Employee Training and Development -Week 5

Adapting to the concepts of SMEs is the new way of embracing a new training practice that lifts instructional design to a level of standards and efficiency (Hodell, 2013). The roles of Instructional Designers (ID) and Subject Matter Experts (SME) have been challenged as to whether they should be made autonomous. However, the role of an ID is to analyze the training needs and to develop specifications of training course while a SME role is to provide his/her expert knowledge, offer an outline of training subjects, describe the required resources needed for training and assess the accuracy of the materials provided by the Instructional Designer (Pappas, 2013). The effectiveness of SMEs in training implementation is dependent on communication and commitment. L&D professionals need to communicate clearly the training expectations with the SME.