Content Development

TeamOJT Tip of the Month for December, 2005

People in corporations need to know how to do their job - period. Employees need job-specific skills and the necessary knowledge to develop those skills. Everything else is irrelevant.

Many people in corporate America are trying anything and everything to keep employed in this era of downsizing and outsourcing; and for the training industry that often means convincing managers and CEO's that using technology, and especially rapid-e-learning, will improve the bottom line. Well there's really no such thing as "rapid" learning of any kind. Nor is there any such thing as "rapid" content development. Content development requires serious thinking from the right people. And the right people are not necessarily instructional designers or SME's - at least not SME's alone. SME's do have an important role in developing training content, but instructional designers, if not careful, can get in the way of good content development. In fact, if the right people decide what needs training and go ahead and develop the training content themselves, you might not need instructional designers for that.

There simply are no shortcuts to training development. The key is engaging the right people for the job. And who are the right people? The employees themselves - the ones who currently do the job - a mixture of SME's and less experienced employees. They know what the training needs are, and collectively, they establish the best way to do the job. It's a simple idea and it works every time. And it's incredibly cheap.

Human Performance Applications
Phone: (206) 447-0860
FAX: (206) 447-3410
E-mail: diane@teamojt.com