Action Mapping

Hi Terry,
It sounds like a difficult situation you’re in! A needs assessment would help get to the meat of the matter – why they think the course needs changing in the first place. If it is indeed just a facelift, if indeed the course achieves its desired outcome but just looks old, that is one thing. Asking questions about why they want to revise the course may raise issues that they feel they don’t have the time or firepower to address, though. For example, if the course has never been very engaging, and an attempt to change the fonts and graphics is all they’re prepared to do, the course will still fail to engage the employees. Technical training in a web based course is notoriously both overwhelming (information dump) and underwhelming (boring!).

It can be done, though. In Cathy’s February certificate seminar “Designing Powerful e-Learning”, one of the participants had just such an issue. He needed to figure out how to create engaging software training (I believe it was a medical health records program?).

The route Cathy guided us through started with an introduction to the software. A tour around the dashboard or home page, perhaps with small memory tests along the way so that people actually knew the structure and functionality the main features of the dashboard / home page. Then the next step would involve walking through a normal real-life activity – admitting a patient and prescribing some medication, for example. The user would first be shown the steps, and also the support tools available to them.

Then in the next portion, the user would be expected to complete a few of the steps in a similar real life scenario. The caveat here is that at this point, the user also has access to the real life support tools they would be using. How do I access the “Help” menu? How do I search for the names of medications? Cheat sheets briefly detailing the steps of common tasks (admitting a patient, prescribing a medication, etc). You are training them on how to figure it out for themselves! The course at this point allows them to make mistakes, but doesn’t allow them to fail. They can practice here for as long as it takes for them to feel confident that they can complete the tasks by using the support tools really available to them.

The last step would be a test. In a similar scenario, are they able to admit a patient and prescribe medications? They still have the support tools available to them, as they will in real life, but at this point they CAN fail if they don’t know what they’re doing.

Terry, what support tools do your users have available to them once they have purchased this enterprise software? Training to the real life tools is a major idea I took away from Cathy’s certificate program. This could raise more headaches if the tools either aren’t present or aren’t effective, but then you’ve got someplace to start from. A needs assessment will tell you if training is needed, but it can also open up a lot of doors. It can create a lot more work in the beginning, that is very true, but it can also guide you to the real heart of making a training successful.