Continual Development

I am currently continuing to develop the new Team Member first 20 days training manual that I have been describing. At this point I am on Day 16 of 20. The document is merely a design document and I have began working with our ISD branding professional to draft a look and feel to the finished product. Once that happens I will begin to import and complete what guide will be given to the GM/Trainer in the stores as a facilitators guide, as well as a cohesive one to give to new Store members to have during their training. I have also began to work with Senior Training Specialists to create activities for the first 20 day new hire program. As the instructional designer here at Advance, we rarely create activities unless asked to do so, we are not subject matter experts and thus differ to them to create items we use and then we design it accordingly and aesthetically and incorporate it into our training design.

Additionally- As I mentioned in the beginning we do Period Focus Trainingand I have that going on in the forefront of things. I am working on a course that trains General Managers as well as Assistant Managers on Duty who open the store how to review Daily Plans with their Team Members, how to accurately read the Daily Plan documents and implement a proper line of communication as well.

A Continued phase of Design

With various documents in hand with what needs to occur in the final product of what new Team Members must learn throughout their first 20 days, I have been diligently working on a design document of what each day should look like. I have broken that Design Document down into 5 color categories with sectors of work that NTM must be familiar with as well as added times and learning progressions throughout the design document, I have now gotten through 6 days of solid work and a portion of a few more days there after. I have multiple meetings with business patterns who are experts at New Team Member training and what must occur and they have really enjoyed looking through the beginning stages of the design document and believe that it has great potential. I have made sure to add in segments of instruction that are from senior staff members, management, online training courses and hands on follow shifts that should benefit the new Team Member accordingly. Additionally, since this is more of a side project that I work on, I took existing battery knowledge assessment courses that we have been working on for current Team Members and have been formatting them to be a part of NTM on boarding. They will be required to take these tests before the first week is over so that we can build out their learning plan accordingly.

Below is an example of one of the pages from the Design Document that I have been working on. It is a very lengthy document, totalling 32 pages and rouhgly half way complete. This shows learning progressions, learning success acheivements, and day break down.

Beginning a New Project

At work recently, I was tasked with working on the new hire, first 20 day learners guide. This will consist of a copy for General Managers to have to help them facilitate and train the new hires, what to do with them in terms of activities and hands-on learning as well as answers to quizzes. The second copy will be information broken down into days as well as learning checkpoints for the new Team Members to keep and learn from.

After a couple of meetings, we decided we will create a test market first and set up training stores in regions for all new hires to go to to see how the use of proper training procedures work.

Being in the beginning phases we have done the Analysis and know that we need to critique our new hire training program, however, analysis still needs to be done on what all needs to be covered. We have multiple past General Managers who now work as corporate trainers and go to new store openings to train new hires, however there still may be some shortfall in that bleeding into stores that are set in their ways and have been open for many years. As part of the Analysis phase, I am beginning to work in an Advance Auto Parts store part-time. They do not know that I am from corporate as I applied as a walk in. This is not in means to cause anything to the store if they do a poor job, but more just to go in and see what I am taught, and shortfalls and find out thing I wish I would have known earlier or later in the process to get a better and more accurate understanding of what needs to be taught to the new hires.

How ADDIE can solve problems

This week was interesting for me in my internship. The week before I had finished a course before leaving down to which I thought was complete and it turns out, it was not. I spent this current week trying everyday to solve the problems, edit the course and make sure that it works correctly and loads in our stores. The biggest issue with training for our team as Instructional Designers and Video Producers is the amount of bandwidth that goes to stores. Due to this, we are limited to what we can implement as many of times, if a store is busy, courses on our training laptops placed in each of our 3,000+ stores will run slower.

My course on car care chemicals was no different. Before, we published courses with video sizes of 140x320 pixels and now we are bumped up our size to 360x640 to increase viewer experience. However, with larger videos comes more loading.

One might ask, where does ADDIE come in?

Well...

