Gabrielle Sun on Integrating AI in Learning and Development

Nigel Rawlins: Welcome Gabrielle to the Wisepreneurs podcast. could you tell us something about yourself? Because my guests won't have heard of you before, but I think they're going to find out some very interesting things during our conversation.

Gabrielle Sun: Sure. Yeah. Thank you, Nigel, for having me here. So hi everyone. My name's Gabriel and I'm currently based in United States. So official title where you can find me on LinkedIn is called Instructional Designer. So that's what I'm doing for a living right now for audience who is not very familiar with this profession.

So basically I'm working in house in Epic Corporation. So we design a lot of compliance training and also we define some of the skill gaps and design training to teach people and to upskill and reskill. And we also do , for example, career milestone trainings, like you, you enter a managerial role, things like that.

So basically I create training programs with the business. That's me on the, on a more professional side.

I was born and raised in China, and I finished my undergrad in China, before I came to the States to pursue a master's degree. So yeah, I a, like to travel between different countries, like in Asia, Europe, and United States, like in this way, in this journey, I met a lot of people and eat a lot of food.

That's something I always enjoy doing.

Nigel Rawlins: Fantastic. That's amazing. How long have you been living in America now?

Gabrielle Sun: Great question. Let me think. Actually, I moved here in 2018 for my master's program, and that was like a 12 month program, so I graduated in 2019 and fast forward to the pandemic, basically stuck at home, and right now I'm still working in the same role.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, you were telling me that you actually work remotely, so can you tell us how that's worked? Did it start off that way or because of COVID it moved to that? How did that come about?

Gabrielle Sun: Yeah, that's a great question. So it actually was a remote role before COVID was a thing. And at that time I have to explain to my friends how does remote work even is a thing and how do we potentially collaborate. But after COVID hit, like we no longer need to explain to people how remote work is like that.

Basically the reason why I can work remotely is because my colleagues, they are based in different parts of the world and many of them are in Europe, in India, like in US West Coast, East Coast. Yeah. So it has to be a remote setting.

Nigel Rawlins: So how does it work? Can you tell us a bit more how your day is structured and the technology that's involved and how do you keep yourself organized?

Gabrielle Sun: I haven't really think really hard on that one. So it really I think it just happened natural, more naturally to me. Maybe it's because this is my very first full time job, and it is just, it is, so I never had other a prior knowledge of how going into an office and having an office job is going to be like, so I was thrown into such a world, and it is quite natural to me. So I didn't really think of that specifically.

In terms of technology, so basically we use Zoom or Microsoft Teams. And my day sometimes I start pretty early, like 6am or 6.30 am because I do have colleagues who are like India, so it's like a 12 hours difference between me and India time zone, as well as colleagues who are sitting in Europe.

So basically the first thing am in my morning, it's going to be their afternoon time. And like in order to collaborate across time zone, you have to a common day for the time zone differences.

Nigel Rawlins: Basically, what you're telling me is that you've never been into an office and yet you've started full on your instructional design, position and, it works and it's working okay. Do you find that you stop at the end of the day or how do you define the hours of work?

Gabrielle Sun: That's a good question as well. So usually with my work time, when I am very busy, I tend to time box my day. So for example, like two hours a block and here's another two hours, I'm going to dedicate into that task, but for times that I'm not busy, I actually don't time box myself. I just let myself like just flow.

So for example, today I started at 6 30. I actually don't have any work left to be done in the afternoon. What I was doing is that I'm on my computer. I'm learning something new and then I'm entering your podcast room. And after the podcast ended, it's probably 5.30 of my day. I would just call it a day and go out for walk.

So it really depends day to day. And I would like to say I think time is quite fluid. I think about it as like a supply and demand relationship. So when I have a lot of things to do, I need time box my day and have a, like a very certain fine line that I call it my day. I'm going to close my my computer, but for other times, like when the supply demand relationship isn't like that, I just keep that very fluid.

Nigel Rawlins: I think you're very disciplined.

