Onboarding Training — Richard Washam

Fig. 1The Environment screen: an isometric server room with highlighted equipment. Clicking a highlight opens an explanation, and its ring turns green once opened.

Addison Group asked me to build a series of onboarding trainings for their sales staff. What they had was a set of PowerPoint decks that weren’t holding anyone’s attention.

The subject was the industries their recruiters sell into. One course walks through data center infrastructure — what an operating system does, what the hardware in the room actually is. Another lays out healthcare revenue cycle management as twelve steps, from patient scheduling through denial management. Sellers needed enough of both to talk to a hiring manager without bluffing.

I went through each deck and wrote a storyboard proposing an activity wherever a slide had been doing the work of a lecture. On the infrastructure course that meant putting learners inside the room: they click each piece of equipment to find out what it is, and the ring around it turns green once they have.

I built the course in pieces and sent each one over as it was finished, rather than saving it for a single review at the end. Seeing the format work on their own content gave the client ideas, and they started suggesting activities themselves.