How to make training manual

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. 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. 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. Having a tried and tested method of creating useful, interactive training manuals can be an invaluable tool for any modern business, no matter how large the organisation or how high the employee turnover. Our tutorials and other content are like having someone sitting next to you while you learn.

Take a free trial and see how we make life better for your users. Millions of users have learned with Nickelled. On the flip side, companies and organizations create training manuals that support their customers, too.

They teach how to use their products, when certain features come in handy, and demonstrate key workflows. Training manuals for customer education help users get the most out their purchase. They are a critical resource, and every successful company provides them. The best training manuals are easy to follow, informational guides.

They lay out concepts in clear language, using relevant examples and imagery. Done right, a good training manual becomes a trusted resource for employees and managers or customers and clients. With the right approach, you can quickly go from outline to production, and provide your co-workers or customers, whomever your audience may be, with a helpful, easy to use resource.

The first thing when you start working on your training manual is knowing for whom you are writing. To do this, develop a picture of when, where, and how people will access your training content. Answering these questions helps you to right-size your content.

With an understanding of things like audience skill level, their context, and their content preferences, you can build your content to fit their expectations and needs. And, while you probably do, spending some time to flesh it out and bring the picture into clear focus will help you craft training content that truly solves your audiences problems.

A great training manual is easy to navigate. Someone encountering it for the first time feels comfortable discovering the information they need and a returning user is able to quickly find specific content and topics.

You can make sure this is the case for your training manual by strategically planning your content. Simply put, this means laying out all of your training material and organizing it in a logical fashion. There are different themes you might use to organize and categorize the topics in your training manual.

You could organize them by:. If you do have a lot of topics, consider placing them in groups and using headings and sub-sections to create a logical flow and organization within your manual.

Use this structure to create a table of contents in the final manual. In many cases, there will be ideal ways to deliver your content.

Figuring out which it is requires thinking about both your audience and your content. You have a number of options for delivery.

Common delivery mediums for training manuals include:.