[Webinar] Designing an Engaging L&D Experience

Planning and executing an engaging and productive learning & development program can be challenging no matter where your team is located. In fact, a recent survey found that 45% of L&D professionals said driving overall engagement is their biggest challenge.

Adding in the complication of remote and virtual attendees makes engagement even more difficult. How can we capture the attention of a sea of silent black boxes?

We spoke to Michelle Futo, Lead Learning Experience Designer at Johnson & Johnson, for a recent webinar where she shared her tips and best practices to improve your learning & development programs.

Q&A With Michelle Futo, Lead Learning Experience Designer at Johnson & Johnson

Michel Benjamin: Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today. We’re here to talk about designing an engaging learning & development experience. We’re joined by Michelle Futo, the Lead Learning Experience Designer at Johnson & Johnson to share her knowledge and expertise on this topic. I’ll kick it over to her to introduce herself a bit more and share her background in L&D. 

Michelle Futo: Hello and thank you Michel. I am Michelle Futo, and I’m the Lead learning experience designer at Johnson and Johnson Global Services, coming to you live from Tampa, Florida. I graduated with a master’s degree in instructional systems and learning technology from Florida State University. (So go Noles! I know we have a lot of Noles on this call.) 

I’m so excited to share best practices with you and learn from you today. I’ve had about four years of learning design experience, both in the higher education setting, and in the corporate setting that I’m in right now. I started my career as an assistant to a team of 15. And now I am leading a team of four designers across the globe. 

To start off sharing some best practices and tips for success, I found success in pairing my education with my heart and my soft skills that I learned on the job to really help my career flourish and be seen as a leader within the L&D space really quickly. So, even for all of our newer students who are joining this industry, do not let your lack of experience hinder you. I think the more you compare what you’re learning in the classroom with real-world experiences, that’s what’s going to help catalyze you to the top of the leaderboard. So absolutely take other professional development opportunities such as this one to continue growing your network, and really learning best practices within the space. I’m really excited to be here today. Thank you so much, Michel, let’s jump on in and start talking about some great tips.

How is the L&D Team at Johnson & Johnson Structured?

Michel Benjamin: All right, sounds good. Let’s start at the top. Can you give us an idea of how the team at Johnson and Johnson is structured, I know it’s a little bit bigger than some other people might be used to?

Michelle Futo: Absolutely. I was previously a one-stop shop designer at the University of Tampa. And when I joined J&J, we now have four separate teams that focus on all aspects of learning and development. We have an information gathering team, a learning experience design team that I lead, a visual design team, along with a learning delivery team. And a really big positive to our team structure of having many teams is that this empowers every person to be a process owner, and lean into their strengths. My strength is learning experience design, so I’m able to focus solely on taking confusing content, and making it digestible and meaningful for our learners. I have an amazing visual designer who rocks out articulate coding, web design, all the things that I don’t pride myself on being, you know, up to speed on. 

And I think if you are a one-stop shop, and you don’t have the luxury of having each of these individual teams, I think if you’re able to grow your team in the future, really consider finding someone who has complementary skill sets. So, really not trying to copy and paste someone with your exact skills to grow your team. But find someone who really excels in areas that you are looking to grow in and figure out how you can amend your process to help you both be agile. So maybe you’re working on storyboarding, while they’re working on development for another project. And you might be able to turn out work faster and more efficiently by having those really specific process owners. Again, I used to be a one-stop shop. So we’ll also talk about ways that designers, one-stop shop, meaning, you’re gathering content, you’re designing, you’re delivering, you’re meeting with clients, all the things, I have some great suggestions for how you can make that process more efficient. But overall, if you are able to scale up, find people who can complement your skills, not necessarily who are exactly adjacent to your skills.

Michel Benjamin: All right, it’s good advice. Can you quantify the L&D program in terms of how many what you guys are producing over the quarter or a year?

