Training to support launch of 3rd party Onboarding Portal

The Onboarding Portal is an online tool that manages many aspects of the onboarding process. This includes managed forms, tasks, socialization, and analytics. This tool allows the company to attain the goals of improving new hire engagement and retention and simplifying and standardizing the process for onboarding new hires and leveraging technology for the delivery and management of those processes. This portal is a major system that impacts all new hires, the hiring managers, recruiters, and anyone else that is involved in the onboarding process.

This project was both interesting and challenging in that it is a brand new, complex system that involved the collaboration of the human resources, IT, and the training department to configure, install, deploy and provide training to users successfully.

Role: Acting project lead and instructional designer

• Conduct training analysis and design.
• Manage training project schedule.
• Design course layout and initial graphics groundwork for contractor to follow to maintain consistency throughout all courses.
• Manage and review contractor work
• Work closely with the customer to ensure that the newest changes and updates are reflected in the training.
• Support implantation of the training rollout, ensuring that instructors are trained and materials are reproduced and delivered to the classroom.

Project Challenges/Issues & Solutions

Challenge: The schedule for system installation and configuration runs parallel with  training development with training starting 3 weeks before the full system go-live.

Solution: Participate in all project core team meetings to ensure that our needs for resources are met and that any changes or updates to the systems are immediately known and reflected in the training materials.

Challenge: Our analysis identified five distinct audiences to be impacted by the system.

Solution: Create five courses that share the same overview lessons but tailored to the needs of each audience. Sharing the same layout and media assets, the rest of the lessons in each course contain distinct content customized to the roles of each audience.

Challenge: One audience has approximately 1500 members located in various parts of the United States that are to be trained immediately, there is an additional group numbering in the thousands that will need the training in the months following system go-live.

Solution: Training solution includes daily instructor led online courses for multiple weeks and a WBT course that can be delivered anytime to any location via the company intranet.

Challenge: Implementing the system will mean moving users from a mostly manual and paper process to a highly electronic, automated, online process.

Solution: Training design made sure to make heavy use of  system demonstrations to show audience as much as possible, the system in action.

Issue: System demonstrations is extremely difficult and tedious to set up as there are a number of artificial data that needs to be created to walk a fictional new hire through an entire onboarding experience from start to finish.

Solution: All the system demos are recorded so that every session consistently show the same demonstration.

Training to support the launch of PeopleSoft ePerformance application

This system enhances HR processes, systems, and employee experiences relating to performance reviews for approximately 40k employees. The system will automate the review process by providing online forms, routing, and approvals, provide visibility into the performance management process throughout the year, from establishing performance objectives for new employees and transfers to end of year evaluation with meaningful input from both employees and managers.

Acting as the project lead on this project, I did not get to do any development work. Initially, I found it difficult as I’ve always loved the development process. But as time went on, I find that I also enjoyed working other aspects of the project; customer service, project management, contractor management, etc.

Role: Acting project lead and instructional designer

• Conduct training analysis and design.
• Manage training project schedule.
• Manage and review contractor work.
• Work closely with the customer to ensure that the newest changes and updates are reflected in the training.
• Support training implementation, ensuring that instructors are trained and materials are reproduced and delivered to the classroom.

Project Issues/Challenges & Solutions:

Challenge: The schedule for system installation and configuration runs parallel with  training development with training starting 4 weeks before the full system go-live.

Solution: Participate in all project core team meetings to ensure that our needs for resources are met and that any changes or updates to the systems are immediately known and reflected in the training materials.

Challenge: Our analysis identified four distinct audiences to be impacted by the system.

Solution: Create four courses that share the same basic lessons and added additional lessons when necessary to address the needs of each audience.

Challenge: Audience is very large (every employee needs to do a performance review, every manager needs to conduct a review for their direct report).

Solution: Training solution includes demonstrations that can be accessed online via company intranet. Oversaw and review recorded demonstrations customized by the vendor using vendor to ensure the needs of our customers are met.

Decision Tree

Description: Scenario that has more than one outcome. The student will be required to make decisions along the way that will shape the end result of the scenario.

When to Use: Practice making decisions. When there is no obvious right or wrong answer.

Note: Decision trees can be time consuming to build. You need to have enough information for the logic flow to make sense. Make sure to test every single decision point to ensure that it takes the student to the correct conclusion.

Tools Used: Captivate 2; Fireworks 8

Tell Me

Description: Clicking on “Tell me” reveals answer to question. In the example below, the Tell me text is below the > Tell me button, sometimes a colored box is used to show the new text.

When to Use: This is a great technique to add interactivity and maintain whitespace. Tell Me is not a test, it is used to initiate thinking about the subject,  it is similar to an instructor prompting a student for an answer in class.

Audio with Closed Caption

Description: Complete transcript of the audio script is visible on the screen or as a separate sheet to download.

When to Use: To be section 508 compliant, when the student’s access to audio equipment is uncertain or the training environment doesn’t allow for audio.

Tools: Tools such as Captivate provide closed captioning features.