Building quality content is one of the most time consuming and hence the difficult activity. Following are the points you must consider to understand : How to build quality content.
1) Which Content is needed :
Identify which training content is needed. Find out the same as per the voice of customers, voice of top management(future skills needed), voice of managers and voice of employees.
2) Who will create the content? Outsource or Insource? :
Be absolutely clear on which content to outsource and which one to insource. Ideally no external trainers will have a magic wand to solve your problems. You and your own people only know your problems and the tricks to solve them. Insourcing the content creation is all about finding and motivating that internal talent to express. Look at your own people as a source of content creation. In fact they already might have created it e.g. SOPs etc. which is the next point below.
3) Start with whatever is available :
There is no short cut to success, and there is no short cut to building quality content. One of the best starts though can be straight away looking for standard operating procedures which are normally used most of the times while performing the work. They can be in the form of Process Flow Diagram, Work Instructions for performing a task, Check Lists to ensure that work instructions are followed, Escalation Process Documents, The BEST Practices to be followed etc. You should look for such documents and use them for building your training content.
4) Create your own internal social networks :
People sharing their own learnings, experiences, testimonials, tips are always helpful and are taken positively by everybody. This increase the organizational bonding as well. Make sure that you publish ‘Employee Connect’ or ‘Me in a Minute’ kind of interviews or essays of your employees, which in an informal way will be a training platform for your learners.
5) Use Technology, but keep it simple :
Provide relevant tools to your people for content creation as well as content consumption. (e.g. Use of LMS, Internal social network, Internal webinars etc.) Keep the technology you use to create content as simple as possible, meaning anybody should be able to use the subject authoring tool without much expertise. The whole point here is to avoid the barriers to content entry in system.
6) Tweak the Organization structure :
Create a 1-1 mapping of senior and junior employees in your organization. That will work wonders for you without you creating a single piece of training content. Because…
The most important messages are in-person
Tweak your organization structure in such a way that it promotes short term as well as long term development of people (e.g. People Manager & Project Manager for each employee, Short term as well as Long term mentor for each employee)
7) Motivate to train others as well as get trained :
Motivate your people to create, share as well as consume content (e.g. KRAs, Awards, Internal recognition mechanisms)