Gabrielle Sun: Really?

Nigel Rawlins: I think anybody else thrown into that position would probably find it difficult how to manage their day because a lot of people are used to going to work and turning up and doing that work. But then when you start to work from home, there's a whole lot of other distractions, especially for the older ones like us.

You've got to hang out the washing, do the dishes, eat food things happen. Like the car's got to be serviced, or if you've got children I've got older children sometimes, they need help, or if they've got grandchildren. So all sorts of things can as you get older, interfere.

So that's fantastic. So can you tell us a little bit more about how you actually got into doing instructional design? What was your master's degree that you did, and did that lead into instructional design?

Gabrielle Sun: Yeah. It definitely has relationship. Like my master's degree is in education technology. So at that time, like the reason why I choose this as my master's program in the first place is because when I was in undergrad, I was admitted to a business major. I'm not sure if you're very familiar with the China's college entrance system.

It's not like an application base where you think, okay, I might want to study this and that. It's not like that. It's usually like you pass a nationwide, like a very organized exam, examination. You sit there for three days and you get a total score.

And based on your scoring, like you, you can have different colleges you are choosing and different majors have different scores as well. So based on all these factors, I was admitted to a business major. Which was considered to be like a good major for students at my time.

But I wasn't really quite knowing like how I can deal with my degree and because like business I feel like it is not very solid, like what would make it's not like you're learning, building something or learning coding or anything like become very tangible. At that time it does not really speak to me, so I just go to different departments and meet new people and sit in their classrooms and trying to learn, just basically trying to figure out what I want to do, what I want to learn, what I want to do in my life.

And that moment I feel like I really like the feeling of being able to learn things. And teach things. So that drive me to apply for a master's degree in education technology. And after graduation, like an instructional designer position in a corporate setting is just one of the many career choices I have at my plate.

Nigel Rawlins: Would you say that the Chinese educational system is very different to, say, the Western one? Three days of intensive exams and then being offered some choices? That's fairly academic, isn't it?

Gabrielle Sun: Yeah, it is. I would say it is very selective. So think about some of, for example, math or like those questions, like the purpose is not really what they want you to master certain things so you can become a better engineer or something like that. Like they make the problem tricky. So that takes multiple steps from the beginning to the end.

And if like how memory works. So things like from your long term memory loaded to your working memory, and some people are just not that good at solving problems that involves multiple steps. So I think a lot of this is mostly for selective reasons they wanted to make this hard for a purpose they can get the best students, too. They have the best educational resources.

Nigel Rawlins: So when you went from the Chinese university system to the American university system, how did you find that transition?

Gabrielle Sun: Oh, that was very different. Actually I took my master's program in Carnegie Mellon University. So that is a university who's very famous for its computer science education. And they got a very good computer science courses. And I sit at some of them and to me like that was like eye opening because during my undergrad, I took computer science courses as well, but at that time I thought, okay, I might be too stupid to master those programs, but, in my master's degree, I find like even those hard subjects, you can find a way to teach it in a way that the students don't feel like they are actually learning something really hard.

It can be done in, I think like it can be done in two ways. One thing is that you are making sure like you are really giving the resources for students to be able to complete certain tasks. So in my undergrad, this is I would say it is almost non-existence. So like the presentation material is one thing, and the test materials is the other thing.

So like I, I never thought about from a perspective, like how we actually link what we want them to be able to do at the end of it too. The kind of material we are presenting to them. So that was like the one aha moment for myself. I realized, okay, it is not that I was stupid. It is actually, the course material isn't lined up with what they actually wanted you to finish.

And that actually causes a lot of like extraneous cognitive load to me. That's one thing. The other thing I could tell is passion is quite important. I know like in America, we talk about this a lot, but when sitting some of the professor's classroom, you can clearly tell like this person is passionate about what he is learning and teaching.

Especially some of the professors are like the 50s, 60s and like even older. I like to say like they are very prestigious scholars and they have studied this for her lifetime. And in my undergrad some of the teachers are really like I'm just too bored to teach you guys. I'm, like, prepared to retire.

