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Angelette Boddie’s work is her passion: professional development and adult education. A good curriculum helps learners draw lessons they can apply to their job, their broader career, or even their life outside of work, she said. The trick is to find the hard and soft skills trainees can develop that spark their own love of lifelong learning. Boddie’s career and her diverse professional experiences have taken her on an HR journey from cashier trainer at a now-defunct local discount store back in high school to designing leadership development courses at TCGplayer, a hobby gaming e-commerce and data management company, where she’s the senior manager of learning and development.
What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?
Implemented a six-month leadership development program. We have some self-serve content where they can do it through a third party. There’s what we call “cohort connections,” where the group within the program comes together and they talk about their experiences, they share best practices, they lean in and on each other…That happens over a four-month span, and then those last two months…[we use] our learning design model, which is to learn, practice, share, reflect, and refine, and using that model simply says, “Take what you’ve learned, and let’s now apply it. Let’s bump our heads a little bit. Let’s trip over and skin our knees a little bit, get a little bruised up, wipe our shoulders off, get up and try again.”
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
The true meaning of training. Training is an activity to improve competence, capacity, and performance on the job. Training is not an outcome or an end result; it’s the improvement of knowledge or expertise over time, aka mastery.
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What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
Having autonomy to truly be a subject matter expert for my field: How can I help you be successful in this current workspace that you’re in? Wanting to be sure that I can help the people leaders do that…My passion is in making sure I can show you how to be a role model. My passion is in helping you to understand the business that you lead that you’re supposed to be modeling and making better through your team members as a people leader. My passion is showing you how to be a leader and changing your leadership style for each person on your team and realizing it’s not cookie-cutter.
What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
I’m most optimistic about L&D because for too long in corporate America, “training” was about hard skills, and now L&D is placing more focus on soft skills.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?
I’m least optimistic about [people’s inability to see] past the “operations” of HR of yesterday and [embrace] the “people” aspect that truly cares for and supports people as best as possible. HR includes people development. HR includes people engagement. HR includes people acquisition. HR includes people ops, yes, naturally it has to…At TCGplayer, we don’t call ourselves HR, we call ourselves people success.
Tell us one new or old HR tech product or platform that’s made your life easier, and why.
[A] learning management system (LMS) that resides within the HRIS is critical. It’s made my life easier because as a professional development software, it combines database management of curricula, training materials, course scheduling, and regulatory compliance—this is where I geek out!—AD