Portfolio launch!

Alexandre Foisy-Geoffroy’s portfolio

This is the portfolio I have been meaning to create for a while now.

This is but a small sample of the (usually confidential) projects that I have had the pleasure of working on in my years as in instructional designer.

In my line of work, I have handled the following tasks associated with learning & development:

  • Training
  • Coaching
  • Instructional Design
  • Multimedia integration/coding
  • Needs assessment
  • Organizational Development
  • Change management
  • Choice, configuration and administration of a learning management system
  • ROI evaluation through KPI calculations that I personally automated

I have also been an active member of multiple communities of practice since 2013. Those communities of practice have mostly focused on organizational development, although they have also covered training and management in a significant manner.

Having had the chance to experience almost all aspects of learning design, except for graphic design and 3D modelling, I am looking forward to move upwards into a role focusing on strategy or management. This is where I shine.

At Belron Canada, when I helped the company’s largest province, Ontario, recover from a deficit to a strong profitability in the two years I worked for them, it was not purely because of my pedagogical skills. It was mostly through my skills in organizational development. I developed a network encompassing mid and high level management in Operations, IT, HR, Marketing, and inside the call centres. Not only did I create the training for the Ontarian customer service representatives, but I also helped retool the call centre training to bring it in line with the rest of the company. I made sure that marketing was aware of our whole sales process, so that all marketing strategies would align with our work. I made use of the new tablets that all service centres were receiving, and designed all the training for this exact screen size. I made the marketing department aware of our new LMS’ capabilities for training outside clients without giving them access to our internal documents.

Building those relationships within the company is what I do best.

And with those relationships, I can truly improve the performance of your teams, across multiple channels, with a measurable effect on your bottom line.

This is what you get when you hire me.

Photo by Zalfa Imani on Unsplash

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Training during the pandemic

How can we adapt our training to the ongoing pandemic?

Many industries have been affected deeply by pandemic, and the Learning & Development trade has been affected more than many others.

After 2 years of confinement, most trainers have realized that putting in-person training materials online does not work properly, but solutions are few and far between. Many teams do not have the capability to design quality asynchronous e-learning, and they might simply not have the number of learners that would justify such an expense.

I suggest three techniques of going forward to resolve those issues, depending on your specific needs:

  • Create instructions that can be followed on the job site
  • Use breakout rooms during webinars
  • Allow the use of search engines and video sharing websites

Create instructions that can be followed on the job site

For simple tasks, or tasks which can be broken down into small steps, you can make the training material available for use at the moment the learner needs it.

In the case of software training, especially if the software is created in-house, the ideal solution is to include instructions within the software itself. For example, a user could go to the Help menu, chose a task to perform, and the software itself will use tooltips to show the learner where to click in order to complete that task. You have probably seen this technique used by some websites when they add new features, and they tell you about them through the website itself. “Walkme” is an example of a software solution designed to do exactly that.

For manual labour, short instructional videos can be created, then made available on a tablet or computer near the work site of the employees who might need them.

For example, if your team designs a new method to clean a filter used in your manufacturing process, making the demonstration available any time a worker feels the need to watch it before performing said maintenance will reduce mistakes, and is likely to be much more useful than having the employee watch the same video at an unrelated time.

Use breakout rooms during webinars

As a trainer, when you transfer from the classroom to a webinar, you lose a lot of interactivity between you and the students. Also, it is much harder to realize when you’re starting to lose your students, even if their cameras are turned on. The connection between you and them is never the same as what it was.

This means that, if you attempt to use lectures to teach a subject, you will lose your students a lot faster in a webinar than you would in a classroom. The adaptation that will solve this problem is to use breakout rooms, a functionality already programmed into Zoom, Microsoft Teams and a lot of other videoconferencing software.

The way I handle breakout rooms is by giving the learners a question to ponder. Generally speaking, I ask them how they would apply what they have learned in their work. and give them a set amount of time to talk about this issue with a few of their peers (4 or 5 people).

To see an example where I use a breakout room, you can look at the PowerPoint presentation in my portfolio by clicking here.

Allow the use of search engines and video sharing websites

There is a secret that allows technical support to do their job, and support a large variety of applications that they never get to use themselves as a part of their daily jobs. Whenever you give them an error code, they don’t know what it means by heart. They Google it.

