About

My Mission, simple…

Work with your team(s) to identify the root causes of your knowledge retention and customer engagement challenges, ideate and develop holistic solutions, and implement sustainable strategies..

JJulie Gillespie wears glasses & a turquoise shirt, standing in front of a geometric design multi-color wall. She is smiling and looking right at the camera.

My Journey…less simple.

I've always been interested in art and business so getting my AA in Business and my BA in Theater Arts set design while taking business classes seemed like a good fit. I continued this theme while freelancing as a set designer in San Francisco for 5-years while working in customer service before transitioning into sales (even doing a stint going door-to-door), then into account management before it became "customer success". I specialized in training employees and customers, project management, and developing customer relationships. I loved it.

However, there was a problem I couldn’t solve for…

After a decade in Customer Success, I left to pursue Instructional Design to address the challenges I saw as a Customer Success Manager (CSM). From onboarding that did not meet the needs of the employee or the customer to a lack of defined journeys without planned support along the way to set them up for success.

The challenges stemmed from some obvious sources, including decentralized resources siloed by departments, a lack of feedback analysis for improvement opportunities, and no process for capturing tacit knowledge to enrich explicit knowledge training.

Julie Gillespie wears a glasses and a black shirt seated on a brown concrete structure with trees and grass in the background. She is smiling and looking of to the right of the camera.

I realized that while I could address many of these challenges through training, 1.) training wasn't always the solution, and 2.) training was not supported, advertised, or treated as a 1-time event. The companies I worked for were facing a bigger challenge upstream: low engagement, high churn, loss of knowledge-based IP, and poor interdepartmental communication and collaboration.

Facing the realization that the solutions I was seeking didn’t come from the singular focus of learning experience design, I began studying knowledge management, big data and analytics, design thinking, customer education, digital marketing, and change management. I discovered that these fields could be a holistic solution to knowledge retention and engagement challenges through learner and customer-centric journey design, effective knowledge management strategies, engaging learning experiences, and sustainable growth solutions.

Obtaining my MBA in Information Systems and Knoweldge Management satisfied my goal of learning how to design holistic solutions that consider the entire business ecosystem while integrating information and data security practices to protect organizational knowledge. I now work with businesses to leverage their knoweldge as a competitive advantage.

Don't let challenges like the above hold your business back. Let's work together to engage your employees and customers through effective learning experiences.

Certificates and Credentials

  • Certified Knowledge Manager (CKM), KM Institute (KMI) (2023)

  • Instructor Development Course, Knife River Corporation (2022)

  • Knowledge Management and Big Data in Business Certificate, edX (2022)

  • Applied Instructional Design Certification, Learning Strategy and Design (2022)

  • Instructional Design Credential, Learning Strategy and Design (2022)

  • Vyond Animation Credential, Learning Strategy and Design (2021)

  • eLearning Development Credential, Learning Strategy and Design (2021)

  • Instructional Design Certificate, Association for Talent Development (ATD) (2020)

  • Training Certificate, Association for Talent Development (ATD) (2020)

  • Project Management Certificate of Completion, Pryor Learning (2020)

  • Certified Customer Success Manager (CCSM) Level 1 & 2, SuccessHACKER (2020)

“Julie Gillespie is one of the best instructional designers I have worked with! She joined our team and immediately set out to learn as much as she could about the team itself as well as the customers for whom the training was being created. She has been incredibly patient and persistent in working with subject matter experts who, in some cases needed to be reigned in and in other cases pried open. She is conscientious and full of great ideas and suggestions. Her recommendations made the training that could have easily been extremely boring engaging and worthy of advertising. I’m blessed to have found her and to be working with her, not only on some client projects, but also on my own business!”

- Julie Noonan, Founder & CEO of Julie Noonan Consulting LLC