Learning Design – Building Content for You to Deliver

Many organisations naturally want to deliver as much of their L&D as they can in-house. This saves cost and there are usually benefits associated with having learning experiences delivered by people who know the company and culture well. Yet not every L&D or HR team have the capability and capacity to design their own programmes, which is where we come in.

Aside from the critical need to understand your objectives and therefore what the content needs to be, it is super important for us to also understand your context. It is much easier to apply learning when the learning has matched the context of the everyday. That’s why we often say that anything we design needs to feel like it was built for the business, by the business. If it feels like an external programme, then it often loses that relevance and applicability.

We balance that with the fact that many of our clients like to promote programmes on the basis they were developed with external experts, so then it’s all about showing the best of both: external expertise and internal context for relevance.

We can create slide decks and facilitator notes, session plans for workshops with no slides, videos, recorded webinars for use in broader programmes, pretty much anything you can think of. On the elearning front, we are often asked to work in partnership to create elearning, for example where we are the content experts and the elearning provider has the tools and system to build the programme. That works well for us, as we do not have our own elearning design platform.

As a super flexible team, we are happy to work with you in whatever way works best. That might mean we are building a small online session for you to run, or working in partnership with you to build a 12-month in-person programme. It might mean we do all the detail, or you are heavily involved. We shape all of that with you at the project scoping, so we’re all on the same page about how we will work together.

Train the Trainer

When we are asked to support with some sort of train-the-trainer of L&D / HR Business Partner development, the work usually fits into one of two categories: learning to deliver a specific programme or overall skills development.

This is the more traditional reason for a train-the-trainer: we have designed something and you need your facilitators to learn how to deliver it in-house.

We’ll build a workshop that helps your facilitators experience the content for themselves, explore the fundamentals required for delivering this well and then have a go at running it.

We can also provide detailed facilitator guides and materials to make your facilitators’ lives easier when it comes to delivering the content. Many of our clients choose to have us on-hand for the first round of delivery, either on-site to co-facilitate, or over the phone to offer support or run action-learning sets with the group of facilitators, sharing learning points from their experiences.

More broadly speaking, who develops the developers? So often L&D teams or HRBPs who get involved in facilitation have never been fully developed themselves in the specific skills of facilitation. There is a big difference between saying someone is an expert on a topic, that this person is a great trainer on that topic and indeed to say that they are a good facilitator on that topic.

We help professionals in this space understand the difference between expertise, training and facilitation as follows:

Expertise means you know how to do it.

Training means you know how to explain or show others how to do it.

Facilitation means you have the skills to enable and empower others to find their own ways of doing this, using your expertise to guide as required.

We then develop those skills according to what is most needed in the business. On occasion we are also asked to develop the L&D team in their ability to understand a business need, define success and then design their own learning content in-house.

If you’re interested in this broader development of business partnering skills, then check out our content on that here.

However you want your L&D team and HR function to develop, we can help by simply starting with the great question: what do you want them to be doing that they are not doing now?