The Creative Training Techniques® Conference isn’t just for professional trainers. The strategies and insights you'll experience are transferrable across a wide spectrum of industries and can transform your professional life in unexpected ways.
In this post, we’ll hear from Angela, founder of UX.training and an attendee at last year’s conference who used creative training techniques to transform her business.
As Angela transitioned her company from a UX (user experience) consultancy to a company that trains UX professionals, she incorporated principles and techniques she learned at the Creative Training Techniques® Conference to develop what she calls the UX Competency Model™ for training.
The UX Competency Model™ is participant-centered learning in action—a participant-centered, evidenced-based method for training UX professionals on how to apply their skills and succeed in their careers. Sound familiar?
When she first started to develop training services for UX.training (then called Normal Modes), Angela relied on 300-slide PowerPoints and hours-long lectures as the basis for her courses. She recognized that while her content was good, her delivery sorely needed help.
“I felt helpless watching a room full of people fall asleep while I droned on reading my slides full of text and definitions,” she said.
An adjunct faculty member at Kent State’s Master of User Experience Design program, Angela initially came to the conference looking for ways to help build a community for her online master’s program students. She was talking too much in the lessons and the students felt isolated as a result of the online forum. She wanted to create more interactivity in her training by using games and fun as vehicles for learning.
“The conference did a great job of reinforcing the concepts in the workshops,” she said. “Repetition was helpful, and it was interesting to observe how other organizations approach formal training.”
When Angela applied what she learned at the conference to her online master’s program, the results were remarkable. Student satisfaction increased and the course received great reviews. She also observed greater connection amongst the students.
“You get to the point where people don’t even know they’re learning. They come to realizations on their own rather than being lectured to, and that makes it stick. By working together and getting involved in the concept, they really see how it works instead of just trying to conceptualize it.”
Following the success she achieved in her master’s class, Angela started applying the creative training techniques to her training courses for Normal Modes. Empowered by the newfound knowledge she gained from the conference, she rebranded the company as UX.training and its signature UX Competency Model™ was born.
A client who had attended previous UX.training courses said of the new approach, “This has totally changed since last time. I actually wanted to participate now!”
