A lot of workforce training materials are written. This is true if it’s something your workers will actually read. And it’s true of scripts that are used for e-learning training courses as well.

We’ve written earlier about style issues for your written training materials–click here to read more about that. That article includes some simple tips, such as writing at an appropriate reading level, using conversational words, and so on. Later, you may also be interested in reading this interview with Anna Sabramowicz about using storytelling and scenarios in training.

But in this article, we’re going to show you how to format training materials using simple techniques like headers, bullets, and tables to make your training materials more effective. This will apply to materials such as Word documents and PDFs that your employees read but also to PowerPoint presentations and e-learning courses they view on a monitor or screen.

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Companies put a LOT of money, time, and hard work into training their employees. New employee onboarding, job role training, succession training, compliance training–you get the picture.

In many or most cases, that training includes some element of testing. People in learning and development often refer to this testing as “assessment” or “level 2 evaluation” (to learn why, read our article on the Kirkpatrick 4-level Evaluation Model). We’re going to try to use the word “test” as much as possible in this article, though we’ll fall back on assessment from time to time.

The problem many trainers face is that after putting so much work into planning and creating the training materials, it can be easy to give short-shrift to the test part. And that can be a BIG problem because you don’t really know if your employees are learning what they have to learn if you’re not testing in one way or another. So you may be providing training that’s not effective for some, many, or all of your employees and never know it. And that’s why we’re going to focus on tests in this post–testing employees after training. Hope you find some stuff interesting and helpful.

You’ll find that this information includes a lot of high-level, more general information about testing. As a result, you may also find yourself interested in the following, more specific articles too:

• Writing multiple-choice questions
• Writing true/false, matching, dragging, and other types of questions
• Using scenario-based learning and assessments
• Testing and fidelity
• Testing, reliability, and validity 
• The “testing effect” and the forgetting curve 

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If you’re a trainer or design instructional material, your job is to train people.

But what exactly are you training them? What kinds of things? If your initial answer is “stuff for work,” we can dive down a little deeper on that. The benefit of doing so is that once we realize that we train people on different kinds of “stuff for work” (or to speak a little more formally, we train people to help them with different types of learning), you can get a little more efficient and use different training techniques for each of those different types of learning that you want your employees to master.

That’s what we’re going to cover in this blog post. So if that sounds spot-on, continue reading. If you’re not quite sure how you feel about it, keep reading nonetheless, if you can spare the time. You just might find some tips to make the training programs at your workplace more effective and efficient.

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We recently wrote an article with 25 tips graphics and visuals for training materials.

That post was so popular that we thought we’d dig deep again for another article on graphics and learning.

The source for the tips in this article is the book Graphics for Learning: Proven Guidelines for Planning, Designing, and Evaluating Visuals in Training Materials by Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark and Chopeta Lyons.

We hope you like this article, and we recommend you go buy the book, it’s got a million great ideas in it for making better use of graphics and other forms of visuals to improve your training.

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