How to Develop Effective Training Material in 2025

Training materials, whether documents, job aids, videos, in-app walkthroughs, or simulations, are the essential tools that help employees learn and apply knowledge on the job. In 2025, these assets are more critical than ever. Reports suggest that companies with comprehensive employee training programs report 218% higher income per employee compared to those without formalized training systems. This underscores a powerful reality: well-designed training materials are not just helpful, they directly drive business performance.

For L&D leaders, the challenge is clear. Your materials must not only teach but ensure that learning becomes behavior, driving adoption, reducing errors, and accelerating time-to-proficiency. Without thoughtful design informed by learning science, training fades and ROI vanishes.

In this article, learn how to create engaging training materials that adhere to the highest market standards and are designed to help employees learn quickly through effective training materials and tailored lessons.

11 Steps To Designing Effective Training Materials for Your Employees

Here’s a checklist for you to follow to design training materials for your employee training programs.

1. Understand your audience

Understanding your audience is the foundational step in designing effective training materials. This involves analyzing the demographics, roles, skill levels, learning preferences, and existing knowledge of the employees undergoing the training.

By gaining insights into who your learners are, you can tailor the content to meet their specific needs and ensure that the training is relevant and engaging. This step helps create a learner-centric approach that maximizes the effectiveness of the training program.

2. Set learning objectives for your training material

Learning objectives are central to designing a training course. These define what a learner is expected to know, understand, or do as a result of a training program. The learning objectives guide your content development process and ensure that all training materials align with the desired outcomes.

Learning objectives must be SMART, that is, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This approach eliminates generalities by assigning a clear timeline, obvious outcomes, and success metrics. Furthermore, defining SMART goals makes it easier for managers to track the progress of employee growth while tying these goals to business outcomes.

3. Assign ownership to the right team

To design training materials, different team members—such as the learning experience designer, project manager, instructional designer, graphic designer, video editor, and developer—collaborate to get the wheels spinning. Each member has specific duties.

• Learning experience designer – understands every element of your training material and translates stakeholders’ expectations into a custom learning experience, ensuring the end product satisfies the requirements.
• Project manager – facilitates the back-and-forth communication of action items, decisions, and deadlines.
• Scriptwriter – synthesizes raw content into the required design format, be it video scripts, infographics, interactive eLearning, etc.
• Graphic designers – create the visual display of information through visual design.
• Instructional designers – create the course design and develop instructional materials, including various multimodal learning formats such as presentation materials, participant guides, handouts, etc.
• Video editors – help create and publish visually engaging videos.
• Course Developers – proficient with corporate LMS, SCORM authoring eLearning tools, or any other training tools, developers handle the technical specifications and ensure error-free training delivery.

4. Audit and curate your existing training material

There is always a wealth of training material sitting in an organization’s drive, which is a great starting point for designing training material. Curating existing material and presenting it in a new way instead of designing from scratch saves you a lot of time and effort. Think of it as a recycling, eco-friendly learning technique.

Be sure to assess the quality of existing material and look for ways to improve if it’s not up to your current learning standards

Here are a few factors to consider for curating existing training content:

• Audit the existing training materials – presentations, documents, training manuals, specifications, and videos.
• Check if the existing materials are complete in terms of containing all the necessary content.
• Check if the information contained in the existing materials is still accurate.
• Check if the material is up to date.
• Determine if the training content is exciting and engaging.
• Check if it got positive feedback from the learners in the past.
• Figure out the scope for improvement.

5. Choose the content formats for your employee training curriculum

Selecting the appropriate content formats is essential to cater to your employees’ different learning styles and preferences. Training materials can include various formats such as written documents, video tutorials, interactive eLearning modules, webinars, podcasts, and hands-on learning activities.

The choice of format is influenced by the learning objectives, the complexity of the content, and the preferences of the target audience. A mix of formats works best to keep the training engaging and effective.

6. Break down your training into segments

Considering the fast-paced professional world and the reduced attention spans of the digital workforce, traditional long-form training content is hard to digest and easily forgettable.

Dividing the training into manageable microlearning content helps in organizing the content logically and coherently.

Each bite-sized segment covers a specific topic or skill and builds upon the previous one. This modular approach makes it easier for learners to absorb and retain information, allows for more flexible learning schedules, and facilitates the assessment of progress.

