Educational and instructional technology student elevates employee training with Zoetis

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—A strong orientation experience gives new employees the guidance they need and defines their first impression of the organization. As an intern on the Operational Excellence and Training team at Zoetis, Amy Coughenour ensured those impressions met the standards of the world’s leading animal health company.

Through the Western Michigan University College of Education and Human Development’s collaboration with Zoetis, educational and instructional technology students, like Coughenour, can partake in an instructional design practicum. The practicum allows students to build technical expertise, strengthen professional networks, and prepare for careers in instructional design and workplace learning. 

“The team I was a part of oversees basically all the training and utilizes the Lean Six Sigma methodology in their manufacturing facility,” explains Coughenour. “Essentially, their team is always looking at systems and revising things to be more efficient.”

Coughenour spent most of her internship working alongside the Environmental Health and Safety team on revising its new employee orientation to make it more engaging and learner friendly. Starting from a presentation that contained outdated information, her team redesigned the material to be learner-centric. 

“If we’re updating it because it’s not correct, we also need to update it with best practices for the learner so they are actually going to get something out of it,” says Coughenour. “I think that a lot of times something is brought to the attention of the training team when it is outdated, and at that point there is the opportunity to say, ‘Hey, we can do better. Let’s do better while we can.’”

Connecting her responsibilities at Zoetis and the curriculum in her program, Coughenour was heavily influenced by the need analysis introduced by WMU faculty. In revamping the Environmental Health and Safety team’s learning modules, containing over 70 slides of information, she changed the training format to be storyline-based.

“Your learner is looking at the slide for maybe 30 seconds,” Coughenour explains. “So, what do they actually need to get from this? What problem are we trying to solve with this training? Is there something that isn’t being done correctly, and we need to try to address that?”

Collaborating closely with her supervisor, Sarah Birnbaum, she migrated the dense material into an interactive model focused heavily on basic awareness and application. She integrated practical knowledge checks and engaging activities to further reinforce the information.

“It was an absolute privilege to work with Amy. Her skills and experience she brought to the practicum experience was incredibly valuable for our projects in the Operational Excellence and Training Department at Zoetis,” says Birnbaum. “We are working on improving our employee experience within training, and Amy’s mindset was on point to best implement meaningful improvements.”

Coughenour’s initiatives have now been incorporated into the company’s learning management system and are actively used to train new colleagues. For future students in the educational and instructional technology program looking to step out of the classroom and into a practicum, Coughenour highly recommends stepping into a corporate environment like Zoetis’.

“There are so many opportunities at Zoetis to get involved with instructional design and training, and to see the things that the program is teaching us at Western in the real world,” she says. “It definitely was a good way to put our coursework into practice.”

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