Hello! My name is Callum, and I'm a BA (Hons) Human Resource Management student going into my fourth year at the University of Stirling. I applied to the Saltire Scholars programme to push myself outside my comfort zone. I’d had work experience before, but I wanted something on a bigger stage. It was my first time going through a full application and interview process, so the nerves started early. It probably didn't help that I knocked a full glass of water over halfway through the interview. Thankfully, they let it slide. For summer 2026, I worked at The Craneware Group as a Learning & Development Intern with the Product Education team. The Craneware Group specialises in transforming the business of healthcare, providing SaaS solutions that help US hospitals strengthen their financial performance so they can keep delivering quality care to their communities.
At the beginning of my internship, my experience with e-learning development was rooted in theory rather than practice. My main project involved adding interactivity to content for our Sentinel Foundations cohort. It started as a simple scenario in Articulate Rise, but as we hit limitations, we moved it into Storyline to create a fully interactive, branching scenario with xAPI integration. Storyline was software I’d never heard of before, let alone used. With my team primarily based in the US, I spent most mornings working independently before anyone came online, which meant I largely taught myself the tool from scratch. It was slow-going and challenging at first, but once everything clicked, I was able to take fuller ownership of my work and become more resourceful. By the end, I was confidently working with advanced functionalities such as variables and the feedback master. The result was a branching scenario with multiple possible outcomes, audio narration, and custom interactions, which went through several review cycles before being rolled out to real learners. Alongside this, I helped with wider content across several courses, contributing to knowledge checks and other interactions that are now part of live training.
As The Craneware Group’s solutions are so specialised, instructional design involved thoughtful consultation with subject matter experts and other stakeholders to ensure accuracy. I worked closely with colleagues across both our Edinburgh office and the US, gathering feedback, hosting working sessions and refining content based on expert input. I quickly found out that soft skills matter just as much as anything technical. Learning who to ask and when was often more important than anything I could do solo. Reaching out as early as possible made for better foundations, and more than that, it let me get to know the people I was working with.
I was also given freedom to follow my own interests beyond my main project. I found it paid to treat every opportunity, no matter how big or small, with equal care. By doing this, I got the chance to work with the Employee Advisory Group to explore how developments in AI can be implemented throughout the business, and I took on a project to standardise our team's intake, ticketing and feedback processes through SharePoint and Power Automate. This involved designing a streamlined intake process that brought requests into a single workflow, improving clarity for our ticketing system while allowing for future scalability. At first, this freedom made me anxious, as I wasn't always sure I was heading in the right direction. Over time, though, having the space to shape my own work made me more comfortable with ambiguity, which is where the best ideas came from.
The beauty of the Saltire Scholars programme is that every Scholar has thousands of paths open to them at every step. For me, this was the hardest thing to deal with, as it’s so easy to freeze with uncertainty on what to do next. My advice would be to start with the dumbest path you can think of, because it’s easier to improve upon flawed ideas than to search for “perfect” ones. That’s what my summer felt like, a lot of dumb first attempts that turned into work I’m proud of.
