Has anyone seen ADDIE?

Training and Development (T&D) is the term used to describe teaching people new skills to increase their job performance. Typically training refers to teaching new employees and development refers to teaching current employees how to enhance their skills. Like every other term used by human resource development, there is no one definitive description used by all professionals in the field, but that is the gist of it. (Makes me wonder if they do that on purpose to confuse people in other jobs/academic fields knowing that only other HR people in the field will be able to figure out what exactly they mean, if they themselves know). But I digress, moving right along….

Training and development consist of five phases. Known as ADDIE in the T&D field, these phases are quite similar with the ones in HRD and OD (organizational development) but use slightly different names (keeping with my mass confusion theory). ADDIE is well used by HRD professionals and stands for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. Longer more in depth version of ADDIE involve multiple processes at each level and step-by-step instruction for each sub process.

Step 1-Analyse includes diagnosis the problem and gathering expertise to learn about the problem. If an HR person is brought in to determine why performance is down across the factory, all the HR expertise in the world will not help her determine what workers in the line actually do.

Step 2- Design involves the creation of workplace training or teaching that will teach new skills to address the problem. Teaching can be in various forms including instructor led or media led.

Step 3- Develop requires gathering and assembling the materials needed to conduct the training. This may be as simple as overhead slides and paper handouts or as complex developing an interactive computer simulation program. This depends upon the need of the skill to be taught, the background of you workers, and your budget!

Phase 4- Implement is pretty much like how it sounds and involves putting the developing teaching plan into action.

Phase 5- Evaluate, which may be one of the most important phases allows the HRD professional to access the value of the training, retention of materials and if the skills taught will actually help the problem diagnosised.

Evaluation can be tricky because participants can really like the training but not learn anything; participants may learn but the new knowledge may not have any effect on the current problem; or participants may learn a great deal but not like the training overall. So while ADDIE may seem simple to use, even too simple, the accuracy of the actions is quite complex.