While there are many challenges when trying to scale corporate training development, two of the most fundamental problems that must be solved for learning and development (L&D) departments are automating instructional design and streamlining collaboration with subject matter experts.
As Josh Bersin stated, “we have entered a new era that is not only a shift in tools, it’s a shift toward employee-centric design.”
Without fundamental changes to the instructional design processes, it
will be impossible for companies to transfer knowledge from subject
matter experts and keep pace with business needs.
Quality instructional design is needed to develop effective training content, however, in many organizations, instructional design is a bottleneck because of time and costs. As discussed previously, the question is not whether you need instructional design, it’s how can you incorporate this important skill into the new world of learning. You want every employee to contribute to the development of training content if needed so it becomes more efficient and effective.
Melissa Milloway at Amazon stated, “in 2018, design systems are going to be trending”. Not only do Learning Design Systems allow you to build training solutions faster, but some even help transform instructional design from a specialized skill into something that every employee can do. They help companies standardize how to make the best decisions when collaborating to design and develop content.
To reap the benefits of a design system, you need to do a couple things:
- First, there should be a simple tool to gather requirements from stakeholders and departments who request help.
- Next, there should be a flexible way to organize relevant information around the business requirements.
- Third, there needs to be a way for everyone to curate and organize content that can be used for corporate training, i.e. not everything needs to be built from scratch.
- Surrounding all of this you need modern collaboration tools that guide project stakeholders and subject matter experts through instructional design best practices for consistency and streamlined communication.
L&D can no longer scale if only a small team of professionals
with specialized skills produce all of the training content. Everyone
involved should understand how to design content effectively. To do
this, L&D needs new scalable ways to incorporate instructional
design into the content generation workflow.
Some organizations have managed to do this by stitching together Design Systems with Word, Excel or Google Docs, project management tools, collaboration tools, and other stand-alone tools. While these methods can provide some level of templating and collaboration, you don’t have time to train everyone to use a bunch of disparate tools for documenting, organizing, and collaborating. Furthermore, they don’t actually guide teams towards the ultimate goal: Creating effective training at scale.
With new modern technology available, L&D can provide a new level of automation to ensure content is produced faster while maintaining quality. Whether you need to design performance support material, micro-learning or mandatory compliance training, a Learning Design System such as Cognota should be part of your tools and processes. It’s agile, easy to use, and scalable.
