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John had risen through the ranks of a multimillion-dollar company to become the leader of the training function. He knew his industry backwards and forwards, but was new to this aspect of the business. His energy and passion for the industry enabled him to create the content his people needed to perform their new roles, but he knew they needed more to excel. Two years ago, John enlisted our help to redesign a series of existing courses, which he recently described as “still the most interactive and engaging courses in the catalog.” But that was just the beginning of the relationship between this client and Gillespie Associates.
During the initial course development, we shared instructional design strategies and helped John and his team better use course development tools, like Articulate Storyline. When we engage with a client, we never intend for them to become dependent upon us; but rather, we help them develop capabilities so that they may no longer need us. Our goal is to save organizations from ineffective training, whether that’s through partnering with them to revise their current offerings or helping them develop skills to create better training on their own.
John and his team found so much value in the tips and strategies we shared throughout our first engagement, that they requested us to facilitate quarterly workshops. After assessing their needs, we’d create a workshop to help increase their skills in areas like writing for engagement, scenario development, and activity design. The feedback we got after the workshops included comments like, “Come back and teach us more!” and “I loved how the content applied to our organization and our training needs.” Our relationship transitioned from helping them build content to helping them build expertise.
As we continued working with John’s company, we noticed gaps in knowledge and skills, and would bring these to John’s attention as suggestions for future workshops. Soon we became their educational consultation partner, assisting with the strategic planning for the training department and ensuring those plans were aligned to the organization’s goals. Our relationship changed once again, this time to accommodate a focus on overall strategy.
Through the strategic planning process, John shared with us his need to develop his own leadership and instructional design skills, so we began to coach John individually. After our first session, John wrote, “Our conversation really opened my eyes. I am definitely open to new ideas and suggestions.” And again our relationship expanded, now including one-on-one coaching and development.
We help organizations on an enterprise level and on a personal level. Our goal of saving organizations from ineffective training requires us to look deeply into the organization to identify the issues, and then propose solutions. Those solutions could include revision of current training, creation of new training, educational consulting, one-on-one or group coaching, and much, much more. This is how we helped John and his organization. Learn more about us to see how we can help you, too!