The gap between an approved plan and a running program is mostly sequencing. Teams that build the content first end up teaching things people already know. Teams that assign before they have built anything spend the quarter apologizing for broken links.
The order below avoids both. Each step produces something the next one needs.
1. Measure before you build anything
Start with a short assessment of what people already know. It changes what you build: part of what a plan assumes people need often turns out to be known already, and a topic nobody listed can turn out to be the real gap.
Two things make it worth running. It has to be short enough that people finish it: fifteen minutes, on a phone, with no scheduled sitting. And the results have to break down by team and by role. Example: "The average score was 62%" gives you nothing to act on, while "the Riyadh branch scores 40% on one topic and 80% on the rest" tells you what to build.
With Salalem’s AI add-on, the questions can be drafted from your own material, such as the policy, the procedure, or the course you already run. That takes care of the slow part, which is writing plausible questions and wrong-answer options. Someone on your team reviews and approves every question before it goes out.
2. Build against what the measurement found
Now build, and only for the gaps the baseline showed. A program scoped to three real gaps is shorter and cheaper than one scoped to the twelve topics the plan listed, and people are more likely to finish it.
You do not have to author everything. Some gaps are already covered by material you own, some need something new, some are best served by an external resource, and some only close through a person: a mentor, a workshop, a rotation. Choosing the right one per gap is the whole point. Treating every gap as a course is how a program becomes expensive and ignored.
3. Bring in the training that happens elsewhere
Workshops, conferences, job rotations, and courses bought from an external provider are part of the plan and belong in the same record as everything else. Schedule them where the rest of the training lives, say what counts as proof of completion, and collect that proof against the assignment so it lands in the record.
4. Assemble it into one program
By this point you have assessments, some built material, and some scheduled external activity. A program is those pieces in an order, with dependencies: the assessment before the content, the content before the practical session, the reassessment at the end.
Ordering matters more than it looks. A program whose pieces can be taken in any order gets taken in the easiest order, which is the one where the reassessment happens before anyone has learned anything.
5. Decide what is per person and what is per group
Two kinds of assignment, and using the wrong one is a common source of both overload and gaps.
- Per person: Driven by that individual’s assessment results and their role. This is where the baseline earns its keep: a manager can see what the assessment found and assign the gaps that remain.
- Per group: A department, a role, or the whole company, for training everyone in that group needs regardless of individual results. Policy changes and required training belong here.
Then reassess with the same instrument you opened with. Using a different one at the end makes the comparison meaningless, and the comparison is the only evidence you will have when someone asks whether the program was worth its budget.