5 Golden Rules For Creating Great Learning Content

Creating great learning content trips up businesses time and time again!

But if we understand why, nail the context and follow some simple steps with consistency, L&D can truly deliver resources that drive performance.

Easygenerator Co-Founder Kasper Spiro joined Nelson Sivalingam on L&D Disrupt Live to build an understanding of:

?? Why context is just as important as content.

?? How to use marketing tactics for better discovery.

?? Why best-fit content beats the best-produced content, and so much more.

Rule 1: Use internal experts to keep content relevant and up to date

Knowledge is being created too fast for L&D to build every resource, so we need our internal experts.

But by the same token, L&D teams won't have time to approve everything they create.

We can't swap one L&D bottleneck (creating) for another (approving).

So we need a mindset shift, one centered around trust and L&D becoming the facilitator.

“L&D’s role becomes setting the guidelines for the types of content we should be creating, how to go about it so it has the biggest impact and is meaningful to the learner.

"As L&D you can educate and empower internal experts to do it in the most effective way.” – Nelson Sivalingam .

This is how you create a company brain, where people’s knowledge is captured, made available to others, and won’t head out the door with them if they leave the organisation.

“If somebody in your company has a question, somebody else probably has the answer. And if somebody has a problem, somebody else probably has the solution. And that’s what you want to achieve.” – Kasper Spiro .

Rule 2: Think context, context, context

When content doesn’t work, L&D tends to think the content is the problem – it needs to be more engaging or interactive. But they don’t consider whether it’s a good fit for that moment of need or those moments that matter.

“Like a fish out of water, learning content that’s designed without the context doesn’t last long.” – Nelson Sivalingam.

These are situations where connecting someone to relevant content shapes their performance.

?? Macro moments: For example, I’ve just become a first-time manager and the right content can really shape how I perform.

?? Micro moments: Maybe you’re on a call with a potential customer and they ask a question. Knowing the answer to that single question can shape your performance on a smaller scale.

And there are factors to take into account when you’re creating content for those moments that matter:

• Environment: Audio content wouldn’t work for people in noisy environments, for example.
• Technology: Which tools do people have access to in moments of need?
• Time: If someone works on a shop floor, it might need to be minutes long and available on a mobile device.
• Activity: What else is that person doing in the moment that matters? Are they interacting with someone or using a machine – you need to consider how much of their bandwidth is being used and create content with that in mind.
• Organisation: What’s the culture like? Do people have the psychological safety to learn without fear?
• External environment: What’s happening in your industry that influences the content you create?

Rule 3: Make it discoverable for the people who need to discover it.

We’re living in a world where content is cheap and abundant, and so discovery becomes our biggest problem, not creation.

We have to consider how we help people find the most relevant content.

Here are three steps you can take today:

1. Write better headlines: Use as many of these Four Us as you can to convey the value of content and ensure it gets engagement: Useful, unique, ultra-specific, urgent.
2. Conduct keyword research: Which language does the learner use? Content and search results need to match user intent if that content is going to be discoverable.
3. Try to avoid echo chambers: Algorithms recommend more content based on what we’ve consumed before and that can pigeonhole us. Kasper believes that it’s people who can break us out of these bubbles, using an aggregator or facilitator to recommend the right content to us.

Rule 4: Curate where you can, create where you need to.

“Before you start creating content, you need to think about a few things: Is this a learning issue that I’m solving…

"If learning is the proper way to solve the problem, what kind of learning do we need?… And is it already out there? If it is, use it.” – Kasper Spiro

Rule 5: Timing beats perfection! Deliver content when it matters.

Nelson gave a great example of his boiler breaking down to prove why timing and relevance beat perfection every time.

The warning light comes on, he turns to YouTube and finds a really poor quality video – filmed on a phone with a terrible angle – but it explained how to solve the problem in 30 seconds.

Millions of views, loads of positive comments and the production value didn’t matter at all.

“When you’re in those moments that matter and you have a challenge, getting the right content makes all the difference.

"Relevance is more important than the production values. Speed over perfection is what matters!” – Nelson Sivalingam.

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