For this paper, imagine you are a corporate communication manager in a large technology company and have been assigned to inform your technical support employees about a new, ongoing training requirement. In the past, memos have been sent out to announce new programs, but leadership wants to create some excitement around the new training and has asked you to design more personal messages than a memo to spread the word. For your paper, you should come up with ideas for 2 or 3 messages that work together to explain the new training program. Details of the training program are provided below for your reference. YOU ARE NOT ASSIGNED TO CREATE OR PLAN THE TRAINING PROGRAM ITSELF as it has already been set up. You are also not going to actually be creating the messages you describe. Instead, think of your paper as a plan or proposal you submit to your supervisor for approval before these message elements are created. That means that if you are writing your paper directed toward the employees who will participate in the program, you are approaching this assignment the wrong way.
Your options for the message elements used to deliver this information include, but are not limited to
Videos
Infographics
Interactives
Web pages
Live presentation with slide deck
You can use a combination of the elements above, as well as other ideas you come up with. And your supervisor has instructed that somewhere in your plan should be a clear opportunity for training articipants to send feedback and ask questions about the new program before it launches.
Remember that the training program is already completely planned and designed, and your task is to plan a way to inform employees about it. Do not plan a training program in your paper. Your paper is also not intended to be the actual communication to employees. You are supposed to tap into what you are learning in class to plan messages to explain the new training program in ways that seem more personal (or maybe INTERpersonal) than a memo.
What should be submitted for the Week 3 paper is first an overview that explains in general terms your two or three message elements. Next, you should describe these message elements in some detail, especially in terms of what they would look like and how they will be created. You may even want to identify the tools you will use to create these messages, for example, PowerPoint or a video editor. Next, you need to justify why you chose these two or three message elements using evidence from the course text or other resources that you find. Somewhere in your message elements, you should identify and briefly explain a way that employees will be able to send feedback and ask questions about the training program once the messages have been disseminated. Keep in mind that you are supposed to tap into what you are learning in class to plan messages to explain the new training program in ways that seem more personal (or maybe INTERpersonal) than a memo.
In your paper,
Explain two or three elements in a “campaign” to communicate this information.
Describe your concepts as thoroughly as possible. Use a heading for each element and describe each separately.
Justify the elements in your plan in terms of why you chose them and why they will yield better outcomes than a memo would.
Support your justifications with evidence from class readings or other resources you find. Remember that your general goal here is to consider communication that uses technology to share information in ways that feel more personal than a text-based memo. You may include illustrations as well if this will help explain your plan or its elements more fully.
Describe how employees will be able to ask questions and share feedback about the training.
Please see the sample paper provided in the classroom for the way your paper should be organized. It is suggested that you use headings for these five areas to organize your paper.
If you submit a paper that does not meet the requirements of the assignment, you may be marked down and/or asked to submit a revised paper. In the past these have been common errors that students have submitted. Be sure you are not submitting any of these three things:
The plan for or design of an actual training program (the training program has already been designed.)
Direct communication with employees who will participate in the training program. (Your paper is more like a proposal to be approved by your supervisor.)
Actual message elements, for example a slide deck or poster. (You are just describing and justifying them. But in Week 4 of the class, you will actually develop a message element or two.)
If you are not clear on what to prepare and submit for this paper, please review this enter page and contact your instructor if you stiil have any questions.
The following is a summary of the training program that you may refer to in planning your messages:
This training is intended to keep technical support employees current with a frequently updated AI product similar to ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, or Google Bard (it is not one of these however) that your company sells and supports. The employees in this training program are the people who help your customers understand and use this AI product, so the training program is intended to make them knowledgeable about this AI product and prepare them to support the users of this AI product. Here are some details of the program:
There is a required quarterly full-day training that all technical support employees will participate in every February, May, August, and November.
In the other eight months of the year, all employees must complete one training credit per month from a selection of full- and half-credit training options. Full-credit trainings should take about four hours to complete, and half-credit trainings should take about 2 hours.
This new policy takes effect in the next quarter, and the first training covers the training program itself.
A website listing available trainings will be available at the beginning of the upcoming quarter. (You can use the URL techcorp.com/trainings in your paper if you like, but this is not a working link.)
