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New Instructional Designer (ID) Onboarding
The situation is where you start. You learn by dealing with real-life work situations. Provide a short description of the situation for the learners to work on. Along the way, you will impact results.
Sitches are situations, jams, issues, errors, gaps, troubles, stoppages and many others to fix and solve. They are also opportunities to improve, grow, expand, and introduce better, faster and cheaper ways to get the desired results.
What is your Situation and Question?
A learning design company regularly hires IDs in batches and engages them in an onboarding program that has several goals: familiarize IDs with the company's policies, procedures, pertinent documents, and related practices; 2) introduce and engage IDs with the actual tools and templates they will use once they are vetted; 3) determine how the new IDs work with their peers and supervisors particularly on team projects and in terms of work feedback and revisions; 4) Identify IDs level of creativity when it comes to learning design.
The onboarding is extensive and involves the actual design of a learning experience (no development) for which eight hours have been allocated (the onboarding is a total of 40 hours). There are a lot of moving parts that IDs need to stay on top of. Built into this work is their nervousness of doing "the right thing" as a new ID in a new company with specific work structures and approaches. And their desire to come on board and thus be "perfect" during the onboarding.
What's the biggest challenge?
Can the onboarding be structured so that there is sufficient time for the IDs to dive into all of the materials to get a fuller grasp of the tools and templates so that they can be better prepared for the learning design element, a three-tiered task that involves understanding complex templates while completing an assignment that is to be reviewed? Can this learning design experience be more realistically timed to allow for a more natural design process?