I entered college undergrad in 2014, and some of the slides are created in 2006, and teachers just don't bother. They didn't bother to update the slide materials, and it's just their job of teaching. But here in my master's program, I could clearly tell some of the professors still have a huge passion.

They really wanted to know what they are researching about. And that really makes a big difference, bigger than I thought. Sorry, I was talking a long way.

Nigel Rawlins: No, that's good. And one of the points you've made there is the distinction was that in, in China, they lectured you on the material, but what they wanted you to learn was something else in a way, whereas in America it was directly related to what they wanted you to learn. And that's one of the biggest issues in instructional design anyway, isn't it?

So maybe that will take us into instructional design. I recently did some online training for an organization. That I was working with at the time. And I must say I was a teacher more than probably 25 years ago for 16 years. But I was looking at this training and I'm thinking this is really quite basic.

And then they'd give you, say, a test on it and it had no relationship to the material they taught you and then some of it wasn't even on that material if you go back and you check. So one of the biggest dangers I would assume with instructional design is to really get that connection between what you're trying to teach and actually what the outcome is.

In terms of the education you've received, does that actually help you with the training design that you create?

Gabrielle Sun: That's a very good point. Glad you're bringing this up from your teaching experience. Clearly, it seems like you can relate like this part of alignment of what we want to do versus what we are presenting to them. So in my current role, this is called like alignment. Go, practice, Presentation, there needs to be alignment.

So that is like I would say core or foundational principle, like guiding my work. In my current role, a lot of subject matter experts, so for example, I am not an audit professional. I don't know how to do an audit. So I work with an audit professional to create any audit courses, if you just let the audit professionals write the courses themselves, you can see some of the issues you just mentioned they think like they are giving a task, but like what they are teaching on the slides does not 100 percent align well with the task. So you could find this problem to be very common in a lot of professionals I work with who are not from a learning science

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, now I can understand that. so let's talk about that. You mentioned that you work in a couple of areas of learning and development. Was one compliance?

Gabrielle Sun: For example, workplace harassment or HR regulations, data policy, et cetera. Those basically, if you are a full time salary employee in this company, there are certain rules you need to follow and we call it compliance. On top of that because of the industry we're working in, for example, law and audit, those are like highly regulated industries. So you need to meet their compliance training requirement as well. So all of these are called compliance.

Nigel Rawlins: Which goes to show that in most of the professions you now work in nowadays, there is once you've got your degree and you're working in the organisation, there is continuous training, or do we call it learning? So I guess there's a distinction between training and learning. So how much, training do you think is going on in any sort of organisation now? My wife works for a major supermarket chain, and they're continuously sending out training, it's two or three times a week, there's this, there's that, there's this, I'm just wondering there must be a range of programs that you have to learn nowadays.

Gabrielle Sun: Oh, okay. I guess that could be like very different from company to company, industry to industry. So for example, if you're working in a small startup, maybe like you, you are the first couple, two employees. Like you might not even take any formal training of any sort. It's cause like your purpose is really to make the company work.

But if you're working like very large giant corporation, like there's a higher probability, there are different kinds of training you can go through in your time here. In the organization I am currently working in, I think we are having like onboarding training. One is like a company wide welcome to our organization.

And here's how you access the HR system, how you do here and there. Here's a little bit about us, our mission, et cetera. And another is like a team wide orientation onboarding training. So you are going to, like a lot of teams are having like their programs, how you, how they receive newcomers, audit, tax, like they have a very known program.

They have been running this for like over 20 years or something. Of course they make the new edits every single year based on like their understanding of, for example, Gen Z, towards millennia or basically the changes in the things in the work environment we are having. So they make some tweaks every single year.

That's the onboarding part of it. The other part is like compliance training. These are like almost like a drip feed. So I don't even know when a compliance training will be assigned to my dashboard. Yes. As a learning profession, I got assigned courses as well. So like data handling diversity and inclusion, sustainability.

