Are you in charge of educating and training your coworkers, clients, or new hires? If that's the case, keep reading.
It can be difficult to share and educate others. Especially if you don't have a good example for a training manual template to get you started quickly. In this article, I'll show you how to increase productivity and decrease downtime by using Docsie to create a simple training manual template and sharing it with your team.
Creating an Effective Training Manual Template: Key Steps
- Identify your target audience and training needs
- Outline the structure and content of the manual
- Develop clear, concise training materials
- Include visual aids (diagrams, screenshots, videos)
- Create interactive elements (quizzes, exercises)
- Implement a user-friendly design and layout
- Review and test the manual with potential users
- Gather and incorporate feedback
- Regularly update and maintain the content
Benefits of a well-designed training manual:
- Improved employee onboarding
- Consistent training across the organization
- Increased productivity and efficiency
- Reduced training costs
- Better employee engagement and retention
A comprehensive training manual template serves as a valuable resource for both trainers and trainees, ensuring effective knowledge transfer and skill development.
A comprehensive training manual template serves as a valuable resource for both trainers and trainees, ensuring effective knowledge transfer and skill development.
Step 1: Create an account with Docsie (it's free).
Docsie is a simple training manual development tool that provides companies with reusable templates to help them develop better training manuals. To get started, it's completely free, and you can build your first training manual in under 10 minutes. Once you are signed up we can begin to explain how to write a training manual through Docsie.
Step 2: Create a book to make an awesome basic training manual template.
Docsie is based on the concept of books and shelves, with books serving essentially as instructional manuals and shelves serving as departments and knowledge base hubs.
Assume you're a busy sales team with a need to have all of your outbound training materials in one place. You may use Docsie to organize and categorize your training manuals using sets. You can then invite the rest of the training team to collaborate and build better training manuals together once you're ready.
Step 3 - Define training instructions
This is where you'll identify the training categories and pathways you'll need to create to order to educate your target audience.
Keep in mind that this guide assumes that you already know who your target audience is; this guide's aim is to show you how to easily build content for your instructional training manual.
Consider a sales force. It has beginner and advanced sales tracks for a variety of positions, including SDRs (Sales Growth Representatives), Account Executives, Customer Success Representatives, and so on. The positions can have different names and responsibilities depending on the nature of your sales company, but they all require training manuals and a traceable way to share information.
As a result, once you've identified your training tracks, you can start interviewing experts in those positions to help you determine the content for those tracks. As an example, you could interview an account executive to learn more about how they work.
Once you know their everyday routine, practices and duties you'll construct a process diagram that details the tasks of that specific job, giving you a clear picture of those responsibilities.
You'll then break down those duties into actionable steps by stage/seniority, which will make creating a training manual a breeze because you will know what and how to write a manual for your specific team.
Once you have completed gathering enough information, you can use it to develop your training material using a training manual template.
Step 4: Develop training materials
Following the outline and road map you drew up for yourself in the previous steps, and armed with the information gathered from your team. You will begin to fill your training and instruction manual template prototype with content, stage by stage, gradually expanding each stage to help your trainees develop a proper training base.
Different articles can devise different steps in Docsie to illustrates in training manuals. There are many great tools that work together with Docsie to help you easily build amazing manuals.
Amazing tools
There are many amazing tools you can use to help you gain the cutting edge over the creation of your training manuals and help you on the path to developing and filling in your instruction manual template.
Snag-It
Note: If you're a Mac user, in order to copy and paste the image into Docsie using Shift, Command, and 4.
Snag-it allows you to easily take a photo of your page's content and annotate it with a sleek and simple annotation tool.
Camtasia
Camtasia will help you easily record how-to videos to improve the training experience and improve the effectiveness of your training manuals.
Docsie Guides
Using a simple chrome extension, you can use Docsie Guides to automatically record your training manuals as well as all of your training images with annotations. Docsie Guides will also assist you in creating non-coded guided tours to demonstrate how to use your product to consumers or new trainees.
Step 5 - Publish your training manual and share it with your team
You must want to share your training material with your new trainees and/or customers now that you've developed it in Docsie. It's as easy as clicking publish and having it appear on a Docsie embedded page on your site.
If you want to limit access to all of your training material, you can do so easily in Docsie. You can also allocate a unique password to a particular trainee and revoke access at any time.
With only one line of code, you can also insert your training material directly into your company's intranet using Docsie.
Step 6: Collect feedback on your training manual and update it on Docsie.
Once you've released your training manual prototype, you're ready to go. You may want to learn how your trainees and/or customers communicate with your training manual and give them the chance to provide you with actionable feedback so you can better your job.
This is where you can use Vocally (a Docsie Extension) to collect video clips of your trainees' training experiences to better understand how they deal with your instruction manual template. You may also give them the option of providing input on their training experience, which will be categorized in Vocally manager.
You can then use Vocally Manager, which is easily incorporated with your project monitoring software, to build actionable tasks for yourself to update and refine how you write a manual based on user feedback.
Step 7: Maintain and translate the material of your training manual.
You can now translate your instructional manual templates into multiple languages right on Docsie, and you can even communicate with experienced content translators who can help you update your content at a discounted rate.
Furthermore, creating new versions of your training materials in Docsie is as easy as clicking a button as your training materials grow. As a result, you will not lose any more valuable training copies and will still have a point of reference to refer to.
Final Thoughts
Docsie can be used if you are serious about making excellent training manuals and use instructional manual templates. It will significantly simplify and improve the workflow of your training manual.
Instructional manual templates play an important role in employee training by informing new employees about the organization and its procedures. Employees are maturing and learning new technologies, techniques, and processes.
Employees who aren't actively learning or who aren't knowledgeable about the devices, applications, equipment, or machinery used by their company may become disengaged at work.
However, disengagement often leads to high employee turnover and poor work satisfaction. In the end, both the employers and employees suffer losses.
Not to mention, there are statistics to back this up:
Within a year, 40% of workers with inadequate training quit their jobs.
Because of a lack of growth opportunities, 74 percent of workers feel they are not reaching their full potential at work.
Employees consider contributing financially to training in 72 percent of cases.
According to 68 percent of employees, the company's most important agenda is growth and training.
Just 13% of workers worldwide are engaged.
Employee disengagement costs the economy more than $500 billion each year.
The numbers, on the other hand, are endless. The problem is real. Employees want to grow and improve their skills in both traditional training and developmental opportunities.
A great way for businesses to get started on this much-needed method is to create a fantastic company training guide or training manual.
We need to get down to the point and figure out what the most important aspects of a fantastic training manual would be and how to write a manual.
In 2017, 45 percent of learning hours in a typical company were created by online or even e-learning methods, according to the ATD (Association-for-Talent-Development-in-the-United-States). In comparison to 2015, this represents a 42 percent increase.
The ability to develop an instruction manual template is a natural skill that is necessary for business continuity and growth.