Here’s something to file under the ‘Must Read’ category for instructional designers and anyone else tasked with creating training; a great list of questions to consider before you start working on any training program.
NOTE: These questions originally created and shared by The Training Doctor were offline for awhile but now they’re back. You can find them here: Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3.
21 Questions to ask before Designing Any Training Program
This is a three part series of posts from the Training Doctor.
There are a lot of different causes for performance problems and most of them can NOT be solved by training. These questions can help you identify the source of a performance problem and avoid building a training program that is doomed to fail from the beginning.
Mike Taylor 
This is great! I’m getting my MA at CU Denver in Instructional Design. (new student as of Spring 2017) We just started discussing this in my “Design and planning” class. This will be so helpful as I’m learning.
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So glad to hear that you find it useful Michelle. Please don’t hesitate if there is every any way I can support you with anything else.
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Small world. Michelle, I’m doing the same program also at CU Denver and I agree, this is a great resource!
Thanks, Mike. I first got to know you during an eLearning Guild Spotlight webinar earlier this year. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
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I would add “What is the cost/benefit of creating this training?” Often times we have requestors who want us to create a 20 minute training for a large population of learners (>100,000) to solve a problem that occurs a handful of times every 6 months. Maybe there is a better way to convey the information or…crazy thought…maybe we should fix whatever is causing the issue to arise so that no training is needed.
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Yes, absolutely. One of the questions should be. “Is this worth pursuing?”
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This is such an important reminder and honestly, one of the biggest blind spots in our industry.
Too often, training is treated as the default solution, when it should be the last validated option. What I really like here is the shift from “What training do we need?” to “What problem are we actually trying to solve?”
In practice, most “training problems” are actually process issues, environment constraints, lack of clarity, weak reinforcement, or misalignment between expectations and reality. And no amount of content will fix that. Even when training is the right answer, the real impact rarely comes from the course alone. It comes from what happens around it: manager involvement, reinforcement, application in context, and clear performance expectations.
From a Mexty perspective, this is exactly why interactive learning matters. Not because every problem needs more training, but because when training is relevant, it should help people do something differently, not just consume information. The goal is not to generate more content faster. It is to make it easier to build learning experiences that support decisions, practice, feedback, and transfer into real work.
That is also why needs analysis matters so much. If we skip that step, we risk producing polished learning content for the wrong problem. If we do it well, then tools like Mexty can help teams move faster toward something much more useful: training that is aligned with a real performance need and designed for actual behavior change.
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