This course still did not work after 3 days of attempted fixes so I changed my approach. I stepped back an analyzed three other courses that had the larger video formats in them. went into the LMS system to watch the rate of which the courses load and eventually came to the conclusion that because I received .FLV instead of .SWF files, they were downloading completely instead of instant playback while buffering, which is what our bandwidth is modified for.

Furthermore, I found that because I was not using a master slide and had images on each page that had to load, it was causing the course to load slower, and therefore had to go into the design phase and create master slides with the image used in order for it to load once and not every time a new page appeared in the course.

We then found out that the course was sized to large to begin with and had to be scaled down. Therefore I had to redevelop the course to fit the information sections along with the videos.

I then implemented all the changes and retested the course. It finally worked and loaded much faster than the beginning versions. It still has some lag time and we believe that because our courses with video usually have 1-3 small clips and mine has 7 substantial clips it is to be expected. We also found out that my courses file size went from 157,986 KB down to 31,748 KB once all the changes had been made.

Finally, we employed a survey at the end of the course for employees to click on to evaluate how the videos loaded to see how we can fix the issue in the future.

So, here is a great example of how we always think of ADDIE to design effective training programs, but in this case it solved a problem.

What am I Doing?

I am currently working as an intern in the Team Member Knowledge and Engagement sector for Advance Auto Parts. Specifically, I am an instructional design intern. The way that our team works is we break the year down into 13 periods, and there is a training prescription for each period, this is called, Period Focus Training, PFT. Period Focus Training can be anywhere from 1-5 courses that all 54,000 team members across America and in Puerto Rico must take in order to continue with employment. Each of the 5 designers on our team work on individual projects, or sometimes larger scope projects and come together weekly in meetings to catch up on where they stand. One of the hardest things to accomplish is being able to stay within labor hours, when doing this form of training development. Labor Hours are given to each employee in order to do company mandated trainings, and each employee is allotted 30 minutes per period, down from an hour that it was until July of 2012. This is very difficult because when designers are working on individual projects, they are unaware of times that other trainings are going to take up, and so far it occurs where some trainings become to long to fit into the 30 minute allotted time and must be cut down. 

Since I started working in November 2012, I have now had 4 Projects that I have worked on, 2 of which I have had my own free reign over. My first project was to complete a training course for a new employee sales and transaction per hour management system that was a 9 part course, and I had to complete the last 4 courses. Next I moved on to re-working the District Leader checklists which are used to grade and rank how managers in their districts are doing and where they lie within target sales goals. 

My first project that I started and finished on my own was the new Best Case Fulfillment screen used in every store for parts ordering. I began with creating a project charter, which is used with our "business partners," commonly referred to as Subject Matter Experts. This saves us as designers because they agree to what is going to be in the training and what it will entail before you start developing. Then I moved into a design document which we begin to layout the look and feel as well as the progression of the training. Finally, I began to develop the course, using Articulate Storyline. The course began with an overview of why the new system is more user friendly and effective than the previous, then into teaching the functions, and finally ended with a quiz on using the system.

We require every course to be completed with an 80% passing score in order for them to be finished, if the score is not 80% they may retake the course and quiz, but it is not within the labor hours distributed to the stores.

Lastly, my course that I finished working on this past Friday, was a course on Appearance Chemicals, and what products are correct for car cleaning. This course was simply a rework of a course published last year, just with an updated fell and some new information. We also have increased our bandwidth sent to stores and doubled the size of training videos employees can view to help increase their likeliness to appreciate and enjoy the training. This course was more to see how the new video size worked and we sent surveys out with each to see how the new video experience was for them.

That summarizes what I have done up to this point so far in my internship. It is probably one of the best experiences I have had thus far in my career, and hope this turns into a full time job upon completion of my program.

As I detailed my projects above, each project I work on has ADDIE as a foundation to it. With Analyzing what needs to be taught during each training, designing what will go into the training, developing the course, implementing it to all team members, and evaluating the course by seeing whether or not they have passed, is a daily process that we go through. With a fast turn around of 3.5 weeks to design training courses, it is a very cyclical and fast paced environment.