Examples of microlearning content formats to deliver short, timely learning include:

• Microvideos – 3-6-minute long videos are an effective way to deliver short lessons to learners.
• Audio clips – Short audio clips provide a great microlearning solution for concepts that don’t require visualizations. For example, micro audio clips are effective for helping employees pronounce co-workers’ names or for scenario training (like for customer service or call center agents handling complaints.)
• Microquizzes – Microquizzes are an effective way to measure training effectiveness and determine whether employees are retaining knowledge. They should be short and take learners less than a minute to complete.
• In-app guidance – In-app guidance refers to interactive step-by-step walkthroughs that overlay any software to guide employees through contextual processes. It can utilize various forms of UX elements, including interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, and tours, to educate users on how to use an application and its features. Enterprises maximize value from their mission-critical software by overlaying contextual in-app tutorials on their custom workflows to enable learning in the flow of work.

7. Design the outline for your training content

A training course outline provides a framework before instructional designers design training materials for a particular course. A detailed outline makes the writing process more manageable and organizes your information to serve your trainees best. Here’s an idea of what this outline looks like:

Course Information

• Introduction (why was the course created)
• Background and scope
• Target audience
• Resources supporting the content (e.g. citations, web links)
• Training policy
• Copyright and contact information

Course Planning

• Goals/learning objectives of the course
• Materials, equipment, and facility specifications
• Module overviews
• Scope and sequence guidelines

Course Content

• Course outline, including content, learning activities, directions, and timeframes.
• Presentation notes with support materials for each session (e.g. PowerPoint, overheads, and handouts)
• Teaching points for trainers
• Learning exercises (e.g. role plays, group discussions, case studies, brainstorming)
• Topic-specific questionnaires
• Participant handouts and other course material
• Accurate and appropriate technical content

8. Leverage content development and design technology

Utilizing advanced content development and design technologies helps enhance the quality and effectiveness of your training materials. Tools such as eLearning authoring software, graphic design programs, and video editing tools can help create engaging and interactive content.

Employee training software can be leveraged by organizations to deliver compelling employee training experiences. These allow you to create engaging training modules, ensure compliance and security, track employee engagement with the material, analyze performance, and gather feedback. These are all-in-one platforms to deliver highly effective training to your workforce. Some examples of employee training software include:

• Learning management systems: A corporate LMS provides a framework that handles all aspects of your employee training – from creating to housing to delivering to tracking the training material. It helps L&D teams identify and assess individual and organizational learning goals, track progress toward meeting those goals, and collect data for supervising and improving the learning process.
• Digital adoption platform: A digital adoption platform like Whatfix enables learning via in-app guidance, tutorials, and interactive walkthroughs. These platforms overlay any software or application to provide contextual guidance to users, ensuring they can navigate and utilize the application without leaving it. This approach minimizes the learning curve and boosts productivity by delivering real-time, role-specific instructions tailored to the user’s needs. With Whatfix Mirror, you can easily create sandbox IT software training environments that allow employees to practice everyday tasks without posing any risks for actual business.
• Instructional design software: Instructional design software is used by course designers to create impactful, accurate, and relevant instructional content. This content may come in various formats, from texts and presentations to podcasts, videos, etc.

9. Utilize visual elements

Incorporating visual elements such as images, infographics, charts, and videos can significantly enhance the appeal and comprehension of your training materials. Visuals help break down complex information, making it easier to understand and remember. They can also make the training more engaging and enjoyable for learners. Careful selection and design of visual elements must align with the learning objectives and the overall aesthetics of the training materials.

10. Create a final draft and share it with the L&D team

Before launching the training course, send the newly designed material to your L&D teams for final suggestions and edits. A checklist can be created to check the quality of the training material:

• Is the material capable of holding your learners’ attention?
• Does the material encourage recall and apply prior knowledge?
• Do the presentations convey information in an easy-to-understand manner?
• Does the material include examples, case studies, or graphics to add to the interactiveness of the content?
• Does the training material include ways for employees to apply what they’ve learned?
• Does the material expose learners to new scenarios and problems where they can apply the skills they’ve learned?

The final training material should only be released after incorporating this feedback from the L&D team.

11. Monitor pre-determined training KPIs and make adjustments

Designing training material is not a one-time process. It needs to be continuously monitored and evaluated to determine if it is successful and meets your training goals.

