Author: Steve Mullins Published Date: Oct. 22, 2020
Tags: #roles, #team, #strategy, #goals, #objectives, #planning
Digitization of Training Requires Distinct Skills
The ongoing digitization of learning requires us to reassess the skills of our training teams, to design, produce, manage and deliver the ever widening array of content, tools and processes needed. Do the positions you have match the changing landscape? Should you consider expanding the expertise of an existing team, hire new members to fill a specific need, or reach out to external resources to fill gaps? Or maybe you are trying to build a Learning Team from scratch, and need to know what types of expertise will be needed. Identifying key roles will be essential in meeting the ever changing landscape for learning.
There are two primary phases of a learning program to consider roles for:
- Implementation
- Ongoing Management
While ongoing management will encompass most roles needed for a training team, there are a few unique capabilities to consider during an implementation and/or updates to existing systems and processes. Even for those who have an existing Learning Team and System stood up, it’s often important to think of a project similar to implementation to perform updates, and/or redesign of a system. Understanding what roles are specific to a one-time implementation versus an update and ongoing management will also be important.
The roles listed below can be owned by separate personas, or in the case of smaller organizations shared with a smaller number of individuals, resulting in one person owning multiple responsibilities.
Ongoing Production
When most folks think of roles for a Learning Team, they think of roles for ongoing management. However, not all teams will have all roles, and often it’s when expanding the learning program when you might need to evaluate what qualities your team contains, and where you might have gaps in capabilities.
The following is a comprehensive list of roles and skills learning teams may need, either directly inside the team, or through partners who can provide the capabilities.
Management Roles
There are three key management roles needed for any Learning Program.
Senior Sponsor:
Identifying the Senior Sponsor is key. Even though a Senior Sponsor may not play a day-to-day role in the active program, the Senior Sponsor is key to aligning the goals of learning to the organization. They also provide guidance for strategic objectives and help promote learning as key to the organization. Finally, the Senior Sponsor will be critical when lobbying for funding for additional roles and resources as needed.
Learning Manager:
A Learning Manager is responsible for managing the learning team and systems on an ongoing basis, and is key to the success of any learning team. Depending on the expanse of the team and silos in learning, there could be multiple team managers who together form a Learning Manager Steering Committee. Not only is it important for the Learning Manager to be a people manager when managing other members of the learning team, the Learning Manager is also the key conduit to the Senior Sponsor and organization as a whole. It is the responsibility of the Learning Manager to promote the value of learning to the organization and work with other parts of the organization on how to best utilize the learning program output. The Learning Manager is also responsible for establishing and maintaining clear goals & objectives as well as metrics to measure the success of team members and the success of the learning program as a whole in meeting the outside organizational goals.
Project Manager:
All learning programs will have a slew of projects that need to be managed such as:
- implementation
- LMS rollout,
- new training rollout,
- maintaining ongoing content,
- certification rollout,
- etc.
Larger teams could have one or more dedicated Project Managers, while smaller teams often run these projects on their own. Either way, it’s important to manage the project, and if possible assign one person as the overall project manager to help keep everyone focused. Even if you work as a one person team, you still need to organize a project and arrange a small amount of time to manage that project including establishing clear objectives, tasks & timelines.
Design (UX & Curriculum Design)
As the learning landscape adapts to our ever changing environment and the types and methods of our training change, it becomes important to consider how best to deliver that content to the learner. Content needs to be easily consumed. As a result it becomes critical to have team members who focus on how the learner will access and consume the content. These are our designers who focus on the learner’s experience, and not just the content. Whether the content is written, audio, video or live streaming, the user interface and user experience is key to keep learners engaged and benefiting from the content . Even if you design content to be used in a live classroom environment, the design of the curriculum, content and presentation materials will be critical to how that student absorbs the knowledge being conveyed during the class and how it will be reviewed and consumed after the class.
There are two key Design roles needed on a Learning Team:
Curriculum Design:
Most learning professionals are familiar with the discipline of Curriculum Design, where the core curriculum outline is planned and organized. In today’s learning landscape, it’s also critical for the Curriculum Designer to interface with other teams to help identify the differing delivery methods as well as define the goals and objectives of the learner as well as metrics to measure their success. Notice, I said to measure the success of the learner, not the success of the trainer. Curriculum Design needs to think outside in, and not inside out.
