A Conversation with Jessie Blum-Gabriel, Trakstar’s Education & Instructional Designer

Have you taken a course through Trakstar Academy? If so, you’ve seen the work of Jessie Blum-Gabriel, Trakstar’s Education and Instructional Designer. She’s completely changed how we do internal training here at Trakstar and how we help our customers get the most out of all of their Trakstar products, including Trakstar Hire and Trakstar Perform. She’s also shown us the possibilities with Trakstar Learn, designing beautiful, informative, and effective courses.

Jessie is also the mastermind behind many of Trakstar’s webinars! She designs the slides, helps facilitate conversations, and works hard to ensure everything runs smoothly. Without Jessie, Trakstar wouldn’t be the same.

Let’s learn more about her!

Can You Tell Us Briefly About Your Experience With Trakstar?

I joined Trakstar back in 2019, as a member of the support team, primarily working with Hire. I loved helping our customers learn about the products. I spent time outside of answering tickets to develop our support articles, create and host webinars, and create internal training resources. I ended up leaving Trakstar for about a year to pursue my graduate degree in Instructional Design, and I was delighted when this new opportunity showed up to rejoin and start creating some awesome training resources!

What Does Your Day-To-Day Look Like?

I spend most of my time researching, writing, and editing training materials – be that support documents, eLearning courses, or webinars. I also work across many departments – so I have a lot of meetings to keep communication clear with all of our customer-facing teams, such as the customer success and support teams, sales, and account managers, as well as product. It’s always a little different, and it’s always fun!

What’s Your Favorite Trakstar Memory?

My second first day at Trakstar – being welcome back to the team and feeling like I had never left! My colleagues are the absolute best, and always willing to step in to help when I need a knowledge gap filled or just some extra eyes on a project. I am so lucky to work with the best folks in the business every single day!

What’s Your Favorite Trakstar Learn Feature?

I love catalogs – they allow you to create a whole section of courses for your team to self-enroll in. The trainees can either self-enroll right from their dashboard, or you can share or embed a link to the catalog. As a self-guided learner myself, I love the idea of being able to go in and take a course whenever you want a little knowledge boost.

What Feature Do You Wish More People Used?

Learn allows you to auto-enroll users in courses by groups! We use this at Trakstar whenever we have a new hire – we put them into this specific “new hire” group, and they get enrolled in all of our onboarding courses. It’s so easy and saves so much time.

How Do You Edit Your Learn Courses?

I use Articulate Rise360, which is an authoring tool that allows me to create responsive, interactive courses. I start by creating an outline of the course content, then pull in any existing documentation or support articles we have, to fill in the details. I’ll often reach out to a colleague who is a subject matter expert to look over my outline and make sure I’ve hit all of the important elements!  

Once that is set, I begin to create the courses in Rise360. After a few rounds of review, I export it as a SCORM file, then upload it into our Learn account, along with a PDF cover slide I create in Canva or Google Slides. I always add relevant links or PDFs as handouts, too, so there are tons of resources, and it’s easy for anyone taking the course to find exactly what they need! Learn lets you put so many different elements together into a course, and I love combining these elements to make the courses as engaging as possible.

What is Your Favorite Course You Ever Created?

I create courses for both our customers as well as internal training for our own team. My favorite course I’ve created is an internal course called “Intro to the Industries.” It goes over the general landscape and HR world of performance management, hiring, and eLearning. This course was designed to help our internal team better understand how our products fit into the larger picture of the HR world. This, in turn, helps them better understand how our products can help make these everyday tasks easier!

It was so much fun to research and create these courses. They’re a great example of how product training is more than just learning how to use a specific product – this course goes over the bigger picture, and the goal is for our team to see how Trakstar fits in. We have every new team member take it!

Let’s Talk About Trakstar Academy – Why Do You Love It?

I mean, what’s not to love? The guided layout – the adorable astronauts – the awesome courses? I love it all so much. When I rejoined Trakstar, we were tasked with creating this extensive learning resource in two months – can you believe that? But we did it! We recently launched version two of Trakstar Academy, which features additional learning traks to help everyone better understand the products. I am super proud of the Feautre Traks – deep dives into everyone’s favorite features of our products. I learned so much putting it together!

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