So I was around those hot topics. So that's the second part, it's compliance. And the third part is some of the, I would say hot skills. So for example you're working tax, there might be like sustainability or ESG, like those new things coming up and the clients are asking more and more about it.

So your process boss is thinking, okay, here's something we need our whole team, all the tax professional to know. And there might be another training just on these kind of topics to, to bridge the skill gaps. That's the sort of type of training we're talking about. may be, for example, like a big career milestone.

So for example, you are becoming a manager for the first time, there are a certain mindset shift to a manager. So we call it like a career milestone chain. It's usually a, my organization that's usually three days to a weeks training. Like you gather all the new managers together and you have some training simulations you apply, et cetera.

Basically, these four types of training occur in different times of your career in my organization.

Nigel Rawlins: That's huge, isn't

Gabrielle Sun: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Nigel Rawlins: I think in the old days, when I was younger, you just go out to work and you'd never get any training. You just do your job.

Gabrielle Sun: Oh, really?

Nigel Rawlins: and then suddenly it's become so much more complex. So, and in any day, are you working on a particular project until it's done or do you work on a few projects at a time?

Gabrielle Sun: So it's usually like a few projects. I would say like one, two, three. Three is like the most kind of like the biggest number of project I can take at a time and because my team is huge, so we divided the process up to be very granular, so most of the time for me, I am just interviewing subject matter experts, those people who have the content expertise, and like writing course outlines, designing activities, and discuss, approve, edit, that's like this iteration process.

I'd say I'm in this part of the workstream and there are people who is like dependent on me, on my work. So like the deployment people. So for example, I got a fancy new set of PowerPoint slides, teaching you a certain topic. I do not facilitate those workshops. So these are like the deployed people who do this.

And also if I need to edit a video or an e learn, and I don't usually do that myself, neither. So we have those developers who are into the softwares and doing all that.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, it's good that you don't have to do it all. I subcontract out lots of work because I just don't want to know how to do it anymore. So that's pretty exciting. So you're busy from the sounds of it. Now, I came across you because you wrote an article talking about AI and you were also talking about routine processes and stuff like that and how AI or artificial intelligence is starting to not starting.

It's roared right in, hasn't it? With a bang, it's landed. So let's talk about AI and how that helps. How you work with AI, or how you suggest we work with AI?

Gabrielle Sun: Sure. Yeah. So I started off playing with this kind of tools because my boyfriend is in the tech industry and he is actually a machine learning scientist who is at the forefront of everything like even before ChatGPT launched, we know GPT3 and he has already started to play with something like that.

And he was like, okay, this is going to be something like. Take a look at it. I was like, no, don't bother me. And until what time is like last November, ChatGPT become a thing that's well known and everybody started to talk about it. so For me as a instructional designer, although we talked a lot about using these tools in integrating in our workflow, I do not see like a very direct impact or integration into our current workflow yet. liKe there are a couple of reasons. One thing is a lot of times we are doing some of the judgment based work. So for example, I have the business partners coming to us saying, okay, here are like A, B, C, D kind of skills we want to touch base on, and they want to put everything into a whole curriculum. And as an instruction designer, your job is not going to say yes to all of them and implement it and make yourself an order taker. So we definitely want to know more about like the reason behind each request. So that is not actually something AI can help me to do at this moment, that's one thing. The other thing is when it's really getting down to some of the nitty gritties. So for example, a lot of my time in this current row is actually reviewing some of our existing learner's report or the data we collected so that we can have a better informed design or redesign next time.

And that is not something GPT can help me like keep going through line by line or generate summary. It actually can, if you feed it into the tool and ask it, like it generates insights or, but if you really wanted to go line by line and make these edits, I think that still requires a lot of manual labor and attention from your end. That's what it cannot do at this moment, but there are like obvious some things we can do with it. Which maybe we can talk about it later.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, definitely. I find the same. I, use Claude, to summarise large PDFs. But I'm getting very generic , and we're going to talk about prompt engineering as well, it may be based on the. fairly poor at this stage prompt that I put in to get that feedback .

