Business Writing Workshop Redesign for Continuing Education/Employer Partnership

The Challenge

A community college’s continuing education department contracted me to redesign a business writing workshop for a national credit union client. Learners and credit union leadership had given consistent feedback that the existing training felt “too much like a class from high school,” heavy on grammar memorization but disconnected from real, on-the-job writing tasks. The college needed the workshop rebuilt to be practical, job-relevant, and responsive to client feedback.

My Approach

I started by meeting with the credit union’s business leaders to hear their concerns firsthand, ask clarifying questions, and identify the real gap between the existing training and what employees actually needed. From there, I:

• Conducted a learner analysis and established learning objectives directly from those early conversations with leadership, ensuring the redesign was grounded in their actual concerns rather than assumptions.
• Collaborated asynchronously with multiple stakeholders and department representatives who supplied real work scenarios for key roles.
• Built activities and scenario-based stories around real organizational writing tasks, revising quickly based on stakeholder feedback to reach consensus efficiently across a group with varied priorities.
• Iterated toward client buy-in, adjusting content based on ongoing input until leadership felt the training genuinely reflected their teams’ day-to-day work.
• Refined activities post-launch based on results from the first delivery, adjusting activities for clarity and impact.
• Created a reusable framework from the workshop design, making it adaptable for other industries and organizations.
• Developed full deliverables: a PowerPoint presentation with embedded activities, a participant workbook, and a facilitator guide.
• Adapted the workshop for virtual delivery, later used for an in-person session with a steel fabrication company and a virtual session with an insurance company.

The Outcome

The redesigned workshop received praise from both the leaders who observed it and participants in post-training evaluations. Employees reported that the activities felt directly relevant to their jobs and that they could apply what they’d learned immediately.

The credit union’s leadership said they felt heard and respected throughout the instructional design process. The workshop went on to run successfully for several years, with leaders reporting increased confidence and clarity in participants’ workplace writing.

The reusable framework allowed the training to be extended beyond the original client to two additional industries, with similar processes for identifying business-specific writing scenarios and activities.