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.