So if I'm reading something fairly detailed, it's better that I actually go through, like you say, and get what you're looking from it. Unless, of course, you can continuously question it to find the things you want. But even then, you've got to use your judgment to make sure that it's accurate. And and that's the biggest danger at the moment.

You were talking there, obviously, about the things that humans can do compared to the AI. And so I think in one of your articles you were writing about, creating scenarios with, AI.

Gabrielle Sun: Oh, yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: So tell me about that a bit.

Gabrielle Sun: Yeah. So actually leading our conversation to the topic of I can use the tool to help me with at this moment. I think it's like a, in general, it's a very good brainstorming partner. Because, it has, the worlds knowledge, all the data we use to train it.

And sometimes, for example, when I'm struggling creating a scenario to make some of the practice exercise more authentic, or I want to, brainstorm how I can run this workshop. For example, some icebreakers, some reflection activities. Or some of the energizing activities, I may not think about it.

I may not be able to think about it off the top of my head. So I use it as a brainstorming partner. And also when I find it to be very helpful at the initial stage of a course, when you still have a huge scope and large problem space, and you want to create an outline or something it may give you some very good results that you wasn't expecting.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, definitely. And that's how I use it. I would have to say that I use it. 20 or 30 times a day now.

Gabrielle Sun: Oh, wow.

Nigel Rawlins: I write, I try and write two big articles a week and, or I want to rewrite something, or I want to analyze something, I guess I use it to get an opinion and sometimes it'll kick out a sentence for me which I don't like, so I then question it and say How would you reword it?

Or I want it to say this, how would you say it, including this and I might work on a sentence three or four times or ten times just to make sure it fits in, or a paragraph I've rewritten, and then I ask it to help me tighten that paragraph up, and then I use Grammarly as well afterwards, so I can have AI help me write an article, from the information I fed into it.

But then I would probably spend four or five hours still editing. anD you're right it's like having a blank page and then, and getting past that blank page which is fantastic. Alright. What technical skills do you think, then, that we need to learn to use AI?

Gabrielle Sun: I would say to me AI that's a huge word if we can break it down into different sort of technology. For example, ChatGPT that's text generation. And there are other functionalities like, for example, text to image, or text to audio, or even text to video. So I think all of these are actually have a huge potential in in my role as an instruction designer, or more broadly as a creator or knowledge worker.

Let me go through them one by one. So one thing is... Text to audio, like in the old time, we have those like TTS that does not sound, sounds very robotic, the kind of sound. But recently, I think a lot of the text to audio tools are getting really good. And you can even make a voice cloning.

So for example, if you record some pieces of your self speaking. And the algorithms will learn some of the phonemes, like when you pronounce and then when you type, like it can actually produce in your own voice. It's not a hundred percent accurate. It's really getting very close to that level.

So I think if that is the case in going into the future, I would see a lot of like voice over artists. I do work with some of them, like creating e learning materials, mainly to think about other ways of doing like a career transition. That's one, one of the four technology we talked about. One text to audio, the other text generation summarization.

ChatGPT is definitely something we are already use and you mentioned like that it's a summarizing ability. Sometimes it's not good. It's probably related to the, I would say like the memory, it allows you to put into the system tags. So for example, right now, I remember it's like 80, 000 tokens, but as the models are becoming more and more powerful, it may increase this limit.

Or like they have a better way in the back end to chunk this into pieces and summarize one chunk and another chunk and piece them together. So I still see there's a huge possibility of this model to become like even stronger and also like ChatGPT like Open AI release, like they are multi modal.

Chatting ability, meaning that you can send graphic for it to summarize. Then it can also like generate, for example, a data representation from from your description or from your data sets. So I think that's something we need to continue to learn how to incorporate especially the multimodal text generation into our knowledge workflow.

