Here’s the situation: you’re onboarding a cohort of new employees. Knowledge is stored in your company’s drive, training is conducted via manager meetings and video calls, and onboarding materials are delivered via email. Current employees keep asking with the same questions (even though you already answered those questions in a message to the team last week), and your new hires are missing critically important steps.
How did you get here?
The answer is not only simple, but inevitable: as your company scales, its most important information becomes disorganized. While wikis and communication tools may work when your team is small, these systems degrade over time, leading to infinite complexity.
The solution? File cabinets, not libraries.
How information is created and distributed is one reason behind this increasing complexity. In an effort to make training accessible, most companies create a "catch-all" training library where all information is stored. While this makes sense in theory, in practice it dilutes content relevance and accessibility: employees are forced to sift through mountains of information to find answers, and the answers they find might not be relevant to their unique circumstances.
Instead, try building a file cabinet instead of a library.
File cabinets are specifically organized and simple to navigate, ensuring information is contextually relevant and accessible across large workforces.
Here’s the basic structure of your training using the “file cabinet” method: courses → subjects → lessons → quizzes.
Let’s take a look at each.
🗄️ Courses: the file cabinets. Organizing and contextualizing information, they provide guidelines for how training content should be presented.
📂 Subjects: the file-folders. By nesting similar information together, subjects allow you to organize training into manageable parts with a clear beginning and end.
📄 Lessons: the pages within your file-folder. High-impact lessons address one concept at a time, and relate to the other lessons in your subject.
🤔 Quizzes: are associated with lessons and should be used to test one's understanding of lesson information.
When building training content, there's an immediate contrast between the library and file cabinet organization methods. Let's see this contrast in action when building onboarding materials for Acme, Inc:
Library method
Disorganized
Confusing
No content structure or hierarchy
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File cabinet method
Organized
Structure is clearly-defined
Steps in the learning path are easy to follow
..png)
Now you could do all this yourself, or just use Basewell. 😎
We maintain best practices, ensuring that your training is always perfectly presented using the file cabinet method.
Start for free: Basewell.