Nancy Curtis

VP, Content, Logical Operations

One Quote I Love:“ You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty”   - Sacha Guitry

The most important highlight of my career was being hired by the original Logical Operations back in 1991. They took a chance on a bright and eager applicant based on my potential, aptitude, and my organizational fit, not on a clear track record of relevant accomplishments and experience. I’ve been fortunate and blessed that my talents and aptitudes have aligned and grown along with the company.

I fell backwards into it. My academic background is in music performance, and I was doing secretarial work and contemplating whether I truly wanted to pursue a career as a classical singer. By chance I bumped into a friend from my student days at Eastman who had been employed by LO and was still close to the company founders. He knew I liked computers, and he tipped me off that LO was hiring. Thirty-two years later, I’m still here.

I think there are huge parallels between the performing arts on the one hand and learning and instruction on the other. You have to be able to communicate ideas clearly. You have to read a room and adjust to participants’ reactions. And you have to have the self-confidence to believe that you have something to offer to the people who are graciously lending you their time and attention.

Now, I’m not enough of an extrovert to be directly delivering training every day, but as a lifelong bookworm with a love of language, combined with my (sometimes overly) analytical mindset, abstracting learning back one level to create the curriculum that drives the training experiences was a professional match made in heaven.

I believe in the power of aptitude and ability to promote achievement, and not in being constrained by specific prior training and experience. We all learn all of our lives, so to fully benefit from everyone’s talent, we need to allow them to grow in new directions. (As I tell my kids, what I do for a living didn’t even EXIST when I was in college.) Some of my very, very best colleagues and staff are people who didn’t have degrees or work history in instructional design or technical writing, but who had a passion for instruction, a knack for technology, and a talent for clear thinking and clear expression.