- How many instructional designers
does it take to change a light bulb?
Two.
One to do it, and the other to point out
all the ways it could've been done better.
Which is to say,
your ideas on how to digitize training
are just as valid as mine.
Okay, in the example,
I see two pieces of low-hanging fruit
that call for digital treatment,
that icebreaker, and all that content
that deals with the company history,
values, and the construction process.
Getting-to-know-you exercises
can loosen a class up for sure,
but they can also be awkward time sucks,
so I'd suggest having this icebreaker as pre-work,
and then moving it to the company internal website.
Besides creating a less awkward way
to share personal information,
it also signals to new employees
that the company is serious about digital communication.
The instructor could still run a condensed version
of the activity in class if they wanted.
Next up, all that content
that deals with the company history,
values, and how the construction process works
at that particular company.
Because it's all more or less factual information,
it should be in some type of digital format,
maybe as short e-learning modules done as pre-work,
or articles on the company internet.
Now, don't get me wrong,
I'm not saying that the instructor
shouldn't go over any of that factual stuff.
I'm saying that digitizing it helps the instructor
and empowers the learner.
It helps the instructor by providing a safety net
if they run out of time on a certain topic.
It empowers the learners in two ways.
One, if they review their material before the class,
they'll have a better context
for what they're going to learn,
and two, digitizing it makes it always available.
Learners can return to it whenever they wish
and work through it at their own pace.
Okay, day two,
where the focus is interacting with the customer
and the customer relationship software.
It's fine to introduce software tasks in a live training.
If this is done, however,
I suggest using prerecorded software demos,
or screen recordings, as they're called,
to minimize that stumbling that often occurs
when people use real projects to demonstrate software tasks.
To get the learner really initiating the learning
and interacting with the software,
I'd set up a few activities
in the sandbox environment of that software.
A sandbox environment mimics the production environment,
but it's filled with dummy projects
so learners can't screw up real projects.
I'd also create a small library of job aids
based on the common software tasks
so that the new hires can pull them when they need them.
The last day of the training is all about
giving the learner a real feel for the role,
which is essentially creating
a realistic context for learning.
Activities in class are good,
but you know what would be even better
is a structured job shadow.
Based on what was covered the first two days of class,
you could pair up a new hire
with a real project manager for, say, half a day,
and give the new hire tasks to accomplish
and specific things to observe.
With that top shelf LMS,
it wouldn't be too hard to create a checklist of things
for the new hire to complete during the job shadow.
The ability to track a new hire's performance
in an extremely realistic context is a really cool thing,
and a total win-win.