HOW WE WORK

For many clients, it isn’t an either-or decision. Many medium- and large-sized organizations already have internal learning and development teams. These teams often manage multiple priorities across the business, balancing ongoing initiatives, stakeholder requests, and operational needs. This is where we come in! Partnering with a studio like Phoenix Learning Solutions provides focused, dedicated attention on a specific project. While internal teams continue managing broader organizational priorities, we concentrate fully on the defined scope. Rather than expanding headcount or stretching existing resources, you gain targeted execution without long-term overhead.

Development is intentionally designed to be streamlined and efficient on your end. While we handle the writing and buildout of the materials, your input is essential at key milestones. To keep the project moving smoothly, we require a single point of contact who has the availability to review content on schedule and respond to questions as they arise. This helps prevent delays and ensures clear, consolidated feedback. At the start of the project, you’ll provide any required source materials, brand guidelines, and visual assets needed for development. From there, your primary responsibility is reviewing content during the designated feedback windows outlined in the project plan. All review periods are scheduled before development begins. If those dates conflict with PTO or particularly busy periods, we can adjust them in advance to keep everything aligned. For a deeper look at how projects are structured, please visit the HOW WE WORK page.

The process starts with understanding your needs – both the needs of your business and the needs of the learners. Once needs and knowledge/skill gaps are understood, we will make a recommendation on the training modality (guide, course, etc.) that will be best for this content, though if you have a preference on what you’d like to receive, we will certainly keep that in mind. List your preference when you fill out our intake form. When writing content, we always consider adult learning psychology and methodology such as course length, engagement, making the training applicable to the learner (what’s in it for me, or WIIFM), gentle repetition, and reinforcement. You will have the chance to review all content and provide feedback at strategic intervals: storyboards, first look slides/pages, and final materials. Once all the work is finalized and approved, you’ll receive files that can be loaded directly into your LMS or used wherever you plan to launch it.

At this time, we only use Articulate Storyline 360 for eLearning development and PowerPoint for guides. We do not currently use eLearning development software such as Articulate Rise or Adobe Captivate. Custom graphics and animations are created in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and similar tools. Narration is created via AI tools.

The number of courses will vary greatly depending on the topic and your learners’ skill gaps. More straightforward topics like HR and compliance may only require one or two short courses, while more complex topics or ones that need greater reinforcement like soft skills or difficult software may warrant longer programs. You don’t need to know exactly how much training a topic will require. What’s more important is that you fill out our intake form with as much detail as possible. This will help us understand what will be most effective for your learners, and then, we can chat to decide how many modules make sense given the learners' needs, the topic, and your timeline and budget.

If the scope shifts during the project, we’ll first assess whether we have the capacity to take on the additional work. If so, you’ll receive a Change Request form outlining the revised scope and any corresponding updates to cost or timeline. No additional work will begin until the Change Request is reviewed and approved by both parties, and depending on the nature of the change, current development work may be paused during that review period.

No modality is better than another, though you aren’t alone in considering it! eLearnings and videos tend to have a higher perceived value, and it makes sense why: they are flashy, engaging, and fun to watch. But that said, each modality is simply a tool in the toolbox and should be leveraged as needed. Videos and eLearnings are great for building excitement but generally poor for showing steps in a process. Guides aren’t as flashy but are easy for employees to reference over and over again. eLearnings can be locked down when it’s essential for the business to ensure every slide is watched, such as in a compliance training. Guides move slower, so learning a lot of detailed information is usually easier. As you can see, there’s no better way – but there is a right way for each project. This is dictated by the topic, learner constraints like technology and time, the needs of the business, and even constraints like development time. Unless a topic is very simple, the best way is usually a multi-modality training, such as pairing an eLearning with a short reference one-pager or a short eBriefing with a longer guide. This type of approach gives you the best of both worlds. If you aren’t sure what modality is best for your topic, we can help you! Fill out our intake form with as much detail as possible so we have the best understanding of your needs and can help guide you in the right direction.

Courses can be published in a variety of ways depending on your needs! The most popular are SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004. Let us know what you need on your intake form so we can verify that we can make compatible courses for your LMS! If you aren’t sure, contact your internal LMS administrator.

At this time, we only create training in American English.