Discover Booz Allen

Booz Allen Hamilton, a global strategy and technology consulting firm, wanted to redefine its orientation program so new hires could quickly learn to navigate the culture.

Its team turned to IDEAS to design, produce and install the new program.

Discover Booz Allen, a two-day immersive, story-based enculturation experience, challenges new hires to explore the firm’s history. To do so, they use intentionally placed environmental sets, props and resources around the classroom to find answers to pertinent questions.

The features tell actual employee and client stories using media and live storytelling to exemplify the firm’s mission and core values. Each learner uses their own workbook to record their ideas and insights in response to the activities.

Our instructional designers worked with Booz Allen subject matter experts and stakeholders to gather collective insights to drive the content.

The charge was twofold:

• To enculturate each participant into the Booz Allen world by the end of the two days
• To enable them to locate and use the firm’s available people and technology resources to successfully serve clients

We used these learning objectives to design and develop the firm’s stories as rich media elements to dynamically and compellingly engage new hires.

These elements included top leaders within the firm sharing their personal Booz Allen experience stories. We placed and strategically grouped historical items from each era of the firm’s storied past on the classroom walls. We also used customized graphics and animations to tell organizational legacy tales.

Overall, the features connect learners with the firm’s culture and keep them actively engaged.

Further Resources

Next, we developed “The Learner’s Passport,” a print workbook, to allow participants to record their answers to activity questions and insights for reference.

We also developed a facilitator guide to allow new facilitators to embrace this content using verbatim scripts. Additionally, we crafted outlines with references to the iconic classroom environment, videos, audio clips and pages tied to each lesson in The Learner’s Passport.

A dedicated, IDEAS-led train-the-trainer session emphasized that this immersive course format would be a role change for trainers. In essence, it would reposition them as true facilitators instead of their usual roles as presenters.

Booz Allen holds this revolutionary, story-based enculturation program weekly at its global headquarters in McLean, Virginia.

There, new hires arrive from offices worldwide to share in the learning experience together. They leave knowing that joining the firm was the greatest career choice they could have ever made.