Student Story: Lucas Ginani

My career started a couple of years ago when I moved to Ireland to work in learning development. For the last six years now, I’ve been working in this industry, which is my real passion.

In the last couple of years, I took a deep dive into instructional design. Now I’m working for an American engineering company that’s focusing data pipeline to build training for the engineering department. 

My role involves a lot of communication between my internal stakeholders and SMEs (Subject Matter Experts). I get the requirements for the training from these main stakeholders and from there I start to build my pipeline on how I will get the content, who is going to be my SME, and then I start to build the content that is relevant to the specific audience.

This content sometimes can go to different paths and different strategies from synchronous to asynchronous learning to live sessions. The majority of the tools that I use are Powtoon and Rise 360.

My daily focus is three things,

1. building content,

2. ensuring that I have all the SMEs content updated and really tailoring it to what I’m going to build ‘

3. and then of course ensuring that the stakeholders are happy with the deadlines and all the updates.

As a matter of fact, I did. One of the difficult challenges I came across when I started with this company was how to approach the SMEs and to consider that there are different ways for us to approach them and especially to get the information in the fastest way.

This is the biggest challenge, how can we get SMEs to really align with what we would like to get from them? On the other hand, how we are going to please the stakeholders with all this information within the deadline. This was one of the biggest challenges for me and one of the drivers for me to complete the course.

The second challenge was also how I could best tailor the learning content for my audience. This was actually covered in a specific module on the course. This module covered the knowledge, the learning format and the learning outcomes and how we consider the levels of learning to apply to the specific training that we are building.

The impact for me was strong for a lot of reasons. I saw this course as an opportunity to close a knowledge gap, I needed to become more specialised.

In the previous points, I mentioned the importance of the learning outcomes, learning objectives, how to communicate best with the stakeholders, and how to understand the analytics behind building the content. Those points were really important to me and now I’m applying with way more confidence than anything else.

Now I’m benefiting in many ways. I’m approaching my work way more efficientaly because I have the clarity on those points I mentioned. Not only that, but my manager also saw the benefits of my new approach in regard to the content that I’m building, it’s way sharper, it’s more precise, using Blooms Taxonomy, for example.

I closed the knowledge gap I had and now I’m on the next step, which is to become potentially a manager for the team.

In twelve months, it will help me be more efficient, and build on the quality of my work because of the knowledge I from the course I took with the Digital Learning Institute.

In the next twelve months, I’m going to be equipped with a better understanding of the tools that I’m using, a better understanding of the communication styles that I needed to take to communicate with my stakeholders and my needs and an understanding of what learning entails from a digital point of view.

I couldn’t find any course that was as precise as the Digital Learning Institute on the internet and it was also a recommendation. A very good friend of mine did the certificate a couple of months back and he warmly mentioned John as a fantastic facilitator.

Of course, the diploma qualification carries some weight in the learning and development world..

I totally recommend this course if you want to go to the next step of understanding the learning initiatives and the learning steps in digital learning design. If you want to become better at what you do, this course is precise in how they deliver things. Even if you don’t have the expertise and if you want to start a learning design career, the course is really suitable as well.

If you are thinking of becoming a better professional within the Learning and Development world or in the Instructional Design world you need to take this course.