How to Simplify Your Life with an All-In-One Training Document Posted by Mimeo on April 19, 2016 in. By Gus Prestera, Talent and Organizational Development Consultant If you run lots of workshops and webinars, here’s a deceptively simple technique for reducing the file clutter, production time, and maintenance costs of producing and maintaining world class instructor-led-training materials. Grace used to be a happy-go-lucky person; that is, before she got stuck updating a three-day instructor-led-training (ILT) program. Before being sucked into this administrative quicksand, she actually enjoyed instructional design. After a week of sifting through piles of marked-up edits and applying them to the slides, participant workbook, leader guide, and other documents associated with the course, the joy drained from her tired eyes. The changes themselves are not that time-consuming, but cascading the changes down through all of the files is maddening. She edits a slide, then needs to edit the leader guide document to reflect that change, and then the participant workbook, and then she needs to copy and paste the revised slide into the documents as a thumbnail. One little change has her shifting back and forth among multiple documents, trying to keep straight what she still needs to edit. Like the water-dripping torture technique, it’s driving her crazy. After a week of making the same edits in different documents and trying to keep it all straight, Grace is ready to submit her revised materials for review. A week later, her subject matter expert comes back with more change requests and the process starts all over again. If Grace’s story sounds familiar, you’ll be happy to know that it doesn’t need to be like this. Saving Grace! Over the last 15 years, my team and I have produced hundreds of in-person and virtual ILT programs. Since we would rather spend our time designing than being stuck in the minutiae, we’ve made it a mission to find the most efficient way to build and maintain a set of ILT materials. After many experiments—most too horrifying to share with you—I’m ready to unveil our simple technique. We’ve found that the most effective way is to build all of our ILT materials directly in a single Microsoft PowerPoint file. That’s right, we build our slides, participant workbook, leader guide, and supplemental materials all in one PowerPoint file, and it looks “amaze-balls,” as my daughter likes to say. To see a brief demonstration of what the guides look like, check out the YouTube video below. How to Use One Master File to Save You Time We start by building a leader guide template in the Notes Master. The Notes Master is a little known and under-utilized feature within PowerPoint that can enable you to create a beautiful layout for your leader guide. Once we’ve built the template, we build out our slides and add in our talking points, leader instructions, timing estimates, etc. What about the participant workbook? Here’s where we really get sneaky. The participants will get a subset of the leader guide, typically the slide with the talking points section. The other parts—the elements that are just for the leader guide—we cover up with a white box and make that a blank student notes area. PowerPoint’s notes view will already have a thumbnail of the screen built into it, so we never need to update slide thumbnails in our participant workbooks or leader guides. The talking points in the leader guide and participant workbook are the same, so we only update them once. We are working with just one file for any given set of content, so there’s no clutter. Once we’re finished, we output a PDF for the leader guide and a PDF for the participant workbook. To see a demonstration of how we create the leader guide template, check out the following YouTube video. How One Training Document Saves You Time This technique involves a tool that most instructional designers already use in the ILT development process, so the learning curve is not too steep and there’s no additional cost to purchase specialized leader guide software (that doesn’t work very well anyway). Using the all-in-one approach, we’ve reduced production time by 40%, revision cycle times by 150%, and overall production and revision work hours (effort) by 120%. In other words, we’ve chopped our time and costs in half (at a minimum). We’ve reinvested some of that time and effort into producing higher quality graphics, case studies, videos, and activitieswhich add a great deal of instructional value to the programs we produce. When it comes to ongoing maintenance, the difference is even more profound. If a round of updates might have taken us three days to make previously, we’re now able to make those same edits in about half a day. As Donald and Bernie like to say, that’s HUUUGE! Of course, it’s not just my team that benefits. After we do the initial build of the program, our clients—including the fine folks at AIG, Vertex, Main Line Health, SCTE, Ballard Spahr, and BMS—are then able to take over the maintenance of their own programs. They’re happier because the process of making edits is so much faster and easier. We took it a step further with Johnson & Johnson’s global leadership development curriculum by building for them a whole collection of slide and leader guide templates that their internal and external instructional designers use to build new programs in a consistent manner. Instructional content is logically organized in a visual flow that is easy to follow. The documents are professionally formatted and branded. And they are Word files you can share, edit and PDF. Customizable smart templates & work task automation to build facilitator guides. Find Our Lowest Price.Download and Read Participant Guide Word Document Templates Participant Guide Word Document Templates Follow up what we will offer in this. A recommended format for creating the instructor guide notes pages is to use Microsoft PowerPoint’s. Participant Workbook and the Administrative Package. Early on, Office became one of the most conspicuous of the many unwitting and unwilling participants in the spread of computer viruses. The most common form of these Office- targeted exploits has been the e-mail virus, a beast that infects the system through the simple task of receiving and opening an e-mail message. Use available resources and templates. Note key points and add examples that can illustrate them. Participant's Guide - Effective Training. At SCTE, we took it even further by creating a leader guide template that could also double as an elearning storyboard. I call it “Frankenboard.” The bottom line is that if you want to streamline the production and maintenance of your ILT programs, you need not go further than exploit some additional capabilities within PowerPoint. Between that and your own imagination, the sky’s the limit to what you can create there. After watching the videos, open PowerPoint and give it a try. It really will change the way you look at ILT production. If you get stuck and need some assistance, please contact me. For over 20 years, has been helping businesses improve the capabilities and performance of workers and their leaders. He holds his Ph.D. In Instructional Systems, an MBA, and a BS in Marketing. As a principal of, a talent development consulting firm, Gus helps organizations architect, build, implement, and evaluate learning ecosystems that support onboarding, competency-based training & certification, performance improvement, professional development, and leadership development. Millions of dollars are being invested in training each year. But how are organizations measuring the effectiveness of their training, especially soft skills training like sales? At Richardson, Eileen Krantz, Vice President of Client Analytics, has discovered that some clients believe that there is just an inherent value in providing quality sales training, others are more concerned with just aligning training with the sales strategy, and some to isolate the financial return on their investment. Thanks Jessie! Yes, there is a cutoff point. We have a few ways to address that. (1) If we have that much to say, consider re-chunking and spreading content out across more screensno sense in overloading the student or instructor. (2) When we’re close, we’ll play with the text formatting to “shoehorn” the text. We start with a standard text format that gives us good font size, line spacing, and paragraph spacing, so then we have room to go down from there when necessary. (3) we can add additional slides that have no screen content and are hidden to students but have additional talking points in the Notes Page or instructions for the instructor. They may or may not go into the Participant Guide PDF/printout. Those are our top 3 approaches.
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