Bridging the Gap: Integrating Training and Technical Writing

When creating a new e-learning program from scratch, you may feel overwhelmed. Even if you have ideas about the curriculum you want to build, deciding on modality and content can cause headaches. But you probably already have content that has been created within your company. Between your marketing, support, product, and sales teams, you might have half—if not more—of the content necessary for a minimum viable product (MVP).

All you need to do at this stage is collect the existing content and bridge the gap. As designers, our job is to bridge the knowledge gap to create content and learning that brings something new, engaging, and high-value.

Tell, Show, and Let

What’s the best way to handle a situation where content exists in many different formats and you need to bring it into one cohesive experience? When I create e-learning programs for my clients, I use an approach called “Tell Me/Show Me/Let Me” to ensure I create high value and engaging interactions with the existing content:

• Tell your learners the concepts—the new pieces of information that are part of the program and skills you want them to learn. This is the backbone of the learning program.

• Show your learners what these new concepts look like in practice.

• Let your learners practice and apply the new concepts. This reinforces the learning.

Any existing technical docs, knowledge base articles, manuals, and documentation are the first step—the Tell Me stage. Once you collect them, do a review and gap analysis to create the base of the program. Adding the Show Me and Let Me engagements turns your text-heavy concept phase into an engaging, interactive e-learning program.

Content Repurposing Challenges

There are unique challenges with content reuse. Often, the audience and tone of the content is not appropriate for the intended audience of the e-learning program. When you are creating content—especially foundational content—make it evergreen from an audience and tone perspective so it can be modularized and reused in different programs for different audiences. Unfortunately, most content isn’t created with this in mind, so it may be a challenge you must overcome.

Updates can also be a challenge once you have used content in multiple ways. When repurposing items, identify this need early and put processes in place while setting expectations. Being in alignment with other teams—including marketing and product—is important.

Pick the Right Tools

Of course, a technology solution can also help minimize these potential pain points. Pick learning tools that work for you and not against you. For example, if your technical writers use a content authoring tool such as MadCap Flare to create documentation around processes and procedures, it eliminates many of the challenges. For example, Flare has capabilities that allow you to take the content in the system and turn it into a course to add to your learning platform. With built-in quizzing, the ability to embed videos and interactive images, customizable feedback pages, and output into SCORM and xAPI standards, creating e-learning courses can be quick and painless.

Best practices for reusing content internally abound, but this approach steers me in the right direction and allows me to reach that MVP for my clients faster than if we started at zero. If you find you are struggling with any of this, reach out for my help about how to bridge the gap.