Training in Transition

I talk to trainers, training coordinators, and HR personnel every day, all facing different training issues depending on their industry, their worker population, and the maturity of their learning organization. But they all say the same thing:

"Our training program is in transition."

Of course it is! I don't know why I had to hear it so many times before I noticed the pattern that exemplifies that obvious fact of corporate life: nothing is more constant than change, and the only training that is NOT in transition is training in a stagnant company.

("Training in Transition" sounds like a good session title for a presentation at ASTD or eLearning Guild... I wonder if it's taken yet! I should trademark it; Google only spots 900 instances of it, but I hear it every day.)

Anyway... I'm not brilliant, but I have my moments. When I do things right, when I hit the nail on the head, it's only because my business methodology is to instinctively do the right, brilliant thing, and only later figure out that evidence (of which I was oblivious) supported my approach all along. The positive side of this personal phenomenon is that I get to enjoy plenty of satisfying epiphanies, the sort where I smack my forehead and exclaim in amazement, "Damn, I'm smart!!"

So the smart thing this summer was this: collaborating with my partners, we dramatically expanded the options for acquiring our training content. The starting point of this revolutionary evolution was this – our "finished product" is great; we made our courses so that in their integrated player, they'll run in SCORM/AICC-compatible learning management systems, directly from the web or intranet, stand-alone on learners' PCs, or as auto-launching CD-ROMs. Very cool stuff; we're proud of what we created. And we've been optionally including uncompiled (editable) source files for some time. But it turns out that even with those flexible options, our clever clients are using our courseware in other ways we hadn't thought of, most notably as the focal point of instructor-led classroom training.

The big "ah-ha" was that behind the 91 courses in our library, there is a repository of some 50,000+ files. Not just the uncompiled Flash files. I'm talking about the digital photos (both the final course graphics and the extra shots). Storyboards. Assessments. Digital audio files (again, both final narration as well as the random "Please go on to the next screen" and "Correct!" and "Sorry, try again" bits and pieces that make up navigation and feedback. If our clients are using our finished courses as stand-up training aids, wouldn't the files behind them be just as useful? Why the heck is all that usable instructional content gathering digital dust, sitting idly in archives on our servers?

We tossed that idea at a couple crucial clients, and they were stunned. Shocked that we were willing to provide those files, and shocked that no one had done that before. "No-brainer," one said. Of COURSE all those digital assets would be useful to trainers and in-house training developers! At the minimum, they'll have the dressiest PowerPoints in the whole company. More enterprising developers will have new "custom" courses ready in a fraction of the normal development time, using our course materials as a foundation to build their own courses "from scratch." This is HUGE.

When another prospective client had no need for our finished courses but wanted to purchase storyboards only, we knew our thinking was moving in the right direction, and we formalized the idea. In press-release-ese (the way our marketing department states it), "Our eight Multimedia Curriculum Libraries are each available in three distinct editions - Developer's Edition, Business Edition, and Ultimate Edition - to put exactly the training materials you need – no more, no less – at your fingertips." There's more info at the site of a recent promotion I probably shouldn't be linking to here in my blog, but whatever... can't see the harm in pointing to it.