That's the second thing. The first thing we talked about is text to image. Right now I find it's most useful when I want to create some of the descriptive images. So I'm not going to ask you to create like a Van Gogh or any expressive art, modern art, I don't think it's used for that purpose but to me, so for example, I want to create a blog article master image for my blog article. Here's the five ways how you can do instruction design. And previously I need to Google search or I need to search the database to find photo or something to use. I would say this is a, just like descriptive image, but text to image tools really relieve my burden on that end. I I would sincerely recommend people to play with those kind of tools and to see what, which prompts work better. There are definitely like different prompts can resolving very hugely different image qualities. That's the third thing. And the fourth, for knowledge workers, is to explore the text to video AI tools. I played with many of them. I'm not mentioning any brands or names here, but basically, I think it really is the burden of having to show yourself on the camera and edit afterwards, because just need to play with the timeline a little bit, but right now it's like a text to video generation, meaning like you can edit the video in a way that you used to edit a Word document.

So I think that's something for us to really keep an eye on and start exploring.

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, definitely. That's a fantastic explanation of all those. And you're right on to those things. You're using it and you're young. So imagine, what are you going to know in 40 years? What's your future looking like?

Gabrielle Sun: I don't know.

Nigel Rawlins: when I was a kid, it was black and white TVs. I think we had a TV, but we never really spent much time at home. I can't even remember if we had a phone in my house when I was a kid. I think most of the time we were outside riding our bikes somewhere. Very different world today. Okay, you wrote an article where you mentioned value chains in the nature of work.

In terms of some of the work today for a knowledge worker, some stuff is just basic and you can almost, what we call, handball it off to AI to help you with. So what do you think are the human aspects that we still bring to our knowledge work compared to say what AI can do?

Gabrielle Sun: I think that's a great question. So I definitely think there is a huge potential for to treat AI as a I would say cheap outsourcer, outsourcing partner. So for a lot of things I don't want to deal with such as generating and finding a descriptive picture for an article or to so for example summarize some data and or to like even to because there are some browsing plugin you can pair it up with ChatGPT.

I can ask it to summarize like what is out there on the internet without even leaving that, that interface. So I think some of the things that's taken me a lot of time, but it's not generating quite some value. I can outsource it to, ChatGPT. And for the things that do create, like more value, just as like you said, the humanistic aspect. I would say for example, thinking about what I want to express and write those table of content or article outlines. So these are some things I'm still going to do myself, because without, even without a good outline, the ChatGPT cannot generate a good article.

And also I still believe, even though like text generation is so cheap at this moment right now, I still believe that good writing is actually good thinking. So it just put what's on your thoughts into pens and papers, and that part won't change.

Nigel Rawlins: Definitely. Okay, we were talking about using ChatGPT for some routine processes. But we've still got to keep in mind that, being humans, where do you think ChatGPT should be starting to fit into all businesses now?

So if you're doing instructional design work, would they ask at some stage for you to design programs about using ChatGPT and where it would be appropriate?

Gabrielle Sun: Yeah, so you were asking whether we are designing training programs to teach people how to use this, or? I think in other companies they are starting to do this, but I would say usually in house L& D teams are generally more reactive than proactive, and this also depends on the kind of industries you're working in, and for example, if you are working in tech industry, there might be already producing some great content.

Yeah they are currently creating some training courses on how to use ChatGPT. But in my personal view I think this needs to happen earlier on.

Nigel Rawlins: Okay, I think earlier you talked about when you had some spare time, you do some online learning. What sort of online learning do you choose to do, to keep yourself, up to date or continuously learning?

Gabrielle Sun: Yeah, I don't have a very specific learning paths. I want to master certain skills this year, and I want to do another year. Basically I, it's based on what I want to do. So for example, recently I am building like a role play simulation tool. So I was thinking things.

I make a lot of role play simulations in my role as an instruction designer. I create those scenarios. Can I have GPT to be my roleplay partner? Instead of talking to a facilitator, talking to a partner, I just talk into ChatGPT. And also, by the end, if this too can give me a personalized feedback, how well or how badly I did, that would be awesome.

