How to Curate Training- A Quick Overview
Running a small or medium-sized business means your time is stretched in every direction. When it comes to training your team, you probably don’t have the luxury, or the budget to create every course from scratch.
The good news? There’s a tonne of excellent content already out there.
The challenge is knowing how to find it, and more importantly, how to make it accessible and usable for your employees.
Here’s how I do it.
4 Tips for Curation
1. Hunt Smart: Where to Find Learning Content
Over the years, I’ve realised that some of the best training isn’t what you pay for, it’s what you curate.
My go-to sources include:
Free online courses and microlearning platforms: Coursera, LinkedIn Learning (even the free content is often surprisingly good).
Industry blogs, articles, and whitepapers: Practical insights from people actually doing the work.
YouTube and podcasts: Bite-sized learning your team can consume anywhere.
Government or professional body resources: These are usually credible and up to date.
Pro tip: Don’t grab everything. Focus on content that’s relevant, actionable, and current. It’s very easy to end up down a rabbit hole of information, and without presenting the right content, you and they will waste time on unnecessary or nice to know content that doesn’t focus in your needs.
2. Organise It Before You Share It
Once you’ve found the content, the key is making it easy to access.
I’ve tried a few approaches:
Shared drives or SharePoint folders: Easy, searchable, and everyone knows where to look.
Bookmark managers: Tools like Pocket or Raindrop let you tag and organise links.
Internal Slack channels: A dedicated “Learning Resources” space keeps everything in one place.
Simple spreadsheets: Include columns for topic, link, duration, and why it’s useful.
Pro tip: Make it visual. Categories, emojis, or short descriptions make it far easier for your team to scan and pick the right resource. And keep it organised! Without a regular sort through and rules of use, it can quickly become unusable and relegated to last year’s great idea.
3. Make Learning Simple and Engaging
Even curated content won’t get used if it’s hard to navigate. A few small tweaks help:
Stick to consistent categories like “Customer Service,” “Compliance,” or “Technical Skills.”
Add mini descriptions for every resource so your team knows why it matters.
Update regularly- drop outdated links, add new ones.
Make it social if possible- encourage your team to share takeaways or run mini challenges.
Pro tip: Learning journeys or by Role are a great way to organise content. Get your experienced employees involved in developing and maintaining the content, it’s a great way to share knowledge and keep content relevant.
4. Keep Tabs on What Works
You don’t need fancy tracking, but it helps to know who’s engaging:
Shared drives often show views or downloads.
Slack reactions or quick polls give you a sense of usage.
If you want something more formal, even a low-cost LMS can track completions and engagement.
Pro tip: Knowing what’s used and what isn’t can give you great insights into gaps and needs. Consider a formal feedback cycle to gain ideas for new additions and content format or style preference.
The Takeaway
Curating learning isn’t about doing it all yourself, it’s about finding great content and making it easy for your team to use. A little organisation goes a long way. Once your resources are easy to find and simple to navigate, your employees will actually engage and you’ll see the benefits in productivity and confidence.
In small businesses, we can’t afford to reinvent the wheel. But with a thoughtful approach to curated learning, we can make sure our teams always have the tools to keep growing.
Need a hand getting started? If you’re keen to implement curated learning but don’t have the time or resources to set it up, Jessanol can help. We work with SMEs to find, organise, and deliver learning resources in a way that’s simple for your team to access and effective from day one.