Map It: The hands-on guide to strategic training design

At this point, you should have a map with a lot of specific, on-the-job behaviors that people need to perform to reach your goal. But are all behaviors equally important? Probably not. Have the SME identify the actions that are most important. These might be actions that contribute the most to reaching your goal, are commonly performed incorrectly,

Here's an approach I stole from the world of interactive fiction. First, we add links to some important elements.

A practice activity as I'm defining it meets these criteria: Decision: The activity asks people to decide what to do, not show what they know. Context: The activity has people with names in a specific place, doing specific things. Realism: The context is the same as the learner's job. It's not a fantasy land or game show. The decision is one that t

From "We need training on X" to "We have a performance problem. Can you help?"

Example: Learning Zeko

Ask yourself, “Is it really this simple? What might happen to make someone break this rule? Is it always clear what you should do?”

This is a common mistake made by people who treat action mapping as a way to organize content. They don't plan to ask, "Why aren't they doing it?" so they don't use verbs. Instead, they just list “what we should cover.” Because they plan to skip the analysis, they'll create training when it's not the right solution, and their activities a

First, the name: "Action" refers to focusing on what people need to do, not what they need to know. "Mapping" refers to the visual way you can show how all the elements of the solution depend on each other.

Principles of the "stream of activities" approach 1. Activities help people practice making the decisions that they make on the job, in a realistic context. 2. Activities target common mistakes and support behaviors that will achieve the business goal. 3. Activities target specific job roles and levels of expertise. They aren't expected t