The Scrappy Training Starter Kit

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Introduction

If you’re tight on time and resources, this step-by-step guide is a super quick way to up-skill your teams & foster a culture of learning

SiNing Chan

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Welcome to

The ‘Scrappy’ Training Starter Kit

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Overview

This starter kit walks you through how to launch as simple learning program in just a day or two—based on videos, articles, books, and other resources you already have right under your nose! No learning specialists or trainers? No problem.

You’re just 4 steps away from creating a new learning experience!

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Form a Group⁠

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Choose a Topic⁠

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Get organized⁠

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Meet weekly⁠

Looking to develop more in-depth training for your business or organization?

👉 Check out the

‘DIY Learning Design Toolkit’⁠

for an easy way to get started »

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QuickStart

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Make a copy of this guide

To make a personal, editable copy for yourself:

Click here

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Pro Tip: For the best experience, follow each of the 4 steps of this guide, in order.

Go to

Form a Group⁠

to get started

If you’re not quite ready to dive right in, click on ‘The Backstory’ to find out more about what this guide is all about before first.

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The Backstory (the Tl:dr)

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Training—a growing need

If you ran a quick search for LinkedIn jobs for the word ‘training,’ you’ll find over a million results in the U.S. alone *(based on a June 2020 search). These days, it seems like every business or organization is looking for some kind of training program to up-skill and develop their employees and leaders. With the trend towards more distributed teams after the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, people are thinking about

how to grow and learn⁠

, beyond the idea of just binge-watching training videos.

The reality is, however, that only a few of these businesses and organizations have the resources needed to hire an external training consultant or to purchase an enterprise learning platform.

Not only are budgets tight, timelines are tight as well. So, people end up having to get scrappy—and do whatever it takes to put together their own training.

3 common approaches

All too often, training developed in-house by companies comes in three flavors:

A 1-2 hour in-person or online video class led by a content expert who’s reading from bulleted lists on a Powerpoint or Google Slide deck with about 50-100 slides (and a few animated GIFs thrown for comic relief).

An ‘e-learning version’ of that same Powerpoint or Google Slide deck, this time with a voiceover and (if it’s real fancy) a ‘talking head’ video recording of a content expert’s presentation.

A PDF ‘training manual’ emailed out—often with one-too-many words and a long list of links to recommended articles, podcasts, books, and YouTube videos.

What’s not working

The similarity between all of the common approaches to training is clear—they are, for the most part, passive forms of learning.

Don’t get me wrong—people will still learn and performance may still improve, especially when the speakers have a wealth of knowledge to share and are dynamic, engaging presenters. But, in order to

make learning stick⁠

, studies have shown that our brains need to engage more deeply with new information.

Beyond slides & ‘talking heads’

Studies have shown that training presentations and online manuals are ineffective when delivered as standalone performance improvement solutions—and not combined with other types of learning that require more ‘active’ brain activity (even if comes with some really hilarious animated GIFs).

What to expect from this guide

This guide was designed as a no-budget, scrappy-yet-structured approach to developing learning experiences with little or no help of any learning specialists.

Think of it as an interactive workbook designed to walk you through the basics of learning design:

Leverage existing content, resources, and expertise

Engage people in active learning through conversation and collaboration

Enforce deeper learning through reflection and mentorship

Promote application of new learnings to real-world issues and challenges

Not only does this guide offer a quick way to develop learning experiences, it’s built on time-tested approaches, like the

70-20-10 model⁠

, and promotes social learning, coaching/mentoring, and on-the-job training opportunities.

OK. Let's get started! »⁠

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The ‘Scrappy’ Training Starter Kit

Overview