Training Development and Instructional Design
Curriculum development, learning paths and training materials built directly from your procedures, so the two cannot drift apart. Delivered by us, or handed over so your own people can run it.
Training written alongside documentation starts drifting from it immediately.
Two people writing two things at two different times produce two different accounts of the same work. Within a year the procedure and the course contradict each other, and nobody can say which one is right. The organization concludes that documentation does not work, when what failed was the sequence.
Training derived from the procedures cannot drift, because there is only one source. Change the procedure and the consequence for the training is visible and traceable. That is the whole argument for doing these in order, and it is why this stage sits last rather than first.
What We Build
Scope comes from the needs analysis, so what follows is what the roles require rather than everything we could produce.
- Curriculum development - the shape of the whole program: which subjects, in what order, at what depth, for which roles, and what is deliberately excluded
- Learning paths - a defined route per role from first day to independent competence, so new hires stop learning by observation alone
- Instructional design - sequencing, cognitive load, where practice sits, and how you establish that someone can now do the task rather than has merely watched it
- Session materials - facilitator guides, participant materials and exercises drawn from your real work rather than generic scenarios
- Job aids and quick reference - the one-page material people actually use under time pressure, which is often the highest-value thing produced
- Assessment - a practical way of establishing competence that is not a multiple-choice quiz taken once and forgotten
Facilitation and Delivery
Building the material and delivering it are different skills, and a program can fail on either.
We deliver it
In person or remotely. In-person sessions consistently produce richer discussion, and the discussion is frequently where the remaining process problems surface.
Your people deliver it
Train-the-trainer sessions, facilitator guides and the coaching to go with them, so the capability remains with you after the engagement closes.
Blended
We run the first cohort, your trainers run the second with us in the room, and the third is yours entirely. This is usually the arrangement that sticks.
Where This Fits
Training is the fifth stage of five. It is the one that determines whether the previous four were worth commissioning, and it depends on all of them.
Common Questions
What is instructional design?
The discipline of structuring material so that someone learns to do something, rather than simply being shown it. In practice it governs sequencing, how much is introduced at once, where practice is placed, and how you know whether the person can now perform the task.
What is the difference between curriculum development and training development?
Curriculum development is the shape of the whole: which subjects, in what order, at what depth, for which roles. Training development is the production of the individual sessions, materials and job aids that sit inside it. Most engagements need both, and the curriculum comes first.
Do you build eLearning?
Where it is genuinely the right medium. A great deal of material that becomes eLearning would work better as a one-page job aid, and a great deal that becomes a workshop would work better as a short recorded walkthrough. We choose the medium after the need is defined, not before.
Can you deliver the training as well as build it?
Yes, in person or remotely, and we run train-the-trainer sessions so the capability stays with you rather than depending on us being available next year.
How do you keep training from going stale?
By deriving it from the procedures rather than writing it alongside them. When there is one source, a change to the procedure has an obvious and traceable consequence for the training. Material written in parallel with documentation begins drifting immediately.
What should a new hire be able to do by week two?
If that is hard to answer, the answer is usually the place to start.