Member Spotlight on Lori Randall
Lori Randall is the Corporate Training Manager for Dart Container Corporation, headquartered in Mason, MI where she is responsible for developing the corporate training strategy as well as designing and delivering training to almost 7,000 Dart employees, world-wide. She currently supervises a staff of four – including trainers Ray Miller and Gary Laverick (also ASTD-SCMC members), an administrative support person, Kathy Sievert, and one summer intern (Arianna Dart). Lori has over 20 years experience in the training and meetings industry, with at least 14 years as an instructional designer and classroom trainer in the corporate arena.
Prior to coming to Dart five years ago, Lori was responsible for leadership and employee training at Foote Health System in Jackson, MI and prior to that, started a new training department for a large, mid-west uniform rental company headquarted in the Detroit area. Her early work history was with associations in the Lansing area, including as Chief of Physician Education at the Michigan State Medical Society and Executive Director of the Michigan Dental Hygienists Association. With this strong background in the association arena, she has been a member and strong supporter of ASTD, both national and the South Central Michigan Chapter, since early on in her career.
Through her training, Lori specializes in presenting creative and “participant-centered” learning experiences for employees on a variety of topics, including: personal accountability, improved communication skills, diversity/harassment, customer service excellence, and other leadership development topics. In addition to training for Dart, she occasionally trains similar courses for the Michigan State University Human Resource Development department, and plans to branch out this fall by offering some Saturday programs to bring some of her favorite courses to the general public. Some of her favorite classes to teach include a custom-designed course on personal accountability, “Thunderbolt Thinking” (a creative thinking course), “Fish Philosophy” (based on the Seattle-based, Pike’s Place Fish Market), “Feedback Fundamentals”, and Mindmapping. Her most difficult course? She says, “It has to be either conducting the “Fish Philoso phy” course to a group of nurses on a bus-ride to Chicago so that they could get CE credit for their trip, or the time I had to teach creative thinking skills to a room full of Engineers!”
Lori’s educational background includes a Bachelors of Science (B.S.) in Management and Marketing from Northern Michigan University. In 2004 she earned a Masters in Adult Education/online-learning (M.A.E.D.) from the University of Phoenix. She loves to read and considers herself blessed to have a career where she gets paid to continually read and learn new information.
Lori is the single parent of three “twenty-something” young adults, 2 daughters and a son. They are all living out of the house (for the moment anyway!) and in college or graduate school in East Lansing, Lexington, and Boston. She is active in the Lansing Area Emmaus community and her local church, working to develop strong Christian leaders. She has also served as a volunteer, on-call advocate for a local domestic violence project. She says that her most far-reaching leadership role was when she led a group of high school students on a work project in a Russian orphanage during the summer of 1997. This summer she plans to repeat that experience when she travels to Romania with an adult group to do volunteer work in orphanages, children’s hospitals, and gypsy camps. She loves to travel and has also recently been to the Grand Caymans, England, Australia and various places around the U.S.
