Job Aid Design

Employee & Organizational Development

Curriculum, Leadership, & Technology

100 Cumulative Hours

Overview:

Job aids are guides and visuals that serve to train, direct, and enlighten employees. Typically, job aides are filled with visuals to assist in the learning of new software, databases, or other systems that require step-by-step instructions. I developed and improved various job aides for the EOD, Office of Procurement, and the CLT. Each job aid was developed because of out-dated information, hard-to-see visuals, or hard-to-follow instructions.

Employee & Organizational Development:

One of the responsibilities of an EOD office GA/intern is to develop methods that support training courses. Job aides are important tools for training course participants to have as sometimes courses can be overloaded with important information. I regularly volunteered to design and improve job aides for the EOD, CLT, and Office of Procurement. In order to improve my ability to develop job aides, I spoke with Sheila Hall who is a SME on job aid development. When I submitted a few of the job aides listed below, she could see a remarkable improvement and thought my job aides were of high quality.

Operations Manual: The operations manual is utilized by new interns and graduate assistants. I volunteered to revise the office operations manual, which has become a yearly process. Upon reviewing the operations manual, I noticed several grammatical errors and out-dated instructions. The EOD office is constantly going under changes to increase office efficiency. I updated and added the following sections:

• Procedures for first arriving in the office;
• Phone etiquette and operation guide;
  
• Reserving rooms for training courses and other events;
• Sending training course email reminders;
• Setting up automatic course reminders;
  
• New employee orientation procedures;
• Adding users to BlazeView (online) courses;
• How-to process I Caught You Caring awards;
• How to access ADP for guests; 
• Accessing grades through the Oracle database.

This project was completed using Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office, and PowerPoint software to create a visually appealing and easy-to-follow guide of office operations. I have provided a copy of the operations manual below:

Manual:

EOD Business Operations Manual

Training Courses: Some of the more detailed training courses provide job aids to assist in the delivery of complicated material or material that requires multiple steps in order to complete a task. One course, ePro Requester & Procurement Guidelines, provided an expansive job aid that covered multiple topics in detail. Using the information gathered from the course evaluation surveys, an EOD representative contacted the instructor(s) responsible for the job aid regarding the negative feedback from the hard to read visuals and expansive nature of the guide. The instructor(s) were unable to improve the job aid before the upcoming training course so I volunteered to assist in the redesign and improvement of the job aid. I was granted provisional access to the ePro database, which I learned to navigate with the help of SMEs and self-directed learning strategies. I reached out to job aid SMEs and used resources such as the SHRM website and the ATD website. The job aid for the training course took a total of two weeks to complete. The length of the job aid was decreased by 5% of the original length. The visuals were larger in size and included text bubbles as caveats that included important information that could not be eliminated from the job aid but was not necessary enough to warrant an entire bullet point list. A copy of the improved job aid is included below:

Training Guide:

ePro Marketplace Guide

ePro Special Item Guide

Purchasing Quick Reference Guide

Compliance Modules: The annual compliance modules are required to be completed by all faculty, staff, and student employees. Compliance policies change and require updating every year. For the 2015 compliance year, I was put in charge of moderating the compliance modules which required checking the content to ensure that all the information is up-to-date and contact SMEs for assistance in updating the content.  One of the new changes this year was the anti-harassment training. VSU switched to a learning management system for the anti-harassment training called Everfi. I created a job aid to train faculty, staff, and student employees on how to access the Everfi training system and regularly volunteered my time to assist employees that were experiencing difficulties with the compliance modules. I have included the training aids below:

Materials:

Everfi - Faculty & Staff

Everfi - Students

Curriculum, Leadership, & Technology:

My first graduate assistant position was at the Curriculum, Leadership, & Technology department. As an I-O student, the professors used my skills to assist in the creation of a job aid for Blackboard Collaborate. The professors in the CLT tailor their classes to their online students and have been needing a platform with which they can better connect with their students and decrease the amount of University-related travel expenses for the department. A very small percentage of the professors were familiar with the current methods of online training and a need existed to fill the performance gap.

Blackboard Collaborate: The Blackboard Collaborate system is available for use across the University, as all courses are given a BlazeView module. As previously stated, a performance gap existed between the professors who were well-versed on online collaboration with students and those who were not. The department head put me in charge to close this performance gap. I spoke with SMEs and attended Blackboard Collaborate training courses to learn the more advanced skills. As the Blackboard Collaborate classes were notorious for low attendance, I was able to have a tailored learning experience to suit my needs in the creation of a job aid that the CLT professors would always have on hand. From the information gained from Vincent Spezzo with eLearning, I created a job aid that covered the basic Collaborate features and discussed innovative methods to use Collaborate in a more interactive way. A copy of the job aids can be found below:

Blackboard Collaborate Quick Reference Guides:

Guide 1

Guide 2

Guide 3a

Guide 3b

Guide 4

Guide 5

Web Conferencing Guide

Application: 

The training & development side of I-O psychology is constantly looking for innovative ways to teach knowledge, skills, and abilities. The use of job aids provides a visual how-to that illustrate procedures and navigate systems that would otherwise need intensive training over a longer amount of time. The aids, if current, will serve as a gentle reminder on procedures that may not be as familiar due to not being practiced frequently.

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