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Competition Archives > 2005

In 2005, PacifiCorp (http://www.pacificorp.com/) and the Design and Development Division of AECT were pleased to offer AECT members an opportunity to participate in the second annual PacifiCorp Design and Development Award for promising instructional design research by graduate students working with mentors in the Design and Development Division.

The following three finalist teams advanced to the final round of the competition and presented their solutions at the AECT Conference on Saturday, October 22nd at 1:15 p.m. (Durango 1):

*Also won the award for the best solution presentation.

Each member of the 3 finalist teams received a competition plaque and team members who won the presentation round received additional ribbons.  In addition, PacifiCorp paid for the student team members' conference registrations and D&D/RTD luncheon tickets for the 6 student team members and the 4 judges.  PacifiCorp also sponsored a ?gmeet and greet?h at AECT on Wednesday evening prior to the presentation session for all participants.

In addition to the students and mentors, several others put in a great deal of hard work to make the 2005 competition possible:

2005 Problem Statement:

You work as a human performance and training specialist for a leading-edge electronics company, Lighting Inc., with offices in 23 states in the USA and in 13 other countries. The products that your company develops are state-of-the-art electronics products for the home.  The company has developed a reputation for being innovative by applying new technologies to create products that range from email-enabled sensors that send email to a specified address when particular events occur to medical monitors that record readings, develop histories, identify trends and send reports and alerts to selected email addresses.

The company takes pride in being the first to bring an innovative application to market but has recently experienced a series of setbacks due to competitors being able to find and apply new technologies in innovative ways ahead of in-house efforts involving those same technologies and similar applications.  The corporate leadership has decided to attack this problem on two fronts: (1) hire a number of young and very promising engineers; and, (2) create an advanced engineering design institute to reinvigorate the current engineers.  The plan is to provide two groups with the means to support these efforts and to evaluate outcomes after two years and again in five years.

The person responsible for the training effort has asked you to work on this project and assigned you to the task of developing a plan for assessing short-and-long term outcomes of the advanced engineering design institute, which is tentatively planned as a one-month long intensive, project-based training institute at one of the company?fs six regional training facilities.  Your task is to provide a plan to assess transfer of training and other beneficial outcomes that can be attributed to the advanced design institute. Your plan should include:

1. A short summary of the design institute, its overall structure, the training approach adopted, and the intended objectives.
2. A statement of the rationale for the institute and a justification for expenditures in support of the institute that identifies anticipated benefits, including new product development.
3. A description of the transfer of training challenges that arise in this situation, including those specific to a project-based approach.
4. A method to conduct pre-and-post assessments after graduates have returned to their workplace settings that addresses the transfer of training issues identified earlier.

Additional Information:

Lighting Inc.?fs corporate offices are in Atlanta, Georgia with 40,000 employees. The six regional offices have a total number of 27,000 employees. The breakdown is as follows:

Their 13 country locations employ a total of 7,550 employees. The breakdown is as follows:

Inside company headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, 40% of the employees are engineers. Outside of the headquarters, 60% of the employees are engineers with 40% support staff.

The increase in new hire engineering employees is estimated at 2 ? 5% with the 5% hire focused in the outlying countries.  The rest of the engineers will qualify for the institute.