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Updated August 14, 2024You’re reading an excerpt of Great Founders Write, by Ben Putano, writer, entrepreneur, and book publisher. He’s the founder of Damn Gravity Media, a publishing house that inspires and educates tomorrow’s great founders. Purchase now for lifetime access to the book and on-demand video course.
Before you write a single step of your training program, let’s go over the fundamentals. We’ll call these Building Blocks because they set the foundation for your program. Your building blocks include resources, principles, and your employees’ levels of prior knowledge.
Your resources are the content, tools, and experts at your disposal.
There’s a good chance you’re not starting your training program from scratch. Look at your existing content to see what you can repurpose: your past training courses, customer knowledge base, case studies, templates, and frameworks.
Your tools can be as high-tech or low-tech as you want, ranging from Word docs to slide decks to interactive training software. However, as we’ll discuss more below, multimedia content is more effective than written content alone.
When it comes to experts, you’ll likely find those by staring in the mirror. If you’re still in startup phase, you and your co-founders are probably the experts. If you’re not an expert in the training you’re conducting, talk with your advisors or hire a consultant. Training your team well is worth every penny.
“Learners will only remember a handful of things,” said Barry, “so take the time to clarify the top three to five takeaways you want them to leave with.”
These three to five main takeaways are your principles. You can also think of them as buckets of knowledge you need your team to acquire. For example, when I finally identified the learning principles for WeContent’s freelance writers, they were:
Client’s brand voice
Conducting research
Creating outlines
WeContent’s writing style
These principles will eventually turn into chapters or modules in your training program.
Last, but not least, you need to figure out what your trainees know and don’t know about your business. In education parlance, this is called “levels of prior knowledge.”
Hopefully you’ve hired a competent team who knows their jobs and industry well. But don’t take for granted all the nuances of your particular business. This was the trap I fell into when building WeContent’s writing team: my writers knew how to write, but they didn’t know how to write for WeContent’s clients in WeContent’s style.
So before building your training program, make a list of everything your team should already know before getting started. Then make a list of things they don’t know. This will become the outline for the next section: Key Learning Outcomes.
When in doubt, err on the side of caution and recover the basics, which aren’t always as basic as you expect.
With your building blocks in place, it’s time to start creating new material. But don’t just dive into the first module. Before you start writing, you need to identify your key learning outcomes.
Key learning outcomes, or KLOs, are what you want your audience to be able to do differently after completing each section.
Each section of your training program should focus on a single learning outcome. Learning outcomes can range from remembering factual information (i.e., definitions) to creating new solutions to complex problems. Your KLOs depend on your team’s level of prior knowledge. Less-experienced trainees should start with learning factual information, while veterans can jump straight into more challenging tasks.