Our team put together an e-learning module to introduce staff to the topic of unconscious bias that would then be followed up with a face-to-face training programme presented by a team of professionals from the Diversity & Inclusion department.
Click here to view the Design Document
Instructional Designer
Main e-learning developer
Instructional Design within the team;
Interviewing SME’s;
All Storyline development;
Prototype building using Balsamiq Wireframes;
All video conceptualisation, storyboarding, scripting, recording, and editing; and
All graphic design.
Leaders and hiring managers at an aerospace company.
Adobe Illustrator;
Articulate Storyline 360;
Animaker;
Audacity;
Well Said Labs;
Canva;
Google Slides; and
Balsamiq Wireframes.
An aerospace company in the US partnered with a team of Instructional Designers to design and develop a training program which will be used to train leadership teams at the company, with plans to roll it out to other employees later on. The training program had to focus on practising empathy and curiosity by leaders and hiring managers in their everyday work and decision-making practices. The training also aimed to focus on reducing misinformation and a lack of understanding of implicit/unconscious bias in leaders and managers during the hiring process and while working with a diverse group of people. The Training program was planned to initially be administered as a pilot program to a smaller group of individuals in leadership and team manager roles after which it was to be scaled up to cover almost 10,000 employees in North America. There is only one facility in Mexicali that will require a Spanish translation of this program.
The training program was sponsored by the CEO who announced that the company needed to re-energize its efforts regarding diversity and inclusion and proposed that all employees would be provided with the opportunity to participate in the "unconscious bias" learning program so that everyone can help lead the company toward more respectful interactions.
As Unconscious/implicit bias training is sensitive in nature, the team worked towards getting a Subject Matter Expert/s on board to consult with during the design phase for politically correct content and delivery methods.
The team worked directly with the Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) team Manager for all data requests (qualitative and quantitative) and interviewed other D&I members to get a clear understanding of the project, their expectations and how this training program would be different and more effective than past training on similar topics. The training intervention broadly covered aspects of diversity, inclusion and unconscious bias and focused on promoting diversity, inclusion and equity at the company and the community in general through this program.
The instructional design team worked on several iterations of training prototypes based on the information provided before the final artefact was developed. There were several iterations and the product prototype (training program in this case) went through numerous changes during the process.
We had a really big challenge finding SMEs to work with, given the time limit on the project and the availability of SMEs. Team member Jennifer managed to secure a few meetings with a lecturer at the university where she was also employed, but we were relying on her goodwill and had to still manage and rework information around her busy schedule.
Unconscious Bias is a difficult topic to provide training - we had to go back to our drawing board several times because we would realize that our own unconscious bias was in some way showing up in the course. This was especially true for the scenarios we had to create.
The training was initially aimed only at leadership and hiring managers, but we had to ensure that it would be a pre-training course that could be used when the rest of the 3000+ employees receive training.