Instructional Design Portfolio
I’ve had the pleasure of both designing curricula as well as managing teams of instructional designers, building out the L&D roadmap for an organization, and working within cross-functional departments to help them assess high-level training needs and then create a training roadmap and develop and facilitate for their teams. I have worked with ADDIE and SAM models which have parallels with agile project management and product development. Audience needs are a central focus, with articulation of metrics and how they’ll be monitored. Bloom’s taxonomy of learner needs and Kirkpatrick models are also frameworks I use.
I highlight just a few of the curricula that I’ve designed for Sales, Client Success, Management Training, and traditional classrooms, below. Additionally, I have experience designing internal and external-facing job aids for healthcare and tech.
Sales Training designed by Kate Rado
Sales Training
Sales teams need more effective ways of connecting with prospective clients than the “info dump” that can often happen during cold-calling. Using the principles of Empathy Mapping, I designed a sales training for inside sales and sales teams when prospecting.
Communication Skills training by Kate Rado
Communication Skills Training
Asynchronous training developed for emerging leaders who needed communication and executive presence skills.
Healthcare
I’ve designed internal and externally facing training and job aides for healthcare startups (examples: HIPAA compliance, how to administer medications, assessing the risk factors for a heart attack). Click to download an example PDF.
Sales Performance Training
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A newly formed startup was largely operating from a place of training via shadowing, which, while effective in many ways, was highly time consuming for sales management.
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To avoid scripted sales calls, I developed sample case studies of potential client fits, mapping out their pain points and desired solutions to root sales training in how to speak to those needs in a more fluid way. I also looked at how we could better reinforce the product’s value proposition.
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Initial development started with a mix of shadowing, evaluating recordings of prior training, and then moving training into modules and beta testing with slide decks.
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Implementation occurred with a select group of sales professionals phased in based on their past experience (more experienced sales people, new sales people) to determine how the training would need to adapt to the different audiences of sales professionals at the organization.
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Post-training feedback was provided via comments and NPS scores. Ultimately it was determined that there would be a “base level” of foundational training for all new hires, with more advanced training breakouts for senior sales professionals that integrated coaching for targeted feedback. Overall sales increased from Q1 to Q2 by 13%, when training was implemented midway in Q1.
New Hire onboarding by Kate Rado
Software Training: Hubspot by Kate Rado
Merchant / Client Success
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Established Bay Area PR agency needed a training that would specifically help their merchants/clients to transfer the PR agency’s initial scoping and launch process to an in-house team. PR Agency requested help creating a largely “evergreen” training that could then be customized depending on the needs of the client they would service.
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After researching and meeting with multiple stakeholders at the PR agency, I designed the training around a series of conversations that the team told me they were having with most clients. This would make the “training” feel less like a training for the PR Agency’s merchants when transferring services to in-house.
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I met with different team members and we conducted “mock conversations” that were recorded so that I could capture how the flow of these conversations typically went. I also sat in on sessions with the PR Agency and their Clients and took notes. From there I was able to develop a series of conversations that could be adapted as training for the PR Agency to support their clients in the transfer + maintenance of PR work to the client’s in-house team.
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I completed writing and curating of assets and worked with the marketing team regarding how to best brand them. We also created a strategy for me to support implementation efforts until the PR Agency had had their first run through with a client.
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The Agency already had a dedicated Merchant Success manager who regularly followed up with clients who had completed their contracts to find out how they were doing and if there were any additional needs, including collecting ratings feedback. Merchant Success Manager reported that ratings (1-5 Likert Scale) had increased from an average 4.5 satisfaction to 4.7. Director of Client Success shared that the offboarding process was now more streamlined and efficient.
Leadership + Management
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Initially I was called to conduct values clarification and mission statement operationalization for a small leadership team within a larger tech firm. After holding a one-off workshop, the team asked me to create a management and leadership training that would include helping them to better allocate their in-house coaching staff to work with more teams through team coaching sessions. This training would primarily serve new managers, though some established managers would also participate.
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I had previously developed a competency-based leadership and management training and was able to quickly adapt that training content for this organization’s specific needs. The addition here was in thinking through how to structure and scale their in-house coaching staff to further support these managers. In-house coaches had previously only conducted 1:1 sessions and the goal was to tie the training and the 1:1 session work together, perhaps moving into group coaching as a way to scale the training’s impact.
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Development work took place for approximately 4 weeks, during which I met with different team leaders to assess their most pressing needs within their teams and then tie that back to the training that I had previously developed and would adapt and implement for this organization.
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I adapted leadership + management coaching training to be deployed in small teams that were a mix of different departments to avoid silos. We initially met for four weeks, 2 hours per week in-person, and then moved to remote work from there (1x weekly, practicum sessions that reinforced skills learned in the initial training). This allowed some managers to learn more coaching skills that would supplement the work of the in-house team, who moved to small group coaching sessions to support more people.
