Avoid Disorientation in Your Move to L&D

For K-12 teachers and higher education faculty, the transition into corporate, government, or nonprofit learning and development (L&D) can be disorienting.

When the focus is no longer solely on creating and conducting great learning experiences, you may feel like a duck out of water.

A way to make sense of it all is to find a model that relates the big picture to what happens inside your classroom.

One useful model is ADDIE, an acronym representing the five phases of the instructional systems design (ISD) process: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation.

If you’ve been working in the classroom, you’re already familiar with practices related to the implementation phase of ADDIE.

You’ve probably also created materials and assessments and have some experience with development and evaluation.

During the analysis phase of the ADDIE process, the organization reports a business problem (e.g., a high number of injuries in a warehouse operation).

The L&D team explores the problem with the organization’s managers to identify affected performance measures (e.g., the number of hours lost per quarter due to injuries) and establish target performance measures.

The team delves deeper into work processes and practices relevant to the problem, identifies causes of the problem, and recommends appropriate solutions (e.g., a training program).

During the design phase, the team reviews work processes and practices to identify workplace behaviors required to get the job done correctly and, in this example, safely.

From these, instructional designers create learning and performance objectives indicating what employees will be able to do after completing the training.

The team carefully reviews these objectives to ensure they address the root causes of the business problem and support the achievement of the business goals.

In the development phase, the team creates the program, aligning content and activities with the target objectives, addressing the root causes of the business problem, and framing things in the context of the target business goal.

The development team also creates a facilitator’s guide, which is handed off to the implementation team.

During the implementation phase, facilitators bring the training program to life, supporting learners, and keeping everything relevant to the business problem, its root causes, and the target business goals.

They also align their own content presentations and learning activities with the target learning and performance objectives to support learners in attaining them.

This is the point where many of us coming from K-12 or higher education commit a professional misstep.

It’s easy to create lessons about the learning topic, especially if you already know a lot about it, and bypass program content, which was specifically developed to support the program’s learning and performance objectives, which, in turn, are meant to remediate the business problem and bring about desired business results, which were identified during the analysis phase.

In the fifth and final phase of the ADDIE process, the team evaluates the learning program’s effectiveness at multiple levels.

At the completion of the program, the team compiles data on program inputs, conducts surveys to measure program satisfaction, and administers exams to measure learning.

A few months later, the team measures how well the learning is applied in the work context.

A few months after that, the team re-engages with the organization’s management to measure the impact of the L&D solution on business goals and, where possible, calculate the return on investment for the solution.

If your entrée into L&D has been disorienting, reflect on the following: Can you reasonably predict that your classroom practices will directly support your learners’ workplace performance, leading to the reduction or elimination of the business problem and ending in improved business results?

If you don’t know what the learning and performance objectives, business problem, or business goal are, the answer is probably “no.”

Can you reasonably predict that your classroom practices will directly support your learners’ workplace performance, leading to the reduction or elimination of the business problem and ending in improved business results?

The purpose of most L&D solutions is to improve employee performance related to a business problem and improve business results.

This is the heart of the matter, and your role is crucial in making it all happen.

The statistician George Box said that “all models are wrong; some models are useful.”

ADDIE can be useful to you as a tool to ensure proper alignment as you create and facilitate L&D experiences.

You’re great at what you do, and you don’t have to become an expert in all the other ADDIE skill areas.

However, basing your work on what happens in each ADDIE phase will increase your own effectiveness and bring more value to your organization.