Every year in December, the Gala is organized by the trade association for professionals in Learning & Development. The central focus is on presenting Awards to colleagues who have performed exceptionally in that year. Professionals in the field of learning and development serve organizations and sometimes forget to put themselves in the spotlight as a sector!
In 2020, my company Expert Trainers won the Publieks Award because of the help we as trainers gave in the year that Covid-19 struck, to start training online. I am still proud that I was allowed to receive the Award then. And director Dick Krikke asked if I wanted to take a seat on the Jury, which I found an honor to also give something back to the profession and Develhub, after winning the beautiful prize.
This year 2024 I was also a jury member and I enjoy the process in which colleagues nominate other colleagues as candidates (the nomination round) and the meetings that we as a Jury have to arrive at the winners of the Awards. There are 4 categories:
- L&D Talent Talent of the Year 2024
- L&D Professional of the Year 2024
- L&D Impact Traject of the Year 2024
- Learning Leader of the Year 2024
In this blog I would like to take you behind the scenes of the Jury, so that you know how the process of judging goes from step 1 to step 7!
As a digital nomad I also became very happy that the jury worked together a lot online and used these tools: Typeform, Sora, Mentimeter, Fahom (= AI Notetaker), Chatgpt, Suno, MS teams, WhatsApp, Trello, Canva, YouTube.
Step 1: Composing the Jury
The Jury will already meet in September. All meetings are online, because getting 8 professionals together in 5 meetings in the busy autumn (because that’s how many we need), is actually only possible in the evening and only online. Chairman Dick Krikke asked the 2023 winners in September if they wanted to be on the Jury. That is 4 to 5 people and the jury will be supplemented with colleagues such as Jeanne Bakker and I who, as Partners of Develhub and former Jury members, would like to help with this process!
In the first meeting we got to know each other, because of course we don’t know everyone equally well. The next agenda item was to go through the process/lessons learned of the 2023 jury. The nice thing is that the process is a bit different every year, for 80% the process is the same, because the core remains to get from many nominees, via a Longlist to a Shortlist and to a winner. But in each Jury there are specialists and creatives who bring new ideas that the entire Jury is enthusiastic about and also wants to implement. For example, the type became Hollywood with a touch of red: the idea was that we received the stars of our profession via a red carpet in a cinema in Rotterdam and not only the nominees were stars, but every visitor was captured on photo or found their name on a star on the wall! An event team, students from the Hogeschool Utrecht, will work for 3 months to organize the Gala (left) and we as a jury will continue to meet (right). In 2024 the jury consists of:
At the end of this first jury meeting of the Jury, we divided the Award categories (4) among the former winners coupled with a buddy, because we are 8 after all. And the assignment for the next meeting was: check the 2023 criteria for how we select candidates for an Award and sharpen them. We created an app group to share interim thoughts and ideas and a Trello, because we could already set criteria there.
Step 2: Determine nomination criteria
In this second meeting, the duos shared the criteria that they thought were appropriate for candidates for an Award. For example, How do you select the best Talent from all the nominated nominees? We also did this for the other 3 categories. For example, for L&D Professional of the Year, we found these criteria appropriate to look at nominees:
• Craftsmanship: has in-depth knowledge and skills in L&D. The work is characterized by quality, accuracy and consistency in achieving effective learning results. Assessment: This can be assessed by examples of high-quality learning projects and feedback from participants or colleagues.
• Mentoring and development of others: this can be assessed by references and feedback from colleagues or by looking at the growth path of those they have mentored.
• Sustainable contribution to L&D; publication, training, workshops or other forms of knowledge sharing: this can be assessed by publications, presentations at conferences or participation in cross-disciplinary projects.
We kept each other on our toes, such as with the criteria for the Impact Trajectory: how exactly do you measure impact and when do we consider the impact worthy of an award.
We also tackled the practical side to arrive at a list of nominees: how do colleagues nominate who they want to nominate? We created a website with Typeform, which contained a questionnaire for each Award that the nominator had to complete (‘What is your name, what is the name of the person you want to nominate, why does this person deserve the Award, what makes this person distinctive, etc.’).
Step 3: Nomination month
The lines opened at the beginning of November and colleagues could fill in the nominations for 3 weeks. We saw them coming in and in the meantime had a third meeting about how we would arrive at a Longlist. Which candidates did we think were nominated so well that they could have a chance of being in the top 3 (the short list).
