Creating Clarity Around Career Transition and Fit - Career Transition SIG

A move into Learning & Developmentis more than a job change.

It’s a chance to choose work that fits how you think, what you’re great at, and the kind of impact you want to make!

Right now, L&D is changing fast: New tools, new skills, and new ways of working are opening doors across corporate, non-profit, academic, and consulting spaces.

In this session, you’ll get a simple, practical way to make sense of it all. We’ll briefly walk through where L&D roles show up and the kinds of roles that exist today, but the real focus is on helping you build a repeatable way to evaluate any role as the field evolves.

You’ll learn how to:

1. Understand your own strengths and preferences,

2. Define what “fit” looks like for you, and

3. Spot where your experience creates real value.

Learning Objectives

1.      Assess personal strengths, constraints, and preferences to determine role and organizational fit

2.      Define their target L&D roles with specificity, including scope, expectations, and success measures

3.      Differentiate between surface-level “transferable skills” and true functional alignment

4.      Reframe prior experience into clear, value-driven narratives aligned to L&D roles

5.      Evaluate job opportunities more strategically, using fit criteria instead of keyword matching

By the end, you’ll have a clear, usable approach you can apply again and again, so you can move toward roles with confidence, not guesswork.

About the Presenter

Sara Hounshell (formerly Stevick) is a Director of Product Strategy & Design at Huron, and product owner for the Huron Learning Digital Platform (HLDP)—an enterprise program that upskills and reskills the healthcare workforce.

Throughout her career, she has blended methodologies from digital transformation, change management, product management, process improvement, project management, and organizational design to bridge learning and development with organizational integration—delivering measurable adoption, retention, and performance outcomes.

A former educator turned L&D and product leader, Sara builds CE‑accredited, role‑aligned pathways at scale and equips talent development professionals with practical playbooks for skills frameworks and analytics.

This SIG is a joint effort of the ATD-Orange County and ATD-Los Angeles Chapters and provides support and education to professionals making the exciting transition into the L&D field.

About Your Co-Leaders:

Kesha Thomas Clark is an experienced professional currently working to transition into the learning and development field. Recently, Kesha worked with UCLA’s Office of Undergraduate Admission and the Association for Talent Development—Orange County chapter to facilitate leadership workshops to executive staff and senior managers. Driven by a desire to help people, Kesha is interested in leveraging her unique experience in business and the nonprofit sector to create impactful strategies and learning experiences that support professional growth and organizational success.

James Oakley is an Instructional Designer and eLearning Developer who specializes in the electrical, engineering, and technical spaces. He started out his career as a High School English Teacher and then took his passion for education into adult learning. Most recently, James developed a comprehensive curriculum of eLearning and Instructor-Led training courses for Critical Facility Engineers in Meta Data Centers across the globe. In this space, James makes meaningful and results driven training experiences for Fortune 500 companies.

Earn Professional Professional Development Points

This program is worth 1 Professional Development point. 

Find out more about APTD/CPTD Certifications here.

Each ATD-OC Learning Event will be aligned to at least one Talent Development  Capability, as identified by ATD National.

This program aligns with:

Building Personal Capability:

Developing Professional Capability:

Impacting Organizational Capability:

Disruption via technology will continue to be a reality for organizations and talent development functions. Talent development professionals must have the ability to identify, select, and implement the right learning and talent technologies that serve the best interests of the organization and its people. Practitioners should be able to identify opportunities to adapt and leverage the right technologies at the right time to meet organizational goals.

To find out more about the ATD Capability Model for the Training and Development Profession, visit http://tdcapability.org.

PHOTOGRAPHY RELEASE

As part of your registration, you will be required to indicate your acceptance or rejection of the statement below:

By registering for this event, I hereby give the Association for Talent Development, Orange County Chapter, its clients, agents, and assigns, full permission to use, publish and copyright photographic images, film images, video images, sound recordings, and any reproductions from these materials of me and/or my property or any part thereof, either in conjunction with or without using my name, and make changes or alterations therein and/or alterations thereto Worldwide in perpetuity. Some places these images and recordings may be used and posted include, but are not limited to, the Internet, emails, social media, etc.

If I do not provide permission, I understand I will be seated outside of the field of video.