What we learned from delivering training at scale
As part of the rollout of our new degree finders, we’ve been delivering tailored training to our undergraduate and postgraduate editors. We’ve learnt a lot about training and our editorial users along the way, and have compiled some of our own tips for running training sessions.
Throughout 2025 we’re launching our new degree finder content management system (CMS). Undergraduate content launched in early March, but until May the only editors in the system were Admissions colleagues and the Content Operations Team. We knew we’d have to train our pool of content editors, starting with postgraduate, and unlike previously, we’d need to train everyone at the same time.
How we used to deliver training
With the legacy postgraduate degree finder, we didn’t have a structured approach to training. If anything, it was an opt-in system; people approached us for training if they thought they needed it. This was largely due to four factors:
- We had a group of legacy content editors – people who’d been editing degree finder content for many years, who interacted with us regularly, and who worked with us on their content (who didn’t require system training)
- Editors could nominate other editors (so we were coming along with training after they had access)
- We had exhaustive guidance for the legacy CMS (meaning a lot of the time we just pointed people across to the relevant how-to)
- We had 500 programmes to review and approve every summer, from June to early October (and knew schools would need to share the workload across multiple people)
For various reasons, we knew this approach wouldn’t work in 2025, and we’d need to start over with our training materials. From a technical standpoint everyone was going back to square one, as the how-to was totally different to the old system. But we also knew it wouldn’t be sufficient just to cover the technical elements – in some instances, particularly for newer editors, we’d need to go right back to the start to explain what the degree finders are for and how to write for them.
One tool in the toolkit: how we wanted to deliver training
When done properly, hands-on training sessions are a key part of the support and guidance toolkit – but they’re just one of many. Experience had taught me that one-off training never achieves what you need it to – like driving, it requires consistent practice to hone the skill over time. This was particularly acute for some of our users, who only interact with the system once or twice a year. There’s also a not insignificant amount of turnover, meaning a consistent trickle of new and changing user roles.
As a result, we needed to think about the whole editor support provision, from hands-on sessions to the bank of guidance and support that sits both inside and outwith the system. Training sessions are one piece of the puzzle, not the whole picture.
To help us contextualise our training, we actually started with a review of our existing guidance catalogue, writing the guides as we performed certain actions, and using the in-system helptext where possible to make sure we didn’t end up with a death-by-handbook situation. In my experience, guidance is best delivered at the point you are about to take an action; almost nooone sits down to read the whole textbook before they get started using a new tool (sorry dad).
Read Jakob Nielsen’s 10 general principles for user interface design
With this work happening in parallel, we were more ready to turn to the training provision, to look at what should be delivered in a session that introduced the system, tested the editors’ ability to access and work in the system, and allow us to discuss specific school requirements.
Planning effective training sessions
The next stage was planning and scheduling our training sessions. We knew how many editors we had and we knew that we’d need to split it up school by school, so we knew we’d need to deliver at least 24 sessions.
We also knew that we’d need to tailor our sessions as not all schools place the same emphasis on degree finder content. While we have some excellent content editors in many areas, in others degree finder information is not prioritised the same way, or teams lack the resources to adapt curriculum information for the prospective student audience.
My preferred option for training was a see one, do one, teach one method: we all plan it out together, we all sit in on the first training (mine), and then we take the rest of our training sessions solo, or with another team-member observing or supporting.
We (myself, Louis, Cathy, Alisa and Emily) started with a Microsoft Loop board to gather our thoughts about what we needed to train people in, and how best to deliver this. There was the usual stuff about technically getting in and making edits, but we especially wanted to cover:
- Editorial style
- CMA compliance
- Background (for people totally new to degree finder)
- Key content areas to look out for
- The roles of other teams in signing off content
To help tailor the sessions, we all reviewed a selection of the school’s content as preparation for the training sessions. This helped us establish the editors’ experience with degree finder content, and where to place the emphasis in the training. We didn’t want to patronise our experienced editors, but we also didn’t want to assume too much of our new editors.
Louis also created a comprehensive slide deck covering each of the training points. This acted as a base template which we all took a copy of before tailoring it further ahead of our individual sessions.
