Chesterfield Co. was a small loan office regulated by the Texas Office of the Consumer Credit Commissioner under Chapter 342 of the Texas Finance Code. Companies in this industry use loan origination software designed to ensure compliance with state laws and regulations.

Chesterfield’s software vendor transitioned customers from a decades-old, DOS-based product to a modern, web-based system before their training program was complete! To remain compliant with changing regulations, Chesterfield would have to migrate to the new system with minimal training support from the vendor.

To complicate matters, Chesterfield’s staff were of an older generation, and none had experience with modern computer technology beyond basic cell phone use. They did not own home computers, and the computer workstations at the office did not even have a web browser installed! Using the new web-based system would be a big jump for them; many were fearful and resistant.

I worked in operations at Chesterfield for several years and developed a great working relationship with the software vendor; their assistance with the necessary hardware upgrade was invaluable. Knowing I had training experience, the company president also charged me with training the staff on the new software.

Learner Analysis

I didn’t want to base essential training decisions on my current knowledge of staff computer skills, so I started fresh with learner analysis to gather insights and baseline data. As the office staff was small, conducting individual interviews was a realistic choice. I asked them to discuss their confidence level with the current software and to demonstrate what web-browsing tasks they could perform. From this, I concluded that I would need to embed activities that taught basic web-browsing, so they could confidently navigate the new system interface.

Evaluation of Available Training Content

Once I had written the instructional goal, performance objectives, and assessment strategy, I contacted the vendor to see the available software documentation. When I received the User Manual, I found it was organized by the interface menus, not office processes or tasks, as the training would be. I sourced the Manual for each process and created Action Maps that aligned with the new software interface. These Action Maps laid the foundation for the instructional materials.

The training event was quite successful. The staff quickly built confidence, and by the second day, they were independently working through the examples I had set up for each process task rather than us working them together more slowly as a group. As a result, the office transitioned to the new software ahead of schedule. Within two weeks, the staff were able to perform daily processes on the new software with the same speed and accuracy they had on the old system they’d used for decades. They continued to use the action maps from the participant workbook as job aids for tasks they performed infrequently. I was pleased to receive very positive feedback from the manager and staff.