Forum Discussion
How are you approaching learning creation in your organization beyond “traditional” L&D use cases?
I am the "sole" instructional designer for our team of 5, and I enjoy it quite a bit. The other members jump in to work with Rise courses (prebuilt templates provided by Articulate), but for group-up projects, the task usually falls to me...and I can't complain at all as I LOVE doing what I do and have relied on Storyline (since version 1) and Rise (since its inception) to design, develop, and release training across multiple business units.
One of the main reasons we don't have a large team is due to budget constraints for sure, but we like to say that the reason we don't grow the team is because we don't need to. It would be a waste of both talent and company money to grow the team beyond what it is now as we are all very solid in what we do; we know our strengths and our manager allows us to focus on those projects that play on that.
Our training delivery focuses on both ILT and eLearning via an internal LMS; that's my focus. And I have projects that come from every business unit within our organization. Safety, OSHA, compliance, HR, FAA/EASA requirements, internal employee training focused on specific roles, etc. And it works very well for our company. We save time, and money, by internalizing the training needs, and, because we ARE internal, we can create content that is specific to our organization.
I've worked with some outside vendors in other contracts before and...wow...it was painful. Not only because the content itself was generic (and dare I say, utterly unprofessional in look, feel, and delivery) but the costs were outrageous (they should be ashamed of themselves for charging people for the "materials" they submitted for use).
Keeping things internal, and having a dedicated L&D team, I believe, saves a company money in the long-run as well as ensuring we have complete control over the entire process, from design to evaluation. Revisions can be made immediately (although we do have annual requirements set forth by the FAA and EASA) and being the designer and developer, I am in charge of the graphics, animations, video, audio, and supplemental/supporting material development, which, again, keeps costs to a minimum and ensures that all the materials for each businness unit maintains a high quality control and consistent branding across the enterprise while allowing for individual "uniqueness" to separate their content from other avenues within the company.