Corporate Training Tips & Tricks—Save Your Money & Prove Your Worth, Book Excerpt #2
NOTE: The following article is taken, with minor changes, from Corporate Training Tips & Tricks: Save Your Money & Prove Your Worth by Katrina Baker. It is one of three articles by Microassist Senior Learning Architect Kevin Gumienny. To hear more training tidbits from Kevin and other learning and development professionals, we encourage you to get your copy of the book from Amazon—and to stay tuned to this Learning Dispatch blog for additional excerpts!
Budget-Friendly Training Development Program: What to Borrow from Other Industries
One of my favorite interview questions to ask is: Who inspires your instructional design? I’ve received several different answers, some expected (leaders in the field), some that I should have expected but didn’t (my children, spouse, family), some that are vague enough to be meaningless (everything!).
If you’re going to run an affordable, effective training department on little budget, you have to leverage excellence where you can find it. And instructional design is still a relatively young field. Other fields (some young, some not) have much to offer.
Software Development: Proven Project Management Practices
For example, there’s been a tremendous amount of work done on effective project management in software development. Does ADDIE’s waterfall method take too long to deliver inflexible training solutions? Consider Agile and the particular implementations that it offers, such as Scrum or Kanban. Allen Interactions has done a nice job of pre-digesting and adapting this to training in their SAM (Successive Approximation Model) methodology. And you don’t have to take the whole thing—find what works for you.
Computer Programing: Tips on Estimating Learning Development Time
Computer programming is a great field to find information on a personal pain point, estimation. How often are you asked: How long does it take to…? How do you develop estimates that are accurate and precise? Who has done it before you, and what have they found? Look to works by those who describe how to do effective estimating in fields similar to yours.
Website Design: Insights on Learner Interactions and Experience
Website design is a great field to find information about how to design effective user experiences. How do you know what learners want? What will be effective, and what will just be confusing? Draw on UX’s deep knowledge about user surveys, user personas, reading methods, and habits.
Marketing: Expertise in Engagement
Marketing is an entire field dedicated to determining how to reach and engage new audiences. What can A/B tests and other marketing tools offer you in your effort to develop effective training on a budget?
Leverage Excellence Where You Can Find It
Doing only what you’ve done before doesn’t allow you to develop your efforts. Investigating new ways to do old things can take time and resources you don’t have. Looking to other fields and what they have to offer may be a method that you can use to ensure that your training (and department) becomes more efficient and effective without breaking the bank. (NOTE: We recently developed a rich list of resources that spans industries and may be helpful as you build a budget-friendly training development program: Elearning Development Resources: Develop the Elearning Your Program Deserves.)
Additional Resources
- Book Excerpt #1—Corporate Training Development Tip: Beware Sniper Stakeholders—Unknown stakeholders can quash your elearning project right before launch. As featured in Katrina Baker’s Corporate Training Tips & Tricks, here’s how to anticipate them.
- Book Excerpt #3—Corporate Training Development Tip: Take Training Yourself—Yes, you can educate yourself in a piecemeal way with help columns, articles, forum discussions, and Google. But will that revolutionize your approach?
- Corporate Training Tips and Tricks—Save Your Money and Prove Your Worth contains the collective wisdom of over 200 L&D professionals and industry leaders. For more on the book, Katrina, and her company, ROFL (Resources of Fun Learning), catch Microassist CEO Sanjay Nasta’s interview with her during the January 2017 Elearning Council’s Leaders in Learning podcast.
Microassist excels in bringing strong project management skills to each custom elearning development project.
Contact us today to find out how we can help you with your custom training project!
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