Creating an online training program is a prolonged activity. It involves creating loads of unique content in the form of online training courses.

It is becoming increasingly important that training-related content is selected carefully and shared at regular intervals. During employee training programs, content is curated for different stages including pre, post and in-between training. Training and Development departments also use various forms of content and deliver them through online training software which stores and support all types of audio, video or document files typically via a built-in content library.

Also, one must think, is it possible to deliver training content on all devices and channels? Today, employees are consuming content through digital devices such as tablets & mobile, mediums such as social media & forums and emerging technologies such as virtual reality & augmented reality. You may need to ensure that content is presentable across all these platforms and in various formats for consumption.

While curating content for training modules for your organization, it is essential to know the end goal of this exercise. In the course of and post-training, curated content will help to

• Promote learning to stick and be reinforced
• Encourage implementation of learning at work
• Facilitate bite-sized learning

Points to keep in mind while curating content?

1. Current – Content that is being shared with the employees must be current or ongoing and something that will add value to the employee in the long or the short run. Outdated content is detrimental to corporate training programs where the objective is to bring employees up to speed with specific information, which is vital for them to know, to perform well on their jobs.
2. Engaging – Is the content visual, audio or kinesthetic – which prompts them to do something to learn? For example, engaging content like videos ensures that the employees retain 90% of the message.
3. Originality – Sharing content that is authentic and checks out on facts and figures- this whetting should be mandatorily done when sourcing and sharing content from other references.
4. Use various forms of content curation – You may think of accumulating content in different ways such as:

• Aggregation: means compiling article links and sharing
• Distillation: would involve sharing only the best material
• Elevation: would mean drawing conclusions and trends from reports
• Mashups: is about combining original and curated content into a new piece of content and 
• Chronology:   is developing a timeline of events

Tips to present curated content

1. Keep it simple: Learning anything should be simple. Content presented merely with visual cues, creative acronyms and via other graphical representations are easier to remember instead of just words.
2. Keep it short – Content that is curated may be sent through newsletters, should be posted in compressed formats so that learning does not feel like a burden. This concept of sharing short information at regular intervals is called ‘microlearning.’ Microlearning helps to reinforce learning.
3. Give them something to do— Incorporate games, webinars, case studies, debates – all of which can help to reinforce learning or start the process even before corporate training program begins. There are many third party applications which can help in driving this objective.
4. Social Listening— Use employee discussion boards to find out what is being discussed and share related curated content. In training, such employee discussion boards can keep the conversation around a particular training module alive, helping employees to imbibe learnings easily.
5. Personalize: If you have individual trainee data through feedback or preference surveys, you may be able to personalize curated content – especially for the leadership as they are continually looking at relevant information to help them run their organization, teams, departments better.

Conclusion
Curation takes much time and rightly so. You do not want to be sharing irrelevant, unhelpful content with your employees. What would help is to schedule and use automation tools to help you push content to specific groups of employees or the entire organization. Some examples of the content curation tools may be Buzzsumo, Pocket, Feedly among many others. Before you begin, take a quick look at the Code of Ethics  of dos and don’ts for curating online content.

One last thumb of rule is for you to stay consistent in your content curation strategy and see its impact on employee experience and learning.