Billions of dollars are invested in corporate training in North America annually, but the investment shows minimal return. While many corporate training departments claim to use an analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation (ADDIE) model as a basis for building training, in fact, the initial analysis step is often ignored or performed haphazardly. The distributed nature of many organizations is a further impediment to performing front-end analysis.
I suggest that if a method for a flexible and effective competency analysis (required to determine exactly what skills must be developed or reinforced) were demonstrated, this initial and critical step would not be overlooked as often. This research will conduct two online, asynchronous competency analyses (OCANs). Design-based implementation research (DBIR) methodology is used because of its appropriateness to real-world interventions and the alignment of its iterative nature with OCAN. It is hoped that the results can be used to encourage greater use of competency analysis in corporate training as well as to add to the literature on online group facilitation and consensus-building.
I want to try this process as a proof-of-concept with competency analyses of eLearning developers and instructional designers who work in distributed offices. I’d like to find out if the process can work, what obstacles there might be, if the quality of the analysis is similar to that produced by a face-to-face process, and how difficult it is for people to participate.