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How to Create a Training Manual – A Comprehensive Guide
For example, it may help ensure consistency in presentation of content. It may also ensure that all training information on skills , processes, and other information necessary to perform tasks is together in one place.
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On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. In the end, both the employee and the employer gets hurt. The stats are never-ending. The problem is real. Employees want to grow and hone their skill sets through regular training and developmental opportunities. A good way for companies to start this much-needed process is by crafting an awesome company training manual or training guide. In order to create a training manual that is not only informative but interesting to read, you need to have a plan in place.
We have put together some key points you need to keep in mind to create the best training manual. The first step in creating an effective training guide is to have a clear objective in mind. Answers to questions like these will help you figure out the main objective of creating the training guide. After the training is complete, the employees must be able to carry out the tasks for which the training manual is being created.
Writing a training manual is not an easy task. Your employees are counting on you for help as their entire work might depend upon the information present in the training manual.
Gather your peers around and start working on a training manual collaboratively. One person could be in charge of writing it, while others search for information, organize information, or create visual assets for the manual. In order to create an effective training guide, you need to have a good idea of what type of content you want to include in it. Compile all the information, knowledge, process, checklists, etc. Make sure you are thorough with every point and have everything you need to write a training manual.
Never, ever, rely on your memory! Even skipping a small step may lead to confusion amongst your readers. For example, forgetting to tell the reader about an important switch in a piece of new machinery, can not only be misleading but can also be dangerous. The content of the training manual directly depends upon the type of audience reading it.
If your training your employees on new software that no one has used before or training new hires , then going in deep with explanations and describing the steps precisely and clearly can help them grasp the knowledge quickly.
However, if you are teaching them some additional features of software they already use, no need to go all-in from scratch. Keeping your audience in mind will give you an idea of how broad or specific you need to be throughout the manual. Outline the flow of the training guide into chapters, sections, or parts. Make sure that the training manual is in a smooth flow and covers all the steps in-depth from start to finish.
Organizing the information is important to avoid confusion and make it an easy read for your audience. Adding a table of contents to your training manual is a must.
If your training manual is heavy on pages, the importance of having a table of contents increases exponentially. The table of contents provides navigation to the reader and helps them go to a particular topic quickly.
This is especially useful when employees need to go back to the training manual to refresh their memory on a particular topic, helping them save time and effort. Using a document editor that automatically creates a table of contents along with subheadings is a good way to achieve this.
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.
You can build it from scratch the same way you create PPT slides — or, if you have an existing PowerPoint presentation with instructions, convert it to an online manual with just a few clicks. To make sure your employees understood the information covered in your manual, you can enhance your course with a quiz. With iSpring Suite Max, you can build engaging graded assessments with fourteen question types, including multiple choice, fill in the blank, drag and drop, matching, and sequencing.
Some processes, like repairing a laptop or fixing a printer, may be difficult to explain using text and pictures alone. By viewing videos with clear narration, subtitles, and highlights of key points, however, it becomes possible even for new employees to perform their tasks.
Of course, you can record such a video with your camera, but to make it look professional and enhance it with images and captions, you will need separate video-editing software.
If you have iSpring Suite Max, you can record and edit a webcam video with a single tool. If you want to teach employees how to properly use some digital tools, such as CRM or email service, then the best solution is to record a screencast. With iSpring, you can capture your screen alone, together with a webcam or audio. You can even highlight a cursor and add click sounds to draw attention to your actions on the screen.
Add a visual hint for each step, so your employees can easily repeat your actions:. If you want to provide your employees a quick guide on, say, how to conduct a SWOT analysis, visualize your brand values, or present an online office tour, then you can use interactions. You just need to choose a suitable template and fill it with your text and images.
This is a slide from a quick manual that introduces your office and future workplace to your new hire:. Whatever your content, you need to deliver it to all employees and make sure they study it. The best solution here is a learning management system LMS. This will let you find out how useful the manual is for your employees and how it can be improved. Ask your students questions about their learning experience.
After you consider these insights on how to make your manual even better, you may want to update it: add more valuable information, refine the design or even put the manual into another format. It might also need to be updated if some processes in your company have changed, or you have released new products and features, or the government decided to amend the law.
Be sure to collect all the source files for your manuals so you can easily come back to them and make updates. Of course, creating each manual from scratch is time-consuming. The best way to reduce the development time is to make a training manual template once. This will also help ensure that all your learning materials have a consistent look and feel that aligns with your organization.
