I started as a television director, then found my way into editing when the station got an Avid system — good enough at it to get hired at WHNT as a motion designer. When corporate needed the Avid rolled out to sister stations, I ended up training people on it, station by station. First step into the training world.
An aerospace firm — Teledyne Brown — recruited me out of WHNT: they needed someone who could handle higher-end media, and some of what I'd make would end up in front of Congress, justifying budget for the International Space Station program. Over four and a half years there, I moved further into technical writing too, turning engineering specs into training media and technical manuals a person could actually follow — including a video for the company's 50th anniversary.
Contract one was working on the MyPay site for DFAS, creating training for FCP, the Forward Compatible Payroll system, for military accountants. There were 2.3 million users of this system who needed to be trained, which led to a series of online trainings I was part of.
The other contract was delivering training to a series of cities by way of ILT. I traveled to over 21 cities in a business quarter for nearly a year — a bit of a road warrior back then.
The longest stretch was at a global medical device manufacturer, mostly building service and compliance training for the engineers who repair the equipment. Field service safety, on-the-job qualification, regulated product lines, where the cost of a bad course is not a compliance finding but an injury, a misdiagnosis, or a slower engineer. Onsite in Cleveland, then remote from Charlotte. Over a hundred courses, an annual retrain for a field force where most engineers already knew the equipment cold, and every one of them surrounded by manual production work that no authoring tool covered.
Every one of those jobs started the same way: somebody handing over material that was technically correct and unusable, and needing it back in a form a person could act on. By the end, the production work around a course was still being done by hand. That is what the tools are for.
11pm director to motion designer
Hired as 11pm director at WLIO in Lima, Ohio, then the station's Avid editor. Moved to WHNT in Huntsville as motion designer and graphic artist, training sister stations on Avid for the New York Times Company — the first step into training.
Space program documentation
Recruited from WHNT to Teledyne Brown as a media developer and technical writer for NASA's International Space Station program: engineering specs, made followable, plus training videos that helped justify program budget to Congress.
Training at federal scale
Built training for DFAS's MyPay site (FCP, the Forward Compatible Payroll system) for 2.3 million military accountants. Delivered ILT training across 21+ cities a quarter for nearly a year.
Regulated service training
Service and compliance courses for a global medical device manufacturer. Field safety, OJT qualification, FDA-regulated product lines.
Learning technology
Courses, plus the production tooling around them. Three sources before anything is built, timed against the manual process, built to run on locked-down machines.