Michelle Futo: Yes, absolutely. Not only do we design instructor led training and virtual instructor led training, but we actually offer 13 learning solutions that are customized to meet our client’s needs, and the business goals. So, those solutions range from job aids that we typically use for system implementation to animated videos to encourage utilization or adoption of a new platform or a new concept, or even microsites interactive PDFs. Again, we have a suite of about 13 options that designers at J&J get to choose from. And that really helps us select the best fit solution for our target audience. At any quarter, my team could be working on three to four projects a person, so that’s about seven to 12 learning projects per quarter that we’re completing for our clients. 

We do also see a lot of trends right now in the solutions that we are suggesting to our clients. So, everybody says I need an e-learning course, I need a trainer, I need these people in a classroom, but the truth is we know training is not always the answer. So we have to help identify which solution we can offer to get you to achieve your goals to help you change behavior, to make sure that your KPIs – your key performance indicators- are positively impacted. 

And so the trends that we’re seeing right now from my team are short, interactive, just in time solutions. Of course, we do get those requests for instructor-led training, or a digital learning or e-learning course. But we’re really seeing our clients want things that our audience can reference. So when someone is having trouble, rather than having to go back to an entire course, they can easily email to a team member a short explainer or demo video to help them. So the biggest trend we’re seeing is just in time learning as a favorite from our clients right now.

Tips & Tricks for Smaller L&D Teams

Michel Benjamin: That makes sense, given people’s attention spans in general, you know, it’s the version of an L&D TikTok. Okay, so let’s go back to the smaller organizations. You said you had some tips and tricks for that, having been in that role, what would you think is important to thrive there?

Michelle Futo: Absolutely. So I mean, as a one-stop shop, you are expected to wear every single hat. I called myself, the Mad Hatter of the University of Tampa because I was sharing our process, trying to help professors take their in-person courses and put them online. I was training them on our LMS (we used Blackboard at that time) going through their content, suggesting learning tools, helping them deliver the course. I was the project manager, the client exec, the account exec, a learning delivery manager, all the things. It’s a lot. So how can a one-stop shop designer work smarter and not harder, and uplift our community to help make our jobs easier. 

1. Grammarly: The first suggestion that I have for you is Grammarly. Grammarly.com is a really great resource, you can sign up for an account and that is going to help take care of a lot of the quality assurance that you’re going to have to be doing. So whether you’re designing a deck for an in-person training, or writing content for an E-Learning course, copy and paste that into Grammarly. They even integrate really well into Microsoft Office programs and Grammarly is going to do your quality assurance review, it can help suggest how to rewrite sentences for clarity. It takes that grammar hat off of your plate so you have one less thing to worry about. Let’s offload that and make sure that we have Grammarly so you can focus on the content, the design, and the experience overall. 

2. Templates: The next tip I have for a one-stop shop is to create templates. So let’s say you design something really fabulous for the Marine Sciences Department, and now you’re trying to work with the biology department. And you think “Oh, it would be so great;I could copy the marine project, take out all of that content and share it with biological sciences.” That’s amazing. But if you start to create templates based on your successful solutions, and you’re able to just reference those templates, download either a blank storyboard or some master PowerPoint slides, that’s going to help you get up and running a lot quicker than reflecting on previous projects, deleting all the content and starting over. Another great thing about templates if you’re a one-stop shop is that it could also help you share examples with your clients upfront or help them understand the learning experience right away. 

3. Process Maps: My other suggestion is to create process maps for yourself. Even though it might feel silly if you’re the only person doing the design, the dev, and the content intake, having an outlined process that you can follow for every single project is going to help you stay on track. If you have to go out of office and you need a colleague to step in, you can send them the process map and let them know exactly where you are in that process. And it also will help if you leave your position. Let’s all set up our organizations for success even when we’re gone. That way you would be able to say, “I’m sorry, I’m leaving. But here is a very detailed process map of how I’ve been doing design and dev at XYZ company or XYZ university.” That is going to be so appreciated. All of the templates my team makes, all of the process maps that they give me feedback on, it’s so valuable. And again, even though it’s just you, what happens if you’re able to grow your team in two years? How are you going to onboard that person to the process you’re using? If you can reference those process maps, that’s going to help that onboarding be a lot more seamless, and help your new teammate be more effective in a shorter amount of time.

