What Is a Job Aid? On-Demand Knowledge When Employees Need It Most

Cultivate on-demand learning techniques to deliver employee knowledge, right on time

Imagine you’re just starting out at a new job. You’ve sat through lengthy instructor-led training sessions, role-playing workshops, and subject matter expert lectures. You’ve got three weeks of intense, full days of training meant to boost your confidence, build foundational knowledge, and allow you to hit the ground running.

Then, training is over, and the actual daily work is nothing like advertised. You’re constantly scrambling, teaching yourself how to do simple and complex tasks that weren’t covered in training. Eventually, you start writing down step-by-step instructions on how to complete specific tasks, keeping them all in a folder labeled “TIME SAVERS” on your desktop.

This scenario is more common than you might think—nearly 59 percent of employees claim they rely on skills that were almost entirely self-taught. Those three weeks of training may as well have never happened. For good reason, employees increasingly prefer asynchronous, on-demand microlearning resources known as job aids.

In this post, discover the benefits of simple step-by-step guides, and learn the best techniques on how to create and deliver effective job aids to your employees exactly when they need them.

What is a job aid?

Job aids—sometimes referred to as cheat sheets, job templates, or handouts—provide essential information about how to complete a specific task or job. Often following a step-by-step format, they offer simple, quick, “just-in-time” training to enhance employee knowledge exactly when they need it.

Job aids come in a wide variety of formats, both digital and physical, including:

• Checklists or cheat sheets
• Vast knowledge bases
• Screen recordings
• Infographics
• Flowcharts
• Step-by-step instructional guides

Job aids aren’t meant to replace traditional training methods, but to supplement them, allowing new and established employees to quickly find and apply the right knowledge. But the benefits don’t stop there.

How do job aids benefit employees and organizations?

Employee learning retention remains one of the most important, if not the most important, priorities of workplace training. While many hope that their onboarding training programs can do it all, continuous learning provides the consistent reinforcement needed to retain knowledge at a higher level.

• Employee retention. 88 percent of organizations recently polled agreed that retaining employees is their number one priority. Providing consistent and timely learning opportunities—like the ones job aids bring to the table—happens to be the number one line of defense against employee turnover.

• Learning retention. Job aids give employees the help they need, when they need it, improving the chances the information will actually be retained.

• Adaptability. One of the most important soft skills to train employees on is adaptability, but it doesn’t hurt to have on-the-spot guidance readily available in a work environment where new technology seems to pop up daily. Give employees the tools and knowledge they need now, and adaptability becomes easier.

• Quality and efficiency. Job aids provide full context—if properly designed—for what, why, and how to complete a specific task, effectively reducing costly errors and increasing efficiency.
• Increased productivity. When knowledge is effectively on-demand, employees can save time by spending more time doing, and less time searching.

Now that you’ve learned how job aids benefit employees and organizations, read on to see the top five essential job aid formats to effectively engage employees.

Top 5 job aid formats to effectively engage employees

1. Flowcharts and decision trees

Flowcharts and decision trees are best utilized when there’s more than one way to finish a task, or there’s a decision-making process that can change the order of task completion or even deem the original task unnecessary. Visualizing a particular workflow—like an onboarding process—or even a decision tree based on where to go camping depending on the weather one prefers can be easier when put into an interactive decision tree template.

While a flowchart may have arrows from one piece to the next, it may also show users steps that have multiple branches. Similarly, a decision tree—like this example that walks users through understanding whether or not they should schedule a meeting—takes into account changing scenarios depending on what the user wants or how the user answers.

2. Checklists

Checklists work best for when you need to remind employees of the most critical things needed to complete a task, but not necessarily in order of importance. It may be a checklist for a mechanic to go through for a car’s 60,000 mile checkup, a sales rep to make sure they’ve studied all the necessary topics to prepare for a client meeting, or even setting up your dream home office.

Interactive checklists can engage employees more, allowing them to physically or digitally check items off as they go. Checklists can also be used for step-by-step processes by adding numerals to the listed items.

3. Screen and video recordings

Screen and video recordings work best when a visual walkthrough is needed for a complex task with many steps. This could be for walking new hires through general navigation in CRM software, training employees on how to use a new meeting scheduler, or any other software simulation your employees need to become familiar with quickly.

Additional tools in screen recording software include zoom regions, highlight markers, visible mouse clicks, and caption editing, all of which help direct the user’s eye to the most important part of the screen.

Creating an interactive screen recording can be fairly straightforward with the right tools. For example, Articulate now offers an interactive video feature to record videos like this and deliver them as chaptered artifacts with stops for quiz and reflection moments.

4. Step-by-step guides

Step-by-step guides work best when a task needs to be completed in a specific order—sometimes referred to as a standard operating procedure—for maximum efficiency and a reduced risk of costly or dangerous errors. Sometimes called process and step graphics, these guides help ensure employees engage with the content numerically, so they don’t skip or miss a vital step.

Examples include steps to ensure data privacy when logging into work software through a home device, steps to turn on and safely use machinery, or how to hit the perfect backhand tennis shot.

5. Quick reference guides

Quick reference guides work best when employees need quick guidance on completing a task, but order of operations isn’t important, and there may be multiple points of interest to consider. Transforming infographics into interactive quick reference guides is a common way to make information more engaging for the user.

Examples include airline safety cards that cover multiple scenarios or an interactive image showing a deskworker with all the necessary tools for success where each tool is an interactive, clickable feature.

Articulate customers can build custom interactive guides in Storyline, or create quick guides with AI help by starting with an upload. Having both options gives learning designers the flexibility to get really creative with the former and the speed to move quickly with the latter.

