Skills in Action Microlearning Series
Role: Instructional Designer
Timeline: 1 day for initial proposal, 1 week per microlearning for draft and review
Tools: Articulate 360, Office Suite
Stakeholders: VP People Development, Director of Learning Programs
Problem: For the Skills for Success framework and monthly newsletter, the team wanted more practical, hands-on practice for learners outside of the classroom.
Outcome: I delivered a proposal for the Skills in Action series, allowing us to build a library of in-house microlearnings tied to the Skills framework, a template for the series, and the first three microlearnings. U
Prep
On a training team, it’s not uncommon for something negative to happen one time out of thousands, and that usually triggers the question, “Do you train on this? If you don’t, can you?” And you have to look at whether a training is needed, or if it’s just one person who needs coaching. This was not one of those times!
A Senior member of our Social Media team came to me with a document: a deep dive into dozens of social media cases where customers had the same issue:
“I am transgender and need to change my Spotify username because it’s got my dead name in it.”
If you’re not familiar with the term, a dead name is the name a transgender person was assigned at birth, usually correlating to the gender they were assigned at birth. But they no longer use it, and having to engage with it can cause legitimate distress.
But we can’t change that link. We don’t have the ability. The only thing we can do is offer to help you set up a new account and transfer over all your data. You’ll end up with a new Spotify link that doesn’t have your name on it! And we had a process for this that advisors could follow, but when we read through these cases, there was a clear pattern of a lack of empathy—or maybe a lack of understanding over the *why* of the problem.
I chatted about it with the specialist who had come to me and here’s where we landed: this is a relatively low-volume case type (only a few dozen cases a year), but it’s one that can have a high emotional impact on the customer on the other side of the interaction.
I asked: What other case types do we have like this? Issues that are low volume, but had real-world, human impact if they aren’t handled carefully?
These are the case types I identified with the social escalations team and analytics:
Trans & Non-Binary Usernames
Accessibility
Block Requests from Domestic Violence/Stalking Victims
Deceased Users
Development
These became the subjects of a branded soft skills series I called Handle With Care. I specifically wanted to create a series we could add to (and subtract from!) as needs changed. We’d attach these trainings to their respective process cards in the knowledge base, which would allow advisors to take them when they were most relevant.
I created a full project plan, with the plan to roll out one course per month for four months, and delivered a course template. Since all of them are low contact drivers, we couldn’t really use that kind of data to determine what the rollout order should be. Instead, I looked at what we currently had training resources for.
Since we had individual lessons on the actual processes of the other three types, I decided to start with the original contact, trans and non-binary usernames, and then the three following in order from least resources to most.
Here’s a look at the first course I created for the series. It includes an interactive block introducing a customer persona named Liam—so learners could create a tangible attachment to the person they were helping—and a snippet of a definition matching activity at the end of the lesson, calling back to earlier in the lesson when we had defined them:
Training demo
Outcome
The process card reached nearly 10X more advisors in the four weeks after the training than the entire year prior.
We saw a 30% increase in training forum engagement after this course.
“I feel seen” was a common refrain in the feedback we received.
The other three courses are still in the team’s roadmap, as they were postponed by competing priorities and limited resources.
Stock images within the training via Unsplash.com: @johnschno, The Gender Spectrum Collection