An Inside Look at the Making of a LinkedIn Learning Course

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This week I'm taking you behind the scenes for my upcoming LinkedIn Learning HR Fundamentals course.

Greetings from Ventura, CA! ????

I've been in SoCal this week filming my first LinkedIn Learning course. If you haven't followed the journey on LinkedIn, I wanted to take a build-in-public approach and share an inside look at how the course came together. You can view some of those posts below.

Past Posts: Announcing the Course

Past Posts: Overview of the Course

Now that you're caught up, here's an inside look at the production process.

Welcome to Los Angeles ??

As a former Angeleno, SoCal will always hold a sweet spot in my heart so it was great to get back to the city of angels.

I flew in Sunday afternoon and started the trip on a high note with an early SUGARFISH by Sushi Nozawa dinner with Robbie Harol . ??

After dinner, I drove out to Ventura to check into my hotel for the week and spent some time reviewing my scripts before calling it a night.

Filming ??

I started the day with a walk on the beach before packing up my wardrobe and driving up to the Lynda.com studio in Carpenteria.

Upon arrival, I was greeted by my amazing Producer, Brittany Bauhaus , who gave me a tour of the studios and set me up in the green room to get settled and begin assessing wardrobe options.

Let's talk about wardrobe. It's a bit of an art. You need to find an outfit that has patterns that won't create issues with the camera, while also fitting with the backdrop of your video. That means you need to bring some options.

I ended up filming on a green screen. That gave the production team a little more leeway in picking the outfit first and then the background to match it.

We ended up going with the pink shirt and grey blazer combo.

Before filming, the Director and lighting team work together to key the camera and record a test video for the production team to approve the elements of the shoot (see below).

The slate for my first video on mission, vision, and values.

And, of course, I couldn't resist a cheesy shot with the slate before we got started.

Once the camera keying, wardrobe, and test video are locked in, you're off to hair and makeup to get film ready.

The actual filming process is a team effort. For my course, it included a Producer ( Brittany Bauhaus ), Director ( Jeff Carter ), and a teleprompter technician ( Oscar Nilsson ). All were outstanding and really helped me get comfortable in front of the camera.

Jeff opened with music requests to set the mood in the studio. We kicked off with some Sublime before moving to Rage Against The Machine's Bulls On Parade in the afternoon when I needed some more energy. ????

While the scripts are written in advance, you make adjustments on the fly for each video with the production team. It's a truly collaborative process.

I've done a lot of public speaking and a decent amount of video in the past, but the production and format of creating these courses are different. The level of energy, motion, voice inflection and modulation are all very different when you're filming a three-minute course.

And the ever important question, "WHAT DO I DO WITH MY HANDS?!"

I didn't have much experience with a teleprompter so I was a little nervous about how that would work (see my pov view below).

My writing style tends to be very conversational, so I found that really helped when it came to working off a teleprompter.

You do have the ability to freelance a bit outside of your script. You just have to be disciplined on brevity so it doesn't increase the length of the video.

Over the next two days, we recorded 17 roughly 3-minute videos. They covered a range of topics including:

• Optimizing your recruiting
• Building business acumen
• Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging
• Mission, vision, and values
• HR Transformation
• And more

It's hard to get deep on expansive topics like the ones above in three minutes. Each of them can be (and likely are) full courses.

The aim was to be specific with actionable takeaways that learners could do right away to level up across those 15 topics. I think we did that.

It's been a tremendous experience working with the LinkedIn Learning team. They're pros and really made the experience run smoothly.

If you've ever contemplated pitching a course to LinkedIn Learning - go for it!

You can apply to become a LinkedIn Learning Instructor via this link.

Thanks for following along on this behind-the-scenes journey. My course will go live in Q3 so I'll keep you posted when it's available.

More to come! ???

That's a wrap for this week's newsletter. Thanks for reading, and I'll catch you around the interwebs.

I'd love to hear from you. You can also find me on?Twitter?and?Instagram. Share your feedback on today's newsletter in the comments.

Feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested, and if someone forwarded this to you, you can?subscribe for free on LinkedIn here.

If you're interested in working together on HR executive searches, training, leadership development, coaching, or speaking?hit me up?any time. ???