How do we communicate training as a technical writer? Is collaboration a key to good training? Collaboration is how well we work with others, knowing others, and being able to communicate well with others.
The right side of the brain helps us with communicating and training and collaborating. As a trainer, a technical writer has to:
- have explored and learned all the essentials, information, or data that is to be transferred. By doing so, they will know how to structure the mediums that will be used to transfer the knowledge.
- have a key understanding of what the audience needs and to tailor it to them through any medium needed to aid in the training, i.e., scripts, presentations, manuals, etc. The medium used has to be engaging, interesting, and relevant.
- be able to be a good listener, writer, be focused, and be able to adjust their teaching methods and their technical documents accordingly. A good trainer will be sensitive to a changing environment either while interactively training or when writing new policies, procedures, designing the curriculum, etc.
- be able to manage their time, their audience, and be able to continuously concentrate on the outcome of the lesson and at the same time be able to work collaboratively across all functions for gathering data and to work collaboratively across all audiences to provide them the training needed.
Trainers have to collaborate with the technical resources or any subject matter expert to gather specific (data or design) information. Therefore, know your SME (Subject Matter Experts). Find them and collaborate; create relationships and work with them and use any opportunity to gather information.
Training via slide shows presentations, videos, tutorials, mappings, documented material, etc. make it easy for us to socially communicate, share knowledge, and collaborate on the web or through any popular medium. With the popularity and reliance of mobile devices being a huge part of our industry now, how do we create independent training events for them? The knowledge to answer this question can be gathered from meetings and improving our own knowledge of and keeping up-to-date of all new technical advances in that area.
Teamwork plus collaboration always equals a positive outcome. Use your excellent communication skills to understand your stakeholders, use your interpersonal skills to collaborate with colleagues to gather information, and use your technical and analytical skills to understand complex technical information and organize it into a logical or customized format. Always remain organized and remember to ensure the look and feel of any training session and any associated documents are appealing and useable.
In the end, good training, collaboration, and technical documents always create better performance in individuals because of increased skills.
What are your thoughts on training and collaboration? Is collaboration a key to good training?
Gail Zack Anderson, President of Applause, Inc., has nearly 20 years experience in training and coaching. She
provides individual presentation coaching, and leads effective presentation workshops and effective trainer workshops.
Theresa Pojuner is a Documentation Specialist with over 20 years of writing experience and is skilled in many areas of documentation, for example, Style Guides, Training Manuals and Test Cases, wth a specialty n Technical Writing and Procedures.