The four areas to cover for measuring the ROI of training materials are:

• Employee feedback: Use post-training feedback surveys to get employees’ feedback on the training material and their overall opinions or suggestions.
• Employee learning: Use pre-and-post course assessments to determine what employees learned and measure the knowledge gained from the training material.
• Employee post-training productivity: Observe your employees to determine whether they use the new knowledge in their daily tasks.
• Quantifiable business results: Analyze your training results by determining whether the training corresponds with a rise in revenue, a decrease in costs, changes in employee productivity, etc.

Deliver and Reinforce in the Flow of Work with Whatfix

Designing training materials is only the first step. The real challenge is ensuring employees remember and apply that knowledge when it matters. Traditional formats like PDFs or slide decks often sit unused after training sessions. Whatfix changes that by embedding learning directly into the flow of work, so employees don’t just learn once, they reinforce skills continuously while doing their jobs.

In-App Guidance for Step-by-Step Learning

With Whatfix in-app guidance, employees receive interactive, on-screen instructions as they complete tasks. Instead of trying to remember training from a past session, they are guided through processes in the moment. This approach lowers errors, builds confidence, and helps learners progress from dependent execution to independent mastery. For L&D leaders, it also ensures consistency across large, distributed workforces, because every learner follows the same guided path.

Self Help for Just-in-Time Answers

When employees get stuck, they often lose time searching for documents or asking peers. Whatfix Self Help eliminates this friction by surfacing contextual answers directly in the application. Employees can search and access bite-sized resources, such as how-to guides, FAQs, or knowledge base articles, without leaving their workflow. This not only reduces productivity loss but also reinforces knowledge exactly when it is needed, strengthening long-term retention.

Task Lists, Pop-ups, and Nudges for Spaced Reinforcement

The forgetting curve shows that knowledge decays rapidly without reinforcement. Whatfix combats this by using Task Lists, Pop-ups, and Nudges to re-engage learners at the right intervals. Employees can be reminded to revisit important steps, practice workflows, or complete follow-up tasks over time. This approach operationalizes spaced learning, ensuring critical knowledge is refreshed and retained, not lost after a single training event.

Mirror for AI Roleplay and Simulations

Whatfix Mirror extends training into immersive practice. Employees can participate in AI-powered roleplay and scenario-based simulations that replicate real work conditions. For example, a sales rep can rehearse client conversations, or a healthcare worker can practice patient intake steps, without the risk of mistakes in live environments. Mirror provides immediate, personalized feedback so learners understand what they did right or wrong. This builds confidence, strengthens retrieval pathways in memory, and accelerates transfer of knowledge into daily performance.

Analytics to Track Retention and Adoption

Training is only valuable if it translates into results. Whatfix analytics track how employees use training materials and how well they adopt new tools and processes. L&D leaders can see metrics like time-to-proficiency, error reduction, feature adoption, and frequency of help requests. These insights allow teams to identify retention gaps, refine training materials, and demonstrate ROI by connecting learning outcomes directly to business performance.

Free Training Material Template

Designing effective training materials takes structure and consistency. To help you get started, we’ve created an editable template that guides you through the essentials, from defining learning objectives to choosing the right format and measuring effectiveness. Use it as a framework to streamline your design process and build materials that truly support knowledge retention and on-the-job performance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are training materials vs job aids?

Training materials are structured resources like courses, guides, or simulations used to teach employees new skills. Job aids are quick-reference tools, such as checklists or step-by-step guides, that support employees while they perform tasks.

How to choose the right format?

Select the format based on the learning objective and the context in which employees will use the knowledge. For example, videos are effective for demonstrations, while in-app guidance or simulations work best for hands-on process training.

How to make materials accessible?

Follow accessibility standards like WCAG 2.2 to ensure all employees can benefit from training. Use clear language, provide transcripts for video or audio, design for screen readers, and ensure navigation is simple and consistent.

How to measure success without an LMS?

Success can be measured using on-the-job indicators such as task success rate, error reduction, feature adoption, or time to proficiency. Digital adoption platforms like Whatfix also provide real-time insights into how employees engage with training materials directly in their workflow.

Training Clicks Better With Whatfix

Effective training materials only deliver value when employees can apply them on the job. Whatfix embeds guidance, Self Help, and simulations directly into your applications, giving employees real-time support exactly when they need it. The result is higher retention, faster adoption, and measurable performance gains.

Request a free demo to see how Whatfix can transform your training programs.