The person designing curriculum needs to think of the knowledge being conveyed (the curriculum & content), as well as how that knowledge will be consumed (the learning experience), and if it will be absorbed using newer mediums. For example, the trend to create more modular content is one of matching the knowledge needed to the user experience. Often times they only need a short 2 minute video, and not a 2 hour class. In the past, it might have been good enough for Curriculum Designers to design broad knowledge topics for consumption in live training classes where the learner is captive, but in todays digitized world, it’s also important to design knowledge nuggets to be consumed in much shorter formats and mediums, then to organize those nuggets into related topics specific to certain personas.
User Experience Designer:
In recent years, having a good UX Designer who focuses on the user experience has been critical. Once the curriculum and content has been defined, it then becomes important to think about how that content will be found and consumed by the learner.
In the past, we might have written instructions on how to perform a certain task then expect this to be placed in the documentation or as a demo topic in classroom training, or maybe even created a tutorial video for the same task. But as content authors, we often didn’t consider how the learner might find or access the content, and as a result we fail. Great content that’s not being consumed is not helpful. One of the primary reasons many learning programs don’t meet their potential is because the learners didn’t know the content was available or couldn’t find it when they needed to. This can be solved with someone focusing on the learner’s experience.
Some may think this is only related to a good Web UI design, but the more people interact with their computers, tablets and phone screens to access learning content, the more important it becomes to think of the learner as a whole and what they are trying to accomplish when they seek out and access learning. Then design an experience that is efficient and friendly for a given learner, and provide the knowledge they need at the time they need it.
This experience extends beyond the learning systems, and needs to consider the product or capability the content is being designed for. Often times, the learning experience doesn’t start in the LMS or learning management system, it starts when a person is using a new product or trying to accomplish a specific task for their job. Integrating a Learning Experience to areas outside learning will be key to aligning the learning content to the learner’s experience, and why a User Experience persona is needed to look beyond what tools are in the control of the learning team. It will then become important for this User Experience person to work with other parts of the organization to align the Learner’s Experience with the Customers or Employees Experience as it relates to learning. This might include Product Managers, Documentation Managers and Community Managers.
Content Creation & Delivery
When I started my learning career, most learning content was delivered as an in person class, or maybe as a book. This concept led to bulky content that focused more on the person delivering the content and not the person doing the learning. Over the past few decades, the speed and amount of information being thrown at folks has expanded exponentially, and hence how those folks learn has changed. They don’t have time to sit and look over pages and pages of content, just to determine if it’s relevant for them or not. It’s not so much that everyone’s attention span has decreased, as it is the need for folks to sift and sort through all of the information available to determine if it meets their immediate needs or not. Also with the move towards more video, live streaming and more digital mediums, the type of content needed and hence the expertise to create that content has changed. This has resulted in content needing to be much smaller and targeted for specific requests and provided in many forms for consumption. This digitization and modularization of content has resulted in our needing different skills from our content creators.
The following may not be regular employee titles, but they are key capabilities that will be needed from team members, and/or folks outside the direct learning team who will be able to contribute their expertise when creating content.
Knowledge Experts
All content should start with knowledge experts, but it shouldn’t end there. Content created without input from a knowledge expert could easily miss the mark of what’s needed. However content created only by knowledge experts can often be too weighty and complex to be useful. So start with the knowledge experts, or at least gain the input of knowledge experts when designing the content to be created.
Often times, knowledge experts might not be directly on the learning team, but are assigned as a resource for learning, so be sure to define their role and expectations. Make sure the experts understand their role on the team, and that their input is a valuable part of the final product. Also, be aware that the value of knowledge experts is such that they should not be asked to work on other areas that are not their area of expertise. A knowledge expert should not become an experience video editor for example if it is not part of their daily job. Every now and then you will find a knowledge expert who might also have the qualifications and inclinations in other areas, and it’s ok to encourage that, but don’t expect them to fulfill all the roles needed for content creation.
