Collaboration Leads to Standardized Onboarding Experience

The North American Manufacturing Learning and Development team at a multi-billion-dollar global automotive company reached out to Innovative Learning Group (ILG) for help creating a self-paced onboarding training curriculum for its new Talent and Development Leaders.

Situation

The Talent and Development Leader (TDL) is responsible for coordinating and recording the completion of training activities at an automotive company’s manufacturing facilities. They represent the assigned facility or facilities and work to consolidate the needs and inputs of all parties involved in delivering and completing various types of training within the facility.

Recently, the Company’s North Americas Manufacturing Learning and Development (L&D) team began addressing the gap in the support structure for this role. Because the TDL role is highly specified to the facility it supports, there was a need for a consolidated set of tools that any TDL could use. Instead of each TDL creating their own path forward, best practices needed to be documented and agreed upon, and institutional knowledge needed to be shared among facilities.

Solution

Job Task Analysis

ILG conducted a job task analysis to document the tasks a TDL performs, the frequency of the tasks, and the environment in which they perform the tasks. The research methodology included interviews with TDLs, managers, and members of the corporate L&D team; document reviews; and creation of an 18-question survey that TDLs completed.

The output of the job task analysis was a task matrix that identified the supporting knowledge, technology and people resources a TDL would need to complete each task. From there, ILG created a design document for a self-guided playbook.

Design Document

The ILG team and a subset of TDLs designed the individual elements that made up the self-guided playbook.

The details were captured in a design document, which included design considerations such as:

• TDLs do not go through a new-employee orientation; most learn by helping facilitate orientation sessions.
• Systems, processes and tasks can change quickly, and as TDLs use the materials, additional lessons learned may emerge. Therefore, materials should be easy to update.
• The TDL role requires constant prioritization, so materials must be easily accessible and digestible for quick reference during tasks like troubleshooting or refreshing knowledge.
• Effective communication across multiple groups is essential, along with understanding the network used to share information and ensure training completion.
• Soft skills are critical for many tasks, and related lessons are included throughout the curriculum.

Playbook

The team collaborated to deliver 48 documents — 41 of which were new — totaling 247 pages of material. One of these documents was a suggested learner journey designed to guide new TDLs through the materials, while also offering individual resources for existing TDLs to use as needed. The learner journey outlines three weeks of learning and application content for new TDLs.

The self-guided playbook provided three weeks of material for the new TDLs. Key items include: 

• Day 1 materials reiterate the role of the TDL, introduce facility types, the role of the union in daily tasks, and the network vital to a TDL’s success.
• The soft skills content features explanations of essential skills, real-world examples of application, and prompts for discussion with experienced TDLs about when those soft skills are crucial to their success.
• System and terminology documents include those used for planning and tracking learner completions.
• Materials and prompts localize forecasts and help TDLs identify the training needs specific to their facility, employees, and business goals.

Results

The client team and ILG saw immediate results even before the project ended. The client team was largely made up of existing TDLs fulfilling the subject matter expert (SME) role, and in doing this work, TDLs began to share their institutional knowledge with each other.

For example:

• One of the TDLs had created and been using a networking tool that the team found helpful and wanted to adopt immediately.
• The TDLs were also able to share scenarios and identify best practices together, which largely became the content of the soft skills activities. Not only did these scenarios highlight the similarities in the TDL role, but they also allowed the team to tease out any topic or process that was specific to their facility. The activities, then, required new TDLs to go and discuss the scenarios with experienced TDLs and start the process of sharing institutional knowledge among the roles.
• The group enhanced an existing document about different facilities by validating or providing information about facility type, location, and headcount. The primary goal of this was to help TDLs identify which facilities might be their closest “peer” in terms of facility needs and size.

To learn more about how Innovative Learning Group can create custom learning solutions to help improve business results, contact us at info@innovativeLG.com.