Chapter 2. The Setup

This chapter gives you a list of goals for your training course and a high-level plan for reaching those goals. You will establish these goals and the plan with input from the intended students, their managers, and the sponsors of the course. Finally, you’ll get the buy-in that you need from the sponsors.

Who Needs to be Trained?

"Who needs to be trained?" is the first question you must answer. Not "What do my students need to know?" or "When do they need to be trained by?"

In the training profession, we call discovering who needs the training and what they need to know an audience analysis. Many people who conduct this analysis assume that they have only one audience, with only one set of goals. Don’t make this assumption. Your audience might include managers who need to know only what the software is capable of, users who need to know how to use it, and technical support people who need to know how to troubleshoot it.

Consider training people to use particular software...