So that's something I wanted to do based on that, I started to find some programs I need to learn. So for example, right now I'm learning how to build an LLM application using Longchain. So Longchain is like a Python, library. So you can use it to compute some of the web application.

I think I think learning is actually very personal different people have different learning style. For me, I do not aspire to complete any training programs or learning paths, even though I design them. I just go and out and find the materials relevant to what I want to do at this moment.

Nigel Rawlins: And isn't that amazing that's just so freely available, freely, or you can actually pay for courses. I've purchased about 20 programs that I want to learn. I've gone a bit mad, and I've just got to make sure one day a week I start working through, but other things interfere.

So I've bought about three or four courses I haven't even started yet. So I've got to get stuck into them. What I'm hearing from you is whatever makes you curious, I can't even say it. Curious. You go out and you find it, and then you learn through that. Can I ask, do you read books

Gabrielle Sun: I would say I'm not a huge reader. I probably read somewhere between 5 to 10 books per year. So that's where I am. That's the numbers. I find myself to be most comfortable during the year. I read paper, paperback books. I prefer these to, to Kindle. I actually had had a Kindle years ago, but I just don't use it that often.

I live in Portland there is a huge bookstore called Powell's Bookstore. And when I want to visit some place, that's probably one of the places I'm going to visit. And if I come across a book on the shelf that looks interesting to me, I just brought it home.

So it's also very sporadic and spontaneous that say, I do not have a huge reading list. I aspire to complete per year. Yeah. And I know I'm not a... Huge like book reader by any means.

I wish I can do that more.

Nigel Rawlins: I think it's quite normal nowadays. I've got two grown up sons and I know they hardly read books. They're mostly looking for video. and I was talking to my youngest son's 33. And I was with him the other day and he just talked into his phone to ask for information. He didn't even type it in anymore.

He just talked to it and it brings up and he said, oh look here. And I'm going, wow. And he hasn't had a very formal education, but boy can he use technology. And I think that's with our young generation now is technology is very normal. What age did you get a phone?

Gabrielle Sun: Ah, that's a good question. I think I think I get my first personal phone when I was in high school, like the first year in high school. Yeah, but before that I think I'm playing with my parents phone since, I don't know, since probably not too long after I was born, maybe in my early primary school days.

Nigel Rawlins: I think that's the norm nowadays, whereas I think I can't remember, I think maybe I was 35 when phones came out. Yeah it's a very different world and you're really living, you're living the knowledge worker life. You're working from home because you're working remotely, you're employed by a large company, and you're working with people all over the world.

So that's an amazing world that you live in. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us about?

Gabrielle Sun: I would say maybe, no matter what age you are, At there are certain qualities and certain good things you possess. And so for me I'm pretty young compared to a lot of my colleagues who are working in the same same company and organization.

And I do think when I jumped onto this roles, I learned a lot from my colleagues . Basically, I think improve my EQs, interacting with people, especially some senior stakeholders, and also just learning how to be a good human being, like sometimes while you're working in this isolated world and everything you care about is those data and getting things down and et cetera, et cetera, productivity, you forget how to be like a very warm human being.

And I think I learned that a lot from some of my elder colleagues, but now, like, when it comes down to some of the technology topics, I find, okay, this is something I can bring value to the organization, to our shared knowledge base, etc. I didn't actually realize that's a strength for younger generation because, this is the world I feel so familiar with, so comfortable living with so I just wanted to say whatever age you are at there are certain very good qualities you possess and we just need to have an open mind learning from each other, especially I think this cross age generation kind of communication could be very helpful and it's always something we neglect.

Nigel Rawlins: that's amazing. No you're coming across as very warm. You communicate really well. It's fabulous. And your knowledge is really quite deep. So I think there's a heap that people can learn from you. Thank you, Gabriel.

That was a fabulous conversation. I really appreciate you coming onto the podcast.

Gabrielle Sun: Thank you. Thank you, Nigel. Thank you for having me