Pictures are worth a thousand words, and even though this picture uses words to communicate, it completely illustrates why I got into instructional design. So much of employee training is "check the box" - questions to ensure that participants paid attention to the footnotes, but not ones that reinforced the key concepts. Training gets a bad rep because questions like the one below (and those "Did you read that parenthetical on slide 847?") are such a waste of time. But it doesn't need to be that way! As instructional designers, we must always approach our work with the learner in mind. Is it meaningful? Is it worth the learner's time? Does it reinforce the things that the learner likely didn't know coming into the training, but will need to know when exiting? Does it allow the learner to practice and assess their knowledge in the way they will use it? Or, is it just like the trainings you went through that you hated?
Assistant Director of Instructional Design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Author | Podcaster | Instructor | Public Speaker
“Our employees hate our courses and we don’t know why.” The course: