Creating content

Let's assume we have already defined competencies and roles within the company. How do we figure out what skills should belong to what role?

There are good and bad ways of designing education, unfortunately, the bad ones are most common. We call them stuffing courses.

STUFFING

Imagine a classic college or university course. You are fed information, information, information and last of all comes an exam. The day after the exam, you have already forgotten half of what you learned and the other half will unfortunately never be useful.

OUR METHOD

In our pedagogical model, we ensure that employees change their behavior. To be sure that we are solving the right problem, we need to go through a number of steps before we decide what content needs to be connected to what role and level.

1. What do you want to change?

What is the purpose of your skills development? If you have to choose a metric you are already working with, what do you want to change? For example, is it to increase sales of a particular product, reduce the number of workplace accidents or get more satisfied end customers?

2. What do they need to do?

In the second step, we figure out all the things employees must do to get closer to the goal. If the purpose was increased sales, the sellers may need to do a better customer assessment with the customer by asking the right questions.

This also means that the participants don't need to read about things that don't help them get closer to the goal. A stuffing course on sales had surely included a long chapter on sales history from the 19th century onwards. However, since it is of no use to the seller in everyday life, our modules don't contain that type of redundant information.

3. Why aren't they doing it already?

In the next step, we'll look at each thing the participants should do and find out why they don't already do so. Is it the lack of knowledge, or is it perhaps a lack of motivation, the company culture or the lack of proper tools?

4. How can they practice?

Depending on the reason, we ensure the right actions for every problem. If there is a lack of knowledge or skills, e-learning is an excellent tool, but it could just as easily be a book or another online course that we find brilliant. It’s not important that it’s content that we have created, just that it’s the best we can find. We’ll pay for any books/courses for the employee, so that you won’t have to administer that.

If it's the corporate culture or motivation that holds you back it's probably a rung up the ladder towards management where the solution exists.

We investigate how employees could practice the behavior they need to learn. It could be questions to reflect upon and answer, practical exercises and scenarios that we construct so that participants can practice and get closer to the goal.

5. What do they need to know to practice?

The last step is to produce the absolute minimum of information people need to be able to practice. Often surprisingly little.

Summary

It may sound like a hassle, and it is an ambitious way to build a bank of modules. More time-consuming than just produce walls of text. In return, the modules do not contain anything unnecessary and ensures that the participants actually get closer to the goal.

This makes them incredibly relevant, and therefore appreciated.

In the end, we produce a measurable goal in the style of this:

A metric we are already using should increase/decrease
digit % to date
when employees do something.

For example:

Sales should increase
10% before December
since the sellers ask more relevant questions to the customers.