We went with Loop because it was easy to collaborate on as a group, and could hold everything we needed to run a training session. Eventually it contained:
- The training agenda with all points to cover
- Links to slides, the new degree finder
- Draft copy for meeting invitations
- A status board with details of who was attending, the trainer and the date so we didn’t have to keep looking in emails
There was a lot to cover even for established editors so we felt an hour was the right amount of time, but having delivered a fair few training sessions and seminars in my time, I knew this might be pretty varied.
I was also keen that we get editors to do something in the training – I know from (unfortunate) experience that sitting following along to a slide deck isn’t the most engaging, so we included a small prompt to get people to do a simple task (log in and check permissions). I don’t think any of us realised quite how important this little prompt would be in our training sessions!
How the training went: team reflections
The training sessions took up a significant chunk of time throughout May, and we’re now starting the delivery of both short- and long-form training for undergraduate editors in June. Here the team share their reflections and hints based on the project. If you’re planning any training sessions, feel free to draw on these, or reach out to us for a chat.
Jen’s reflections
Manufacture a comfortable environment for yourself. As I was first up, I was a bit more self-aware than usual. I combatted this with a bit of power-dressing on the day(!), but I also picked an ‘easy’ session to to make me feel more comfortable. I chose editors from a School I was more familiar with, and knew we could spend a little time at the start catching up to set the tone of the session.
Stick to your agenda… Running multiple sessions on the same topic in short succession can be challenging. It can be very easy to get deja-vu when delivering the same content to multiple groups of people, and you can easily forget if you’ve covered all your points. Tick things off as you go along so you don’t accidentally leave something out.
…But always leave a little room to flex. Always respond to the room and don’t be afraid to change it up if things are working well (or poorly!). Yes, make sure you get through your list, but if an activity proves popular, or the discussion moves organically into something else that you were going to cover later, don’t be afraid to follow that. Just keep an eye on time to ensure you can still cover all you need to in the session.
Louis’ reflections
The admin of organising training sessions is time-consuming. One of the most challenging aspects of the training was finding space in the week to schedule training sessions for multiple editors. I trialed using Microsoft forms to help schedule in sessions but I had a really poor response rate of around 30%. CMVM has a lot of editors, so, I’ll need to schedule in more training sessions in the near future to ensure everyone gets trained.
I had to change my approach to delivering training. When I was planning how I was going to deliver the training, I prepped exactly the same way I’d prepare for delivering a presentation – I like to script exactly what I’m going to say and have everything structured. When it came to delivering my first session, I had to adapt my approach because I felt like the session was pretty boring and attendees were losing interest. I realised I had to be more adaptable within the session and get more input from the attendees when conducting the training.
It’s important to be flexible when delivering training. I really didn’t want to overload people with information, so I really tried to focus on how to use the system first when getting a volunteer into the system for the first time. I could then go into more detail on best practice and areas to highlight while in the system rather than using the slide deck. I tried to have a degree of flexibility within the session, if an attendee asked a question which pre-empted something I was going to cover later, I’d cover it earlier than I planned to.
Cathy’s reflections
Start by asking participants what they know about the topic. I asked participants about their experience of using the current system to date. This gives you context as a trainer and helps you use relevant references during the session – comparing the new system to the old system would not add value for attendees in a session where no one had used the old system before.
Instead of demonstrating as the trainer, get participants to demo to each other. I asked a volunteer to share their screen and then gave them step-by-step instructions to demonstrate a new CMS feature. Participants seemed to enjoy engaging with one of their own team members giving the demo, instead of the trainer. If participants want step-by-step instructions on using the same feature themselves later on, they can revisit the slides and guidance that I shared with them after the session.
To encourage participants to reflect on the session, ask for their initial feedback at the end. When asked for their initial thoughts on what had been covered in the session, most participants shared positive comments – some highlighted features of the new CMS as improvements on the old system features, and others commented on finding the new navigation options and templates intuitive and user-friendly.