We also discussed how we as a Jury could help on LinkedIn to make the nomination phase and filling in a form even more public. So the 8 of us responded to people who had said that they had nominated or were nominated. The Jury included a number of AI and IT-technically experienced colleagues who had automatic emails sent with congratulations. In the end, 200 people were nominated, with most people in the L&D Professional category, followed by L&D Talent, Learning Leader and Impact Traject.
Step 4: Longlist
How do you ensure that you get to the core of the Longlist from 200 nominees divided over 4 categories? How do you select the 5 to 10 best per category from which you will later choose the top 3 that have a chance of winning the Award. By literally reading all the forms! The duos got to work with the criteria in hand.
Where did the nominees really hit the mark on the criteria that we have in mind for an Award and where less so? In the fourth meeting we came to Longlisting that we were satisfied with. Chairman Dick Krikke was busy that month to personally let each Longlist candidate know that he/she had made it to the next round.
Step 5: Short list
It is now the end of November and in a few weeks the Gala will be held. Time to go from the Longlist to the Shortlist. Every year a winner has been chosen from a top 3. The top 3 are invited to the Gala, because they are all candidates for the Award and will hear that evening whether they have become number 1.
As a jury, we looked at the Longlist even more critically in the fifth meeting, which candidates deserve the Award here, stand out above the other Longlisters in the category. We succeeded. I had created a Mentimeter poll for each Award, so that each jury could submit their top 3 via their mobile phone. We have 8 jury members, so 24 votes were received in Mentimeter, but anonymously. In this way you could see objectively which longlisters had been voted for the most and we determined those top 3.
But choosing the ultimate winner from that top 3 was sometimes difficult. We were divided as Jury at 2 Awards, the L&D Professional Award and the L&D Talent Award, it was so close together!
That is why we added an extra round and asked these shortlisters to record a video within 1 week in which they themselves answer in a maximum of 2 minutes why they deserved the Award.
Step 6: Choosing the winners
This also required extra consultation by the Jury, because 5 meetings had been held and now, at the beginning of December, it was getting tight in the agendas to arrange things. So all 8 of us individually watched the videos of the shortlist L&D Professional Award and the shortlist L&D Talent Award. We sent the winners that we found per category to director Dick by app.
This app campaign gave director Dick all the input and only he saw the choices of the 8 jury members for the number 1 per category. In this way, we again guaranteed the objective choice per jury member and Dick let us know the final score. The 4 winners were known!
Step 7: The Awards and Jury Evaluation
The Gala was a great party, everyone was beautifully dressed (touch of red was the theme) and it really looked like the Oscars with a beautiful trailer in which the shortlisters were honored by images and an American voice generated by AI.
All jury members had a role that evening: the former winners of 2023 were allowed to present the Award to the new winners in 2024, director Dick thanked everyone on stage and I was allowed to host the Live Stream as an online presence, where 49 fans of the nominees were present! These were often family members, colleagues, partners.
My role consisted of 3 parts:
– Making sure that everyone felt welcome when checking in and that any problems with sound and image were resolved (‘I can’t see anything, but I can hear you. Oh, that’s how it works!’)
– To properly display the live video image that was streamed from Rotterdam in the Zoom session in which we were with 49 people. I did this by turning on the Spotlight, which made the image appear large and not just one of the 49 small screens
– During the Awards that lasted 2 hours, I regularly asked in the chat as a moderator: ‘Ah, we are now getting the Talent Award’, who is there especially for one of the nominees for this Award!’. In this way, the group of 49 people got to know each other a little better and the atmosphere was good. For example, when an assignment was given in the room: ‘Discuss with your neighbor what thoughts you have about…’, I encouraged the online participants to do the same in the chat. Share your thoughts and ideas too.
The Gala and the Awards were a great success, positive experiences about 10 Dec 2024 were shared on LinkedIn and other Social Media for another week. The winners were congratulated and the various members of Develhub involved who made this evening a success were thanked enthusiastically.
L&D Talent Talent van het Jaar 2024: Annerieke Vorsteveld
L&D Professional van het Jaar 2024: Jeannette Gerritsen
L&D Impact Traject van het Jaar 2024: Alrijne Zorggroep
Learning Leader van het Jaar 2024: Hester van Breda-Verduijn
As a jury, we still have an evaluation session to do in January, in which we want to share and record all our lessons learned for the 2025 Jury (‘What would you advise to keep/what worked well and What would you have done differently retroactively’) will then be central to our last online meeting as a Jury! We will record this again in Trello, which we have been working with since September 2024 to carefully record all steps.
