Docs and Training

Documentation and training both aim to help people succeed with a product, but the teams behind them don't always work in sync. In this meetup, we'll dig into how customer and employee training gets divided across teams, where collaboration happens, and how it could be improved. We'll also explore whether instructional design should be included in a technical writer's toolkit as AI reshapes how products are designed and explained. Whether you're on a combined team, separate teams, or somewhere in between, come share your experience and ideas on the overlap between docs work and training work.

• How would you define training? How does training differ from documentation in terms of goals or deliverables?
• Does your company provide training for customers? How about for employees? What kind of training: in-person, online, videos and tutorials, or something else? If your company doesn’t provide training, do you know why it doesn’t? Does this seem like a gap, or is it not necessary?
• How is ownership of customer and employee training divided? Is it handled by a training team, a documentation team, or a combination?
• Do you communicate with trainers when you research new features with subject matter experts? How does that work?
• Have you collaborated to make sure your content supports training programs? Do trainers routinely share your content with customers?
• How do you decide what content belongs in docs and what belongs in training materials? Does anyone create videos? Who?
• Do technical writers and trainers collaborate on content maintenance? How? When you learn that your content is out-of-date, do you share the info with training, and vice versa?
• Can you think of any missed opportunities for collaboration and communication?
• If you could redesign how documentation and training work together, what would you change? Is there room for improvement in your processes, organizational structure, communication, and other areas?
• How are instructional design and technical writing similar? Which skills or thought processes are required for both? How do the two areas of expertise differ? If you have instructional design expertise, how did you get it?
• As software products become more infused with AI, will instructional design skills become more valuable or less? Do you think that adding instructional design to an individual’s work portfolio, or to a whole technical writing department, is a path toward sustainability?

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