Instructor-Led → Self-Paced
Build the training before the job exists.
A credit union created a Digital Banking Specialist role nobody had held before, with no course to inherit and members waiting up to three days for an answer. This is how the training was built from nothing — and later rebuilt as self-paced eLearning with scenario practice.
01 · The Challenge
A role that didn't exist yet.
Leadership stood up a brand-new Digital Banking Specialist position. They had written the job description. Nobody had written the job. There was no course to inherit, no agreed definition of a correct answer, and no way for a new specialist to find out whether they had handled a call well.
Meanwhile members with a payment problem were waiting up to three days for a resolution — usually because the first person who touched the case was not sure what to do next, and did something that created a second problem.
The hard part was never the software. It was deciding what a right answer looked like, and then making that decision teachable.
02 · The Move
Teach the decision, not the tool.
A tour of the support tools would have produced people who could click. The job needed people who could decide — under time pressure, with a member listening.
So the course was built around the five decisions the role actually makes on a live call, in the order it makes them. Every lesson maps to exactly one of them, so a learner always knows which part of the job they are building and why it comes where it does.
Verify → Read → Choose → Explain → Escalate. Five decisions, in the order a real call makes them.
03 · What Shipped
Five skills, one path through the job.
Built on the Training & Strategic Implementation team to the stakeholders' requirements: needs analysis, measurable objectives, SME-scripted content, job aids, a participant guide, and scenario-based practice on the live support tools. Compliance completions were tracked in Litmos.
Verify the member
Confirm identity before accessing account details — including what to do when the answer is close but not right.
Read the status
Locate and interpret the Payment Center status, so the next step is chosen from evidence rather than a guess.
Choose the right path
Select the next step without creating a duplicate — the single most expensive error in the workflow.
Explain the outcome
Give a clear answer and an expected timeline, in words a member can repeat to someone else.
Know when to escalate
Recognize when to resolve and when to hand off, before a small problem becomes a compliance one.
04 · Practice
Practice where the mistake is free.
Three members are waiting. The learner picks a call and works it from verification through resolution — and their choices about verification, evidence, and plain language move a trust meter in real time, with coaching after every decision. It runs as custom interactive HTML inside the Rise course, which is how it does something Rise cannot do on its own.
Every member is fictional
Names, balances, and case details are invented, and any call can be retried — so nobody rehearses on a real member's account.
Practice is signaled, never disguised
Learners always know when they have moved from learning to being assessed. Surprise is not an instructional strategy.
05 · Craft Notes
The details that made it hold up on a real call.
01
The five skills are named in the learner's language, not the org chart's. "Know when to escalate" is a decision. "Escalation policy adherence" is a binder.
02
Feedback answers the question the learner is actually asking — not "incorrect," but why the safer path exists and what it protects.
03
The desk quick reference was designed to be printed and kept at the workstation, not filed in a shared drive. A job aid nobody can reach is decoration.
04
Manager follow-through shipped with the course. Training that ends at the completion certificate does not change what happens on Monday.
Accessibility
Built to WCAG 2.1 Level AA: captioned media, keyboard-operable practice, visible focus, and feedback that reads correctly to a screen reader rather than relying on color alone.
06 · What It Changed
A three-day wait became a same-day answer.
Less than 24 hrs
resolution, down from 3 days
Built from zero
a brand-new role, with no training to inherit
The role had a training path from its first day, and the specialists had one definition of a correct answer to work from. These are design contributions — stated the way I would defend them in an interview, not the way they would look on a poster.
07 · The Rest of the Program
Read, download, or run the course yourself.
The self-paced rebuild is live and takes a few minutes to walk. The supporting documents are the ones a stakeholder would actually ask for.
About the branding. This began as an instructor-led course for Unitus Community Credit Union. The self-paced rebuild carries a fictional brand, Sample Credit Union, so the work can be shown publicly. The instructional design is the real work; only the brand is invented.
Let's work together
Have a role nobody has trained for yet?
That is the interesting version of this problem, and it is the one I like best. Tell me what the job has to get right, and I will tell you how I would build for it.
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