In addition to the formats listed above, it’s important to keep a vast knowledge database that’s searchable for your employees. This knowledge database could include user guides, tutorials, recorded training webinars, and more to help employees quickly access references. Once you create a job aid, add it to the database so employees can access it anytime, anywhere.

Learn more about just-in-time training in our blog, Just-in-Time Training: Definition, Benefits, and Tips.

Now, let’s take a look at a step-by-step process for creating clear, concise job aids.

6 steps to create job aids customized for your audience

Depending on the job, task, or user, job aids can take many different forms—printed safety reminders, mobile infographics, or simple flowcharts. Regardless of format, the primary function of job aids is to provide employees with the information they need quickly. When the average employee spends close to four hours a day searching for information, it’s imperative that yours are clear, concise, and easy to consume.

Follow these six steps to provide a seamless user experience that guides employees to complete a task efficiently.

1. Define your audience

Before creating any step-by-step guide or process documentation, it’s important to know what you aim to teach and who’s learning. That’s where a needs analysis and audience analysis come in.

A needs analysis determines where the training gap is and, perhaps most importantly, whether they’ll need a full training session. More often than not, your needs analysis will uncover a small knowledge or skill gap that is perfectly suited for a job aid.

An audience analysis will determine what shape that job aid will take. Are the employees who need this knowledge remote or on-site? Which departments need this knowledge the most? Are there any accessibility features you’ll need to employ for learners of different skill levels and abilities?

Answering these questions can determine the following:

• Format. Does this need to be a mobile module for remote employees or can this be a physically posted resource on the manufacturing floor?
• Availability. Is this information consistently available, or is it easily retained after one session?
• Complexity. Is this a process that is complex enough to be distributed consistently to reduce errors, or is this general knowledge that can be covered as part of a larger training module?

2. Gather data on the process

Once you’ve determined that a particular task or process needs to be translated into a job aid, find time to gather exact data on how the process works. Implementing a task analysis should be your first step. Meet with your in-house subject matter experts—those who know the process inside out—to gather pertinent information.

Some good details to gather include:

• Step-by-step process
• Time needed to complete the task
• Resources required
• What challenges typically arise during the process

Once you’ve talked to subject matter experts, it can be useful to bring in someone completely new to the process. This can reveal pain points that the experts can easily navigate, but newcomers may have trouble with.

3. Choose your format

You wouldn’t put a hot dog on a hamburger bun, and you wouldn’t play basketball on an ice rink. Similarly, it’s important to match the content of your job aid to the format best suited for its distribution and understanding. While we’ve already covered the best formats and their uses in the above section, here’s another detailed example.

If your objective is to present precise step-by-step instructions for safely operating a piece of machinery, an infographic with information presented in numeric order makes sense. Even better, a microlearning module in which employees need to complete a step before moving on to the next may be your best bet to ensure they don’t miss a vital step.

Likewise, if there’s no specific order in which the task needs to be completed—like preparing for a trip out of town—a simple checklist may do the trick.

4. Draft the job aid

Easier said than done, creating the job aid can be a challenging task. You have all the pertinent information—processes, challenges, resources, etc.—but now it must be made into an effective learning experience for your audience.

Here are some quick tips on how to make it engaging and efficient:

• Keep it specific and concise. Don’t meander away from the specific task you’re meant to showcase. Stick to the objective!

• Use precise, plain language. Avoid jargon that can confuse your average user. Focus on clarity—this is not the time to get clever with metaphor and idiomatic language.

• Structure matters. If this is a step-by-step process, make sure it presents as such. Employees don’t have time to parse out the correct order of operations. But if there are multiple possible routes to completing this task, don’t present it in a numbered format.

• Use engaging design. Lean on engaging multimedia assets like images, GIFs, interactive content, animations, and even simple icons like arrows.
• Readability, accessibility. Remember your audience. Make your content readable and  accessible for all by using contrasting colors, testing for screen reader compatibility, and using closed captions for videos or audio.

5. Gather feedback from stakeholders

Once you’ve completed your first draft of the document, be sure to get feedback from all stakeholders. You can have a small group of employees test it out—a sort of soft launch—before the final version to work out any kinks in the design, layout, or material.

Doing this before publishing can save time, money, and headaches. Even for digital aids, it’s possible to get real-time feedback that can help bring more clarity and precision to the final version.

6. Publish, distribute, and monitor

Ideally, the easiest part of this process, publishing, distributing, and continually monitoring the effectiveness of the job aid, is the last step. Doing so is easy with an LMS that provides seamless distribution to users and allows for easy tracking of employee progress. As products, environments, and organizational objectives change, update your aids to match employee needs.

Why microlearning and job aids go hand-in-hand

As job aids are meant to be quick, precise moments of learning, and microlearning courses are meant to break down complex information into digestible chunks, the two are made for each other. Almost every example linked in this post would be considered a microlearning course.

While each includes detailed information, they also use plain language, simple icons, and engaging techniques to capture the learner’s attention.

Furthermore, microlearning courses are tailor-made for mobile learning—a must in a working environment where frontline and corporate employees alike are working remotely with unpredictable schedules. When combined, microlearning and mobile learning put workplace education in employees’ hands, boosting productivity, retention, and satisfaction.

Just-in-time knowledge sharing for higher productivity

With employees relying on up-to-date and timely information more than ever, it’s important to establish job aids that deliver knowledge efficiently. Using accessible, plain language means learners of all skill levels and abilities can benefit, and engaging design choices improve learning retention.

With a variety of formats available—flowcharts, decision trees, step-by-step guides, and more—it’s important to match the information you’re communicating to the format’s features. Doing so will ensure maximum learning efficiency and increase employee productivity.

Ready to learn more about short-form, on-the-go learning? Check out why microlearning courses are so effective, their benefits to employees and organizations, and their diverse array of real-world applications.