Testimonial: training design at Solvay

Within the Peroxides department at Solvay, a major seminar for engineers is provided once every three years. The seminar is given by internal experts, who expressed the need to adapt the seminar and training material to get a more interactive, appealing training, with the possibility to prepare or review some training material online.

As training is not the core business of the internal subject matter experts, Solvay requested The Learning Hub to provide a skilled corporate learning professional to revise the training and training material, based upon solid instructional design and pedagogical principles.

After having prioritised the training material, we started a thorough revision of the first chapters. After each chapter, suggestions for improvement were discussed with subject matter experts, who gradually understood and integrated the instructional design and pedagogical principles. They thus became autonomous in reworking the material.

Some weeks before the training, a train-the-trainer session was organised in order to improve training techniques in the classroom. Our consultant also attended the seminar itself, providing continuous feedback to the trainers, and gathering feedback from trainees in order to evaluate the seminar. This turned out to be very useful.

The training appeared to be much more structured and interactive and trainees clearly appreciated the new approach and the build-up of the seminar. There is still some rework to be done, and room for additional improvement, but actually the trainers at Solvay are able to deal with those challenges on their own.

Today, we are setting up an online community in order to facilitate and pursue the conversation between our trainees, with the support of a community expert provided by The Learning Hub.

The support of Evy has been highly appreciated by our trainers; she managed to transfer her didactical know-how in a very efficient manner. Our trainers learned a lot and became self-sufficient in delivering more qualitative training and training material, which was the purpose of this mission.

 

Serge Lanhove

Head of Learning Europe, Middle East and Africa, Solvay