Ending each section of the training manual with a summary can do wonders for your employees. They can quickly get a recap of whatever they have learned so far, which helps save them a lot of time and effort.
Training manuals are well, boring. They are filled with text and are not very engaging. On top of that, visuals are processed 60, times faster in the brain than text. Making your training guides interactive with training videos and audio lessons can be a great way to enhance engagement and generate interest amongst employees. Keep on reading! At the end of each major section of the manual, add a short quiz or learning activity to measure employee learning and retention.
You can add quick-fire multiple choice questions or fill in the blanks to make learning engaging and fun. Include answers to these quizzes in a separate section so that the employees can gauge their learning and see if they need a refresher on a particular topic. Therefore, always ask employees to give their honest feedback and suggestions on how to make training more effective. You can conduct a feedback session after distributing the training guides or include a section at the end of the manual for employees to write in their suggestions.
This is an important step as it helps you craft the perfect training manual and ensure that manuals are beneficial and productive for everyone in the future. After learning about all the key points to include in your training manuals, we know you are itching to get on with the work of creating one. This is why we would like to introduce you to Bit, the smartest document collaboration tool to create training manuals and other digital workplace documents for free!
Bit is a new age cloud-based document collaboration tool that helps teams create, manage and track workplace documents including training manuals, fact sheets , sales decks , project proposals , ebooks , case studies, employee onboarding docs, media kits , and many more.
Bit helps you make sure your training manuals are more than just plain boring text and images. Bit will automatically turn that weblink into live visual content that lives on your Bit documents! Imagine how rich and interactive your training guides can become! Not sure how Bit can help you write the perfect training manual? Bit has a minimal document editor which allows you to write your training manual without the distraction of unnecessary buttons and tabs.
Creating a training manual from scratch takes a lot of time and effort. You have to research content, come up with an outline, add awesome visuals, and create an overall interactive experience for your employees.
Doing this amount of work alone can be pretty daunting and time-consuming. Thus, Bit allows you to work with your peers to get the training manual ready as quickly as you can.
Working in teams also allows you to brainstorm ideas together and get your content and design people together in a single workplace. Bit allows teams to collaborate together, give real-time feedback, suggest changes, and get work done quicker. Most importantly, say goodbye to back and forth emails. In this digital age, you need more than just text to engage your readers. All the other document editors limit your creativity by only allowing you to incorporate text and static images in your documents.
Since training manuals are long-form professional documents, having to read so much text can be dull and ineffective. With Bit, you can create smart training manuals by incorporating hundreds of file types and making them dynamic and interactive.
Steps Included. Focus on the content and let Bit help you with the design and formatting. Bit documents are completely responsive and look great on all devices, irrespective of the screen size they are viewed on. Find content on tons of topics around training, video creation, and more. In many cases, this will fit your audience and your content best. If your manual covers a process that is computer-based, capture screenshots of each step.
Alternatively, for real-world processes, photos demonstrating the process or graphical illustrations are ideal. Screenshots and images often need a couple tweaks to truly get their point across. Usually this means adding annotations like arrows, shapes, and other callouts. Another nice touch is to remove or hide sensitive or unnecessary information. Use the drawing and editing tools in Snagit to edit your images so they convey the right message and have unnecessary or sensitive information blurred or removed.
Now is when creating a training manual usually becomes tedious. The process of adding images to a template, document, or another source involves formatting frustrations, image sizing issues, and other similar, unforeseen challenges. In this case, an easy solution is to create from templates in Snagit. This lets you select the images you want to include in your manual, add text, arrange the order, and make selections about the appearance in one quick process.
Snagit comes with a number of professional templates you can choose from, and you can find more free and premium templates and other resources in TechSmith Assets for Snagit. This is a great method to use because you can take on each process or task you need to cover and create a separate section of the manual. Then you can save the each as a PDF or an image for sharing, compiling into a complete guide, or posting individually in a company intranet.
Of course, making individual stand alone documents might not be the right approach. In this case, you might consider using tools like Zendesk or MadCap Flare to create a knowledge base support center or a help file document.
If you are creating an online knowledge base, you should be able to use video, image, and written content all at the same time. So, get creative and make content that covers everything your audience might need. If you interact with your audience, listen to their feedback about the help you provide. Based on what they say, see if there are topics that need to be expanded or ones that are not yet covered at all.
As always, systems will change, products and features will be updated, and your content will need updates to stay relevant and helpful. Make sure to keep source files for all your work so you can easily return to it and make updates. A training manual no longer needs to be the thick, boring tome it once was.
People are used to learning online, and they often prefer it over analog sources of information. The next step in creating your manual is to identify and understand your audience and their particular needs.
This will enable you to present the information in the best way possible for them. Think about the trainees as a group and as individuals, their position in the organisation, their prior knowledge base and the industry in which you are training.
This will increase the effectiveness of your manual, by embedding new, relevant knowledge, reducing low uptake and making the whole project much more worthwhile and more likely to be a success.
Now you have established what you want the learner to know, and who those learners are, you can choose the right tools for the job by selecting how you will present your training materials. New ways of learning have arrived, and they include video guides from Camtasia , semi-interactive elearnings such as those from Adobe Captivate , and the increasingly popular fully interactive, step-by-step product guides produced by Nickelled.
These interactive training manuals take the user through each part of the learning process with self-paced guided tours of new products. This method makes the user an active part of the learning process and shows them an example of real-time results, which helps to ensure each new step is properly understood before moving on to the next, creating a deeper overall understanding of the task at hand.
During the tour, you can choose which sections to highlight and offer instruction on, while providing the user with the feeling of being on a live site.
Smart scrolling and auto-complete take the user to the right part of the site, allowing them to focus on the task at hand and preventing them from being distracted by other visual elements.
While there are several different ways to present your training materials, be sure to include all the necessary elements in the most logical way:. Keep each section as short as possible as not to overload the user with too much information to take in at once. Consider adding quizzes to each section, to allow the learner to test themselves on their new knowledge and identify points which may need greater focus.
As well as identifying where more training is required for each individual learner, it can also help identify weaknesses in the training itself, by identifying where exactly objectives are not being achieved and allowing you to look at why. This will enable you to improve your materials for future learners. A score of around 80 percent is usually seen as a good benchmark for each learner to achieve, to ensure they have reached a suitable level of understanding through the training, and can go on to use the product or carry out the designated tasks confidently and efficiently.
User feedback is a valuable tool for anyone who wants to learn how to create a training manual. As well as helping to pick up minor faults such as typos or awkward grammar, getting a fresh perspective on how the learning experience really translates into practice can help ensure you are delivering the right kind of training in the most efficient and helpful manner possible. Being open to critique can only improve your methods of training, saving you time and effort by improving your training outcomes, reducing the need to repeat the training programme in future.
Companies that invest time and money into training their employees well undoubtedly see a return on their investment through greater productivity and improved efficiency.
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