Bespoke, modular content design training (1 of 7)
Scroll has developed a range of modular masterclasses to upskill content teams. This is the first in a series of 7 blogs explaining what the training covers and how it can improve user experience in your organisation.
Andrew Charlesworth is a content strategist and Scroll consultant. He specialises in helping organisations measure and improve the impact of their content and efficiently manage its life cycle. He's trained content designers from public and private sector, journalists, and PR execs.
Are you looking to improve user experience in your organisation? One solution is to upskill your content team with techniques that enable them to create more effective content and manage it more efficiently.
To address this need, Scroll has developed a range of customised, modular upskilling courses for content designers in all content publishing roles and at all stages of experience.
Beyond better writing
When thinking about training for content designers, it’s tempting to limit it to clearer writing and ever-closer adherence to the style guide.
But my experience of writing (as technical author, press officer, journalist, and content strategist for private, public and third sector), and as a manager and trainer of writing teams, has taught me that writing is about 10 to 20 percent of a content designer’s job. And training for the other 80 to 90 percent is rare.
That’s why Scroll - with many years of supplying contract content designers to projects and digital teams - has developed customised modules that address the skills content teams struggle to acquire.
The modules are:
Content design basics
Role of user research
Content process design
Stakeholder management
Taking a brief
Thinking like a user
Accessibility
Discussion, review and 2i
Co-developing content
Measuring content and audit
Content lifecycle management
Modular, bespoke, practical
Our upskilling approach is a deliberate departure from conventional, all-day, off-the-shelf training. The courses are bespoke, modular and bite-sized. And the emphasis is on practical exercises, not lectures.
Off-the-shelf training packages assume all content teams need the same skills. But content designers know to base their content on meeting users’ needs, as revealed by research. So the same applies to content design training: it should be tailored to the specific needs of the content team.
For example, the training Scroll provided for Cumbria Council’s content team focussed on stakeholder management and publishing processes, the most pressing needs identified by team members.
My experience of all-day training (as both trainee and trainer) is that attendees retain only a small proportion of the course - the part they are able to practise immediately after the training. So the majority of time attending a course may be wasted.
By keeping the modules short - average 1.5 to 2 hours each - and emphasising doing over telling, candidates learn what they can use straight away, and can build their skills module by module over time.
Skills content designers need
Note that only one of the modules - content design basics - is actually about writing.
When training a variety of content teams in the private and public sector, I’ve found that deficient writing skills are rarely the problem.
By far the biggest fallacy, perpetuated even among content designers themselves, is that you have to be a great writer to be a good content designer. You don’t.
This may sound like heresy to content professionals, but it’s true. The primary skill a successful content designer needs is managing stakeholder relationships.
Another contentious statement: content management is more important than content creation.
So many publishing process flows end at ‘Live!’ What about measuring effectiveness? Where are the event- and calendar-driven reviews? What is the ongoing governance process?
There should be as many steps to the right of ‘Live!’ as there are to the left of it.
And on the subject of content process flows: the job is called content design. You can’t add design after build. It has to be present at the inception, at the point where someone in the organisation says, “We need a page on the website about this…”
The difficulty of achieving that in siloed organisations is why it features in more than one of our upskilling modules.
Do the right thing
So many content teams I’ve worked with complain about being too busy, and not having time ‘to do things properly’. Consequently, user experience suffers.
But my experience is that they are often busy doing the wrong things. For example, stuck in lengthy review and rewriting cycles, or dealing with requests for publishing unsuitable content. They focus on doing the wrong thing faster, because they lack the knowledge and skills to change the way their organisation publishes content.
If you want to improve user experience by upskilling your content team, Scroll’s modular courses might be just the thing you need.
Looking for training to upskill your content team?
Read more about the content design training we offer or get in touch with Scroll.