Mark Millett
Title: Assistant Vice President of Learning and Development, Athol Savings Bank
Age: 46
Experience: 23 years
By his own admission, Mark Millett got into banking accidentally. At 21, he was working for a company that serviced swimming pools. “It was fantastic,” he said, “but it didn’t pay the bills December through April.” Millett landed a bank teller job and eventually worked his way up to an assistant manager position. Since then, he’s moved from the retail side to the training and development function. Now at Athol Savings Bank, Millett sat down with Banker & Tradesman to chat about trends in training and overcoming a fear of public speaking.
Q: Coming from a background working in the branch, how does that help you when you’re working with branch employees now?
A: It gives me a lot of credibility when they know that I’ve come from where they are. “So hey, you’ve experienced the rude customer, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Let me tell you a couple of stories about rude customers that I’ve dealt with.” It puts me on the same level, and all of a sudden, they’re not looking at me as an AVP or just a trainer. Here’s a guy who’s been in the trenches, here’s a guy who’s done it, and so I think that gives me some credibility when I’m talking about it.
Q: So what’s trending today in the world of bank training?
A: The big thing is anything electronic. A lot of e-learning has come out in my time in this field. Everybody’s mobile, everybody has a mobile device or a tablet, so that’s the big thing that I see in the field nowadays. An organization like us, we’re not big enough for that yet, but we do a good chunk of online training.
Training has kind of deviated away from typical classroom style to more asynchronous learning, to not being in the same spot. It might be a webinar, it might be an online course, it might be something mobile, or even social media. I’ve researched some companies that use social media as a learning tool. You might have a Facebook page and all the employees could be friends or fans of that page.
Everybody wants it fast and convenient, so the training function has followed suit. Everybody wants it now. They don’t want to sit through a three-day class anymore, so you’re seeing the training function move to more electronic and more chunking.
Q: You mentioned earlier that you used to be afraid of public speaking – how did you get over that?
A: It’s funny, I took a speech class in college and didn’t do very well in it. I didn’t like it, I didn’t prepare myself, I was nervous, I didn’t prepare myself the night before. They say that public speaking is the second biggest fear most people have, and number one is death. To be perfectly honest, it was so long ago, I don’t remember exactly how I got over it. You just do it. I knew the topic, I knew the subject, and you just do it a couple times and you get over that fear. What’s funny about it now – and it makes me chuckle to think about it – is my goal is to get to the biggest audience I possibly can.
My biggest audience thus far has been about 100 people. I’ve delivered some presentations at conferences. Now it’s just a challenge. Give me a new challenge. What haven’t I done?
Mark Millett’s Top Five Resources For Training And Learning Professionals:
- Have a good relationship with subject matter experts.
- The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD)
- Your local ASTD chapter: The chapters are more focused on your area.
- Social media: I belong to a group on LinkedIn that is devoted to the online course development software that I use.
- Your organization’s human resources department.