4. Naming Conventions: Another suggestion is to create naming conventions for your products. We’re all guilty of saving things to our desktop, even though we know we shouldn’t. But when I am working on a project with clients or other collaborators, a naming convention is vital. Again, if you’re out of office and someone has to step in and help, or if you’re trying to onboard someone new, having a standard naming convention for your folders, your project titles will make it easier for yourself.  

5. Find Champions: Then my last big tip is to find your champions. So at the University of Tampa, I was helping professors migrate their courses from in-person delivery to online delivery. I totally rocked it out, obviously. And I had a fantastic professor in the College of Business, and his course came out really beautiful. He got great feedback from his students, and I asked him if he’d be comfortable being the face of success for me. So I was able to use his course as an example for my future Professor clients. You can  even ask your champions if they’d be comfortable meeting with potential clients and sharing their experience that they’ve had sharing the positive things that they learned from you, how you impacted their organization. 

If you don’t want to put your champion on the spot, you could also just record a quick five-minute call with your champion and interview them. Ask them how it was partnering with the learning team on this project? What success did you see? What did we help you with that you couldn’t do yourself? And if your champion is comfortable with it, you could share that recording to other potential clients so that they see success within their network.

What Business Problems are You Trying to Solve for with Your L&D Designs?

Michel Benjamin: What business problems are you trying to solve for when you create your designs? 

Michelle Futo: My fabulous team members right now are working on HR data privacy projects for our HR team. Some are working on system implementation for our finance team. The learning professional in your organization is needed to solve any type of problem and my one-stop shop people, I know that you are nodding at this too because you need to have Harry Potter magical powers to fix all different kinds of things. You might be asked to adjust the behavior of your target audience or create awareness around a new methodology, a new platform, a new mindset, or a new vision or mission. We might have to create training to empower people to make an action plan. The biggest key takeaway for what problems we’re trying to solve is that training is not always the answer. 

And so you need to feel really confident in yourself that you are the learning expert. And so while somebody might come to you and say, “I need an articulate course, I need e-learning on this new finance platform that we’re implementing.” As the learning expert, you ask, is an e-learning really the best way to give people support three months down the line when they’re trying to adjust their time entry and they took your course, three months ago? Probably not. So feel confident in your education, your understanding of the problem and suggest a learning solution that’s going to achieve this client’s goals. It might be an e-learning course, it might be a job aid, it might be a communication email that you can help your clients craft to solve the problem to write them in there. At the end of the day, try to not let the client dictate what you design. Instead, you need to rely on your design experience and knowledge to help them see how partnering with you can solve their problems potentially in a more creative way.

Michel Benjamin: Yep, and that makes sense also, as I’m in marketing, obviously not in learning and development. So I assumed prior to our conversations, that all L&D was a course. I think most business users you would be talking to would just assume, OK I need to train people, so we have to do a class. But the fact that you have 13 different  ways to engage with learners, I think that’s fascinating. And it’s probably just a communication thing. You know, if they don’t know there are 13 options, then they will never choose those options. So the L&D designers need to be really good at telling them there are alternatives. 

Designing an Engaging L&D Experience

Michel Benjamin: What are your top tips for designing more interactive and engaging experiences?

Michelle Futo: All right, y’all, let’s jump on in. 

1. Be Open About Expectations: I think in designing more interactive and engaging experiences, it starts by sharing your engagement expectations either at the beginning of the event, or ideally, if it’s a face-to-face or virtual event prior to the event beginning. You really need to make sure that your audience and your learners completely understand what they’re stepping into, and that they have clear directions for your expectations of successful engagement for this event. Providing a clear path for engagement will help motivate learners to engage, whether you’re in person, you’re virtual or you’re in an e-learning course, because they know what to expect and what you want to see out of them. 

