Even skipping a small step may confuse your users, so pay attention. For example, you could be telling someone how to enter data into a spreadsheet, but you could easily forget to mention “click File to open a new spreadsheet. ” Or when describing how to use a piece of machinery, you may forget to mention flipping a certain switch that’s vitally important. If you don’t review everything and you do forget something, users are likely to become distressed because something isn’t working right. This is not the outcome training should ever result in.
Before you write any content, make sure you have a good idea of where all aspects of the manual will fit together. You don’t want to mention something from what you think is a previous section if the manual hasn’t covered that information yet. If you can write self-contained sections that don’t build on each other, this may be the right approach in some situations.
Word processing programs often have templates for these types of documents. You can also find helpful resources online for how to structure these elements.
Chapter titles should help people know what they’ll find, but they should be able to skim the preview and make sure the chapter has what they need to know.
You can mention the objectives again to give people the chance to take stock of whether or not they learned what they were supposed to.
If you can’t have a group to help through the whole process, at least consider asking people a few things at different points as you go to get second opinions.
If you are training employees on a brand new software that no one has seen, it’s safe to assume they won’t know anything. If you are training for sales techniques at a clothing store, you don’t need to explain what pants and shirts are. Don’t patronize people by over explaining simple concepts, but also don’t assume they know something that they may not know. It is a good idea to explain the benefits of following the manual.
You can’t fit every employee perfectly, but if you only use one approach you aren’t likely to get through to very many at all. The goal of the training manual is to help employees learn what they need to know, so aim to make it easy for as many people as possible. Tailor it to the day-to-day activities. Be sure to stay focused on the topic at hand; avoid introducing concepts, ideas and instructions that are not related to the topic, workplace or field being covered.
This may be affected by the type of content your manual includes and may not be applicable in all cases. Take stock of the specifics of your manual and judge whether or not extra materials could be created.
Notes sections would be good alongside most sections of text, but you could also make a separate notes section at the end of chapters and the end of the whole manual. This helps people avoid having separate notebooks that they might lose track of.
There really is no limit to what types of visual aids you could include, so think about what you are training for and what would be most helpful for the user to see.
It might even be useful to make these pages easy to tear out so users could keep the checklist handy at later times when they are working on tasks. Checklists could include materials needed, sections for before, during, and after completing a task, or how to evaluate work once it is done.
These would be separate from any official testing you would have employees take after training is complete. The purpose would be to help them along the way in gauging how much their are learning.
