Certified Learning for Financial Auditors & Consultants

Overview

For about 3 years, I led the design of solutions for Moss Adams, a multi-national consulting and auditing firm. The scope of my role ranged from managing the end-to-end creation of large-scale projects with stakeholders and SMEs, to creating and testing things for my design function like improved workflows, process documentation, design standards, templates, and more.

There were a couple notable programs that I led the design, development, and project management for. They included multi-faceted learning solutions for diverse audiences throughout the company, with different stakeholders across several lines of business involved. Each of these are highlighted in their respective case studies below.

Program 1: Instructor-Led Trainings for Consulting Practice

With the firm’s audience of consultants growing, a program consisting of 12 instructor-led courses was needed to be designed and developed for both new and existing team members. The primary focus of this curriculum was technical content, ranging from specific topics like auditing standards to business topics like process flows.

The primary constraints of creating this curriculum were the condensed timeline and the access to the primary stakeholders and SMEs. There was a 10-week window to get these 12 courses from initial concept to final approval and placement in the curriculum for learners to complete their registration. Leading the design and development of these facilitated sessions, I created a project plan for each before aligning L&D stakeholders, business stakeholders, and SMEs on the approach, milestones, etc.

In order to ensure we would have viable learning products to ship within this tight timeframe and avoid an over-reliance on SMEs (as their availability was a risk I identified early on), I began the design phase by leveraging pre-existing content and recording several working sessions I led with SMEs.

Historically, instructor-led trainings at this firm were multiple hours in length, lacked thoughtful interactivity with learners, and contained content primarily in the form of knowledge dumps. Although I still needed to ensure these trainings covered the same topics and qualified for accreditation through the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), there was a lot of potential to push the envelope with these experiences.

On top of accomplishing our business goals and objectives for this learning program, my goal for the design and development of these solutions was to provide this audience with experiences that were learner-centered, with intuitive and clean layout design, on-brand messaging and imagery, and intentional learning activities.

This consulting program was approved for credit by the AICPA and successfully launched on-time and on-budget. Each learning experience included a PowerPoint deck, a facilitator guide, and a producer guide. Additionally, some contained a learner guide for them to follow along with, take notes on, and use to access other helpful resources on the topic.

Following its implementation, the curriculum received positive feedback in the form of learner surveys. We were also able to anecdotally measure the success of the program through newly acquired skills and the improvement of existing capabilities through post-program follow-ups and feedback from the key stakeholders that were involved, as they worked closely with the audience.

Click to view some demo slides of these ILT courses below (content & branding altered).

Click to view the comprehensive activity I designed for the client-focused course below (content & branding altered).

Program 2: eLearning Courses for Audit, Tax, & Industry

I completed many learning projects focused on the audit and tax lines of business, helping them achieve their performance goals and objectives. Most notably, were the large-scale projects I managed and designed throughout 2024.

The learning experiences I managed included a simulation of audit documentation during client engagements, courses on auditing law firms and forest industry companies, an interactive conflicts of interest course, and a project management case study for audit managers.

The audit audience for these projects made up one of the larger demographics at the firm, so it was important that each project was designed in a way that met accessibility standards, achieved the firm’s vision for diversity and inclusion, and contained flexible content for different learners in varying locations and situations.

Grounded in learning theory and the established design workflows I led, this set of projects gave me the space to innovate and experiment with the kinds of learning solutions we could provide learners.

In collaboration with SMEs, I designed storyboards, wrote knowledge check and assessment questions, developed the experiences in Articulate Storyline, and iterated upon the solutions until we reached our end product. Throughout the project, I consulted the "Learning Design QA Guide" I created for the firm.

Due to the interactive nature of these experiences, a big aspect of each project was the final QA phase and LMS testing. I spent much of my time publishing, uploading, testing, and revising our solutions to eliminate any technical bugs and ensure the interface was scalable and fit with different settings and devices.

In addition to these more interactive, high-touch design solutions I managed and created, I also managed the relationship between the firm’s audit team and an external design vendor. While managing the project and content with things like storyboards, scripts, and project charters, I also negotiated the project fees with the vendor.

In the end, the projects I led included over 10 eLearning solutions developed by myself and 4 developed by the design vendor, as well as a comprehensive case study. Several were developed for credit and received approval by the AICPA. The self-paced solutions were deployed to learners across several programs throughout 2024, and stakeholders touted the innovation and polish they saw from the final results.

Click to experience some demos of these eLearning courses below (style & content altered).

Click to experience a partial demo of the interactive case study below (sensitive content removed).

Design Management: Process Guides & Design Templates

In addition to the programs highlighted above, I created over 50 process guides, design templates, and other workflow-related documents in order to improve the design function at the company.

These included resources such as the company style guide for the L&D team, an instructional design onboarding packet, Storyline and Rise course templates, a modality decision-making guides, guides for scripting and producing video-based learning content, best practices for producing AI voiceover audio, and more.

These types of resources and more can be found and downloaded for free here.