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Posted on 2009-03-24 in Training

The Slow Disappearance of Training Manuals

Monica Keaveney mourns the slow disappearance of training manuals from more and more courses. She outlines the key reason for using a manual and offers a few tips for designing one;

Call me old fashioned, but even with the emergence of e-learning, webinars, forums, blogs and knowledge management systems; I’m still a fan of the training manual as a training aide. Many people don’t give manuals a chance. We are too busy to read up on a solution that we spend half an hour trying to call someone in IT or looking for a suitable and sometimes expensive, training course to solve our problems. In my eight years of training experience, it has occurred to me that the presence of training manuals is gradually diminishing. Perhaps it’s down to my own personal self-paced learning style, but I would rather have a bound manual leaving a course than umpteen ‘useful’ handouts.

Using A Training Manual

Maybe it’s because it’s waiting for you there on the desk when you come into a training course, all shiny and new, full of potential to transcend the course and be the manual that you can read and learn from when you run into difficulties long after you leave the course. Unfortunately, training manuals are frequently disappointingly dull and boring and particularly difficult to follow. Any learning professional should know that success should mean more than designing a good course and delivering it well. It’s also about what happens after the course: is the participant now armed with enough information to help themselves?

As a trainer, it would not be unusual for you to have to design and write a training manual. But how many trainers baulk at the idea? Many trainers are excellent at the ‘performing’ part of training, getting up there and delivering a message to the participants in such a way that they actually stay awake and learn from it. But all too often, that does not hold true for training manuals.

Granted, the fact that someone is standing up there, talking you through a concept or process helps to garner your attention, but surely there is a way to design training manuals so that they get used for something other than gathering dust in the boot of your car? In my experience, the presence of a good training manual allows participants to concentrate on understanding something rather than frantically trying to write it down so they know how to do it again. In fact, as a trainer, I prefer to use the training manual as a guide throughout the course so that the participant can take any ‘notes to self’ down at the relevant place. Some trainers provide the training manual but urge participants not to refer to them during the course. That to me is code for saying: ‘The manual isn’t very good –don’t refer to it at all - ever’. By equipping learners with a decent manual, you’re also putting some choice into training; they themselves can decide if and when they will use it.

Designing Your Manual

Designing and writing up a good training manual takes time, and for some courses, where the content changes quite rapidly, it may not be worthwhile. So make sure you ask yourself what the purpose of the manual is and why you are writing it. If the content is one which seldom changes, such as an in house payroll system which the organisation has paid a lot of money for, it’s unlikely to be changed in the next year.

Training manuals should not be so thick that they scare people away; they should start by covering basic skills and later versions should cover the more advanced topics. It might be worth checking out existing manuals and material to get an idea of what style you should use. If I deem a course to be worthy of a manual, I generally write two: one for the trainer and one for the learners. Both essentially contain the same information but the trainer’s manual includes notes on the inventory, delivery, assessment and evaluation of the training. It may come in handy if you work with many other trainers, some of whom may be very grateful for the ‘inside information’. The learner’s manual provides all the information and support on a particular course.

Manuals are usually produced for technical courses such as IT-focused ones. Personally, I believe there is lots of benefit to having a manual for soft skills courses such as communication and meeting management. They are, of course, less factual and more open to interpretation, but there are some basic tools and techniques that can be documented and tend not to date all that quickly.

As with any form of communicating, you must start with a plan. A plan of who the manual is being written for. Is it for participants who are new to this topic, or for more advanced users? Consider the following for each of your readers:

• Day to day job
• Work environment
• Specific tasks
• Educational level
• Native language
• Computer experience for IT manuals

Force yourself to doodle out a plan with objectives of what you want the manual to achieve, what topics you want to cover, how you want it to look, and so on.

You should know from the beginning that nobody is going to sit down and read through the manual from start to finish. Just think about the last time you looked at a manual – more than likely you start at the back index or the contents looking for a topic that you are having difficulty with. Even when you find the topic that you think might help you, you don’t read it. You scan the pictures, diagrams and headings to see if it’s what you need. Then you might read it. So it’s vital to include plenty of diagrams and screenshots amid well laid out non-ambiguous text. It’s also noteworthy that manuals are not read from start to finish when using technical terms. Just because you explained it in chapter one doesn’t mean you can refer to it in a later chapter. The nugget of information needed by the reader may be in that later chapter so you should briefly explain it again and explain that it is detailed in chapter one.

In IT-related courses, it’s a good idea to include plenty of screenshots in manuals for beginner courses and, tempted as you might be, don’t assume that the reader will press ‘OK’ here or there to advance them to the next screen. You must include all screens to make it as user-friendly as possible. The best manuals I have read will even tell you what to do in the event of a common error occurring. For more advanced manuals, to avoid wasting paper and the reader’s time, instead of a screenshot for every step, just use one shot and number each of the steps clearly. To revisit your own most recent experience of using a manual, you can imagine your frustration if there is no contents page or subject index to even get you off the starting blocks, so make sure to include at least one if not both of them.

As for editing and proof reading, try to get a colleague to read the manual as opposed to use it. Failing that read it yourself and then ‘use’ it as a person it was written for.

Finally, a good training manual can be a learning intervention all by itself so it should be made available on the company intranet where staff members can access it.

Here are two useful sites you may find useful in your quest to design and write a training manual:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Designing_a_training_manual

http://www.businessballs.com/training.htm

Monica Keaveney is a Training Manager at Sisk & Co.