Agile-Inspired Training Development
A unique, iterative approach that provides quick, quality wins for your business and your learners
Every organization has unique training needs, especially when it involves training employees on proprietary methodologies or training customers on how to properly use products.
Our method of training development is unique, and we think you’re going to like it.
Hint: it’s agile, it’s collaborative, and it’s highly effective.
Your business is evolving. Your products are evolving. Your staff training and customer training need to evolve at the same pace.
Our Method
We know you can’t afford to wait a long period of time for training to be ready, especially when a change, update, or upgrade happens very quickly. Time is money, and in this case, mishaps due to a lack of training can be very costly.
That’s why we designed our Boost method to apply ADDIE in an Agile way, so we can get a usable, quality MVP in your hands within 4 sprints — typically 8-12 weeks.
We’re very collaborative and want your input as we go. The biggest impacts on the timeline are your availability for collaboration, and the starting point of your training materials.
The MVP is intended to be a temporary solution that will be improved upon with more content and engaging learning activities, but it will be as correct and complete as possible when it is delivered.
Some of the reasons we love the MVP approach:
It provides you with well-designed, usable training in record time so you can start training the employees or customers who need it the most.
It focuses our attention (and your budget) on creating the core of the training first so all the essentials are included. Nobody needs the hassle of scope creep just to get the basics taken care of.
It’s designed to be used by an instructor to train employees or customers. This acts as a round of user testing that will dictate what enhancements are most needed and beneficial.
The sprints that follow the MVP are used to address the feedback from the initial training sessions, and provide the polish that takes the training to the next level. You can be confident that the enhancements made are the best options for improving the effectiveness of your training and boosting learner outcomes, not just doing things that seem cool or fun “just because.”
Instructional Design vs. Learning Engineering
Instructional design is important, but it can leave a lot to be desired when that’s the primary skill set and focus of the team developing training.
As a team of Learning Engineers, we’re able to do things that instructional designers often don’t do. We still do instructional design, but we also have experience with human-computer interaction, UI/UX design, data analysis, business development, graphic design, marketing, web design and development, media production, software development, product design, usability testing, and a whole lot more.
We know what makes for concise and effective training with a great user experience, and how the training solutions we create impact your business success (which doesn’t get talked about much, but we know that’s really the purpose of training).
"Sounds cool, but what does that look like?"
If you need some visuals and examples to bring these words to life, our portfolio has what you’re looking for.
Collaboration and Iteration
In our design and development approach, we don’t spend weeks or months making plans and expecting you to sign off on instructional design documents that are foreign to you.
Instead, our team of learning engineers works efficiently through an iterative development process that allows you to actually see and experience what we have planned at each stage, instead of just reading about it.
Training Formats
We develop training that is platform-agnostic so it can be used wherever you need it — in your existing LMS, in a new training platform, or directly on a device for offline use, which we can make with licensing requirements. We know training delivery isn’t always one-size-fits-all, so we make sure you have the flexibility to share it with your trainees in the way that works best.
All of the training we develop also meets SCORM or xAPI (tin can) standards for tracking learner activity.
We can provide custom elearning solutions, and blended learning or hybrid learning solutions. We’ll recommend an approach based on the intended learner, what the training is intended to accomplish, and the method of delivery that makes the most sense.
For example, highly technical products typically benefit from a blended or hybrid approach, where learners use self-paced, pre-learning materials to build a foundational understanding of the product, then complete their learning and demonstrate their skills with an instructor to earn a certification. We build both the elearning materials and the instructor materials so the learners have a consistent, concise training experience.
Fully online training solutions typically work best when instructor-led training isn’t cost effective, such as for products that don’t have an associated safety risk or that have a very large user base.
Effective Training
One of the biggest gaps in the training world is determining the effectiveness of your training. Although it’s the most crucial aspect of training, it’s also the hardest to achieve, so it rarely gets addressed.
Our team is uniquely qualified to build great training and analyze how well it’s working.
To get the most insight from learner activity, we recommend using xAPI in combination with one of our custom learning platforms so you can really see what your trainees are doing. This helps you see what they’re spending a lot of time on, what they’re going back to review, what they’re breezing through quickly, and more. We can compare that training data with your company’s KPI data to determine what practices lead to the highest performance, and if any of the training needs to be revised to teach material differently or to require learners to review it more frequently.
We can also help you understand how the training is impacting the company’s bottom line. Training is often viewed as a cost-center, which creates a lot of red tape that makes it hard for you to do your job. Imagine the hero you’ll be and how much easier it will be to do your job if you can show that your training is actually boosting productivity and profitability.
Create Your Training in-house
or hire a vendor?
In our experience, many companies prioritize creating training in-house because payroll is easier to justify than vendor costs, or they want to be in every detail of development.
If company success is your top priority, then both of those justifications are typically self-sabotaging.
Internal training departments or L&D teams can’t do what we do. Our team of Learning Engineers can provide engaging deliverables faster, with validation, a higher level of QA, and better results. We also work within your timeline and budget, which are constraints that can be difficult to implement internally.
We’re focused on you and the success you need. We aren’t held back or slowed down by the red tape or micromanagement that exists in nearly every business. We are also dedicated solely to what’s in our contract with you; internal teams can have their priorities shifted by other colleagues and changes in the company, making it difficult to get the quality training that you know you need. With a vendor like us, the expectations are much clearer for the level of dedication that will be spent on your training development and the timeline it will be delivered on.
We’re also less expensive than an in-house team for the service we provide. Good training design is complex, and the breadth and depth of our experience allows us to do a range of things very well, very quickly. You would need to hire at least a handful of people in-house to get the same benefits, which is going to cost significantly more than our rates (if you can even find the right people to hire in this market).
If you need help figuring out how to propose your training internally to get the budget approved for a vendor, we can help! Our team includes a Certified Management Accountant (CMA), so we may have useful insight that can help you get the budget you need to make your training development happen.
Our clients get real results
If you’ve made it this far, you know a lot about what we do.
Now let’s show you what it looks like.