Would You Share Your New-Hire Training With The Whole World?

Yesterday I saw something amazing. It was very good work, engaging, and well designed. I’m sure that newly hired employees learned a lot and it really helped with the “on-boarding” process. (What the heck is “on-boarding”, anyway? Is it like the airplanes “pre-boarding”? When you fire them, is that “off-boarding”?) I digress.

The amazing part was that this training is available live on the web for anyone to look at. Brandon Carson (of Sun Learning Services) was giving us an online demo as part of the e-Learning Guild awards for this year. He casually mentioned that we could all go and look at it — no password, no special access, no restrictions. Gosh. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a big corporation willing to share that stuff out. Would yours?

Here’s the description:

Presenter: Brandon Carson
Title: Chief Learning Game Officer
Company: Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Description – We designed a new hire onboarding wiki that includes a social network-enabled website with custom profile pages, two immersive learning games, a rich-media Orientation e-learning Program, and other content relevant to streamlining the onboarding experience for Sun’s global new hires.

Authoring Tools – We used the Confluence wiki platform, Adobe Flash for the learning games, Orientation, and videos, and Articulate for the Benefits Presentation

Number of Students – The site is live as of 9/28, and will be accessed be every Sun new hire (~4000 people), as well as any Sun employee. The wiki site, the learning games, and all the other content are also available on the public internet for anyone interested in learning about Sun.

Time to Complete – 6 months

Problems & Challenges – We had to involve several stakeholders, including the CEO himself in the design and development. We also had to synchronize our efforts in Sun Learning Services with the HR process, as well as include all the regions spanning the globe in the development of the program. We also had to design and deliver the program to operate with a myriad of platforms and devices including Solaris, Windows, Macintosh and other OS’s. We were also introducing a new form of learning to Sun (“game-based” learning) by building two different immersive learning games.

Lessons Learned – We learned the value of testing on all platforms early in the process, we learned how to work with multiple vendors and internal customers to bring about the desired results. We also had to involve almost every business group from the CEO, to all the executive staff, to marketing, branding, legal, HR, and of course, all the global regions since we were designing for localization as well.