The Problem
When I joined Optimize, new advisors onboarded through twelve hours of video — AI-generated scripts, AI-generated captions — followed by multiple-choice comprehension tests. There was no simulation of real tasks, no practice with the tools and documents advisors would use daily, and no mechanism to verify that knowledge had transferred before someone started making client submissions.
Shortly after being hired, I sat down with the support team to understand where new advisors were struggling most. Many patterns came up immediately, including the two featured in this portfolio: advisors didn't understand how sales tax law applied across provinces — many had clients outside Ontario but couldn't navigate the HST, GST, and PST distinctions — and advisors were mishandling personally identifying information in client documents they submitted through various applications. Both gaps were causing avoidable backlogs. Both had been present in the video content as passing mentions.
The Constraints
- The existing program was entirely passive — no interactivity, no task simulation, no formative assessment beyond multiple-choice recall.
- The free authoring tool that was in place was entirely insufficient — replacing the academy meant first making the business case to purchase Articulate 360.
- Effectiveness had never been formally tracked — any new approach needed a measurable baseline to compare against.
The Approach
I made the business case for Articulate 360, with the core argument that Rise's interactive block types and the ability to publish to SCORM would let us build activities that replicated what advisors actually do and begin building strong habits. The purchase was approved.
For tracking, I established support ticket volume from new advisors on PII and tax-related issues as the primary effectiveness metric, supplemented by error rates on submissions flagged by the support team. That gave us a pre-intervention baseline to measure against once the new modules went live.
For the two knowledge gaps specifically, the design choice was to match the format of the activity to the format of the real task. Tax policy is a reference problem — advisors need to look it up and apply it — so the learning activity is structured the same way: information presented as a reference map, then a check on whether they can apply it. PII handling is a perceptual task — you have to recognize what to redact and what to leave — so the activity puts a real document in front of the learner and asks them to do it.
What You're About to See