This solution does not work for homemade tools and processes, but for commercial software and machines, there is often a plethora of tutorials online, including many in video format, which will show how to perform specific tasks. The best tutorials, or at least the most popular ones, typically reach the top of the search results.

This means that, very often, the best training you could design is already available online, and creating it all from the ground up is likely to be a waste of resources. This is especially true of very popular software, such as Microsoft Office. It might be useful to curate lessons, or create some new lesson for a specific usage, however.

If you allow people to use the free resources to learn when they need to, it allows you to focus on creating the training that really needs to be designed from scratch, either to make it better, or to cover more pertinent subjects.

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The soul of a story

How do we write stories that move our audience?

Training modules are full of stories, from anecdotes to conversation simulations, and the training as a whole is often a story onto itself. Through it, the learners make sense of the notions being taught, and they become emotionally invested in the results you are trying to help them achieve.

While stories can easily be structured using the three acts method of Greek plays, or the hero’s journey from Disney movies, writing a good story is another topic altogether.

So, the question is: where can you find inspiration for your stories? How can you make them coalesce into something interesting?

Find something that matters

One important part of any story is that it needs to matter, emotionally speaking, to the person watching it.

The rule of thumb is this: if the story matters to you, or to the expert, it will matter to the learners too. Pick personal stories that have affected one of you emotionally and start with that. The emotions can be positive or negative.

For example, if you are working in healthcare, you might want to use a situation where a parent almost lost a child, or when the expert told a patient that she was in full remission from cancer. Don’t go into the improbable or overly dramatic, however. Ideally, the notions taught in this training would directly relate to the event in question. And help either avert the negative situation or make the positive situation possible.

Use convergence

The convergence of ideas is the key to original stories. No single idea is truly original by itself. No single idea can create a whole story.

It is the combination of ideas that make for a great and unique story. Let us take an example from my own literary writing projects. We start with 4 ideas:

  1. The characters line in a space station
  2. The society is a cultural hegemony: no cultural differences
  3. A planet under the space station inhabited by an alien lifeform that is close to reaching space travel
  4. Séances where the living and ghosts can spend an evening together, crossing into each other’s world

None of those ideas, by themselves, make an original story.

  1. This was done in Babylon V
  2. This was done in 1984, or Le Meilleur des mondes
  3. This is a recurring theme in Star Trek, the subject of their Prime Directive
  4.  This was done in Coco (the Disney movie)

However, if you weave them together, you get a story no one ever wrote:

The characters live in a space station where humans, a homogeneous cultural group who ignores its past cultural genocides which led humanity to hegemony, survey a planet and watch in fear as they realize that the alien lifeform below has the potential to reach for the stars, and perhaps, eventually, threaten humanity. This tempts many humans to consider genocidal action against the alien lifeform to prevent this possibility.

Within that society, some secret societies have harnessed the ability to contact the world of the ghosts. One of the two main characters die at the beginning of the story, and the other one is thrust into this occult underworld trying to contact her beloved.

Those storylines mingle as the hero comes to understand that there is a limited amount of soul stuff, or ectoplasm, in the universe, and the demographic growth of humanity is forever stunted by this limitation, lest humanity come to bear once again the birth of soulless humans, and the cataclysm that unfolded when that event first happened towards the end of the 21st century of the old calendar.

The alien lifeform below, however, seems able to produce its own ectoplasm, ever giving itself more soul to work with. A secret well guarded. The true purpose of those humans who wish to protect the alien lifeform is not a moral one. Rather, it is to enslave those beings, terraform worlds to make them fit prisons for them, and forever harness the soul stuff they generate to bring humanity forward.

The characters will navigate those conflicts and try to work their way towards a third conclusion, where humanity will establish contact with the alien lifeform and broker peace and collaboration instead.

The same goes for any story you write. If you pick a few common occurrences in your line of work, all of them related to what you want to teach, and bring them together into a coherent story, you will get a story that is meaningful, and that has depth in characters and storyline both.

Note that, as opposed to the example above, which is meant for literary fiction, your examples should be believable. They should also be applicable to the learners’ line of work.

If you wish to learn more about writing stories, I strongly suggest Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass. Simply listening to Neil Gaiman speak is a pleasure by itself.

Photo by Nong V on Unsplash

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