Q & A with Tyler DeWitt, Ph.D & Vanessa Figueroa
has built a deep knowledge of microbiology and contamination control. Figueroa was one of the co-creators of the QxP Virtuosi learning platform. She is an active and publishing member of several professional organizations, such as the PDA, American Society of Microbiology, and Association for Women in Science. Discover more at: www.vvf.science
INTERVIEWER: Alright, Tyler and Vanessa we’re going to take a deep dive into an article that Tyler published recently, for EJPPS Online and we want to talk a lot about the state of learning and development, upskilling, and training for Pharma, Biotech, and CGT staff. Tyler, can you talk to us a little bit about the article and the work that you put together, and the organization that it was for?
TYLER DEWITT "T.D": Yeah, so I was invited a couple of months ago to write an opinion piece for the European Journal of Parenteral, Oral and Pharmaceutical Sciences. And what they wanted me to write about was, how virtual reality can be a transformative tool for training in the pharmaceutical industry, it made sense for me to be part of an article like that, because most of what I do is working on Virtuosi, which is our trading product that has a big VR component to it.
So this is an area that I know a lot about, it’s an area that Vanessa knows a lot about, and many of our SMEs are, very familiar. The main points that I wanted to make were how training and Pharma are pretty broken right now. Everyone kind of privately acknowledges that and nobody really wants to say it.
I talked about some of the challenges that the industry has right now and how VR can be a really effective tool for solving a lot of these problems. It’s a really long article, so I really went in point by point and talked about these various challenges. But that’s kind of the big picture; VR really can be, in our opinion, a transformative tool for pharmaceutical training.
INTERVIEWER: Vanessa, From your point of view as the QxP in-house SME on all things micro. We know that people don’t just land in Pharma, Biotech, and CGT manufacturing positions, all set to go, never in need of any upskilling. What are the nuggets of information that you can share from that perspective?
VANESSA FIGUEROA "V.F": I read a fantastic article recently that ties very nicely with what Tyler is saying about the U.S. specifically in microbiology. This observation occurred during the pandemic; a lot of people were outside the lab during the pandemic. And they didn’t have access to equipment, to petri dishes, to things that you would have in a standard micro lab, so they used VR and it was tremendously effective.
They compared people who learned in a traditional lab and people who learned in a virtual lab, and they were on par - this is important and extremely impactful. So I love that Tyler’s article brings that to the forefront for Pharma. Because we can learn a lot from other industries and apply what Tyler has developed here, that’s key for innovation.
INTERVIEWER: That’s such a great point, Vanessa, the depth of that article is astonishing, yet it’s so easy to read for folks all over the industry and start to process how we can use this.
Tyler takes apart a lot of issues that we want to explore today, everything from what constitutes an outdated learning method to highlighting where we have gaps in SOPs.
Also, we need to look at the fact that SMEs are not necessarily poised to be educators, because there’s a huge gulf between being a subject matter expert versus being an educator.
Another key consideration from the fiscal side is, what’s the revenue impact here? A lot of times, L&D is seen as a cost center; questions come up like “How is upskilling actually going to affect the product and the money that we make?”
Tyler, do you mind if we explore this by talking about what you see as methodologies that need to be in the rearview mirror? What is most efficacious? When we’re talking about people, adults, particularly synthesizing new information and cross applying it to what they’re doing?
T.D: You know, there’s a whole area
of learning science that’s devoted to figuring out and continually discovering best practices. But most folks have an intuitive sense of what doesn’t work. If you ever had to sit through corporate training of any type or frankly, a lot of teaching and academia, you have some first-hand knowledge of what is not effective and you know what, usually folks’ gut instincts are correct.
So, outdated methods that we see all the time include sitting in front of somebody talking, talking, talking for an hour about some topic. You know, it’s just lame old direct instruction. It’s not necessarily bad, but it usually is just somebody talking for an hour.
A much better way to frame that is to do some real learning design and think:
• What are the things that these people need to know?
• How can I make sure that exactly what I’m talking about aligns to learning goals?
• Is this approach really targeting our objectives?
• Where’s the data showing that learners actually understand what you’re teaching?
• Where are the assessments?
• How frequently are you assessing? Are you stopping to make sure that the students the trainees are actually learning?
I don’t just mean saying, “Oh, do you get it? Does it make sense? Okay, go on, right.”
So for example, good practices revolve around constantly assessing to ensure learner understanding and that they’re achieving desired objectives. Deliberately thinking beforehand about the specific earning goals and skills uplift needed.
“. . . outdated methods that we see all the time include sitting in front of somebody talking, talking, and talking for an hour about some topic. You know, it’s just lame old direct instruction. It’s not necessarily bad, but it usually is just somebody talking for an hour.”
Folks tend to learn best when they can apply and cross-apply knowledge that has been synthesized. So instead of just dumping a bunch of theoretical information on them, saying, okay, these specific tasks, this particular job is important for these reasons is essential! These are things you need to know and they directly impact the job in a certain way is non-negotiable.
Also, there’s an important mix of practical and theoretical, that we always want to be balancing. And too often, we unload either a ton of theoretical information that leads people asking, “How does any of this relate to my function?”
We can also go too far in the other direction of telling people to, you know, read a 100 page SOP of like, Do this, do that, that, you know, there’s no theory. And so they have no idea what they’re doing.
“. . . outdated methods that we see all the time include sitting in front of somebody talking, talking, and talking for an hour about some topic. You know, it’s just lame old direct instruction. It’s not necessarily bad, but it usually is just somebody talking for an hour.”
It’s just like, okay, you know, move your hand here, it’s such a, move your hand five centimeters, and then pick this thing up, you’re training them to be robots. So then you have this situation where they have no idea what they’re doing or why you know, so it’s really this careful balancing of enough background, to know what you’re doing, but not so much you drown folks in background information they don’t need, it allows them to contextualize on the practical, but without the practical.
It’s just, you know, an academic exercise and philosophy. And so all of these things are important to keep in mind when we’re thinking about how we want a training program to look if it’s going to be really putting to use best practices and learning.
I probably can count in my years at university, how many teachers I truly learned from exactly right. And being a science major, a lot of the courses were four credits, because they had a component that was lecture based. And then a component that was in the laboratory.
My best teachers, one of my most beloved teacher actually taught physics. I fell in love with physics because of this person. And he included a design of teaching that wasn’t just his back to us on a blackboard. Then we would go into the lab, he actually would have folks come up to the blackboard. And we would do equations together. We would break down theoretical concepts together in the class, and it was engaging. And that’s just in the classroom.
When we were in the lab hands on, we would be playing with models, we would be trying to understand these different concepts of physics. And he’d be walking around the room, he was keenly interested in us understanding and learning the concepts. He didn’t care about our grades. We didn’t care about our grades. That was like, a beautiful artifact of us actually learning information, right?
And then you go from that experience (hopefully, people get that experience in undergrad or grad school, right?) and you enter pharma, and you’re given a piece of paper. And you’re really out of that engaging experience, that intellectual exchange and application of what you’re learning in that paper to what you need to do for your job, right.
“Folks tend to learn best when they can apply and cross-apply knowledge that has been synthesized. So instead of just dumping a bunch of theoretical information on them, saying, okay, these specific tasks, this particular job is important for these reasons is essential! These are things you need to know and they directly impact the job in a certain way is non-negotiable.”
You need to do your job because you needed to get paid, you need to earn an income for your family or whatever. And so I feel like we really fall short in industry when we don’t engage people when we don’t have an intellectual exchange.
And when we don’t understand how we can do better by teaching these important concepts like GMPs right? That’s such an abstract concept for a science major fresh out of college. Right?