Some authoring tools come with ready-made templates, so you can use them as they are or tweak them a little to best represent your brand. For example, iSpring Suite Max provides access to more than templates. They must concisely introduce the topic of the particular manual and explain to a potential learner how they will benefit from studying it. Here you can outline the knowledge and skills your employees will acquire after completing the training.
Properly formulated objectives ensure that learners know what to expect and feel more prepared for the workload. This slide contains the table of contents. It allows your learners to move around to different modules of your manual. Module content is the heart of your training. Various layouts can be repurposed for different types of content. Here are a few examples:. This slide summarizes the results a learner has achieved.
Here you can outline the skills and knowledge they have acquired, congratulate employees on their successful completion of training, or direct them to the next step of their training program. Handbooks and manuals are basically the same.
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Training manual.Ultimate Guide to Creating a Training Manuals
It means that fewer employees need to take time out of their usual jobs to train new hires. When you conduct initial training with your new employees, you can let them know about further training opportunities that are available in the business. Employees can understand where they might benefit from professional development and how they can grow in their roles beyond initial onboarding.
Developing an onboarding program with a training manual means your training process is more transparent. All new employees are aware of the way in which your business onboards new employees and everyone benefits from the same process. When you conduct an onboarding process that includes a training manual, this sets employees up with an attitude of continuous learning.
Their first encounter with the business shows them that the company values learning and development, which then feeds into a positive company culture. Training your employees is a much better idea than blindly expecting them to become efficient from their first day. First of all, you need to decide exactly what content you want to include in your training manual. Every training manual will have unique objectives that determine the subject matter that you want to cover within its pages.
When you know what you want to achieve with your training manual, and the tasks that employees should be able to complete after reading it, that gives you an idea of the content that should be contained within its scope. If your content is too comprehensive, this is likely to put readers off and prevent them from getting the most out of your training manual. A table of contents is a good way to structure your manual and help readers find appropriate pages.
When the order of your content proceeds in a logical fashion, this makes it easier for readers to progress through your manual and aids the learning process. When you know what you want to include in your training manual, you can ask fellow teams to help you design the template for it.
HR teams are best placed to help because they understand the needs of your internal staff members. A template is a good way to create more than one manual because you can include placeholders to contain content that will be added later. It will be hard for your readers to stay focused on long walls of text, when a well-placed screenshot will help bring your content to life. Using internal knowledge base software like Document means you can deliver internal training manuals to your employees.
An internal knowledge base is a specialized website that can display content in many-layered categories and subcategories, alongside a powerful search bar that enables users to locate relevant articles. If you use an internal knowledge base like Document, this means your training manual can be accessed from anywhere — even in the field.
If someone spots a mistake in your manual, it can easily be changed and updated for all users. Internal knowledge bases can host videos, text, images and more. All your users need to access the training manual is an internet connection for their device. You can password-protect your training manual to ensure no unauthorized users gain access. You can ask them specific questions to find out whether your content has been helpful and whether it made the topic easy to learn.
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 excellent 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.
Checklists could include materials needed, sections for before, during, and after completing a task, or how to evaluate work once it is done.
Include activities and quizzes that measure learning. You want to ensure that users of your manual are learning as they go, so write up small tests of their knowledge. Include the answers in a separate spot so they can check how they did. You could have multiple choice questions, fill in the blank and matching, or scenarios for problem solving.
The purpose would be to help them along the way in gauging how much their are learning. If you want to create a training manual, you could use any word processing software, like Microsoft Word, Pages Mac or Google Docs.
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Once the manual is complete, gather a test group to see if it makes sense and is an effective training tool. Get feedback from them on any ways they think the manual could be improved. Try to use language that is simple and concise so it will be easy for people to understand.
Don't make the content so formal that it gets boring, or your audience won't stay interested. You Might Also Like. How to. About This Article. Co-authored by:. Co-authors: Updated: January 19, Categories: Teaching Business Writing. Article Summary X To write a training manual, start by compiling all of the information the manual needs to cover and then determining whether dividing it into chapters, sections, or parts would work best.
Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read , times. Reader Success Stories. Vanessa Mann Dec 13, More reader stories Hide reader stories. Did this article help you? Cookies make wikiHow better. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Maggie May 5, Short, it covers the main points, straight to the point, and I like the simple way the graphics cover the subject. One does not have to spend much time reading a book to learn something.
You may post my review. Great job. Thank you. However, there are some essential elements found in almost all training manuals. As the title suggests, the introduction is a welcome section of your training manual. In this opening section, users can learn about the topics the manual covers. Also, the introduction section should be written in a clear, concise manner to make it easy for users to understand. This section is crucial for the overall success of a training manual.
