Imagine you are the Director of your IT department at a fast-paced Business Intelligence as a Service company. With all of the different applications your team supports, you realize there is a need to upskill the users and you know providing online learning would be ideal to reach your users at scale. Now, what do you do?

Unfortunately, your team doesn’t consist of Instructional Designers or eLearning Developers and happens to be outside of the L&D department. Where do you start to provide the learning support you think your users need? 

Assess development needs

First, you should establish the business and user needs for the learning support. Once the needs are defined, it will allow you to create the learning key performance indicators, determine the best learning approach for your users, and validate the value it will bring to your users and your organization.

There are several ways to do this but a needs assessment model can consist of:

• Business analysis: Identify the business goals.
• Individual interviews: Identify key processes and gaps.
• Group interviews: Open discussions to address challenges collaboratively.
• Work and work product observations: Observe product use to identify inefficiencies.
• Surveys: (the least preferred method) Use incentivized surveys for insightful information.
• Solution examples: Demonstrate solutions by how you gauge user response.
• Evaluation and growth discussions: Identify methods to measure behavior change post-learning.

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As the Director of IT, you may not have time to conduct every type of needs analysis, and that's okay. The goal is to identify the need to proceed with creating your learning support. After completing one or two of these methods, analyze your results and form a recommendation.

Develop a learning strategy

Once your needs analysis is complete and a recommendation is formed, start working on the components needed to build your learning strategy. This takes your findings, establishes a project vision and purpose, and outlines the key elements, framework, and methodologies for your development plan and goals.

This learning strategy will guide everything you need to build your learning solution, transforming your idea of providing learning support into a concrete action plan to enhance usability and reduce support tickets through learning.

Establish processes and templates

While seasoned Instructional Designers have standard processes and documents, your team without ID support needs to develop standardized processes for all projects. Documents like design documents, storyboards, and presentations or eLearning templates are a good starting point.

Analyze learning management systems

Now that your learning strategy and processes are ready, consider where your learning support will reside and how users will access it. To measure and evaluate results, tracking completion and user progress over time is crucial. Determine what aspects are important for your department in providing learning support. Do you want peer learning capabilities, various learning resources, etc.?

Once needs are identified, research several learning management systems (LMS) and conduct a comparative analysis based on features, pricing, setup and integration processes, customer support access, and user-friendly experience. This analysis will clarify your options and help decide on the best path for your learning support.

In Summary

Even without dedicated Instructional Designers or eLearning Developers, teams can provide effective learning support by analyzing needs, developing a learning strategy, establishing processes and templates, and analyzing LMS options. However, providing learning support requires experience, knowledge, and time.

Fortunately, you don’t have to manage all of this alone or with a small team of non-learning professionals. You can rely on external support and allow them to establish everything you need. Exp.Design has successfully done this for a Tech department and can create a customized learning program design package for you as well. To learn more about how we can support you, book a free consultation using the Get in Touch link below. Remember, you’re not alone; many departments need similar support and don’t know where to start. We can step in and execute your vision for you.