So for example, if you are designing a large town hall team meeting that your supervisor asked you to facilitate, or  really large group meetings. In the calendar hold that you send for the event, share your expectations for being on camera or off camera. If you feel as though the event is going to be extremely successful by everyone being on camera, put that in the calendar hold, that is going to allow your learners to know ahead of time, okay, I need to be in a quiet space, I need to throw my blue light glasses and some quick lip gloss on, so I don’t look as tired. Let me throw a cardigan over my workout tank. By letting them know we’d love for you to be on camera before the event starts. Ideally, we’ll help people be ready to be on camera and be excited to engage with others in that medium. 

2. Add Details to Calendar Invite: Other things to include in that calendar hold include access or directions to the event, what to expect, you could even include your learning objectives, especially if this is a face-to-face or a virtual training session. Including those learning objectives is going to help people see what’s in this for me, even before that event begins, they’re going to know what they’re either going to learn after attending this event, what takeaways they’re gonna have after attending this meeting, or again, your expectations for what you’re hoping to achieve during this time. If there are any relevant attachments that you’re going to be sharing in your event or in your meeting, it’d be great to provide those ahead of time as well. So that way some of your type A learner can go through it, create their questions in advance and be ready to engage with you about that content at the start of the event.

3. Share How You’d Like Learners to Engage: Another great thing that you can do is share how you’d like your learners to engage. Do you want people to ask questions in the chat? Would you rather people unmute and ask questions as you’re sharing content? Do you want to wait for all questions until the middle you know little halftime break of your event where you can talk about sessions one on one, by sharing what you’d like as far as engagement within that meeting, or that event is going to help people know exactly how you’d like to engage. 
4. Use a Sharing Icon: Another thing that I like to do is include a sharing icon. So specifically for either virtual meetings or in-person L&D events, design an icon.  And in that beginning slide, let your audience know whenever you see this icon on the top of the slide, you know that I’d love for you to participate, share, engage with me. After I finish this slide, I’m going to ask you guys to share your thoughts.

That’s going to help them who are more introverted learners or learners who want to sit and process before they share, it’s going to give them a visual heads up that at the end of your slide, we’re going to ask you for their thoughts. And you might see some more success.  

5. Mural: An amazing, amazing resource for specifically Virtual Engagement is Mural. If you haven’t used Mural before, it’s fantastic. It’s an online collaborative tool that allows people to share thoughts and read other’s thoughts in real time. We’ve used it in a multitude of different settings, as icebreakers, as sharing meeting content, design, and development brainstorming meetings with clients. It’s really a great collaboration tool to help everybody share their thoughts, without unmuting or being on camera. So it might make all learners feel really comfortable sharing their thoughts in that space.  

6. Scoot: The last resource I’m gonna highlight is Scoot. It’s absolutely fantastic. It really is. I feel like an influencer, I should say this is not sponsored. But it really does feel like such a great way to replicate the in-person experience. 

I introduced Scoot to my global team of about 50 learning professionals earlier in the year. I used it for a fun reflection activity to connect colleagues from Manila in the Philippines, Bogotá, Colombia, and in the US, and we got awesome, awesome feedback. It was so much different and a lot more engaging and fun than just throwing everyone into predetermined breakout rooms, or staring at the stagnant sea of grids. If you are a little intimidated by it, I promise the Scoot team is going to help you get up and running as a host, share directions, share suggestions, and I really think if you’re looking for a way to bring a new flair to your meetings, bring a new flair to your events, leveraging Scoot is an awesome option. 

Michel Benjamin: Yes, for networking, socializing, moving around & engaging, we think Scoot’s pretty great, too. So I’m glad you agree.  That was a lot of really awesome tips. 

