You're tasked to create a new training program by the executive leadership team. What pieces of information would you ask for first?
Developing a training program is a systematic, step-by-step process. The interviewer wants to learn how you apply your analytical skills in taking the first step of instructional design, setting the objectives of a training program. Executive leadership teams often set lofty goals that may not be realistic for training programs to achieve. Some of the data the interviewer will want you to identify are the overall business goals, the baseline metrics associated with these goals, and other factors such as time and budget constraints.
"Whenever executive leadership approaches me to create a learning program, I always start with the basics. First, I want to find out what the ultimate goal is. For instance, I will find out if it's simply to disseminate complex information to all employees or if we want to improve performance in a certain business function. Based on the answer, I can assess whether or not it's a problem that training can fix. Second, I need the audience. Who needs to be trained and why them? The next one would be time and budget constraints. How soon do we need to deliver the program, and what is the budget? Once I have the answers to these questions, I can take them away, run a deeper analysis and come back to leadership with a plan. Oftentimes, I will come up with a laid-out plan. But sometimes, I may come back to them with a training needs analysis that results in an action plan outside of training. This is usually more difficult to sell, but leadership needs to understand when training is useful and when it isn't."
