Training Program Design and Delivery Checklist

Interview the requesting business owner and 2-3 SMEs to confirm the performance gap behind the request. The common failure here is taking 'we need a training' at face value when the real gap is process or tooling. Document current-state vs. desired-state behaviors.

Use Bloom's verbs that map to assessable behaviors — 'classify', 'troubleshoot', 'configure' — not 'understand' or 'be familiar with'. Each objective needs to be testable in a knowledge check or scenario.

Choose between self-paced eLearning (Articulate Rise / Storyline), instructor-led virtual (Zoom or Teams), blended, or microlearning. Match modality to the audience's time-on-job constraints — a 90-minute synchronous session is wrong for a distributed shift workforce.

Draft module-by-module flow with timing, screen treatments, and where knowledge checks land. Get SME sign-off on storyboard before you start building — rework after the course is built in Storyline costs roughly 4x storyboard rework.

Develop in Articulate Rise for responsive linear content or Storyline for branching scenarios. Set the SCORM 1.2 or xAPI publish settings to match what your LMS accepts before you start — switching mid-build breaks completion tracking.

One assessable item per learning objective at minimum. Scenario-based items beat recall items for transfer. Set the passing threshold (commonly 80%) and decide whether retakes are unlimited or capped.

Run the accessibility checker in your authoring tool plus a manual keyboard-only pass. Confirm closed captions on video, alt text on images, color-contrast ratios, and screen-reader navigation. ADA Title III complaints on training content have been routine for the last decade.

Pull 6-10 learners representative of the target audience. Capture time-on-task, where they got stuck, and whether the assessment items discriminated. Decide whether to launch as-is or revise based on pilot data.

Address the specific gaps the pilot surfaced — reword confusing items, re-record audio that timed wrong, fix navigation dead-ends. Re-publish the SCORM package with a new version number so the LMS doesn't serve cached content.

Upload to Cornerstone, Docebo, Workday Learning, or whichever LMS is in use. Test completion tracking with a dummy enrollment before opening to the cohort — completion-status bugs are the most common day-one issue.

Trigger the LMS enrollment email and post in the relevant Slack or Teams channel. Include the due date, expected time-to-complete, and the manager-visibility note so learners understand completion is tracked.

Run the synchronous kickoff via Zoom or Teams if the program calls for one. Record for asynchronous viewers, post the recording in the LMS within 24 hours, and capture attendance against the roster.

Pull the completion report from the LMS at the two-week mark. Healthy cohorts hit 80%+ by this point; below that signals either a content issue or a manager-buy-in issue you need to escalate.

Pull the not-started and in-progress lists from the LMS. Send a direct email to each non-completer and CC their manager. Escalate to the L&D director if completion stays below 80% a week after the nudge.

Pull the post-course survey results from the LMS or Qualtrics. Look at relevance, clarity, and time-to-complete. Surveys with a response rate below 30% are not signal — flag and re-prompt before drawing conclusions.

Pull the assessment item analysis from the LMS. Flag any item with a pass rate below 50% (likely a wording issue or content gap) or above 95% (likely too easy to discriminate). Compare cohort average against the 80% threshold set during build.

Survey or interview managers on whether they've observed the target behaviors on the job. Level 3 transfer is the failure point for most corporate training — completion and assessment scores look fine while job behavior doesn't change. Document specific behavioral examples, not satisfaction ratings.

Roll Level 1-3 data into a one-page summary for the program sponsor. Recommend whether to sustain as-is, iterate, or sunset. Iterate decisions feed the next planning cycle; sunset decisions need an explicit deprecation plan in the LMS.