Our designers primarily create technical skills training. Occassionally, we are asked to create soft skills and/or leadership training and our designers struggle with creating effective programs. Does designing soft skills and leadership training require a different skill set? Can anyone recommend books, articles or courses that we can leverage to increase our designer ability in this area?

Hi Dcradd -- In general, I believe the answer is no. A good instructional designer can quickly establish relationships with subject matter experts, research the topic(s), perform additional appropriate analysis, and design appropriate learning opportunities regardless of the subject matter.

As for the differentiation to which you refer for your specific situation, it really depends on how your instructional designers ply their craft. Are they actually designing learning, or are they usually really writing technical documentation with canned exercises? If it's more the latter than the former, your folks need to learn how to design learning; not technical documentation.

I don't know where your team is in terms of professional development/college courses they've taken, nor do I know of what they are capable because I haven't seen what they currently do, so I don't really know what specific advice to provide... except to say that you may want to analyze what they ought to be doing and compare it to what they're doing now, analyze that gap and start identifying ways to address the performance gap. That will lead you to appropriate solutions, or at least more specific questions about the gap so that others can direct you to appropriate resources.

If you would care to provide more details here about the team and what they've been doing and perhaps specific examples that explain what led you to post the question, it would be easier to pinpoint specific paths for your team to follow. :-)

(You said that they struggle -- can you be more specific?)

While the process involved may be the same, I believe there is a different "mind set" involved with "putting together" (as opposed to "designing") soft skills training. (I hate to use the words "designer," "instructional designer," "designing," etc. because there is no commonly used definition.) Some people are just better at one than the other; technical vs. soft skills and vice versa. If possible, I would seek out different people to put together the soft skills training.

The real challenge is to be able to put them together. For some odd reason, on the job we use them together but in the classroom we teach them separately. I think it's because it's easier on instructors and designers. It's just harder on students.

What I've found is that a lot of folks simply need to get out of the mind set that designing learning equals writing a manual. If that's where these people are, it's no wonder they're struggling.