Building Instructional Content at Scale

You call your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), get your stakeholders aligned and set a rollout date. But that’s the easy stuff; the biggest roadblock in shipping your training ASAP is the content creation — and sharing that responsibility with other teams will allow you to scale training development at hyper-growth organizations and across multiple departments. But the question remains: how do you create and structure scalable content that allows for a seamless experience for multiple collaborators and users across teams?

Importance of designing content at scale

Enablement is not a solo journey; it takes a village to implement the right content, training and strategy for a new module. It’s critical to think about designing a content strategy that allows for cross-functional collaboration. Otherwise, you’ll run into challenges, including:

1. Maxed-out bandwidth – during training implementation, you become the only person who knows how to resolve the firehose of questions from your reps, leaders and cross-functional teams.
2. Information silos that can create a serious bottleneck. In order to capture the most accurate piece of knowledge available, SMEs should be able to create their own training content.
3. Growth inefficiencies that happen when your content or training module is no longer relevant for your team. Whether it’s a new product feature that hasn’t been documented or an outdated certification course, you need to scrub your training content so that everything is up-to-date — or your user engagement rate starts to decline.

How to build content at scale

The key to building content that can scale with your hyper-growth teams is to democratize the content creation — by distributing the work to Subject Matter Experts and arming them with templates and guides. Having a pre-set content structure gives your editors a starting point so that they’re not building the content format or training design from scratch, allowing them to focus on what’s important: the content itself. This practice also allows for:

• Ease of content creation — creating a great experience for editors
• Improves content management + organization — which helps editors design trainings easily and users to learn materials the same way, every time
• Standardization of language and terminology
• Ability to assign content creation to other teams with ease

Best practices for cross-functional content creation

When you democratize content creation, you’ll inevitably run into all sorts of issues that cause ‘content chaos’. From duplication of efforts to inability to maintain content hygiene and ongoing management, we need to be able to ensure quality and maintain visibility into all of our training content. (Hint: Think restricted permissions, standardization and reporting — all inside WorkRamp.)

Watch the on-demand webinar to learn more about how to avoid the content chaos during cross-team collaboration.