Building A Learning Function From Nothing

(Pala Casino Spa & Resort)

When I arrived at Pala, the L&D function had a reputation for wasting people's time. Courses that should have run two hours had been compressed to twenty minutes. Tenured employees had stopped showing up entirely. The most common response when I introduced myself to department heads was a polite version of "we've seen this before and it didn't help."

The instinct in that situation is to fix what exists. I didn't. I started over.

Over five years I built 50+ courses across three distinct tracks: one for frontline employees, one for the quasi-managers who toggled between peer and supervisor roles on any given day, and one for people managers. Each track was designed for its population's actual reality, not a generic version of professional development. That specificity showed up in everything: compliance training that used real California case law and put employees in the position of arguing both sides, and a course on navigating difficult people that gave frameworks employees told me they used at home, not just at work.

By the end of my tenure, employees were driving over an hour on their days off to attend two-hour courses they could have taken the following week. Not because they were required to. Because the classes were worth their time.

That's the metric I care about most. Voluntary participation on a day off is the only honest measure of whether learning actually works.

What moved: 

L&D went from compliance checkbox to strategic talent pipeline. 10+ individual contributor promotions annually. 3+ manager promotions annually. 90% graduation rate across all programs. A function with a damaged reputation became something people actively sought out.