Employee Training Materials: What to Create and How [2026]

Most training material problems are format problems. A team writes a 40-page manual when what people needed was a one-page checklist at the point of work, or records a webinar when the content should have been searchable text.

This guide covers the main formats, what each is genuinely good for, and how to build a set of materials that people use rather than a library that gets referenced once during onboarding and never again.

Start from how the material will be used

Before choosing a format, answer one question: is this something someone learns once, or something they look up repeatedly?

Learn-once material builds capability. It is consumed in sequence, usually as part of onboarding or a development programme, and its job is to change what someone can do.

Look-up material supports work in progress. It is consumed out of order, at the moment of need, and its job is to be findable and scannable.

These have opposite design requirements. Learn-once material benefits from narrative, build-up, and practice. Look-up material needs to be brief, structured, and searchable, and narrative actively gets in the way.

The single most common mistake in corporate training is producing learn-once material for a look-up need. The 40-page manual nobody reads is almost always this error. Our guide to performance support and job aids covers the look-up category in depth.

The formats and what each is for

Courses

Structured, sequenced content with assessment. The right choice when someone needs to build capability they do not have, in an order that matters, and you need evidence they got there.

Good for: onboarding curricula, compliance training, product knowledge, anything requiring a completion record.

Bad for: reference. Nobody opens a course to check one fact.

Effort: high to build, low to deliver repeatedly. Worth it when the same content serves many people over time.

Our step-by-step guide to creating an e-learning course covers the build, and course authoring 101 covers the discipline.

Job aids and checklists

One page or less, used during the task. A pre-flight checklist, a decision tree for escalations, a troubleshooting flow.

Good for: procedures with steps people skip, decisions with clear criteria, anything where the cost of an error is high and the task is infrequent.

Bad for: building understanding. A checklist assumes you already know why.

Effort: low. This is the highest return-per-hour format available and it is chronically underused.

If you do one thing after reading this guide, convert your most-referenced procedure into a one-page job aid.

Training manuals and SOPs

Longer written documentation covering a process end to end.

Good for: reference on complex processes, regulatory documentation, anything that needs to be authoritative and complete.

Bad for: teaching. People do not learn from manuals; they consult them. Treating a manual as onboarding produces new hires who have read a lot and can do little.

Effort: high to write, high to maintain. Manuals go stale faster than any other format because they are long and revision is a chore.

Video

Recorded demonstration, explanation, or narrated walkthrough.

Good for: showing a physical or on-screen process, conveying tone and manner for soft skills, capturing an expert doing real work.

Bad for: reference, unless carefully chaptered. Finding one detail in a 20-minute video is painful, and search does not reach inside it.

Effort: moderate. Lower than most people assume for screen recording, higher than most people assume for produced video.

The most efficient training video is usually an expert narrating their real work rather than a scripted production. Our video-based training guide covers production, and training video software covers tooling.

Short-form modules

Five to ten minute pieces covering one thing, delivered over time.

Good for: reinforcement after initial training, product updates, keeping knowledge current between larger programmes.

Bad for: initial capability building on complex topics, where the fragmentation costs more than the convenience gains.

See microlearning for where the format fits.

Practice exercises and scenarios

Something the learner does, with feedback.

Good for: literally any capability that has to transfer to real work.

Bad for: nothing, really. The constraint is effort, not fit.

This is the format most commonly missing from training material sets. A library of courses and documents with no practice produces people who know about the job. Our assessments guide covers writing scenarios that require judgment rather than recall.

Choosing the format

A quick decision path:

Most real needs require two or three of these. A new-hire curriculum typically needs a course for the fundamentals, job aids for the procedures, and practice for the parts that matter.

Sourcing without building everything

Building from scratch is the slowest option and often unnecessary.

Convert what exists. Most organizations have onboarding decks, process documents, and recorded sessions sitting in shared drives. Converting these is far faster than authoring, and the content has already been tested on real people. Our guide on converting PowerPoint into an online course covers the mechanics.

Capture experts doing the work. A screen recording of someone doing the real task, narrating their reasoning, takes as long as the task itself and often beats a produced module. Our knowledge sharing guide covers getting expertise out of people's heads.

Harvest from support channels. The answers your team gives repeatedly in chat are already written training material, tuned to real questions. Collecting the recurring ones periodically costs almost nothing.

Curate external content. For general skills, buying or linking beats building. Reserve your build effort for what is specific to your organization, since that is the only content nobody else can supply. See training content curation.

Use AI for first drafts, not final copy. Generating a structure and a rough draft from source material saves real time. Reviewing it against what is actually true at your company is not optional, and the review is where the value is added.

Writing material people actually use

A few principles that apply across formats.

Lead with the problem, not the objectives. "Three ways refund requests go wrong" gets attention. "Module 2: Refund Policy Overview" does not.

Cut the throat-clearing. Learning objectives slides, agenda slides, and recap slides pad length without adding value. If a module can be twelve minutes, do not make it thirty to seem substantial.

Write for one specific reader. "A new support hire in their second week" tells you what to include and, more usefully, what to leave out. Material written for everyone serves nobody.

Show the exceptions. Experts hold a rich catalogue of when the standard approach fails, and they rarely volunteer it because it seems obvious to them. That catalogue is the most valuable content you can capture.

Make it scannable. Headings, short paragraphs, and tables. Even learn-once material gets revisited, and dense prose makes that painful.

Include what to do when it goes wrong. Most material documents the happy path. The reason people need the material is usually that they are not on it.

Keeping material current

Stale material is worse than none, because people follow it. This is the part most teams underinvest in.

Give every piece an owner. One named person, not a team. Ownership without a name decays.

Tie revision to change, not the calendar. A rule that says "when this process changes, the material changes as part of the change" attaches maintenance to something already happening. An annual review of everything is a chore that gets skipped.

Let learners flag problems. People going through material hit discrepancies directly. Give them a low-friction way to report it and act visibly on reports.

Prefer many small pieces to few large ones. A 40-page manual goes stale as a unit and gets abandoned. Ten short modules can be revised individually.

Delete aggressively. Material nobody has used in a year is probably not worth maintaining, and removing it makes what remains more trustworthy.

The format choice affects maintenance more than people expect. Video is expensive to update, which is an argument for keeping produced video to content that does not change and using screen recordings for anything volatile.

Where the material lives

Scattered material does not get used regardless of quality. The practical requirements:

Editable in place. If fixing a typo means re-exporting a package and re-uploading it, corrections will not happen. Our course builder edits published content directly.

The course element catalogue in Pathboard

Assignable automatically. New hires should receive the right materials without anyone remembering. See role-based training automation.

Searchable. Look-up material that cannot be found does not exist.

Organized by what it helps you do, not by internal course codes. The content library supports this structure.

For narration on written material, AI narration is available on Business and Enterprise plans once an administrator enables it, with an optional on-screen presenter tier that requires your own ElevenLabs key. It is worth knowing about because it removes the recording step for material that would otherwise stay text-only.

A starting sequence

If you are building a training material set from nothing:

1. List what people actually ask. The recurring questions are your content brief, and they come free.
2. Build job aids first. Fastest to produce, immediately useful, and they reveal what needs deeper treatment.
3. Convert existing decks into courses for the topics that need sequence and a completion record.
4. Add practice to anything that has to transfer to real work.
5. Record experts for the knowledge that resists documentation.
6. Then write the manual, if you still need one. Many teams find they do not.

Doing it in that order gets usable material into people's hands in the first week. Starting with the manual gets you a document in six weeks that nobody opens.

Ready to turn what you already have into training people use? Start your free trial and convert your first deck into a course.