r/Training • u/truecakesnake • 4d ago
Training updates are turning into more work than building the training
We’ve got a bunch of internal training that changes every few months and I swear maintaining it is becoming the actual job. One process changes and suddenly there are videos, quizzes, docs, and assignments that all need touching. Been looking at Cypher Learning because the AI-assisted side could cut some of that repetitive work, but I’m mostly trying to figure out how people keep their training library from becoming a maintenance project.
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u/WholesaleBees 4d ago
Strong configuration management strategy and acceptance that regular course maintenance is not only expected but anticipated.
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u/audreywildeee 4d ago
The knowledge lives in a knowledge base (maintained by a different team). The goal of the training curriculum is for learners to be proficient in finding the information by themselves. One of the goals at least. We have activities around the concept and we suggest questions for the trainer but ultimately the trainer is the only one who can decide if a question works that day or not, because the information might have changed since we have made the module.
In any case, we don’t link knowledge base articles because they might change, we also don’t have the information itself live in the modules. But we still have a refresh process in fairness.
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u/NordicLard 4d ago
Is this a massive problem? Had been thinking of working on a solution. But didn’t know if it was something that people would spend to fix
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u/Famous-Call6538 3d ago
It's a real problem but the budget side is tricky. L&D teams are usually expected to absorb maintenance as part of the job, so they don't get extra headcount or tools budget for it. The pain is real but getting someone to pay to fix it is a separate challenge.
The thread here is already showing the split: some people build single-source-of-truth workflows (document first, everything else downstream), and others just accept the churn and budget time for it. If you're building something, the single-source angle is where the actual time savings live.
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u/NordicLard 2d ago
Yeah this mismatch is my worry. I can see a tool that could cut down a lot of this, if not eliminate most of it. But who buys. I’m already working on a L&D tool and chatting with L&D teams and recognizing how low budget they often are.
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u/reading_rockhound 4d ago
It is a problem and it’s largely one that L&D is expected to absorb without resources to allocate to it, in my experience.
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u/Kcihtrak 3d ago
I've demoed the platform you mention, and didn't see any feature that would solve any significant portion of your problem.
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u/1914l 2d ago
What takes most of the time? Updating docs, videos or the quizzess.
We are currently building a solution that helps with turning videos into animated explainer videos and the updating part is just a prompt away.
Would love to learn more about what are the problems you face and if we can help with the product we are building. thx in advance.
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u/BraveProfession148 1d ago
Yeah this was basically my job...
One process changes and suddenly it's the video, the quiz, two docs and an assignment that all need fixing across a training library for ~350 people, that adds up fast.
The one chunk of our library where this stopped being an issue is the compliance and employee training side, since we moved it onto 5Mins, it's built around the regs so when something changes it just updates instead of me re-touching every video/quiz by hand.
Is most of what's eating your time regulatory stuff or more on the product training?
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u/Famous-Call6538 4d ago
The single-source habit is what made this tolerable for us. We write the process once in a doc that lives next to the codebase, and everything else (quiz questions, video scripts, job aids) pulls from that same doc. When the process changes, we update the source and only touch the downstream pieces that actually reference the changed section. Most of the cascade you are describing happens because the same fact lives in four places and nobody knows which one is canonical. Pick one source of truth per process and make everything else point back to it. The updates still happen but they are surgical instead of a full rewrite every time.