Action Mapping Designer

Overview

The Action Mapping Designer skill ensures training solves real business problems. It maps business goals to specific behaviors, identifies what learners actually need to know, designs performance support, and eliminates content that doesn't drive results.

When to Use This Skill

• Starting new training programs
• Auditing existing training for relevance
• Identifying essential vs. nice-to-know content
• Creating job aids and performance support
• Focusing practice on real job tasks
• Proving training ROI
• Ensuring training solves actual problems

Action Mapping Workflow

1. Business Goal: What should improve? (revenue, speed, quality, etc.)

2. Behaviors: What must people DO to achieve goal?

• Specific observable behaviors
• In job context, not classroom

3. Situations: When/where do these behaviors occur?

• Real work scenarios
• Triggers for behavior
• Environmental factors

4. Knowledge & Skills: What must people KNOW to do behaviors?

• Just-enough (not comprehensive)
• Essential only
• In context of situations

5. Training Solution: How to build knowledge for behaviors?

• Job aids vs. training
• Real practice vs. simulated
• Embedded support vs. classroom

Content Prioritization

Must Train: Essential for behavior, can't job aid Should Train: Important but job aid could supplement Nice-to-Know: Interesting but doesn't drive behavior

Focus training only on "Must Train"

Performance Support

Create job aids for:

• Complex multi-step processes
• Infrequent tasks (forgotten quickly)
• High-error tasks
• Reference-heavy content

Resources

Reference templates for:

• Action mapping worksheets
• Behavior identification guides
• Job aid creation templates
• Performance support design
• Content prioritization matrix
• ROI justification framework

Integration with Other Skills

• training-designer: Use together to design sessions
• training-reviewer: Validate materials
• training-content-creator: Generate actual content
• Use these alongside learning-journey-builder for complete programs

Best Practices

✅ Do:

• Focus on learner outcomes and business impact
• Use real work examples and scenarios
• Design for application, not knowledge recall
• Measure what matters

❌ Don't:

• Train what doesn't drive behavior change
• Use simulated practice over real work
• Over-design solutions for simple problems
• Ignore the business context