Alisa’s reflections
Initial introductions personalise the sessions. At the start, I spent a few minutes briefly speaking about my role and background, and asked others to do the same. This not only helped me understand each attendee’s connection to the degree finder but also established a personal connection. As I’m relatively new to my role and these sessions were my first face-to-face interaction with many colleagues, I found this valuable; setting the tone for a positive working relationship.
Let people explore first before diving into specifics. This helps people familiarise themselves with layout and reduces overwhelm as they are introduced to overall content organisation and information flow. It also prompted questions and engagement, making the session more collaborative and dynamic.
Sequence of information delivery is key. During my first training session, I realised that my PowerPoint presentation lacked a logical slide order. I had covered the somewhat complex field of applying information before going over the basics like adding body text and reusable content. I felt flustered and this affected my confidence. After the session, I reorganised the slides, giving school editors a more rounded understanding before covering more complex information.
Emily’s reflections
Flexibility is important. When planning my sessions, I had a set idea of the order that I was going to discuss certain topics, primarily following the PowerPoint order. When questions arose, however, I found that I often got slightly sidetracked in discussing other elements, so my later training sessions were more coherent when not working directly from the PowerPoint, and speaking more off the cuff.
Draw on other people’s experience. When running some of the training sessions, I found that some people were much more familiar with previous systems than I was, just by nature of experience. In allowing them to interject and add anecdotes about how to best organize the system for their school, particularly for editors who were less experienced, we all emerged with a more well-rounded understanding of how the CMS could best work for the editors in that school.
Show, not tell. It’s often hard to take on board large volumes of information at any one time, so I found that I managed to engage the editors a lot better by actually demonstrating all of the different elements, rather than just presenting from the PowerPoint. Likewise, getting the editors to navigate themselves also helped get the points across.
Additional resources on delivering training
As part of the preparation for the training project, some of the team also attended a session called ‘Delivering engaging content training sessions’ with Tracy Playle of Pickle Jar. Unfortunately it was postponed till after we’d started delivering sessions, but I was encouraged when catching up by the fact that we’d incorporated a lot of her tips already!
The session had a lot of good ideas to consider when planning training sessions, such as:
- Making training sessions an ‘experience’, not a lecture
- Accounting for the skill, beliefs, capacity and experience of your audience
- Appealing to different learning styles during the session
- Building knowledge up from data and information to knowledge and wisdom
- Adapting and working with detours, and how to handle it when you don’t know the answer to something
If you’ve got access to ContentEd+ Premium and are about to prepare any training or guidance sessions, I’d recommend checking it out.
Find out more about ContentEd+
How it went: our team experience and laying the foundation for future training
After the first training session, we got back together to discuss how it went as a form of debrief. We also took turns sitting in on other sessions, as in some areas it was easier to work together when dealing with a larger user group.
This helped us align on what was working, what didn’t work, and also give us the ability to tweak our training template to cater to the new undergraduate editors we would bring in to the system in June.
This was useful as we soon realised we’d need 2 types of undergraduate training – one short-form for editors who already had postgraduate access, and one for people totally new to the system. We now have a core list of topics to cover depending on the training type, as well as an optional pool to dip into depending on the School we’re talking to, their types of programmes, and how they handle admissions.
How it went: editor feedback
We’re still in the process of collecting feedback from our training sessions. It can be hard to gauge the ‘success’ of a training session; one metric is by how many or how few follow-up questions you’re asked, but as we know from experience a lack of feedback does not always mean things are rosy…
Feedback from participants in the sessions has been good overall, but it’s one of those ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’ situations – ultimately we’ll only judge if our training has succeeded if our editors are empowered to submit good quality content for the postgraduate 2026 and undergraduate 2027 cycles!
What’s next: share your feedback and what types of training you’d be interested in
Our new training sessions are a combination of technical how-to and editorial what-to-dos. However, we know that a lot of editors also want to know more about editorial best practice. We also know that there’s a lot of very good programme pages out there.
We’re planning to keep evolving our training and support – for editors old and new alike – on best practice for programme pages, and ideas to help build on the content you already have.
We want to hear from you about how we do this – in person, drop-in sessions, structured training, so please do let us know if this is something you’d be interested in by contacting me.