Cameras On or Off?

So you touched on this a little bit of cameras on or off. I know this is contentious,, but I just wanted to see if you had an official stance on that question.

Michelle Futo: I love that. Michel, this is a very hot take. I think the easiest, easiest answer is to say “Oh, we’d love cameras on all the time.” I’m not gonna lie, a year and a half ago, that’s definitely how I felt coming into an organization that does have a global culture. You know, I have employees all over. Our work from home experience is really different. I mean, it varies from home to home, state to state and country to country. And so I’ve actually learned since coming to J&J that requiring cameras on all the time is actually inequitable. Because we don’t know if your learner has the blessing of a private, quiet office space, we don’t know if maybe they’re sitting in a co-working space, or they’re at their dining room table with their partner who also has to use that same space for working. 

So number one, again, state the camera expectation prior to the event, that’s going to allow those that might have extenuating circumstances to ideally plan around being on camera. I would say cameras are not required, but encouraged as a blanket best practice because that doesn’t put pressure on someone who’s uncomfortable or can’t get their camera working to put that camera on. After sharing your camera expectations, again, encourage that use of reactions. So if you’re still sad, you know, I’d love cameras on, people are joining in their cameras off, really not try to force them to come on camera, but perhaps just use those reactions. You know, “Hey, Jack, great to have you on the call, can you flash me a quick thumbs up so I know that you’re ready to engage with us.” That really gives equity in the learning experience and helps all of your learners feel really comfortable.

Advice on Training the Trainers

Michel Benjamin: So even after so many years of hybrid or virtual work, this is more speaking to virtual training, but I think it could actually apply to both. But after all these years of doing it, we can’t just assume that people who are facilitating virtual, or who are in person engagements really have the skills that they need. So I’m just curious if you have any advice on training the trainers and if that has an impact on engagement specifically for your learners?

Michelle Futo: Absolutely Michel, such a great point. I mean, trying to keep up with virtual event press practices, that’s a lift in and of itself. I don’t know if anybody on the call has used, for example, Zoom breakout rooms, oh my gosh, very confusing, how to chat to this breakout room, and reassign people from one to the next. It’s a lot. And as a designer, it’s our responsibility to make sure that our trainers feel empowered, they feel prepared, and they feel excited to facilitate our events, or meetings, or town halls. Again, this isn’t just for designing the training session. It’s really any type of large group virtual meeting, how can we make sure that we train the people who are going to be facilitating to act competent. 

So my first tip is to write your directions as if you’re explaining to your grandma and your toddler at the same time. How is grandma who may be struggling, turning on the TV, going to understand how to use polls? How is my five-year-old going to understand how to turn on the annotation feature and erase annotations, once that activity ends? A lot of that comes and feels very second nature to us as designers, because we’re in these tools all the time, we’ve created the material to be facilitated on that tool. So we know all the ins and outs, but really try to put yourself in the experience of our trainer. Make directions as clear and specific as possible. If your trainer is comfortable with that feature, or comfortable with that platform, they’re going to skim through it. 

If this is their first time facilitating an event because they’re stepping in for someone, or they were hired three weeks ago, how can you write to make sure that there’s all the necessary detail so they feel extremely supported by the materials that you create for your trainers. Whenever we design an instructor led training or virtual training at Johnson and Johnson, a facilitator manual is a requirement as part of that package. Our facilitator manual has every single slide in one column, and all the directions for engagement for our facilitators and the other column that includes a script for what they should say, the cues for what they should be doing, hyperlinks for troubleshooting specific technology features, things like that. So it’s pretty lengthy and as a designer, that is a big lift that we have to work through creating not only our solution for our audience or learners, but also the solution for our facilitators. 

