America’s Credit Unions Delivers High-Impact Member Service Training With Articulate 360

Die Problemlage

Train an entire industry

Training at America’s Credit Unions covers a diverse array of topics, including compliance, HR, soft skills, and—increasingly urgent—cybersecurity. Some topics demand more nuance and interactivity than others. Some learners respond better to shorter formats and video, while others, like credit union executives, have entirely different expectations.

And for the hardest topics—soft skills that involve real, nuanced human behavior—generic content simply isn’t going to cut it. If a course on communication is going to equip employees with tools to navigate tough financial conversations with clients, it has to feel real.

The team needs flexible authoring tools to create high-quality training content for all kinds of credit union employees nationwide.

Die Lösung

Customized training that suits both the topic and the audience

Jenny Saucerman, Online Learning Instructional Design Manager, finds that Rise’s templated structure makes it easier for team members who don’t have deep graphic design backgrounds to produce polished courses. “Rise provides a really nice way of communicating the material while scaffolding that graphic design component,” she says.

The team uses Storyline for the projects where custom design and interactivity carry real instructional heft. “Storyline is great in that it’s like a blank canvas and you can paint this masterpiece,” says Saucerman.

A shining example of this is a course Saucerman created on avoiding workplace gossip. For this, Saucerman built a video-based assessment in Storyline where learners watched a live-action gossip scenario and had to decide what to do next. The course then gave learners an opportunity to practice their skills—to respond to a real person’s behavior and microexpressions—in a low-stakes environment before actually encountering a situation on the job.

That same philosophy drove the project Saucerman’ is most proud of: a course on difficult member discussions. In it, learners navigate animated character scenarios throughout the course, then test their knowledge in an exam with live-action video scenarios. “I wanted them to feel what it feels like to be yelled at by someone, to see if they could keep their cool and remember what they were taught in the course,” says Saucerman. “I was able to invoke those feelings by using the tools that were available to me within Storyline.”

Menschliches Potenzial freisetzen

Better training for a future-proof sector

With Articulate, America’s Credit Unions has scaled a complex training library to meet national demand. The team has steadily grown its cybersecurity catalog in response to rising industry demand, and plans to keep expanding it, so that credit unions are always ready for what’s next.

When asked what words she’d use to describe Articulate products, Saucerman uses “ubiquity” and “support.” Articulate’s ubiquity in the industry means the knowledge base is deep. And when she’s filed support cases, she’s received fast, substantive responses.

The community dimension of Articulate 360, E-Learning Heroes, has also proven valuable to the sector. When Saucerman has a question, she often turns to E-Learning Heroes and almost always finds that someone else has already worked through it.

Engaging with these tools, she says, has even helped Saucerman grow in her career. She arrived at America’s Credit Unions in 2018 as a novice instructional designer. She used Storyline’s templates as her starting point. Over time, she began to understand how those templates were constructed, then built outward. Saucerman credits Storyline with taking her from novice designer to one confident enough to showcase her work at industry conferences.

America’s Credit Unions uses Articulate 360 to bring compliance, soft skills, and behavioral simulations to credit union employees nationwide—and develop course authoring expertise.