For the past five years, Mimeo has produced an annual State of Learning and Development report, and one consistent finding is that training teams are tiny. In fact, for the last four years, we’ve found that more than 70 percent of teams are fewer than 10 people. Moreover, as discussed in our recent post with ATD, a shocking number of training teams don’t outsource. You all are scrappy players doing everything yourselves to make learning and development helpful.
From our seat at Mimeo as a print and digital content distributor, we get to see one specific slice of your output: the training materials. Here are five tools that our customers (besides Mimeo!) use for a lean and mean content creation process:
ScreenToGIF
This one is for digital materials, like internal one-sheeters or PDF workbooks. Training someone how to use a software or application is easier when you can show rather than tell. And that’s a whole lot easier when you have an easy screen capture technology.
Use ScreenToGIF to easily record your screen with a GIF file as the output. With this downloaded application, you simply record your screen, edit, and export to a GIF or video file.
Powtoon
Speaking of videos, Powtoon makes it easy to create animated videos in a drag-and-drop editor. I’ve used it extensively for marketing videos, ranging from explainers to pseudo-commercials. Trainers love it because it has standard characters, scenes, and even stock music and video footage. Plus, they have friendly price options and a really fun tone of voice.
Grammarly
This one is less about how to create content so much as how to check your content. No matter how much you try to cover in face-to-face classes, your training materials are going to include written content. Spelling and grammar matter. Grammarly is your friendly eighth-grade English teacher reading over your shoulder to tell you exactly how you’re making a mistake and what to do to fix it.
Piktochart
Complex concepts are often better expressed in charts or infographics. Piktochart makes it easy to visualize your data into charts that can be published on the web or packaged for printing. It comes with templates, stock images and icons, and a drag-and-drop editor. All you need is data or a concept.
PowerPoint
Most training teams don’t have access to high-end design software or don’t have the skillset to use it. But PowerPoint is a great design tool for any asset, not just slides. Learn more about leveraging it as a design center in this webinar.
To be successful as a small team, you have to have the right toolkit. These are just five of many tools that trainers use to work harder, not smarter. What are some of your favorites?