But it really does help make sure there’s a standardized, really positive experience across the board. I’d also encourage you to schedule a run through or a practice session with the facilitator. That’s a great way to help give them experience facilitating and presenting your content, and also for you to share some thoughts or suggestions. If your calendar is absolutely crazy, ask your facilitator to record themselves during the session. If you don’t watch it, that’s okay. But typically, when people are asked to record themselves, you perform, you step up to the plate, you treat it as real. And that’s a great way to give your facilitators a chance to practice on their own time. But also hold them accountable to make sure that they are in fact, practicing before the real thing.

Michel Benjamin: For sure, doing a run through is crucial. I wholeheartedly agree with that. I only do webinars, and I can’t tell you how many run throughs I do by myself, just to make sure the technology is working before the actual event. Because the speaker isn’t just focused on the tech, they need to be able to focus on the actual content they are presenting. 

Nicole added a comment which I think is amazing. She says if you have a team, it’s helpful to have a producer in addition to the facilitator and the producer deals with the tech, the breakout rooms, the monitor, the chat. And my team and I do that also. My colleague Clare’s the one who’s on the run through with me, and in case anything goes wrong, she can press the right button for me so that it all goes smoothly. So that’s a great suggestion.

Michelle Futo: Absolutely. If you have the capacity for a producer, fantastic.

How Do You Measure Success for L&D Programs?

Michel Benjamin: How do you measure ROI or success for your programs?

Michelle Futo: Absolutely. At J&J, I think a big blessing is that we are extremely corporate, we are extremely regulated, we have to send follow-up surveys for our learning experiences, all of our learning products, you know, everything has an automated survey attached to it. If you are a one-stop shop, sending a survey to your target audience or to your clients might not be something that you’re thinking about right now. But I highly encourage you to start implementing the best practice of sharing surveys with your audiences. That’s going to help you get great feedback on your learning experience, even on the process of partnering with you to design these various learning experiences. And that’s how we at J&J know that we’re successful. We make sure that our client states specific goals that we know we can achieve with this learning with this learning product. 

Sending a follow-up survey and really gauging that client experience and that learner experience is going to help you as a designer to feel like you’re being successful, and get some awesome feedback directly from your target audience. 

Something else that we do here that was new to me is hosting a retrospective meeting. This is facilitated by somebody on a different team, not necessarily involved with the day to day of the project. But the great thing about somebody else facilitating the retrospective is that we’re all able to share our thoughts on the process or feedback on the process, gauge satisfaction, but most importantly, identify action items to improve for the next time. At the retrospective meeting, our clients are invited, if we work with any subject-matter experts, they’re invited. 

The designer along with the design squad is also invited. So the person working on visual design, the person who worked on information gathering, the learning delivery partner, every single key person is invited to this retrospective meeting. And again, having somebody else facilitate that meeting lets me as the designer act like the client. I’m able to share my feedback on the process in these meetings just as much as our clients, our subject-matter experts, or my many design teams are, and that really helps identify ways that you know you’re successful, and process improvement. So I definitely encourage everyone to facilitate a retrospective meeting after you launch a project, after you facilitate an event or send a follow-up survey.

Michel Benjamin:  Alright, that’s all the official questions we have, time for Q&A. I really wish we had an icon for Q&A, like you mentioned in your engagement tips earlier. So please send in your questions. 

Other Recommended Resources for L&D Professionals

Clare: Hi, Michelle, Clare here from the Scoot team. I know you are the resource queen, so I wanted to know if you had any books or podcasts you recommend that help you keep up with the trends?

Michelle Futo: Wow, great question. I will keep this professional oriented because reading wise, big fan of YL literature, but we won’t go down that rabbit hole. I think an awesome book as well as aLinkedIn learning course on this content as well, is called “Digital Body Language” by Erica Dhawan. And it’s not only an L&D book, it actually isn’t even rooted in learning and development best practices. It’s all about how we can communicate digitally, and how we can better remove barriers based on our generational communication preferences to make sure that everybody is engaging digitally, in a manner that makes sense to you. 

