Over the past few decades the world of corporate training has radically changed. In the 1920s and 1930s, we put training in the managers’ hands. This meant managers had to roll up their sleeves, show people how to do their jobs, and give them ongoing support.
During World War II, the need to recruit millions of people into the U.S. Army led to the growth of skills testing, competency evaluation, and later formal instructional design. In 1954 B.F. Skinner wrote some of the first books on training, promoting the idea of small learning steps, questions and answers, and the ADDIE model to build high-fidelity training programs.
