omission I see from all the blather about AI is one simple question (posited by Kara Swisher in her new book): Do we realize that all the information that is now digitized is actually not ‘information’ at all but is actually US?

Tech companies have spent two decades hoovering up our information into the largest database of human intentions ever imagined. And we all actually paid for it!

When it’s all said and done, this will be recognized as the largest and most inglorious con ever foisted onto humanity.

🌟 Exciting News for L&D Leaders! 🌟

We're thrilled to share a special snippet from a compelling interview featuring Elsa Powel Strong (she/her) in conversation with two titans of the learning and development (L&D) community: Brian Hackett, the visionary founder of The Learning Forum, and its Managing Director, Meighan Hackett Poritz.

The Learning Forum stands at the forefront of peer learning and innovation, offering senior executives across industries a unique platform to explore new ideas and drive change. Under the leadership of Brian and Meighan, the forum has become a beacon for transformative learning, notably through their groundbreaking CLO LIFT initiative. This initiative is not just another program; it's a movement aiming to revolutionize the L&D landscape by addressing its core challenges head-on.

Follow The Learning Forum for more insights and breakthroughs in L&D.

#LearningAndDevelopment #CLOLIFT #TheLearningForum #Leadership
#Innovation

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