One week from today, many of us will enjoy precious time with loved ones during Thanksgiving. The rituals of familiar seasonal foods and comfortable family traditions rejuvenate my spirit, bringing a calmness and contentment after such a demanding year. Although I am not a member of team turkey, I do enjoy a good holiday honey ham from time to time. However, with so much travel back and forth from Houston this year, Paul and I thought it fitting to each enjoy a Texas-sized rib eye as our centerpiece. Thankfully we have that choice, because not everyone can choose what they are eating for Thanksgiving or the company they have while sharing the meal.
The Thanksgiving holiday is still a good month away, yet I can't help feeling profound gratitude for today. This second round of chemotherapy seems to have much less caustic side effects that the last, so I can actually drink and swallow liquids, chew and taste food again, and even talk. While I still have heavy fatigue, the absence of the crippling pain I was suffering from over the past three months has brought me renewed vigor... enough to even go out and spend time with other people.
Although it stares us in the face every year, how we each think about change is maddeningly different based on our place in life. We see the seasonal cycles every year, passing now from Summer to Fall. Yet most of us don't think of Fall 2022 the same way we experienced 2020, 2001, 1993, 1976, 1963, 1945, or 1931 because of the current events of the day.
Creating training solutions for businesses usually brings up seemingly straightforward assumptions. For example, if you are addressing a quality issue in the manufacturing process, your assumption might be to just narrow it down to a materials issue or a labor issue. Unfortunately, this streamlined path to a common-sense answer is deceptive, and possibly even disillusion. Before taking action could deliver a crippling loss to your organization, read on to learn how models and simulation are used to test assumptions, plus what you can to further avoid the dangers of an echo chamber.
The human condition is frequently characterized as a journey down our own unique path. Each of our paths cross countless others during this lifespan, running parallel for a time as we quest for meaning together until the end of our days. The analogy of "walking a mile in someone else's shoes" is apt, because true connection comes through our deep understanding of one another. But the key obstacle to this understanding is fear, which we see manifest too often in the news, between political parties, or even among our faiths.
Creating inclusive training should be a top priority for every company focusing on training development. But what is universal design, and why is it important? Furthermore, how do you make your training catalog inclusive for users according to the most recent WCAG guidelines? Also, how do you account for accessibility in your development timeline? These questions and more will be answered in the first installment of this article series on accessibility considerations for instructional designers.
