Four Who Questions You Want To Ask Your Client

By Author: Benjamin Brown
Total Articles: 37
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If you do a lot of freelance business writing, you may be thinking about expanding your market to include developing content for corporate training. But you will find that your client contacts for training projects have backgrounds, concerns, expectations, and methods that may differ from what you have encountered in your other business writing work.
When you have your first client conversations about training development projects, the following four "who" questions will help you avoid some ugly surprises.
Who will design the training? The structure of training is just as important as the specific words, images, and tools that are used to deliver the message. Decisions about what content is needed, the flow of information, and delivery formats (text, media, activities, etc.) all have to be made before the actual writing starts. You must know if you're expected to handle that instructional design, if they've already done it, or if a third party will focus on that part of the process. (And if you are doing it, you have to decide whether you have the necessary skills and knowledge, or whether you need to partner with ...
... someone else to provide that service.)
Who will review and approve the content? Every writing project has some kind of review and approval cycle, but if you haven't developed training before, you may not be prepared for how complicated review can get in this niche. Training content often goes into much more detail than, say, a sales letter or a marketing piece. That means that internal "subject matter experts" (or SMEs) -- people like clinicians, engineers, lawyers, software developers -- may microscopically examine everything you write. While excellent at understanding technical details, they may not very good at explaining them, and they are often reluctant to omit any fine details from the content, even when those fine points don't help people learn and change. You must be acutely aware of the review process if your estimated timeline and budget are going to be anywhere near the mark.
Who will deliver the training? Are you developing content for professional trainers, experienced presenters, or for regular employees and supervisors who may not have highly polished facilitation or presentation skills? This has a major impact on how specific and detailed your instructions to the presenters or facilitators must be. As the training experience of the people who are responsible for the training goes down, your time and cost to provide them with training tools will go up. (And even if the project is an online course or a self-study packet, someone will be responsible for providing guidance and answering questions, so this issue still applies.)
Who is paying for it? As with many business writing projects, it is common to have two masters. You will probably work with a committee that directly oversees the design, development and implementation of the training, and you have to keep them happy. But an entirely different set of people within the company may be providing the funds for the project, and you have to keep them happy, too. Over the years, I have seen very similar projects that were paid for by human resources, by legal, by a variety of specific operations departments, by marketing, and so on. Even though the content of those projects was more or less the same, the expectations and assumptions around the projects were clearly influenced by whose pocketbook we were dipping into. Knowing who is paying the bills can give you some insight into the results they hope to achieve, and can ensure you aren't caught unawares by the expectations of the "silent partner" in the room.

Training development is a rewarding field, and a great opportunity for professionals with well-developed writing skills. If you're thinking of adding this market to your portfolio, these key "who" questions will improve your chances for early success.

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