As the saying goes, knowledge is power, especially in business.
Your employees, customers, and partners all need information and knowledge.
That’s where L&D teams come in. Think of them as the guardians of the power. They’re in charge of designing, managing, sharing, and monitoring your organization’s precious knowledge. They’re also responsible for ensuring all employees have access to it at the point of need, a role of growing importance as employment for training and development specialists is projected to grow 11 percent from 2024 to 2034.
L&D teams do this by designing an engaging learning environment and meaningful learning experiences. They must also ensure that all training has clear learning objectives aligned with business goals; however, research shows this is a common challenge, with only 40 percent of companies reporting their learning strategy is aligned with business goals.
Effective training is not easy to achieve but, luckily, there are instructional design models that can help you out.
Today, we’ll be looking at one such model called ADDIE which stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation.
How does it all work and how does it help you achieve your instructional goals?
We’ll answer these questions and:
Give a comprehensive definition of ADDIE
Walk you through the five stages of the ADDIE process
Tell you all about the benefits of the ADDIE model
The future of L&D is here
Find out if you’re ready with our Learning Performance Index
What is the ADDIE model?
ADDIE is a systematic instructional design framework that stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. These five stages guide L&D teams through creating effective training programs that achieve measurable learning outcomes.
Originally created in the 1970s for the US Army by the Center for Educational Technology at Florida State University, it eventually spread across all military branches and into the private sector.
It’s an approach focused on careful analysis and iteration to make effective training courses that achieve the desired learning outcomes.
Today, many organizations, both in the educational fields and in the private sector, use ADDIE.
While the steps in ADDIE are typically linear, that doesn’t always have to be the case. Each step of the process includes analyzing and reflecting on what you’ve done so far. This means instructional designers can go back to the previous step and fix what isn’t working.
While some circles consider ADDIE somewhat obsolete (mainly due to its perceived rigidity), it’s still widely used in different institutions and industries to provide training content and manage organizational change.
Five stages of the ADDIE model
The five ADDIE stages typically follow a sequence, but you can adapt the flow based on your project needs.
ADDIE works well for various training scenarios:
Employee onboarding: Systematic approach to new hire training
Compliance programs: Ensures thorough documentation and evaluation
Skills development: Structured competency building
Customer education: External training for customer education programs
Now let’s examine each stage in detail.
Stage #1: Analysis
Every journey begins with a first step, and so does instructional design.
In the analysis phase, you set your goals and plan how to achieve them. It’s an important part of the development process of any online course or learning experience.
Focusing on the learners and learner needs is the main consideration in this stage of the ADDIE process.
As part of the analysis phase, you will also need to answer some questions about the learners’ needs and learning goals.
You want the training program to match each learner’s level of skill and knowledge. This means avoiding material they already know or that’s too advanced for them.
Here, you’ll distinguish between what your learners know and what they need to know or, in other words, the learning goals.
To make sure you’re doing this properly, you have to consider the learners’ background, what learners need to be able to do at the end of the program, and what skills and knowledge they’ll require to complete the training program.
During the analysis phase, you should also research which learning methods are most popular for your subject matter.
Plus, the analysis phase is when you decide what kind of learning environment you’ll create; many L&D functions embrace a framework known as “70:20:10,” which allocates 70% of learning to on-the-job experience, 20% to social learning, and 10% to formal instruction. For instance, will you use face-to-face instruction or a blended learning model?
Instructional designers must also consider any limitations in their learning and development programs. These can be factors such as the available budget (we’ve all been there) and other technological and human resources.
Stage #2: Design
When you’ve finished analyzing every bit of your online learning program, it’s time to move on to the design phase.
This phase of the ADDIE model should be systematic and instructional designers need to pay a lot of attention to details.
At this stage of the instructional design process, designers determine all the goals and tools they will use to gauge progress, tests, subject matter analysis, planning, and resources.
For instance, here is when instructional designers decide on media selection—text, graphics, and videos. Also, this is when lesson planning takes place as well as deciding on the assessment methodology; i.e., how will you know that your learners have acquired the skills that the training program tries to teach?
As part of the design stage, course designers will create content outlines and develop scripts. Additionally, they’ll consider delivery options, such as fully online, face-to-face, or blended.
Another part of the design process is determining how much time to devote to each learning activity.
Deciding how to gather learner feedback also takes place during the design phase of the ADDIE model.
After you’ve made all these decisions, you’ll be able to create storyboards that help you see the big picture of your future training program.
In short, during the design phase of the ADDIE process, instructional designers answer the basic questions about the learning experience. The analysis phase, on the other hand, focuses more on the learners’ needs.
Stage #3: Development
After the first two stages comes the development phase. Here, instructional designers finally put all those theoretical considerations into practice.
Brainstorming and analysis mark the previous two stages of the ADDIE process. Now, however, it’s time to start creating the learning materials.
If you’re using a Learning Management System, this is where you’ll fire up your authoring tool to start creating the course material.
