Interview Story - Accomplishment

I was working as a strategy consultant for “Deep Analysis” group. We specialized in using data and research to find opportunities for businesses to grow their bottom line and decrease costs.

I was tasked with taking over their new hire training program. This training program was designed to teach new graduates and career changers about the tools we used to find profit opportunities, as well as quickly develop spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel, and create effective Powerpoint presentations.

I saw an opportunity to redesign this training, so new hires had a deeper understanding and hit the ground running.

I sat down with the previous head trainer to review his materials and ask questions. I went page by page through the training manual and each of the exercises. Having finished the training 18 months before, I also reflected on my experience and talked with my former training classmates. Based on this research, I realized that too much time passed between learning basic concepts in the first few weeks and implementing them with our tools at the tail end of the program. This caused training graduates to have little practice applying these tools.

To fix this problem, I developed a daily staged approach. In the morning I would teach a concept. Then we ran practice exercises on the basics. From there, I would introduce our software tools and then run more real-life simulations.

I started mapping out daily outlines for these lessons, and developing important “keystone” exercises to further develop essential concepts. I shared these lessons with co-workers and my manager for feedback. They seem excited about this approach.

The training class started, and I started teaching the concepts. At first, the trainees seemed bored by the pace, so I sped up the training, and then needed to dial it back.

My trainees got frustrated by the real-world exercises. Often, there weren’t right answers, so they had to think about them in different ways. At first, I felt guilty about their frustrations. Then I saw how much they learned. So I kept going.

Their final training project was to run a client case study, based on everything they learned, from research and marketing to doing the work, and presenting to the ‘client’ (my boss).

My boss was blown away by the presentations. More importantly, when these trainees were placed in their home offices, the feedback to us from their bosses was great. One manager said our 2-month training saved her 3 months of “getting up to speed” that she faced in the past. This training is now being offered twice per year to dozens of new hires.