Customize & Personalize

Whenever possible, I love the opportunity to personalize training by capturing my own photos or recording my own videos and then getting fun and creative with them. I think that personalization is a fun way to draw learners in and increase their interest for the learning material itself, particularly when it comes to compliance training. Compliance training has a track record for being a boring attempt at a means to simply check-off a training task. The thing is, compliance training is some of the most important trainings that learners receive. They should care about the content. They should care about the training. And employers should care that learners care. Compliance training is typically required to keep everyone safe. That should matter to all of us. So it seems that giving attention to the affective learning domain should be prioritized.

Background Information

The example below is pulled from an annual refresher training on preventing injuries in the workplace. I am unable to provide the entire eLearning; however, the example provided below demonstrates how I customized and personalized the learning experience. The content itself for this course was already provided. That is, there was already an annual refresher training created for this content; however, it was a PowerPoint presentation that was used for face-to-face training sessions one week per year. I took the opportunity during an annual review of our training materials to update this course and make it more enjoyable and engaging for the employees.

My Approach

The first thing I wanted to do was convert this instructor-led course to a self-paced, online course. I used Adobe Captivate to create the eLearning itself, and rather than relying on stock photos, I captured my own images. I visited both both company locations and took photos of the actual working environment the learners spent time in. Knowing this course was going to be nothing like the instructor-led trainings they were used to, I socialized with and interviewed employees every opportunity I got. This allowed me to hype up the new self-paced training course and gradually build buy-in before go-live.

One of concerns I came across while capturing images was that though employees preferred images of their actual working environment, they did not feel comfortable being “showcased” in the eLearning itself. I “cartoonized” the images using photo editing software so that the employees were virtually indistinguishable and ran that by them. They loved it. It was a huge hit with the learners. They enjoyed getting to be part of the process, and reported feeling drawn in as they virtually toured the buildings, exploring ways in which they could prevent work place hazards.

Check out this stripped-down example of the course below.

NOTE: The example below was designed for desktop training on a Windows PC.