Thoroughly explained instructions enable users to navigate various parts of the manual easily. The objective section explains the primary purpose of the manual. It will clearly define the goals and targets of the training manual. Also, users can know from this section what they can expect to learn after going through the manual or a training session based on the manual.
Effective manuals also use multiple forms videos, images, slides, etc. Typically, quizzes do the job well. And to learn how to improve the manual, surveys are incorporated. The assessment section is crucial to figure out what needs to be done to ensure a better outcome from using the training manual. In order to be impactful, a training manual must include a summary section highlighting the main points of the content.
This can help users to recollect what they have learned. Having follow-up steps mentioned in this section can guide users toward additional resources to better understand the topics. An excellent training manual has a progress tracker feature to help learners track their progress within a module or manual. It helps them plan their time more strategically to finish training on time if they are learning independently.
Having a timeline mentioned in a training manual can help participants finish the training on time. Instead of having a rigid timeline, a successful training manual provides flexibility, especially when trainees will use the manual independently. Users may have unpredictable schedules. The digital training manual can easily have this functionality.
You cannot assume that trainees will not have any doubt or confusion once you have crafted a training manual for them. In reality, participants do get stuck. A good training manual has a help menu to support participants. This section of the training manual offers additional resources for participants to deepen their learning.
One can list relevant courses, e-books, and articles in this section, which trainees can check to enhance their knowledge of the topics. Adding a link to an active, relevant forum in the supplementary materials section can help trainees to clear doubts if they have any.
A well-crafted training manual has all the important sections to make training easier. A well-researched, well-written training manual can help you conduct a training session smoothly in your organization. With access to a well-crafted training manual, users will already know what they will learn during the session.
So by getting familiar with the topics earlier through the manual, they can gain a solid background that will help them grasp the topics better when they are presented in the training session. Also, by having a manual for training, instructors will already know the outline of the training session, which can save a good deal of time that would otherwise be spent deciding which topics to discuss next.
Companies operating at various locations can have uniform processes and procedures with the help of training manuals. Training manuals can work as SOPs to be followed while completing processes and procedures.
As a result, all sessions will have a standardized outline for training. Having a comprehensive manual that explains how to complete various tasks and functions makes it easy to delegate tasks. When you have well-designed SOPs, the person who is going to take over will know what they are supposed to do next. If you have well-designed manuals explaining how to complete all the essential tasks, your business will not face a downturn when the employees working on those tasks take leave.
This is because you can easily assign their work to other employees, and they will do their job efficiently following the SOPs mentioned in the manuals.
A well-crafted training manual sets the right tone for training sessions. You and your participants will know what to expect next from a training session. Users can refer to the training manuals whenever they have any doubt about how to complete a task or want to brush up on previous topics. Remote workers often feel left out. Regardless of how efficient the communication tools you employ are, there are times when remote workers think there is not enough information available to them to complete their tasks correctly.
Creating comprehensive training manuals to describe how to complete various complex tasks and procedures can empower your remote team to do their jobs efficiently. There are no drawbacks to using a training manual as such. But a poorly designed training manual that lacks adequate information to complete the intended processes and procedures will not yield the expected results. In a nutshell, a well-designed training manual dramatically improves the outcome of training and helps your audience clear their doubts.
Also, it can make delegation of tasks easy. The process for writing a training manual is often dictated by the industry it is being designed for. The key steps, compiled below, apply to most industries. Before you start working on creating a training manual, you should fix clear objectives for your manual. Answers to questions like these can help you determine the main objectives of your training manual. After going through the training manual, users should be able to complete the process or procedures for which the training manual is intended.
You may think that you know about the people who are going to use your training manual. And you are probably right in your thinking. You should know how many people will use your training manual. How many people are baby boomers, millennials, or Gen X? How well are they educated?
Knowing the level of expertise of your intended audience will help you determine the comprehensiveness of your content. If your audience is not experts, you will want more detailed coverage of each topic. You should know what type of content written, visual, or audio your audience prefers and plan to accommodate a wide variety of preferred styles.
How much time does your trainee have to spend on training? Also, you should know about their language and cultural preferences to source effective content.
So it is imperative that you know your audience thoroughly before moving to the next step. Proper content planning is crucial for creating an efficient and effective training manual.
Instead, create a logical flow of information so that users can quickly grasp it without feeling overwhelmed. To make your training manual easy to follow, consider organizing your content from beginner to advanced topics, by product features, by jobs to be done, etc. If you have tons of topics to include in your training manual, grouping them logically can make it easier for your audience to follow your training manual.
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