EAC 581 Advanced Instructional Design in Training and Development When this project from which this assignment

t arose was first assigned, it completely overwhelmed me. It was as close to a capstone project as it could possibly be without actually being labeled a capstone. The idea was simple: create a new training course from scratch or take an existing training course and modify it to make it more effective. The execution of the idea was not so simple. In an ironic twist, one of my group mates was an Air Force ROTC cadet at NC State and it was he who came up with the project for our team. As a result, I had the unique fortune of combining my training and development education that I had been developing over the previous years with my knowledge and experiences from my military career. It allowed me to help the team by serving as a subject matter expert (SME) with regards to military information while also learning from others and applying training concepts and ideas to an already established program. This assignment was by far the most large-scale project Ive encountered during this program. Our group tackled 16 of 30 lesson plans from a more than 700-page document and used our knowledge of training and development to modify those lesson plans and improve their efficacy. As part of the project, our team had to conduct the analysis report that follows. No course design should ever be conducted without first conducting analyses of the audience, stakeholder needs, course content, or all three. Creating this analysis report was challenging, but rewarding. It was the first real-world analysis report Id done and it helped emphasize the constraints that training professionals can potentially face in the organizational world. Often, when working on imaginary projects, there is more leeway and obstacles are thought about and discussed in an abstract manner. For this project, there were real factors such as time constraints, limited information, and overarching military guidelines that couldnt be changed. Making our analysis report under these restrictions was eyeopening. As a result of the limitations our group faced, this analysis report was not as thorough as I would have liked. There are certainly holes in the analyses and information that would have made the analyses stronger. However, in retrospect, I believe we captured as much pertinent data as possible given the nature of our assignment and the one semester time constraint and assignment due date. I learned a great deal from this assignment and it gave me a much deeper understanding of training and development from a real-world, practical perspective.