How to Repurpose Training Content for Different User Roles

Have several audiences to serve—and a limited amount of resources to create content? 

For education teams that serve multiple audiences, this is a common struggle. The good news is, you can often accomplish your goal of “doing more with less” with proper planning.

Using the example of launching a new feature, we’ll walk through the process to repurpose training content for multiple user types. This helps reduce the cost and time of production—and allows smaller teams to serve larger audiences with diverse learning needs. 

6 Steps to Design Content for Repurposing

Before diving into content creation, take a step back to plan. If you consider role needs in advance, and keep skill-related assets agnostic of outcome, you can more easily leverage content across user roles.

For our fictional example, let’s pretend we’re a B2B SaaS company that’s launching a robust feature within the product. (Keep in mind: It’s not important that you understand the product feature described in this example. Details are purely for narrative purposes. The learning experience design is the main point.) 

Like with any product release, some customers will benefit from using the full functionality of the new feature. Some will only need part of the feature functionality. Some won’t use the feature at all. 

A single course isn’t going to be adequate; it would force users to learn skills they don’t need, which delays time to value. Customers don’t just need to learn; they also need guidance on what to learn.

Step 1: Identify the business outcomes the learner wants to achieve.

Start by meeting with the product manager (PM) to ask a critical question: “Why was this feature built?” Don’t be too prescriptive in your questioning at first. You want to explore the background and user research that led to the feature’s development. (The Five Whys technique is a great tool for this.)

As you gain understanding from the PM, here are some topics you’ll likely want to explore:

• The customer’s “jobs to be done”
• Why those jobs are important to them
• How the product improves on the customer’s current capabilities

For our fictional example, let’s say we identified nine outcomes guiding the feature’s development:

1. How much do I need to pay my employees?
2. How much do I need to bill my client for WIP and completed work?
3. What is the total revenue value for each client and what cross-selling opportunities do I have?
4. How does the amount of work I’ve initiated compare to the capacity of my team?
5. Is this work/client profitable?
6. Am I budgeting the right amount of time for work?
7. Is this work on pace to finish on time?
8. Is my client to blame for exceeding my time estimates?
9. Are any individual employees struggling to meet time estimates?

Notice that each outcome is framed as a question that the feature helps the customer answer. After you’ve created your list, ask the PM to validate its accuracy. Is anything missing or out of scope? 

With outcomes identified, the next step is to identify what skills a user needs to achieve those outcomes. 

Step 2: Identify skill groups.

Using any software product can be boiled down to two actions: putting data in or taking data out. The next phase of your conversation with the PM is discussing these two questions:

• What outputs will the customer need to generate in order to achieve the outcomes identified in Step 1?
• What will the customer need to input to make generating the right outputs possible?

Aim for 2-4 input skill groups, and the same for outputs. These skill groups describe using the feature at a high level. You’ll get more granular later once you start designing actual content. 

For our example, the skill groups are in Table 2. They might need to enter time actually spent on a project, they might need to enter budgeted time, or maybe they need to do both. For reporting, they might only care about time, or maybe they want to report on both time and money together. 

Table 2

Based purely on how the feature works, any user can give a simple yes/no response to whether they need to learn each skill group depending on the outcomes they’re responsible for. Before moving on to the next step, validate with the PM that every element of the feature fits into one or more of these skill groups. 

Now, you’re ready to map your desired outcomes against needed skill groups.

Step 3: Align outcomes with skills to define user groups.

The inputs and outputs in Table 2 become the axes for Table 3 below. This will define the user groups. Outcomes from Step 1 are distributed based on the skills needed to complete them. There are six user roles defined by each cell in the table. Each one maps feature skill knowledge to desired usage outcomes. 

Table 3

The cell in the lower right is the most comprehensive use case. It requires learning 100% of the new feature’s functionality. The other cells require some subset of that skills knowledge. 

In the next step, we’ll begin more granular learning design. 

Step 4: Design small module learning components.

