Do you find it a struggle to come up with material for your new hire training program? Perhaps you’re putting off developing a new hire training program because the idea of developing the modules from scratch is an overwhelming prospect. A ton of time can be involved with developing a new hire training program completely from scratch. However, there are ways to greatly speed up the process. One of the best ways to jumpstart your efforts is evaluating your existing content and seeing how it can be repurposed as part of your new hire orientation program. You may be overlooking high quality existing content that you already have at your disposal! Save precious time and effort by using these shortcuts that can help you quickly repurpose content for your new hire training program.

Create Your Training Plan

Effective employees and happy customers are the lifeblood of a successful business. This is why it is important to create a training plan that creates both effective employees and satisfied customers. Most training programs are adequate and packed with lots of great content. However, a successful program is not just about content, but also the delivery. No matter how great the content is, it is only useful to the extent that the trainees will grasp and use it. The secret to successful training lies in combining valuable content with great presentation. Mindtickle has produced numerous blogs to help you create your training plan including:

1. You Don’t Have to Be a Creative Genius to Design An Effective Online Training. This article provides useful tips on getting started on the creative canvas for your new hire training program.
2. How to Measure the Impact of Your Training Program. This article shows you how to take practical steps up front to measure the ROI of your training.

Auditing Your Existing Content

Even though repurposing existing content can be a time saver, there is still work involved. Whether you are changing the format of the content or changing the target audience for your content, the next step after sketching your course is to start taking stock of the existing content you have and begin categorizing it. The points in the next section will help you gauge the value of your existing content as it relates to your new hire orientation plan.

Get Employee Feedback

Your existing employees can be a valued resource in helping you evaluate and repurpose your existing content. You can seek their feedback in determining whether or not the material is useful and engaging. You can also seek feedback in determining what type of information will need to be included as part of your training materials. You may want to use notecards, a whiteboard or online mind mapping tools to help organize your team’s thinking.

Is the Content Ideal for Repurposing?

When making a decision in reusing content, you want to creatively recycle old content into something that is new and fresh. Consider these questions:

• Does the content contain information that would be useful to your new employees?
• How much of the content would need to be modified to make it useful, fresh and current?
• What stage of your learner’s journey does the content address? You may need to change the format and angle of your content to align with this.

If the information contained in the content is really out of date, it might not be worth your time to make the extensive edits needed to bring it up to par. That could be compared to trying to repurpose an old Netscape Navigator instruction manual to help people learn how to use Google Chrome.

5  Practical Ways to Repurpose Content

Having a variety of learning paths can be effective in reaching employees with different experiences before starting their new role. Here are some practical ways to spruce up your content while considering the journey that will get them successfully from point A to point B:

1. If you have presentations explaining helpful concepts, convert them into helpful video tutorials.
2. Add colorful visual aids to blog posts or written materials to convert them into them into checklists or guides.
3. Organize related written pieces into a series that your learners can read them in sequence.
4. Take key statistics from webinars and presentations and create reference infographics. Infographics can help new hires to view complex and complicated information in a clear, visually appealing, and simple format. Programs like Piktochart allow anyone to create their own infographics.
5. Use existing related content to create a longer and more in-depth ebook.

For your new hire training to reach its desired result, it will need to capture the attention of the new employee. Ensure that your modifications and the path you develop enable your new hires to see how the content connects to their assigned tasks and the goals you set in the first step. The shortcuts that we discussed will help you effectively use existing content in a fresh and relevant way. Instead of developing material completely from scratch, you can save precious time and resources by making repurposing your existing content. How have you been able to repurpose content as part of your new hire orientation? Share your comments below!