Every spring the increase in sunshine prompts us to do a deep clean of our homes, organizing our prized possessions and throwing out or donating things that no longer spark joy or suit us anymore. A messy closet can hide our favorite outfits and make it take longer in the morning to get ready. It may also cause more work if the clothes are so cramped that they wrinkle. After all, wouldn’t it be easier to get dressed in the morning if your closet looked…
Our learners feel the same way about the training that we create! When all of the information is jumbled together and not organized appropriately, it’s hard to learn! It’s up to us as instructional designers to organize the content in a way that makes the content accessible to the learner and easy to use.
How does training content get jumbled?
Sometimes, especially with content that’s unfamiliar to the instructional designer or very technical, we rely more on our subject matter experts (SMEs) to structure the content. However, while SMEs are experts in their fields, they aren’t experts in adult learning. Often, they’ll do a data dump of all the knowledge that they have in the order it comes to mind. This is the mental equivalent of dumping a laundry basket of clean clothes on the closet floor! Yes, the clothes are clean, but now it’s going to be hard to find your favorite outfit and if you do, you might have to do more work to get the wrinkles out.
Often, when SMEs organize the content, it’s presented in a way that’s useful for someone who’s already an expert, not someone who’s new to it.
Let’s get organized!
Back to our closet, maybe the clothes are hung up, but they aren’t in order by type of clothing or color. As instructional designers, we know that adult learners like to understand the relevance and context to what they’re learning and that they need to fit the new information into their existing knowledge. SMEs might not provide this essential context.
That’s where you, the Marie Kondo of training development come in! You need to organize content so that your learners can use it! Your first step is to remove anything that doesn’t fit. Throw out those size 2 low-rises! Look at your training the same way — what content matches the skills you’re expecting your learner to master? In other words, if the content doesn’t support your objectives and is just nice-to-know, pull it out! Be ruthless! That content might be useful elsewhere such as in a refresher, or communication, but it doesn’t belong in your training. Toss it in the pile!
The next step is to put the content in order. There are a few ways to do this and I won’t list them all here, but you could put it in process order, order of importance, or in order of dependency. It’s the equivalent of organizing a closet by color or outfit. The key is to be consistent and make sure that everything fits within the framework.
You may be thinking, this is all great advice, but how am I supposed to do this? I’m developing a training on the “Nuclear Fission Risks of Underwater Ballet Performed by Pet Psychics” or some other esoteric and complex topic. Well, that’s where your facilitation skills are going to come into play.
You need your SMEs’ help to organize this content, but often it’s not as simple as just asking them because as I mentioned above, they don’t always know how to do that. One of the best ways is to do this live. If you’re in a room together or even virtually, you can share your screen and use the Microsoft Word Multilevel List button to organize your content together. You can also use whiteboard apps, text boxes in PowerPoint, or one of my personal favorites, sticky notes! You can prepare some sticky notes as topic headers and have your SMEs move them around, or you can have your SMEs generate the sticky notes depending on where you are in the process.
If you don’t have access to your SMEs, you could also use a generative AI tool to help you organize the content. Be sure to follow your company’s policies on using these tools and always take the output with a grain of salt as we are still in the early days of these powerful tools. If you’re organizing the content on your own, think back to your school days and remember to find the key points (usually these are your learning objectives), and then organize any supporting points under those key points.
Remember, keeping your training content organized and orderly will help your learner zero in on what they need to do to improve their skills and perform better at their job.
You don’t want your learner to open the door of the training closet and get a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff dropped on their head. You want them to open the door and easily pluck out exactly what they need to make them look and feel great! Happy spring cleaning everyone!