How do you create education content for six different use cases without creating custom content for each? By taking a modular approach to content development.

To do this, start by outlining a course plan for the user who needs to know everything (that bottom-right cell in Table 3). That user role becomes the rightmost column in Table 4 below. Fill in the rest of Table 4’s column headers with the remaining user roles from Table 3.

For each role (column), review the list of modules (rows) and ask, “Does this role need this module?” If so, the cell gets an “X” in it. When the answer is, “They need part of the module,” divide the module into smaller components (i.e., add rows). This will help minimize the learner’s exposure to content that’s not relevant to them. 

Table 4

The opportunity to benefit from repurposing content is taking shape in the example. In Table 4, quite a few modules will be used in three or more roles, cutting production efforts by two-thirds relative to building each role in isolation. 

With content production underway, the next step will prepare you for presenting the content to users.

Step 5: Guide your learner to the right role using outcomes.

The secret sauce is in the delivery. Often, we want to provide learners with choices. After all, isn’t choice wonderful?

But the reality is giving a learner the complete list of course options can be overwhelming. Then they’re investing time into reading course summaries trying to figure out the right course for them—not a great learner experience, and not helping them move forward toward mastery. 

Instead, here’s a two-pronged approach to put the content your learner needs in front of them without much effort on their part.

Prong 1

It starts with your learning management system (LMS). In Step 4, we identified 22 learning modules and six different learning paths. Do all of these options need to appear in the learner academy? No. You can have just one: “Learn Time & Budgets.” This is where the power of a good LMS comes into play. A great LMS can segment learners and deliver content based on what’s known about the learner (in Intellum, this happens through user groups and AI-personalized learning). It can also collect information about the learner to guide segmentation (which you can do using Intellum Evolve or custom fields).

A single point of entry is easy. Either they want to learn or they don’t. From there, we take the reins and guide them. Use the axes in Table 3 to form two simple radio questions, using an eLearning tool like Intellum Evolve or an embedded survey:

• “Do you need to report on time, or both time & money?”
• “Do you need to budget your team’s time, report on actual time spent, or both?”

Based on the learner’s response, route the learner to the path that is right for their role. The learner doesn’t even have to know that there’s more than one path! All they know is that they’re learning the ins and outs of  the functionality they need. (Again, this is where a great LMS can help you out!).

Prong 2

The second prong involves collaborating with your marketing team. Either within the LMS, or perhaps a webpage, present the list of nine outcomes from Step 1 and ask, “Which of these would help you?” Depending on which they select, you can route them to the learning path they need—no academy catalog browsing required. 

Successful content repurposing doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of purposeful design choices. You need to be disciplined about which pieces of content are broadly applicable vs. which have a more narrow use case. In the final step, you’ll see what that looks like.

Step 6: Limit customizations to allow for repurposing.

Even within a small module, a good LMS lets you combine different types of content from varying sources in one place. That creates flexibility to separate those broad and narrow assets, so you can serve learners exactly what they need.

For each course module, the outcome you want can usually be described by the module title and simple introductory text. You’re telling a story or providing context for how the skill is being applied. Check out how Boost.ai does this:

Here’s an example with two different modules on hammering a nail. The “outcomes” portion at the top establishes situational information like where to point the nail and what the benefit of the task is. However, they then repurpose the same underlying skill-related asset that would cover things like the best angle to strike at and where to position your fingers on the nail.

By keeping the skill-related asset agnostic of outcome, you can more easily use it for multiple user roles. Add in a “lightweight facade” around the content you’re repurposing to tie it into your desired outcome. Keep customized elements simple and to a minimum—text and image whenever possible. Look back to that Boost.ai example to see how the title and course description create this “facade.”

Get Started Repurposing Content for Personalized Learning

It won’t be long until A.I. tutors and copilots guide our learners through everything they need. While we wait for that, start creating more personalized learning experiences for your customers based on the technology available broadly today. Show them you value their time by guiding them down the quickest route to the learning they need.