The author shares a great example of a millennial, sending a huge message to their boss about edits to a project that they made, you know, hey, this happened. But here’s what I did to mitigate this problem. Seven bullet points, really trying to over explain, and the boss sends back the letter K, as a response. I’m a millennial, that means I’m getting fired tomorrow. So I’m not sleeping, I’m panicked, I did my best to mitigate that problem, and I get slapped with the letter K. I am so absolutely overwhelmed. And then when you see your boss the next morning, and you’re like, right, this is it, Michelle, goodbye, J&J. And he’s like, “Hey, great job with that.” So there are strategies to really make sure that you’re communicating effectively in this new digital medium. It will help your learners feel more connected to you, and your clients feel more connected to you. And she has some awesome takeaways that you can think about your own communication as well. So, definitely recommend regardless of your function, that you check out that book or her LinkedIn learning course, they’re both really awesome.

Getting Learners Motivated

Michel Benjamin: I know one of the questions that I had heard at the beginning that I don’t know that we necessarily touched on that I’d like to ask a little bit more about is motivation, like motivation being someone’s biggest challenge? How do you get someone motivated to be where they are? Is there a way to deal with that? Or is this just, you know, either you’re interested in being there as a learner or you’re not? 

Michelle Futo: Yeah, what you’re asking is, what’s in it for me? Why am I here? What am I gonna gain? And maybe it’s as simple as a slide that says, “What’s in it for you?” with bullet points about how you are going to positively impact their career development, their “on the job” skills, their ability to synthesize information, you know, we try to get fancy with really great learning objectives, Bloom’s Taxonomy, SMART goals, all these things that we in this space know are valuable and know are needed to design a great learning experience. But what is our target audience actually going to take away from this? Is it the fantastic learning objectives that we spent a week crafting? Or is it very simple?

So take your learning jargon, and make it extremely relatable for your target audience, to hopefully motivate them to engage with your course. Here’s what you’re gonna gain from this. Here’s why we designed this with you in mind. I think that’s probably my best tip. I’m not gonna lie, we’re experiencing that as well. But we’re definitely trying to experiment with our language or communication, even our illustrations and our graphics, making things a lot more colorful, a lot more visually engaging and enticing to encourage our learners to continue exploring our resources.

What is the Ideal Training Method for 5-10 Minutes?

Michel Benjamin: Time appears to be such a huge barrier for so many learning and development teams. Do you have any suggestions on how to train and develop associates that may only have five to 10 minutes? What delivery method is ideal here?  

Michelle Futo: How can we create those short just in time learning solutions? And again, I’ll go back as you are the expert in what your learner needs to be successful. So if you’re under a lot of pressure for an e-learning course, but it can only be 10 minutes of time…respectfully, it takes 10 minutes to read the directions and figure out how to navigate the course. That’s not really going to work. But what are other creative solutions that can get you that same end result that are quicker? Job aids are fabulous. Infographics are kind of a step of the job aid and that they’re visually aesthetically pleasing. 

There are a lot of interesting little areas to look at on an infographic. And you can hyperlink to FAQ articles, other existing training resources, and infographics you can save and download to your computer. So try to get creative with the solutions that you’re offering. It only takes about five to 10 minutes to read through a job aid, and maybe you structure a week of email releases. Every day of the week, you’re emailing a different job aid that focuses on a different topic. And it only takes about 10 minutes to read through. 

The other thing I encourage you to do if you get creative with your solutions is specifying seat time expectations. Read this job aid, it’s going to take you about five minutes, it’ll walk you through how to enter your time correctly so you get paid. Make sure that your learner’s know how long they’re expected to engage with this, and what they’re going to gain from this engagement. And hopefully that should help you.

Michel Benjamin: Yep, that makes sense. Love it. All right, thank you, Michelle, this was lovely. Thank you so much for joining us.  

Scoot is used by thousands of companies around the globe to power more engaging L&D experiences and training sessions. And it’s free to try! Learn more about our virtual platform here.