Training Program: A Video Game Inspired Animated Training Program for New Supervisors at HRdownloads
HRdownloads Inc. is a low-price competitor in the HRIS SaaS industry that needed to transform its training library. I created a ten-course training program that uses video games as inspiration to transfer skills to new leaders.
HRdownloads Inc.
Problem Statement
One of the training catalogue's most used but aged areas was courses with skills for new supervisors. Many of these folks came from the front line and have limited to no real management training. The existing content in the library suffered from severe degradation across all quality dimensions. Simply put, the training was boring, looked extremely dated, and lacked many basic components of adequate learning design. You can see some examples of the old training in the case study about online animated training at HRdownloads located on the main portfolio page.
Solution Implemented
I performed a meta-analysis from leading organizations such as McKinsey, the World Economic Forum, KPMG, and Accenture to answer the question - what should be the optimal set of management skills for new supervisors in the 21st century? We then shortlisted a sample of about 25 skills and directly asked our member base what skills they would like to see from a new leader, amongst many other things.
After analyzing our survey results, we easily identified and validated our top 10 list. Below is a list of the courses in the program with some select clips. Full course descriptions with learning outcomes are available on my LinkedIn page under the projects section.
Supervisor Essentials - Building Your Team
Supervisor Essentials - Achieving Results through Negotiation
Supervisor Essentials - Exploring Your New Supervisory Environment
Supervisor Essentials - Having a Difficult Conversation
Supervisor Essentials - Learning to Let Go through Delegation
Supervisor Essentials - Developing Your Team
Supervisor Essentials - Managing Up
Supervisor Essentials - Prioritizing for Success
Supervisor Essentials - Taking Ownership
Supervisor Essentials - Understanding the Difference Between Supervising and Leading
The courses all follow the same structure: about 10 minutes of learning content and then 5 minutes to complete a video game-like simulation where the learner sees the results of their actions. Each course also has an exam focusing only on the learning content. The courses feature unique nameless characters like "your colleague" to provide a sense of narrative continuity without forcing the learner to take the courses sequentially to maintain narrative cohesion.
While our natively built LMS did not allow for personalized or adaptive learning, that was the next step before I left the organization. I wanted to build or buy a platform to develop a true "choose your own adventure" narrative universe using all existing characters, fictional companies, and events from the animated training programs. This would have acted as a capstone activity for the HRdownloads Academy offering that was also attached to this proposal.
Results Achieved
Similar to my Leadership Essentials for High-Potentials program, the program was performing above expectations. The 12-month average number of assignments per course for this program was 4390 assignments, with the maximum being 5556 assignments and the minimum being 3502 assignments - so there was a bit more variation with this program.
Colloquially speaking, clients spoke very highly about this program since it had a very high impact on many of their front-line supervisors. We were correct in assuming that many front line leaders don't come armed with much management experience so these skills were very high impact for their learners.
Please use the arrows to navigate through various screenshots of projects associated with the case study presented. Please reach out to me if you have any questions about the above.