The Power of Make-Believe.
During my internship at FordDirect, I noticed a need to improve the communication and collaboration skills of the sales team. As a personal project, I decided to develop an in-person training program using the ADDIE model to continually refine the design of teaching sales employees how to communicate and collaborate using the popular tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons.
Design Problem
Due to the large scale of this project, I had to break it down into actionable steps. For the first step, I met with the Sales Manager to narrow down the design problem. The problem is that we want to increase sales at FordDirect, but we noticed that the way the sales team was communicating and collaborating was not meeting the standards of the Sales Managers. In order to rectify this, we want to implement mandatory training to teach these skills, and we want the training to be fun as well.
Personas
After identifying the design problem, I conducted interviews with members of the training and sales teams. I interviewed the sales team to gain insight into their personal lives, areas for improvement in their job, and their level of interest in the upcoming training. Through these interviews, I discovered that the sales team is interested in taking more risks during their calls, but they want to practice in a safe environment before implementing changes with clients. With this information in mind, I developed personas to guide the training development process.
Design Plan
After finalizing the design problem and creating the personas, I started working on the design plan. The design plan includes the design problem, personas, outcomes, assessments, and training modules. I aimed to make this design plan as comprehensive as possible since it would be reviewed by the subject matter expert (SME). The training aimed for learners to adopt two communication and two collaboration strategies. As it was an in-person training, I also included activities to encourage movement, such as guiding someone with a blindfold and having learners write examples of effective and ineffective communication on sticky notes and placing them around the room.
Evaluation Plan
After submitting the design prototype to the SME, I created an evaluation plan for reviewing everything that needs to be assessed before final implementation.
Design Prototype
After submitting my design plan and having it reviewed by my subject matter expert (SME), I created the design prototype. The prototype includes everything from the design plan in a visually appealing and correctly sequenced way. It showcases what the training will look like, what materials are needed for each specific module, outcomes, activities, assessments, and rubrics for each assessment.
Final Design
After reviewing the comments left by the subject matter expert (SME) on the prototype and evaluation plan, I made changes to make the information less distracting. I added simple pictures and reduced the use of clip art. This will make the information more conducive to learning. After making these edits, I submitted the final design for implementation after my internship ended.