The SME Who Wants Every Word In
You are authoring a 6-module onboarding curriculum for a medical device manufacturer's field service engineers. The subject matter expert is the senior technical trainer, who has 22 years of experience and insists that every torque specification, part number, and troubleshooting branch be included verbatim because 'an engineer's life can depend on it.' The first draft is 340 slides for a 2-day course. The delivery constraint is 2 days, and the audience is new hires who will shadow a mentor for their first 90 days. The program sponsor has asked you to 'make it leaner' without specifying a target. A regulatory requirement mandates that certain safety-critical procedures be documented as trained, with a record of completion, before an engineer may work unsupervised.
1. How do you decide what stays in the course versus what moves to on-the-job reference material, and how do you handle the SME's safety objection?
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The decision rule is what must be in working memory versus what can be looked up at the point of need. Torque specs and part numbers are reference data: an engineer should know where to find them and how to verify they have the current version, not memorize them. Troubleshooting branches are different: recognizing a fault pattern and choosing a diagnostic path is a decision skill that benefits from practice, so those stay, but as scenarios rather than slide lists.
The SME's objection deserves a direct answer, not a deflection: agree that the specifications are safety-critical, then show that the risk is not inclusion but retrieval under pressure. A new hire who has 340 slides of specs has no reliable way to find the right one at 2 a.m. A controlled, versioned job aid is safer than memory. Propose that safety-critical procedures be taught to demonstrated competence (practice plus assessment) and that reference data live in a maintained, revision-controlled field app or card.
Concretely: identify the ~15 procedures the regulation names, build practice and assessment around those, and convert the remaining reference content into job aids indexed to the same procedure IDs. This gives the SME a guarantee that nothing is lost, only relocated.
2. Draft the structure of the leaner curriculum and explain how it satisfies the regulatory completion-record requirement.
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Structure (2 days, 6 modules):
- Orientation and safety frame (0.5 day): what can hurt you, escalation paths, where authoritative references live.
- Core procedures, practiced (1 day): the safety-critical procedures named by regulation, each taught as demonstrate → practice → observed check.
- Diagnostic reasoning (0.5 day): scenario-based troubleshooting using fault patterns, with the job aid in hand as it would be in the field.
- Reference fluency: a short module on locating, verifying revision, and using the field app.
Regulatory record: each safety-critical procedure gets an observed competency check with a pass/fail criterion, dated and signed by the assessor, stored against the engineer's ID. Completion of the e-learning modules is necessary but not sufficient; the record that matters is the observed check. The 90-day mentor shadowing is mapped to the same procedure IDs so the mentor's sign-off extends the record rather than duplicating it.
This satisfies the sponsor's 'leaner' request (340 slides to roughly 90 minutes of instruction plus practice) while making the regulatory evidence stronger, because it records demonstrated performance rather than slide completion.