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Last week I was invited as a part-time teacher to provide compulsory courses for new staff. Here was something interesting that I didn’t anticipate.

What happened during onboarding?

My company is well-known for its onboarding and retraining program. We have a unique institution called “XXX University”, but it doesn’t work as a true university where everyone has the freedom to choose the program. Meanwhile, the mechanism of the institution is more like OJD (on-the-job development) program in Japanese corporations.

The framework of maintain the quality of courses is also well-designed.

• The luxurious classrooms are equipped with advanced broadcast facilities, expensive chairs as well as a devoted head teacher.
• New staff will attend a sequence of lessons that are taught by front-line specialists. Teachers can even get extra tuition fees during working hours.
• Part-time teachers are anonymously ranked by students while students must attend an exam after the course.

Despite the hardware and teachers, when I attended the training I found more than half of the students got sleepy and were playing phones during the lessons — not only on my lesson.

Why the course was considered boring?

The course was marked as a success because it guaranteed a high final score. However, the truth is that every staff can pass the exam without any effects from teachers. Meanwhile, a simple exam can’t prevent students from getting bored during the lessons. I’ll try to explain why students got bored.

Firstly, the hours dedicated to preparing the course were not as long as we thought.

• The syllabus and materials could be outdated and need to be reworked periodically. For example, it took me about 20 overtime hours for the knowledge base upgrade, but some teachers just reused the outdated materials without any checks.
• Specialists might not be trained and prepared as a teacher, most of whom can just repeat the text solely from the presentation.
• Feedback from new staff might not be applied because teachers will have been rotated next time.

Secondly, the scope of training can be ambiguous.

• The long-running workflow made it harder to find the value of a course.
• The ingenious new staff were capable of working independently but we treated them as babies.
• The organizer lacked knowledge of the course and the sequence of lessons was a mess.

Inevitably, the final results made everyone frustrated after the lessons.

How to keep the quality of a course?

As we have talked about above, everyone lost their way when they were enrolled in a long-running workflow. If I were the coordinator, I would do the following improvements.

• It’s not a thoughtful decision to compress fundamental and advanced topics together in a short lesson. Likewise, it’s more effective to provide guides, structures, and references for self-learning, while teachers can also collect demands and feedback from new staff before attending the class.
• The syllabus for lessons should be refreshed monthly rather than yearly, and it’s perfect for all staff to create an online knowledge platform for maintaining the materials.
• The part-time teacher such as a specialist should learn teaching and presentation skills consciously as only an interactive class can activate students’ interest during the class.
• The head teacher should improve professional skills, at least terminology and concepts.

Summary

Teaching is a key role in enterprise knowledge management. Even though the lesson was not as perfect as I expected, I refined the materials and gave pieces of advice to the head teacher, hoping the lesson next time would be better.