Interviewing subject matter experts can be both challenging and exciting. But to ensure successful training outcomes, IDs will need to elicit the information required by learners to perform their jobs well. This blog post will discuss five types of questions to ask your SME to ensure you create a good training program that yields significant results for the organization.
It is vital that you ask insightful questions of your SMEs so that you can understand the problem and create a task analysis. Before meeting with an SME for the first time, Read and re-read the SOP (Standard Operating Procedures). This will ensure you have a good understanding of what the client wants to accomplish. There are many important questions you will be asking the SME, but the most important question type you should begin with during your interview session is rapport-building questions.
1. Ask Rapport-building Questions
Your ability to build rapport can make a positive difference in your working relationship. Ideally, rapport-building questions begin after and during the time when you introduce yourself to the interviewee and discuss the purpose of your interview. Rapport-building questions shouldn’t come across as an intrusion into the SME’s personal life. Your focus should be on their general wellbeing and professional lives as it relates to the information you are trying to gather.
You will want to ask questions that help you get to know your SME better as an individual. Questions like:
- How are you doing today?
- Could you please introduce yourself? (Ideally, this question should come after you and any other interviewer has introduced themselves.)
- How did you arrive at doing what you currently do?
- How did you become so good at doing this task?
- How long have you worked at this job?
Spend some time getting to know your SME. Find common ground with your SME. If you find common ground, it could help you get to know them better. Maybe you have similar interests, or you find that you attended the same school. Your questions shouldn’t come across like you are conducting an inquisition, but if you show genuine interest and respect for your SME as a professional, they will warm up to you. How and if you build, rapport can make a difference in how they communicate their expertise to you during a meeting. Building rapport, in the beginning, can help you sustain a mutually beneficial working relationship with your SME throughout the entire duration of your project.
2. Ask Tailored Questions
You will most likely have a couple of templates and questions that you use to prepare your task analysis. However, it is essential to ask questions tailored to your client’s organization. Reading thoroughly through the SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) will help you frame meaningful questions and show your SME that you are prepared for them. Without adequate pre-preparation, you run the risk of asking your SME questions that the SOP already answered.
Your SME might consider such questions a waste of time and rightly assume that you are unprepared for the meeting. Not only can poor preparation affect your ability to build rapport with the SME, but it can also leave you feeling flustered as you continue with the meeting. Give careful thought to the tasks you will be performing a task analysis for. Visualizing the task or the situation might help you think of questions you would like to ask to help your understanding.
Do not feel you need to go through every question on your list simply because you have already scripted them. Sometimes during the interview process, an SME might answer a question further down in your list when answering an entirely different question. Other times, a question on your list might become irrelevant due to the information the SME provides. Reviewing your questions as you progress with the interview can save both you and your SME valuable time that you could both use for more relevant questions.
3. Ask Follow Up Questions
Follow-up questions are powerful questions. Beginning a question with, “Could you tell me more about…?” or “You mentioned…Why is this…?” can communicate to the SME that you value the information they are providing and that getting it right is important to you. There is no way to know what follow-up questions will arise until you interview the SME. You will most likely generate these questions while listening attentively to your SME. They might say something that will prompt you to ask you to probe deeper with follow-up questions to understand the task better.
Sometimes, you might need to get your SME to revisit a specific answer so he can provide more detail, additional details, or further clarification. Another way to generate follow-up questions is after concluding the interview. When reviewing the recording or transcripts of your interview with the SME, you may find that you need to clarify something that you don’t quite understand. It is important to raise any questions you may have with SME. You don’t want to make any assumptions about the learners, learning environment, or the task when the facts are available. You also don’t want to waste time creating a task analysis based on wrong information. You can add follow-up questions to a new list of scripted questions for a future interview or via your SMEs preferred mode of communication. Follow-up questions help deepen your understanding of the task.
4. Ask Dumb Questions
These might be the most important types of questions you ask. They can include scripted or follow-up questions. No one likes coming across as stupid, and it is okay to ask questions that help you understand what the learners are required to do, even if they sound lame. The good thing is that your SME is unlikely to tell you it’s a dumb question, and hopefully, their poker face is top-notch, so you can’t read their non-verbal cues.
If asking dumb questions makes you uncomfortable, remember that you are not the expert. The SME is. You don’t know what the SME knows, and the SME doesn’t know how to design instruction or learning experiences that will close the performance gap at the organization.
Often, experts don’t make the best teachers because they might be so competent that they can’t articulate the exact processes or steps they follow to complete a task, especially if some of the steps are cognitive. It is the responsibility of the instructional designer to elicit the necessary information that learners need to complete their tasks. For instance, if you were preparing a job aid for a foodbank where learners need to know when to accept or destroy donated food items, you might need to ask your SME, “When should an employee decide to reject donated meat? You might assume the answer should be obvious. Everyone should know to reject meat that appears spoiled or has an offensive odor, right? Aside from the bad smell, other cues could include water crystals in the package, indicating that the meat had thawed before the donor refroze it or meat showing freezer burn.
Ask your questions even if you assume the answers are apparent, especially if they help you better understand the employees’ tasks. You don’t want the employee to relearn what they already do well. You also don’t want to skip important information where learning is needed. Asking dumb questions may help you uncover meaningful insights into the task and design instruction in a way that enhances the learning experience.
5. Ask Great Questions
Few things beat the feeling you get during the interview when your SME tells you, “Now, that’s a great question.”
SMEs appreciate when you ask questions that communicate to them that you are demonstrating empathy by listening and trying to understand the organization’s pain spots and the challenges the learners face.
You get to hone your ability to ask great questions by being an attentive listener and putting yourself in the real learners’ position. Asking great questions communicates to the SME that you are fully engaged, and it will help the SME feel more engaged as well. Don’t get hung up on trying to generate great questions. What is considered significant by one SME might not be regarded as great by another SME. The important thing is that you build rapport with the SME and get all the details you need to create the task analysis. With due diligence, any one of these five types of questions should get you closer to your goal.
Putting it all together
Be ready to generate and ask lots of questions from these five question types. However, asking questions is only half the interview process. Be prepared to listen even more than you speak. You will want to engage your ears and your eyes so you can pick up on signs that your SME is excited or getting bored or tired.
Not only will the right questions help your necessary information to begin your task analysis, but they will help foster rapport and trust with the subject matter expert. Effective interactions help motivate SMEs to continue collaborating with instructional designers. Also, good interviewing practice can sustain connections and better working relationships, which could help speed up response and turnaround times when you need feedback and buy-in from the SME.
Everyone can improve their interviewing skills by participating in the process and reflecting on the transcripts. Also, asking for feedback from others familiar with the process can be beneficial. It is important to understand that other factors can influence the interview process, such as tone of voice, sequence of the questions, and sentence structure. Nevertheless, it all starts with a question. With sustained practice