“How to write simple instructions” - (165,000 words, plus appendices)

There’s a basic rule of information technology with which we are all probably far too familiar. Simply put, it is we should never trust any piece of I.T. equipment when the manuals weigh more than the product itself. If they do, the chances are that they will be full of explanations of why the product doesn’t do what you thought it would. A variation on this is that the manuals will contain lengthy explanations to facilitate working around the inconvenient fact that the product the I.T. people have sold you only works in ways that I.T. people, rather than mere mortals, actually understand.

The training world is horribly full of this sort of dead-tree self-perpetuating posterior-protecting nonsense. Back in the early 90’s readers may remember the birth of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs). I was particularly familiar with the early Management Standards, the bastard offspring of the Management Charter Initiative, and made quite a good living for some considerable time by translating these into language the tutors and trainers, let alone the poor benighted bloody managers, could understand.
That work was built on helping them to find their way around the original four key roles, split into 9 units of competence, these divided into 26 elements, and finally a smattering of 163 performance criteria, and seasoned with assorted range indicators. The language was often so difficult and rampantly value-laden that it had little meaning to either students or tutors. Candidates frequently needed a course in understanding the bloody standards before they could get on with the actual “learning” they had signed up for.

So full of woolly language were these wretched “occupational standards” that the (then) regulator employed teams of “experts” working on banks of word-processors, fed by countless consultations, leading to the printing of numerous booklets of guidance notes made from entire Scandinavian forests, to describe not only what the damn things meant, but also how they were to be assessed.
This created such confusion among the providers and customers that it led to further “guidance notes”, apparently produced by entirely different teams of experts, to tell the training industry what the original guidance notes were actually supposed to mean, and how to interpret them in such a way that it was possible for the training providers to make any money from delivering their programmes, let alone for the poor bloody learners to get any real development value out of them.

(I’ll tell you what reader. If, after almost 20 years of promotion, a normal, commercially-driven manufacturer or service provider was still having to explain to its potential customers what the product was supposed to do, and then give them financial incentives to actually buy it, they would pull the whole damn range and sack the people who devised it.)

You may have gathered that I have a teeny- weenie degree of cynicism about “competence statements” “learning specifications”, “assessment outcomes”, “delivery and design parameters”, “Guidance to assessors”, and such like. The poor entrepreneur, the guy or guy-ess who has put their own money into setting up as a training consultant, growing their business into a tidy operation serving customers in commerce and industry who need to train their staff, must be staggered at the ability of the qualifications providers to continually produce reams of instructions about what they will accredit, and how it should be done, in amazing detail and at enormous length, often including such essentials as how to obtain a Gaelic version of the instructions and what to do if a learner needs to go to the toilet.

I would suspect that more than anything else the independent training provider would value this information more in a short document that does not require a month in a monk’s cell to study, a course in semantics to understand, and a degree in law to interpret for their own customers, the learners and their employers.

But this nonsense of over-specification, this illuminating of the dots on the “I”s and gilding of the crossbars of the “t”s, is not the fault of qualification awarding bodies. They are trapped by the system that in turn regulates them. They have been around quite a while; they have vast intellectual reserves, huge experience resides in their staff. They know very well there is a simple test of the quality and reliability of their training providers. That is that they provide their training to employers, the employers know it’s good, and will pay for it.
But instead the qualification awarding bodies have to work within the most regulated, constricting, politically correct, risk averse, self-perpetuating, interfering, state managed, unresponsive, innovation destructive, self-satisfied, overprotected, monopolistic, empire building, intrusive, national qualification framework that can be imagined.