I recently attended a presentation for training leadership. The presentation was supposed to be offering solutions and strategies for rapid training development and delivery. The strategy was to use a simple training development tool for the subject matter experts (SMEs) to develop and deliver training.

I wish this presentation had been with a live audience (it was delivered online) so that I could see the audience reactions and hear all of their questions. The presenters just devalued everything trainers and instructional designers do. No, I’m not being dramatic or even overly sensitive. When questioned about the SME’s lack of instructional skill set, one of the presenters suggested that the SME’s passion for the subject would overcome their lack of skill. That is almost a direct quote.

What I would hope to see are the training leaders in the audience shaking their head at that comment. Surely our training leadership knows what trainers and instructional designers do…right? I also have to question whether the publication that broadcast the presentation even understands what their readership does or is capable of doing. To me, the content of that presentation was ludicrous.

How many leaders left that presentation thinking they had just received a great strategy to implement in their organization? “Great! I can cut out the trainers and developers! They just hold the training up.” By the way, these presenters gave an average training development time as two to three months. Which surprised me since they didn’t clarify the scope or kind of the training this was based on.

It won’t be of any great surprise if I’m also a little critical of the product they were pimping. They knew enough to speak about reusable learning objects. But the tool was little more than a slightly glorified PowerPoint. I liked the look and feel of the finished product so I was actually quite interested at first. But realized as they went on that the content wasn’t catalogued or linked in anyway so if a developer SME made a change to Chapter 3 they would have to go everywhere Chapter 3 was and make that same change. And there is no visibility if someone else copied that Chapter 3 and used it in another lesson so it would likely not get updated. Also, it didn’t use a style sheet or anything so each developer SME could theoretically have slightly different formatting from each other (let alone wildly different formatting). Which as any SME developer will tell you, makes reusing difficult since you now have to reformat and validate all your content every time you use it.

But hey, just be really passionate about the content and it will all be fine. The fact that you have to reformat all your content when you go to create new training and check that the content is still valid and not contradicting anything else the learners are getting shouldn’t hold up the training at all. Hmm, I’d better stop. I’m getting snarky.

There will be people who read this and think I’m just bent out of shape about someone trying to “take my job.” I’m going to list just a few things instructional designers do to develop training content and a few things facilitators do to delivery training. Please feel free to add what I have not listed. Then feel free to forward this to your training leader.

Leaders, your instructional designers do much more than format the content and your training facilitators do way more than just tell people how to do things. They all follow instructional strategies that are designed to maximize retention. They:

• Chunk and sequence logically
• Create recognizable patterns for learners
• Edit OUT extraneous information so the learner doesn’t have to wade through it all to identify salient points (SMEs are famous for leaving in way too much information)
• Create measurable objectives so there may be SOME way to demonstrate success
• Create meaningful assessments that asses to the objectives and are more predictive of behavior
• Develop content that is truly re-usable
• Know the time of day and length of time your learners are at maximum learning potential
• Know the different ways people learn and how to create a strategy to address all those ways
• Know how adult brains are wired
• Know the many different barriers adults face when learning

There are entire academic programs dedicated to adult learning and instructional design. I assure you. We aren’t getting together all that time and finding new ways to format text.