You're looking to upskill your team's content development. What's the best way to do it?

Get a revolver. Load one bullet. Hold it against your writer's temple. Start pulling the trigger when he/she starts writing. Works all the time, I assure you.

I believe I'd start with a speech my adman old man gave to his copywriting staff, long before self-respecting writers started calling it "content development," and even longer before some propeller-head called training "upskilling," for the love of William Strunk and E.B. White. Daddy said, "Boys"—all the writers was boys in them days—"if we don't do bad work, bad work won't get done." While I have ya here, I'd also like to quote Lucy, a graphic designer I once worked with, who once shouted over a cubicle wall that a sidebar on page four was running short. "Dave," she noted, "you need to write some more shit." I felt old Lucy really had things in perspective, when it came to content development. Anyway, folks—I hope that helps.

In my experience, one of the most impactful ways to upskill a team is to lead by example. As a leader, demonstrating a commitment to continuous learning and improvement sets a powerful precedent. Channeling the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Encourage a culture of innovation and experimentation, showcasing your dedication to exploring new content development approaches. Actively engage in the creation process, sharing your experiences, challenges, and those of others. Roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, and encourage your team to draw inspiration from various sources.

I would first do a skill gap analysis to understand my team's strength areas and ones wherein they would need scaffolding. Providing training that is more experiential will get them to apply as they learn. Providing case studies and hands- on would help them scale better. This exercise would need to be done periodically for their holistic growth and development.

I agree that Team Strengths should be assessed. But Team Communication is also crucial - 1. Be it between the manager and the team. 2. And amongst the team members. Effective team communication reduces the gaps, identifies synergy and aligns everyone to achieve the same goals.

Explore mentorship programs and peer-to-peer learning within the team. Pairing experienced team members with those looking to upskill can provide personalized guidance and foster a culture of continuous learning.

The best thing is on the job training. Sure courses are great but nothing beats actually learning hands on with an experienced team.

Knowing your audience and how they prefer to learn is important as well. Not everyone wants to learn in long form. Others may need more detail then a quick hit video can offer. I don't think there is a magical format for learning resources for my team. What I have found is that offering an interconnected variety of formats can appeal to a wide range of learners (particularly when you need to scale learning). For example, I may create a quick hit, high level video to generate interest in the topic. I'll follow that with a interactive webinar or on-demand video. Finally, I'll ensure that there are FAQ resources available for those who prefer to read up in detail.

Each person's learning style and preference will differ. Curating a learning journey that provides a gamut of options - Interactive presentations, audio books, videos, quizzes, gamifications , case studies etc. will help the learner's learnability.

I find peer-to-peer learning outweighs access to the right tools & platforms when it comes to team development. Acknowledging small wins also fosters community leadership within the team.

Nurture a culture of continuous growth. To upskill your team in content development, establish a supportive and collaborative learning environment. Clear goals, regular feedback, and peer learning foster ongoing improvement. Encourage curiosity and experimentation to ignite creativity. Utilize collaboration tools like Slack or Google Docs for seamless communication. This approach ensures that upskilling becomes an intrinsic part of your team's ethos, promoting a culture of continuous learning and development.

Upskilling can feel daunting if "going it alone". On my teams, I promote the team learning together. Often times we discuss what we're hearing from our audiences. We then brainstorm live or remotely on what we can do differently/better. We seek external feedback on our approach. And if necessary, we'll bring in experts content writers from other parts of the organization to share their perspectives. This helps the team grow better together, and I find promotes a healthier environment for learning.

I love this as a team goal vs. just an individual, as content development is rarely a one person role on a team - Having your team share their goals with each other allows for opportunities to share articles, resources and also provide feedback during the development process. How can they make things more creative, more relevant to the customer/market or try a new format they've seen has been performing well. A team environment can enable us to work towards an overall goal to make the program stronger.