Typically, the development includes three subphases: drafting, production, and evaluation.
Essentially, during this phase, you’ll create and test the learning outcomes. When training developers get the green light from the decision-makers in the company, they start creating the course material. These are the modules, videos, graphics, assessments, hands-on tasks, and everything that makes up the training course.
Instructional designers also pick the look and feel of the course material here: fonts, colors, design elements, branding, etc.
It’s a good idea to split the entire course into modules to save development time. This way, the quality assurance team can test one part of the course at a time while the training developers work on the others.
The key to the ADDIE model is iteration. So, it’s completely normal to have to partially go back to the design or analysis phase at this stage. If something isn’t working as intended, it’s best to fix it before the implementation phase.
Stage #4: Implementation
Now for the moment of truth. This is arguably the most critical phase of the ADDIE process.
It’s also the most nerve-wracking phase since the designers present everything they worked so hard on to learners.
A lot of the real work of instructional design happens at this stage. This is because, during the implementation phase, both the instructors and the learners can give feedback.
Instructional designers need to constantly analyze, redesign, and enhance the training course to ensure it’s effective. This way they can make the proper revisions in time. With the contribution of learner and instructor feedback, instructional designers can make instantaneous changes.
Taking feedback into account is essential for meeting learners’ training needs during this stage.
A few questions you may need to answer include:
What is the emotional feedback instructors and learners are giving?
Can learners and instructors grasp the topic?
Can the students work independently, or is constant guidance necessary?
Paying close attention to these can help designers identify and address any instructional problems in time.
We’ll note here that the ADDIE process is interactive and iterative. In reality, the analysis and design phase never truly ends. Instructional designers must constantly tweak training courses based on feedback and analysis of how the training program is performing.
It’s not just the learner’s feedback you should be paying attention to. You also need to check if the delivery method is performing well. Is the LMS you chose suitable for your training course? Did learners have trouble accessing it? All of this impacts the learner experience and could lead to low completion rates or learning results.
At the end of the day, the top priority at this phase is to assess if the training achieves the desired learning objectives. If not, it’s back to the drawing board.
So, what happens after you roll out your training program? It’s time to move on to the final phase of the ADDIE method.
Stage #5: Evaluation
You have finished the training program, and the learners have (or perhaps haven’t) achieved the desired learning outcomes.
How can you be sure?
Enter the evaluation phase of the ADDIE process.
Often, companies and instructional designers don’t devote enough time to evaluation due to time and budget constraints.
But you shouldn’t ignore this very important part of ADDIE.
To understand this final step, we’ll need to bring in two new terms—formative evaluation and summative evaluation.
Formative evaluation happens while the instructors and students are conducting the training program whereas the summative evaluation happens at the end. As such, this ties formative evaluation mostly to the implementation phase.
The main goal of evaluation is to determine if you have met the training program goals and to figure out how to increase the efficiency and success rate.
As part of this stage, you need to determine what metrics you’ll use to evaluate the training, such as job performance and engagement levels. Also, you’ll have to decide how to collect the data and analyze feedback.
These days, you can automate a lot of this and do it through an LMS. The good ones will collect valuable training data and track important metrics. You can pull detailed reports and use them to evaluate learners and the training course itself.
There are several possible outcomes for the evaluation phase. Maybe you got it right the first time and you can roll the course out with little to no changes. Or, perhaps you’ll need to address and tweak certain shortcomings. We’re betting on the latter.
You may even need to begin the ADDIE process again. An instructional designer’s work is never done.
Up next, we’ll look at the benefits of ADDIE.
Four benefits of the ADDIE model
Why choose ADDIE over other learning experience design frameworks?
Here are four key benefits that make ADDIE a strategic choice for your organization:
Benefit #1: Wide acceptance
Have you ever heard the saying: “standing on the shoulders of giants”? When choosing how you’ll design your learning experience, it’s not a bad idea to pick a framework that’s stood the test of time for so long.
The ADDIE training model is one of the most commonly used worldwide.
This means that if you choose to use it, its guidelines are tried and tested. This is in contrast to using newer theories of learning experience design where the science and the methodology may not yet be fully settled.
Various institutions and industries have used ADDIE since 1975. As such, there’s a wealth of information and practical experience with this model that you can draw on for your own needs.
So, using ADDIE means your instructional designers, or whoever owns learning and development in your company, will have a lot of literature and case studies at their disposal. If you need to troubleshoot any of the phases of the ADDIE model, there’s information on that.
Benefit #2: Effectiveness
One of the reasons why ADDIE is so widespread and accepted is that people have associated it with good design for a very long time.
This is because it’s a way of designing educational content that focuses on the details and meticulous testing at each phase of the process.
It’s not that good instructional design requires ADDIE—there are many ways to produce good quality content. It’s that through using ADDIE, instructional designers have a well-developed arsenal of tools and techniques to assess their work.
