Do you work in a complex industry?
There’s a good chance that the average user of your product or service has no real understanding of what you do. Even if your end-use product is recognizable, few people outside your industry understand how it’s made or how it works.
It takes a lot of education for people who join your company to get up to speed, so why should you expect that external consultants would understand your company, let alone effectively teach your people how to be successful?
It’s a fair question, and one that new clients often pose to us.
Many of our clients’ businesses are complex—that’s why they need help creating training or technical documentation that makes concepts clearer to their target audience members.
Yet, just because something is complicated doesn’t mean it can’t be comprehended. If the right approach to learning the business is taken, an outside expert’s perspective may be just what you need.
We have proven time and time again that we “get” our clients and their industries well enough to empower their success. We are confident that we can learn your business, too.
You are the expert in your industry; we are experts at gathering information and digging in to understand it, and we won’t waste your time in the process.
Here’s why we think so:
- We are professional information gatherers.
Whether we’ve worked in your industry or not, you can bet we’ve immersed ourselves in learning our share of complicated applications, products, and tasks. We employ expert interviewers who know what it takes to collect the information needed to provide corporate training that sticks, technical documentation that informs, and performance improvement that yields lasting results.
We have decades of experience interviewing, observing, assessing, and researching best practices in accordance with our proven process to create outputs tailored to meet the needs of specific learners and users.
We know our craft. You know your industry. We are already set up for success.
- We aren’t afraid to “get our hands dirty.”
When pursuing more effective skills and knowledge transfer in your business, it can help to bring in an outside observer who isn’t burdened by pre-existing notions that prevent the recognition of problem areas. You need someone who asks pointed questions that a learner needs answered and knows how to quickly grasp the foundations of a complex industry and convey them in a way that specific team members will remember.
We frequently find it most effective to see firsthand what a “day in the life” looks like—learning how equipment or processes work, how team members complete key tasks, and where communication breakdowns take place. Whether walking through plants, riding along with company drivers, or job-shadowing employees, we do what it takes to learn a business, an application, or a role as needed. Then, we develop appropriate interventions that help people complete tasks more efficiently and effectively.
- We know what we need, and we don’t waste your time.
Frankly, sometimes it doesn’t help that much to bring someone in to see everything for themselves. You may not need to send an outsider through rigorous application training.
There’s a good chance we don’t need to be experts in your industry in order to create high-caliber training and documentation resources, so you may not need to teach us everything there is to know about how the work is done for us to do our jobs.
We always want to make the best use of your time and resources, and sometimes we just need to understand the fundamentals. Then we apply our expertise to develop materials and tools that suit your needs. We’ll always let you know what is needed, respecting your time and resources.
Whatever the case and whatever your industry, rest assured that when it comes to delivering valuable outputs for clients, we’ve been there before … even if we haven’t been there before.
If you trust our expertise and perspective, you can trust that we will lead you in the direction of the best solution to your challenges, regardless of what you do.
Check out our case studies to see how we’ve helped before, or reach out to talk through specific needs.