At a time at my workplace, the content of the design copies we were receiving from the design team was not communicating our MVPs properly. The content including texts was not portraying the brand in its genuine entirety. I ensured I created a channel on Slack dedicated to sharing resources and inspirations from all social media sites. We set clear goals of wanting to improve the content marketing of the brand for the next 6 months. We started experimenting and we started to see notable improvements in our content strategy.

Carving out regular sessions for knowledge sharing is a must for any marketing team looking to upskill content skills and other departments looking to learn, marketing is not an island. Traditional chat tools are great but don’t discount collab tools like Miro and Figma where you can lead colleagues on activities and topic presentations in an interactive way. Learning comes in many forms and useful content knowledge can come from any level in the company and any department, be open to it.

Do proper research and development to determine the impact of the upskilling of the content. You may just be wasting resources if this is not done. All you require may just be product quality assurance and positioning in the market competitively.

Even with small teams I find it's helpful to set up a weekly with a very few shared metrics that you all discuss. What gets measured gets done. I find the team will often bring up better ways to get to the goal because a lot of the time folks are talented, driven adults and want to do a great job.

Measuring the impact of upskilling in content development is crucial for understanding its effectiveness and aligning with business objectives. With my team, we focused on various metrics to evaluate our team's progress post-upskilling, such as improvements in content quality, readability, and user engagement. These metrics provided tangible insights into how enhanced skills directly influenced content performance and, consequently, our business goals. One effective strategy we employed was integrating regular training sessions with hands-on projects, allowing team members to apply new skills in real-world scenarios, thereby reinforcing learning and encouraging innovation.

One of the best techniques would be to direct them towards sources of inspiration. As a team it is important to discuss and form a pipeline of ideas that could potentially be used in the upcoming prefects. This can also be a team bonding activity

In my experience Evaluating the outcome and impact helps in defining your future path. You need to define clear objectives, implement diverse training programs, conduct regular assessments, establish a feedback mechanism, track performance metrics, encourage real-world application, promote peer learning, foster adaptability, gather feedback through surveys, and analyze the ROI to measure and evaluate the impact of content development upskilling initiatives.

As a manager, you must stay current with new developments, trends, and technological innovations within learning and content development. By keeping abreast of movements and developments in the industry, you can ensure the team has the necessary knowledge and skills for the future of content development but more importantly, you lead by example and demonstrate your commitment to the team and their future.

Leveraging Insights from Key Customers and CRM Strategies: Valuable insights can come from key customers, consultants, and experts. Their knowledge about the product is something we shouldn't overlook.I've come to understand that collecting feedback from key customers through the Customer Service team regularly brings valuable firsthand information into the content creation process and having an active CRM could be very useful. By incorporating their insights, our team can tailor content to better meet the needs and expectations of customers, ultimately contributing to the upskilling, effectiveness and engagement of your team in content development process.

In my experience, agency is key. Yes, the needs assessment tells us what skills are needing our support. But we don't teach skills, we develop people and this means that what they care about needs to come first. This helps us build trust to then come in with what we are saying they need, to lower resistance and to foster an innovation and growth mindset. Opening the door to a long term, positive, proactive, and robust learning culture with powerful outcomes and ongoing talent development starts with the learner's own needs analysis. We show that we are their collaborative partner by responding to their self identified talent development plans and dreams.

Before you start the process of identifying where your team is underdelivering, it's important that you clearly define what your goals are. Once you have done that, you can assess your team's learning needs and then align them with your goals to find the fastest, most effective way possible to achieve them. Assuming that your whole team is underperforming, it is important that you train/upskill them in batches/rotation. This way, you can ensure that your content delivery isn't affected when your team (or parts of it) is (are) upskilling. When your first batch is done with their training, keep them aside for sometime to help them practice and then test if they've improved. If you're satisfied, you can get them back live. Repeat for the rest.

A content development team is like a hydra, it's many heads, many creative backgrounds, and many ideas coming together to create one thing. Providing interactive sessions outside of work and providing training can keep the team motivated and help update their skill profile while improving their interpersonal skills as well. I believe it is imperative to have such practices in the workplace and to provide creative minds a safe space to express their ideas and themselves through their work and team efforts.