How to upskill SMEs to create effective and engaging elearning content

by Rob Hubbard, Founder & CEO, LAS

The Fosway Group Digital Realities 2024 report revealed that 69% of L&D teams plan to resource L&D projects by upskilling subject matter experts. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are, of course, experts in their fields but what they are not (often) are experts in how people learn. Whilst it’s true that AI is, to some extent, democratising content creation, this doesn’t automatically result in a great quality learning experience. In order to be able to impart their expertise effectively, SMEs will need to learn about learning.

The theoretical benefits are substantial; you can effectively ease the pressure on your L&D team, whilst helping the business self-serve by creating its own learning content. Then your central L&D team can focus on the projects of high complexity and / or high strategic value. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

But only if you get it right! Here are the typical challenges of taking this approach:

• Too much content - SMEs often mistakenly think that the way they offer best value is to provide the most content. Sounds logical, but it leads to the audience being swamped by an information dump and not knowing what is important and what is just nice to know.
• Dry treatment - learning design is not an SMEs day job and so the treatment may well be a bit dull and uninspiring.
• It needs a lot of work to get it release-ready - then when your central L&D team get to review the elearning they need to do quite a lot of work to get it to be both presentable and effective. This can lead to the SME feeling they’ve wasted their time.
• AI won’t do it all for you - elearning author tools are beginning to integrate AI functionality and new tools are appearing that include it from the ground up. However currently the support AI provides is useful but limited.

However, if you invest some time in educating and upskilling your SMEs you can sidestep these challenges and help them build better elearning content. Here’s how...

Give them the right knowledge and skills to be successful

Investing time in upskilling SMEs on a few essential skills will massively improve the quality of their output. One crucial area to focus on is the limitations of human attention and memory. Understanding how people notice, process and retain information can help SMEs create content that is more memorable and impactful.?

Training in Plain English is also vital to ensure that written content is clear, concise, and accessible to a broad audience. This skill enables SMEs to communicate complex ideas effectively and avoid jargon or technical language that might alienate readers.?

Lastly, providing basic knowledge of graphic design and video production can empower SMEs to create visually appealing and engaging content. Gone will be the risk of migraine-inducing diagrams or 20-minute videos of them talking over PowerPoint slides!

Explain that these new skills are totally transferable to their day jobs

Help SMEs see how these new skills and deeper understanding of how the brain works will help them hugely in their wider role. For example:

• Having a solid understanding of the limitations of attention and human memory will make them a better communicator and will make their presentations more compelling
• Applying the principles of Plain English will make everything they write more engaging and memorable
• Familiarity with graphic design basics and video production techniques will allow them to present their ideas better visually and look and sound more natural on video

Provide them with templates and examples in your elearning author tool of choice

A great way to give your SMEs a head-start on elearning production is to provide a set of basic templates in your author tool of choice. This will mean that they can get to a decent quality result with much less effort than working from scratch, plus you’ll see more consistency across different projects. The risk here is that everything can end up looking the same - that’s where you as an L&D professional can bring some of your magic.

Stress that you are always there to help

Make sure the SMEs know that your digital door is always open! By beginning to author elearning content they are stepping into an area in which they are novices. This is a brave thing to do, especially since the output will be seen by their colleagues within the business. By providing the support I outline above, you are setting them up for success and also helping the audience by avoiding them being deluged with sub-quality content.

If you're interested in learning more, ask us about our L&D Evolution programme.