Writers
A good writer is still at the core of good learning, whether that writer is writing text to be consumed online, or narration to be used in a video. Good writing is even more important in today’s world because it needs to be succinct and to the point, getting the most out of every word used. Long gone are the days of lazy writing that doesn’t hold someone’s attention well.
If you don’t have separate staff writers, then you might consider expanding the capabilities of existing team members by having them take writing courses, and expand their abilities. Just be sure they learn the specific style of writing required, from technical writing, to business writing to writing for narration. They all require similar but slightly different styles and methods.
Video Content Specialists
With the onslaught of the “YouTube Generation”, video has become more important to our learning programs.
The level of video expertise will depend on the types of video you plan to use. Video is commonly used in on-demand training as well as in live streaming, and as a result we need to become video experts, or make sure we have someone with good video skills to help establish standards for our videos. This goes from mentoring instructors on the best setup to use with live virtual training, to using the right camera, microphone, lighting and backdrop, and help setting up a video/audio studio for recording training videos.
Classroom Content Specialists
Even with the onslaught of digitization in our learning, the need to deliver content in a classroom environment is still needed. Classroom content however is not just one type, and having experience in many modalities will be key for content authors. Content for classroom needs to focus on both the learner, as well as the teacher. Often time class content will include instructor notes on how to use and deliver the classroom content, for example when and what types of demos are needed, or when and how to help students conduct labs. This is especially helpful when bringing on new trainers.
Making sure your classroom authors are capable of creating all of the types of content is also important. Skills around writing and graphic design, as well as lab design and quiz writing are part of what’s needed. Each require a special skillset. Key classroom content skills should include authoring:
- Instructor Content:
- Instructor PPTs
- Instructor Notes
- Student Content:
- Student Hand Outs
- Reference Materials
- Hand’s On Labs
- Quizzes
Instructors
Instructors are often one of the first members of any training team, and are still critical. Even as we move towards more remote training and rely more on virtual training delivery, we still need instructors to be trained with proper presentation skills, and skills of engaging the audience during the class, as well as being knowledge experts on the topics discussed. And, studies show that onsite classroom training will still be an important part of many training programs going forward.
Certification Experts
If your training program includes certification, then you will need someone qualified for:
- Exam Writing
- Hands On Exercises
- Proctoring
Managing certifications is a different mindset than straight training, and hence needs someone experience in establishing, promoting and managing the certification program. This is often the Training Manager, but can sometimes be a separate manager depending on the extend of certification being offered.
Implementation
When you are first implementing your training program, you will of course need most if not all of the expertise needed for an ongoing program listed above, but there are a couple of additional roles you will need during the stand-up of a program, and or an update of your systems & processes.
IT Operations
Integrating your training tools with existing HR/ERP/SSO/Community and other tools is one of the key items during any implementation and/or update. To help facilitate this integration, having someone from IT Operations who is familiar with all of the existing systems and able to help code the integration will be key. For larger training organizations who have ongoing updates and improvements, having a full-time operations person would be helpful.
Testing
A very unique role for implementations is the role of a tester. When designing and implementing a new system and/or updating existing systems, testing that system and its processes before rolling out into production is critical for success. Testers often come from an existing group of training users and represent a small sampling of an existing audience. They are usually not part of the direct learning team, however coordinating and managing those testers is an important part of the learning team. Someone needs to set up testing criteria to be used and will need to measure and monitor the results of the testing for a feedback loop into the development process.
Rollout Coordinator
Any implementation should be coordinated by a Project Manager, and one of the key responsibilities is to coordinate any beta rollout as well as production rollout. Considerations for last minute updates and fixes, as well as a disaster recovery plan of rolling back any updates if extreme issues occur. All of this needs to be planned ahead of time and put in place before any implementation and/or updates to the systems and processes occur. This rollout coordination is a unique capability, and often can be covered by most Training Managers or Project Manager or found outside of you training team.
Summary
In summary, good people make a great Learning Program, and making sure the expectations placed on the team meet the capabilities of those teammates is crucial to their success. And if there are skills they need, providing the training to help your team expand their skills to meet the growing needs, and/or to expand the team to fill the skills gap will be essential.