Case Studies

Teaching a Team to Build Their Own Training, Not Just Deliver It

Client: Confidential (Global Engineering Consulting Firm)
Industry: Engineering & Consulting
Focus Area: Internal Capability Building

Audience:  L&D and Training Teams, Instructional Design Staff, Internal Enablement Leaders

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The Challenge:

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The organization had been delivering a set of five project management fundamentals courses for years, across a patchwork of formats: live classroom sessions with hands-on exercises, remote sessions with breakout rooms during the shift to virtual work, and a recorded slide-and-audio version built out afterward and hosted as an eLearning module. The eLearning version had been created after the live sessions already existed, retrofitted onto material that was designed for a classroom, not for someone working through it alone.

That mismatch showed up in real ways. Some employees who should have completed a 90-minute course were taking up to eight hours, opening it, stepping away, and coming back later, because nothing about the format was built to hold attention on its own. The courses also leaned heavily on subject matter experts to answer questions as they came up, which meant the material itself wasn't doing enough of the work.

The organization wanted the training to be more interactive and engaging without becoming more time-consuming to complete or maintain. But just as important, they wanted their own team to be able to build and evolve this training going forward, not depend on an outside vendor for every future course.

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Our Approach

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CK Digital treated this as a capability-building engagement as much as a course-building one. Rather than simply producing five finished courses and handing them over, we built the first course directly alongside the internal team, then gradually shifted more of the design and development work to them over the courses that followed, so the skills transferred along with the product.

We asked:

• What's actually possible here, given the tools and time available?

• Where are this team's existing strengths, and where do they want to grow?

• What does success look like when the training has to reflect this organization’s own context and processes, not a generic, one-size-fits-all package?

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That last question mattered. Off-the-shelf training wasn’t going to work for material this specific to how the organization actually operated. If something had to give, they wanted it to be the finish, not the time and energy spent building something that genuinely reflected their own context.
 

From Vendor-Built to Team-Built

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We helped the organization shift from depending on outside development to owning the process themselves:

✅  Course Development Ownership

Old way:  All five courses depended on an outside vendor for design and development, with no internal capacity to build eLearning independently.  
New approach: CK Digital built the first course using the standard subject matter expert and stakeholder review process, so the internal team could see the entire process play out and be involved from the SME and stakeholder side. For the second and third courses, CK Digital built the design document and the internal team developed the course themselves in Rise, with CK Digital guiding along the way. For the fourth course, the internal team built the design document themselves, with CK Digital reviewing and talking through it with them. By the fifth course, the team built it with minimal input needed, as they were fully up to speed.

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✅ Skill Transfer vs. Simple Delivery

Old way: The team was retrofitting eLearning onto content designed for live delivery, without deep experience in the authoring tools needed to do it well.
New approach:  Ownership shifted gradually and deliberately across the five courses, from full visibility into CK Digital’s process, to co-building design documents, to leading their own design work with guidance, to working independently. Each stage built directly on the skill and confidence gained in the one before it.

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✅  Content Structure and Engagement

Old way: Material wasn't built to be completed independently. Course length stretched unpredictably, and heavy reliance on subject matter experts for follow-up signaled the content wasn't self-sufficient.
New approach:  Redesigned the material to be more interactive and structured for independent completion, aiming to reduce the dependence on SME follow-up and give learners a more self-contained path through the content.

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✅  Defining Success on the Client's Terms

Old way: An external vendor engagement might default to matching CK Digital's typical client-facing production standard.  
New approach: Success was explicitly defined around effectiveness and internal capability, not polish, matching the approach to what actually mattered for training the organization would maintain itself.

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The Outcome:

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• The organization now has employees with direct, hands-on experience designing and building this kind of training, not just consuming a finished product from a vendor

• The internal team moved from a supporting role to leading role over the course of the engagement, building the final three of five courses themselves with CK Digital in a supporting capacity

• The organization is positioned to continue developing and updating this training going forward without depending on an outside vendor for every course

Bottom Line:

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By building toolkits directly into the learning experience for both learners and facilitators, CK Digital helped this organization turn digital coursework into real, applicable skills and make trainer-led sessions something any qualified trainer could lead with confidence.

The result was a more consistent learning experience for every team, a scalable model for future course series, and a stronger foundation for facilitators to build on.