What are the business objectives?

It is always important for corporate trainers and instructional designers to remember the guiding question: What are the business objectives?

If this sounds over corporatized, there’s an angle of business learning that you’ll want to consider: program participants who feel their training isn’t relevant to their work are unlikely to be as invested.

If you don’t know what the business objectives are and how they connect to your training, then your learners won’t either. This is not good.

It’s not an easy job, but instructional designers must strike the balance between the corporate strategy and the individual goals of employees in their programs. Some of this means connecting the right learners with the right opportunities before training occurs, but some of it happens in the design process.

How diverse is your audience in terms of business goals? Try to vary your learning design throughout a session such that it can appeal to a variety of those business goals. This will help maintain focus throughout your session.

What are the learning objectives?

This may seem like it should be an obvious question for instructional designers.

The reason it’s worth mentioning is that in the noise of corporate training marketing blasts, industry conferences, and blog posts, it’s shocking at times how much more focus is on learning methods and not learning objectives.

This may sound like a funny thing to read on the blog of a learning simulations company. We don’t think so.