This Saturday, I want to share the system I use to build training programs remotely.

Onboarding and training are crucial to building a solid, productive, and long relationship with your teammates.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty common to see small and medium-sized teams without a structured training program.

There is always something more urgent or essential to work on, such as a new feature or project.

We tend to procrastinate the training
because results will arrive later.

Other common reasons are:

• Writing content for training purposes is complex
• Building a training program takes time
• We think it’s simpler to train the new teammates just by letting them work

But every time we have a new hire to onboard,
the training always stresses us.

Below 3 steps to stop procrastinating and start acting.

Step 1: Record your subsequent training sessions

That’s simple and effective, especially if you have no written documentation.

• Teach the next trainee as you always do, but record yourself.
• Collect the recordings in a Google Drive / Dropbox folder

Use the folder as your first version of your training program.
The next hire will start from the videos and will come to you only for questions.

You’ll already be saving a tremendous amount of time!

Step 2: Transcript videos

Now it’s time to level up your training program.

In the second iteration, start from recordings to build written documentation.
Transcript your videos, then beautify the documentation.
Add images, tables, and schemes.

Now your training program can be completed by reading and/or watching.
That’s extremely useful to speed up the training completion and reduce questions.

Step 3: Add quizzes

Once you have both videos and text, it’s time to automate the checkpoints.

Add simple quizzes and/or exercises at the end of each lesson.
Add also a final examination at the end of the course.

Quizzes are beneficial to keep a high level of attention.

TLTR; How to build Training Programs

• Record your subsequent training sessions
• Transcript videos
• Add quizzes

I was pleased to talk about this topic with my friend Luca Rossi for his outstanding community of tech leaders (Refactoring.club, check it out!).

If interested, you can watch the video here