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Nicole Bogdanovic wondered: <<What are the difference between training
manuals and online help/user's guides? And what is the relationship
between them? I'm trying to articulate this to my company (I'm the lone
writer here) and have yet to come up with a great explanation.>>
Maybe you're trying too hard? <g> The difference is fairly obvious: a
training guide supports training, and a user guide supports use. A
person being trained doesn't know how to use the software, and thus
needs to be given the basic tools they'll need in future to use the
software successfully; a person using the software after training does
know how to use it, but may need help remembering some of the more
tricky concepts or discovering some concepts they didn't learn during
training.
It really isn't much more complicated than that.
Design training manuals to help the trainer (or a student, in
self-directed learning) develop a basic, intermediate, or advanced
degree of self-sufficiency. Training manuals typically won't cover
every possibility, nor should they; they must cover only the key
concepts necessary for each level of mastery (basic to advanced) that
you're trying to provide. Design user manuals to support that
self-sufficiency once it is acquired. In contrast with training
manuals, however, they must cover _every_ possibility because they must
support both what the person has supposedly learned during training and
what they have not yet learned.
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