Project Details

Learning Design

Designing a Course to Pass on Senior Smarts to Developing Workers in a Multi-Billion Dollar Water Utility

The City of Calgary | Water Services

The Challenge

  • A wave of retirements for senior managers and operators

  • A wave of new hires moving into higher positions faster and with less knowledge

  • As the Water system grew, managers and operators from three key areas (Production, Distribution Control, Engineering) had become less familiar with each other and their roles in operations and emergency response

  • How best to begin passing senior knowledge to new hires as well as connecting people across the Water System?

The Solution

Learning Design Process

  • The Manager of Training and Development and other Water Services managers committed major time and resources to design and offer a world class course (the commitment to have 140 workers in training for two days was huge)

  • Using cognitive work analysis approaches, I worked with 3 learning experts from Production, Distribution Control and Water Engineering to identify key technical concepts but to also identify local knowledge and how it affects the other areas

  • Identified a large body of key technical knowledge for understanding the design and operations of the water system (so necessary as individuals moved faster into new roles)

The Learning Design

  • A modular approach to curriculum breaking the course into 6 modules taught across two days:

    • Module 1 An Overview of Calgary’s Water Distribution System

    • Module 2 System Design & Dynamics

    • Module 3 Calgary’s Pressure Zones

    • Course Quiz (required for Continuing Education Units for Certification)

    • Module 4 Key Operations, Events & Their Impacts

    • Module 5 Locating and Communicating System Data, Dynamics and Risks

    • Module 6 Analyzing Situations and Planning Action

    • Activity 6.3 Shut-Down Planning and Emergency Response

  • Focused on informal learning between new hires and senior workers as well as connecting individuals across the key areas – therefore we designed the class to have a diversity of participants and designed the course to have employees work together to solve operational case studies to grow informal learning as well as technical knowledge

  • Course participants were split into learning teams composed of members from each area as well senior operators/supervisors and new operators

  • Designed learning resources, presentation materials, a facilitation guide, and a standardized exam required for certification purposes

  • To support the three content experts and the training manager teaching the course, I (and my business partner) both co-taught the course to support the new instructors and to ensure adult learning principles were implemented

Outcomes

  • The two-day WATS 400 Course was held 5 times in the first year

  • 140 participants credited for required Licensing Continuing Education Unit’s

  • Course certified/accepted by Alberta Environment

  • Participants from the three key areas became professionally and personally connected (so important for complex daily operations and emergency response)

  • The technical knowledge of new hires increased as measured by the standard exam

  • The participants rated the course the highest of any course to that date (as measured by Water’s Training and Development Course Evaluation system)

I designed a big picture cognitive model with the water experts. It helped scaffold understanding by course participants of Calgary’s complex water system and its daily and long-term dynamics.

The big picture model helped the learners fit the complexities of Calgary’s water system (such as Calgary’s pressure zones) into a larger mental model.