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NPS scores of 82%, with pre- and post-training surveys to assess participant’s expectations coming in and upon finishing the training. Post-survey results showed high satisfaction as reflected in the NPS score. Follow-up approximately 3 months later with an additional survey showed that managers were still utilizing the skills learned in training.
Performance Coaching
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I developed an end-to-end coaching training program curriculum that was based on a peer-learning, experiential, biopsychosocial model of coaching. From there, the curriculum needed to be developed to secure accreditation by the 3rd party International Coaching Federation. This training would need to not only meet the coaching competencies set by the ICF but also integrate marketing training for new coaches breaking into the market as well as alumni support for graduates.
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An existing training was in place and the design of this accredited training needed to include the experiential elements of that training, getting reductive with concepts so as to pull out specific skills that the ICF would require to be demonstrated. Additionally, evaluation criteria set by the ICF would have to be clearly identified with metrics showing how the organization met all training criteria. Finally, the training had to integrate the ICF’s requirements around training of in-house staff to be credentialed through the ICF, so scheduling of and preparation for that process was also part of the process.
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All existing training modules were categorized according to how they tied in to ICF Competencies. Scheduling and prep of all in-house staff was set up in a project plan to ensure they would be credentialed by the necessary deadline. A separate project plan was set for how to map all training components to ICF requirements, and then development was underway as the different pieces were recorded and organized into a formal document for ICF submission. This document had to outline all training goals, competencies, skills, assessment criteria, metrics tracked, audience skill levels pre- and post- training, the plan for how written and verbal feedback would be delivered and tracked. Separately, marketing training and alumni support training were developed and integrated into a self-paced Learning Management System (LMS) supported by live facilitation and informal peer coaching teams.
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Description text goes here
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The final accreditation application included all training exercises, time spent on each competency, and more—a 180+ page document that outlined the program’s curriculum in detail. The program’s curricula was accepted and accredited by the ICF. Following accreditation, graduates of the program could approach the ICF to apply for their individual professional credential. Three years after implementation of the accredited curricula that I designed, 99% of all program graduates who went to get their individual credential were able to secure their ICF credential.
Traditional Classrooms
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Students are able to not just comprehend literature ("What it says"), but to read a work of literature, and interpret one work through the lens of different literary theories (for instance, psychoanalysis, or post-modern theory, or feminist theory, asking "How would someone from X theory interpret this, and how might that be different than an interpretation from Y theory?").
To meet this goal, students need:
Practice with seeing a work from multiple perspectives.
Awareness of tendencies to "pick a position" and only write from that position, which creates bias.
Challenge: most students at the college level aren't excited about reading academic or scholarly works on literary theory or long essays. How can we help them to practice the skill in short exercises that will translate to longer written essays?
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I took a user-centric perspective in that I didn’t start with asking students to apply skills to scholarly essays/literature; I started with short spoken-word poems to garner more interest. The design of the curriculum flowed from this place.
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Share spoken word poetry videos on YouTube (Daniel Beaty, "Knock Knock"; Taylor Mali, "The Problem With Teachers"; Alicia Keyes, "POW") that are more likely to get student buy-in than longer literary theory essays.
First, analyze each spoken word piece simply by assessing what the central message is in its most reductive form. At the advanced level, this is typically easy for students (they've tested into, or completed pre-work for, this coursework).
From there, ask students to assess each of the spoken word pieces from different perspective: a feminist perspective, a republican or democrat perspective, an immigrant perspective, etc.
We also ask: whose voices are missing? Who isn't in the room?
For homework, students will compare and contrast the perspectives of two of the spoken word poets and turn in a short, 1-page composition.
Later in the semester, students will learn about one theory of literary analysis every other week, and we will turn back to the spoken word pieces and analyze them through a different analysis lens, each week.
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Training was delivered in-person to a classroom of advanced placement English students. In addition to the core curriculum, I needed to be aware of the needs of students who spoke English as a second language and those who needed accessibility accommodations.
Through implementation:
Students become more aware that "analysis" is another form of "perspective taking."
They can see the spoken word pieces from different perspectives, and this doesn't mean they have to pick one perspective and argue solely on its behalf.
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Evaluating their analysis capabilities: analysis of not just what is said, but also what perspectives might be missing, and this awareness helped students to think critically.
We know that a student is starting to gain more skills in this area when they are able to think critically about the perspectives that might be missing and are able to go beyond just "I agree or disagree with this perspective." This will show up in classroom discussion as well as in written essays where students write from different perspectives.
As a student's skill develops, they'll understand how two different literary theories might interpret the same work differently, and they'll access their own schema for this understanding when we talk about how two different political parties might interpret the same economic policy, differently.
A Few More Examples…
Management skills in active listening, and mirroring what is heard to ensure understanding.
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Learning marketing and promotion skills; self-paced e-learning modules in LMS.
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How to provide ethical referrals for clients in distress.
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For organizations and teams, a curriculum in learning resilience skills.
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Considerations for instructional design with SaaS.