Elaine Brena
My career journey began in environmental health and safety, where I discovered my passion for teaching and training. As part of my role in environmental health and safety, I worked on training programs and really enjoyed the creativity aspect of it. I've always enjoyed teaching others, and it gave me the opportunity to scale that love of teaching people. I wanted to scale my reach in terms of who I was impacting, so I moved into a learning and performance role in an operational capacity. Today, as Senior Manager of IS Organizational Effectiveness, I work in the technology organization where my scope covers the entire employee lifecycle from onboarding to upskilling staff. I also look at things from an enterprise perspective, currently focusing on AI literacy across the organization and building up AI capability within the enterprise, as well as upskilling our technologists in AI capabilities. I manage day-to-day learning operations, ensuring we're in compliance when working on regulated systems and that employees have the right training. I lead a team of 8 staff members, some in the U.S. and some in other countries, supporting about 6,000 employees in technology and AI/data organizations, with enterprise-wide reach to approximately 30,000 employees. My superpower is really being able to take content and build it, and implement it in a way that it can be well consumed and make a difference in how somebody's performing or has knowledge around a topic.
• Global Learning and Performance Awards at Amgen (multiple years)
What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to three key things. First, it's the relationships that I have and have built that I can lean on to help me. Second, it's always focusing on that experience for whoever is consuming what we put out there. And third, I think it's being able to really have a deep understanding of the levers that I have to pull on or back off on to make sure that I'm focused on the priorities. I'm really good at figuring out trade-offs when I need to.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Build relationships. Look beyond your work and really understand how your work fits into the bigger picture, and ask questions. Be curious.
What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think organizations often see training or learning and performance or learning and development as something they just have to do, like we need payroll, we have to have this organization. I think the opportunity as professionals is to really help the business understand that we can be a lever to be leveraged to help them reach their goals. Sometimes they see us as just checking a box, like we have an organization. But I think where we have the opportunity is to really help leaders understand that we are an enabler for them if they invite us to the table and include us in conversations.
Locations
Amgen
Simi Valley, CA