Assessment and formative evaluation are in every phase of the ADDIE process. This way, instructional designers identify parts of the training content that are problematic sooner, saving time and money down the line.
This translates into better quality and more effective training content, which has a tangible impact on business outcomes; for instance, research shows that companies investing in leader development during transformations are 2.4 times more likely to hit their performance targets.
Benefit #3: Measurability
As a design methodology, empiricism and measurability underpin ADDIE. If you aren’t familiar with the term “empiricism”, don’t worry, most people aren’t. In simple terms, it’s a philosophical theory that believes all knowledge comes from sensory experience.
The focus on collecting actionable information and feedback allows you to measure the outcomes—in terms of learner engagement, course completion rates, and whether or not the program and learners have met the learning objectives.
This is great for organizations that prioritize tracking metrics and making data-driven decisions. It’s also an effective way to measure training ROI, as research indicates that companies with top-quartile leadership development outperform other organizations by nearly two times on EBITDA.
The way that ADDIE works requires L&D teams to decide what type of feedback surveys to use and how to collect the data. An LMS is your best friend here. You can design, deliver, and analyze learner feedback surveys directly on the platform.
You can also pull comprehensive reports to gain further insights. For instance, how many learners stopped the training halfway through? Did a large number of employees fail the final assessment? What star rating did learners give the training? This data is a goldmine.
Collecting all this feedback is one of the strengths of the ADDIE process. It makes sure that training content focuses on the learners’ needs.
When learners’ needs are front and center, engagement is higher.
In brief, by using the ADDIE instructional design method it’s possible to measure and track many of the metrics that will eventually reveal how effective any training program is.
From a resource standpoint, you waste less time and money because you’ve reduced the chances of letting a bad training program slide.
Benefit #4: Flexibility
There is some controversy on just how flexible ADDIE is. Critics of the method say this design framework is inflexible, too linear, and rigid.
And while it is true that ADDIE presents a linear model of how to develop training programs, there’s still some flexibility.
Firstly, instructional designers take metrics and assessments into consideration, always returning to a previous step to make necessary changes. This is because of the formative evaluation mechanism that is integral to each ADDIE phase.
Secondly, you can pretty much use the ADDIE model in any learning experience you can imagine.
It’s equally applicable to on-the-job training as it is to developing a university course.
This is one of the main reasons why so many institutions, from the government to the private sector, have embraced it for so long.
If you choose to use ADDIE, you’ll make that decision once, and then you can create all learning and development in your organization in line with it.
It’s a benefit for those companies that need to produce a lot of training content. Adopting one design framework that is flexible enough means that companies will carry out all design and evaluation with the same set of standards and metrics, making it easy to compare their effectiveness.
Finally, it’s time to recap everything we know about ADDIE.
Limitations of the ADDIE model
While ADDIE is a powerful framework, it’s important to understand its limitations.
Key challenges include:
Linear rigidity: Step-by-step process can feel restrictive for fast-paced projects
Slow startup: Heavy upfront analysis delays design and development phases
Limited agility: Not ideal when training needs change frequently
When to use the ADDIE model
ADDIE works best for:
Large-scale programs: Enterprise-wide training initiatives
High-stakes content: Compliance, safety, or regulatory training
Foundational courses: New hire onboarding and core competencies
Documentation-heavy projects: Programs requiring detailed audit trails
However, if your project has unclear objectives or needs rapid prototyping, consider more agile alternatives.
Transform your training with systematic design
The ADDIE model gives you a reliable roadmap for creating training that delivers real results. It turns instructional design from a guessing game into a strategic process, ensuring your learning initiatives are thoughtful, effective, and aligned with your goals.
Executing this framework is even smoother when you have the right tools. A powerful learning platform helps you manage every stage, from developing engaging content to implementing training and evaluating its impact with robust analytics. Explore why more than 3,800 companies across the world trust Docebo. Book a demo today.
FAQs about the ADDIE model
What has replaced ADDIE?
No single model has replaced ADDIE, but agile alternatives like SAM (Successive Approximation Model) offer more flexible, iterative approaches for rapid development projects.
How long does the ADDIE process typically take?
Simple eLearning courses take a few weeks, while comprehensive curricula require several months, depending on content scope and team size.
Can ADDIE be used for customer and partner training?
Absolutely. ADDIE’s structured approach is highly effective for developing formal customer education and partner enablement programs. It ensures that external training is consistent, comprehensive, and focused on clear learning outcomes, which is essential for driving product adoption and channel success.
What’s the difference between ADDIE and SAM?
The main difference is their process flow. ADDIE is generally a linear, waterfall-style model where you complete one phase before moving to the next. SAM is an iterative, agile model that focuses on repeatedly designing, prototyping, and reviewing smaller pieces of the project from the very beginning.
Do I need special software to implement ADDIE?
Basic project tools work, but a learning platform with integrated authoring, automation, and analytics makes ADDIE much more efficient.
