Product Training for the Technical Expert

9Designing for Proficiency: Determining the Curriculum

Think about the best training class you’ve ever delivered. More than likely, it didn’t just happen the day the training was delivered. It started much earlier than that with a well‐thought‐out plan. In the learning industry, we call the process for creating that plan—or designing that curriculum—curriculum design. Curriculum design is yet another skill. It is a different skillset than facilitating effective learning, which is, as you are aware by now, a different skillset than product expertise. This book will not help you become an expert in curriculum design. However, there are three reasons why this chapter is very important for any good product facilitator.

First, as a product expert, you will get asked to provide content. You must be able to articulate how existing knowledge gets put into a teachable structure. If you can’t, you will get stuck pulling existing information, adding material you believe to be relevant, and calling it training.

The last chapter covered what may be one of the biggest insights required to deliver effective learning. Namely, you need to make sure that content is not king. That is the second reason this chapter is so important: it provides practical solutions to help put content in its proper place.

The third important reason for this chapter is that it breaks down the four levels and eight steps of the 4 × 8 Proficiency Design Model and explains how they work together to create effective learning. ...