How can you create an engaging training manual using storytelling techniques?

Creating an engaging training manual using storytelling techniques involves starting with a captivating narrative that's closely tied to the content. Introduce relatable characters to personify the concepts and show their journey of growth. Incorporate conflict and resolution to maintain interest and demonstrate practical applications. Visual aids like diagrams and illustrations can enhance comprehension as well.

I would like to add that while designing manual we must think about it’s distribution and percolation strategies too. Students now a days are more techno savvy, so we should design manual which are interactive in nature and mobile/tab friendly. QR codes of such manuals should be displayed and circulated for ease.

In creating a training manual, I will consider my audience and the purpose of the training. Storytelling techniques are a good guide for creating a manual.For example, in training examiners for a marking exercise, I will begin by arresting their attention through a conducive setting, blended learning, and a suspenseful introduction. This will be followed by clearly structured and focused areas of training, and the media I will need. I will plan the content and activities for the exercise, and collaborative tasks, taking into consideration the trainees' fears of the outcome, and finding ways of encouraging them. Like in a story, I will build towards the climax of the training: the assessment; and the subsequent resolution, the result.

Learning by doing is the best way to learn so I would include practical methods where learners are asked to be someone and do something so that they can learn it through those methods. If listeners feel they are part of the story and are doing something they will be more interested to do it . Use of three dimensional audio’s and videos is an interesting option.

When creating training materials, keep the narrative relevant to the material. Too many times, the narrative drifts too far from the topic to be useful. If you are teaching a point about how to effectively use keywords in a search, talk about times you used keywords to narrow a search, not the time you found something weird because the algorithm brought it up.

When writing training manuals/material for our County elections, creating real-life scenarios always helps the workers learn. You directly correlate how, when, and why they would use what they have been taught. In our training manuals, we create samples and show pictures of each process they are doing. While it not only helps to know they are doing it correct, it provides a visual aid those visual learners that may or may not have skimmed the actual written directions.

Headings, subheadings, lists, bullets, or tables definitely pull formatting into training documents. If you need to highlight something, consider making it a subheading, if you need to ensure they do not skip a step, you would use a numerical list. If you need to recap to make sure everything is complete, you can just use a bulleted list. Using all forms to highlight your text breaks up the long paragraphs and lengthy reading. Think about it, when we are scrolling on social media, our attention span is extremely short. So breaking up the text is the way to keep your content concise and to the point.