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Creating a training manual is one of the best ways to onboard new employees effectively. It ensures a smooth experience and provides go-to information at their fingertips.
A training manual serves as a document that provides instructions, guidelines, and procedures for training employees or users on a specific topic. It typically includes step-by-step instructions, best practices, and reference materials to improve learning retention and work performance.
But building one from scratch isn’t easy—it takes time, brainstorming, and thoughtful design.
With a training manual template, you can cut your workload in half, provide a smooth experience, and help you keep your materials up to date effortlessly.
In today’s article, we’ll cover different types of training manuals, how to create one, and 20 customizable templates you can use—even if you have little to no design experience.
Ready to create your training manual? Use our professional document creator to build an engaging training manual online that onboards new employees and helps them perform their best. Or, if you're short on time and want a quick and easy way to get started, try our AI document creator.
Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit training manual templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:
A training manual template is a pre-designed document that outlines how to create consistent, organized training materials for employees or learners.
It comes equipped with sections like objectives, instructions, visual placeholders, resources and assessments. Using a template not only helps to streamline training development initiatives, but it's easy to update, share and duplicate across media.
There are seven types of commonly used training manuals you can consider using based on your training needs as highlighted below:
| Training Manual Type | Key Features | Best For | ||
| Employee Onboarding Manual | Company overview, HR policies, job responsibilities, org chart, onboarding checklist | Corporate, Retail, Education | ||
| Technical Training Manual | Step-by-step instructions, system diagrams, troubleshooting guides, tool usage | IT, Engineering, Manufacturing | ||
| Safety Training Manual | Compliance checklists, emergency procedures, PPE guidelines, incident response | Construction, Logistics, Healthcare | ||
| Process/Procedure Manual | Standard operating procedures (SOPs), flowcharts, performance benchmarks | Finance, Legal, Operations | ||
| Product Training Manual | Feature breakdowns, user instructions, diagrams, support and FAQ integration | Technology, Automotive, SaaS | ||
| Soft Skills Training Manual | Workshops, exercises, communication models, leadership frameworks | HR, Customer Service, Management | ||
| Compliance Training Manual | Regulatory rules, ethics policies, audit procedures and certifications tracking | Healthcare, Finance, Government |
Find it challenging to create an employee training manual every time a new employee joins your company?
Don't worry, we've got a solution.
To make the process even easier for you, we've created a video tutorial on how to make a training manual for your team.
Now that you know how to create and edit training manuals in Visme, let's move on to the training manual examples you can use to make one right away.
The position of a social media manager within your company is a crucial one.
They will be responsible for managing your organization's online presence by developing a strategy, consistently producing and publishing content, analyzing data, running campaigns and more.
Seasoned Social Media Manager, Chelse L Hensley puts it best:
"When creating a training manual for your social media manager, an important step for a new social media manager is ensuring the training document includes a clear list of brand resources—both existing and potential.
This should be well-organized, like: Here’s a Google Drive folder with our professional brand photography.
This folder should include:
This will be the foundation a social media manager relies on to create content.
(Of course, beyond just visual assets!)"
This helps a social media manager who needs to quickly adapt to your company culture and know your organization from the inside out. Therefore, don't skip adding details or links to resources like this in your manual.
If you are looking to hire a social media manager, the training manual template is made just for you. Customize it to replace all the pre-existing information with yours to let your employee know about your company, how to set up a social media account and other instructions.
Are you a scientist looking for a lab assistant to help with your tests and research? If so, you may need to train them thoroughly and help them take all the necessary precautions for your lab work.
The template below is a great example as it features basic instructions, dos and don'ts, common lab hazards, lab dress code, and other crucial information.
It will help you craft a visually appealing and informative lab assistant training manual.
Laboratory accidents are too common and even if most lab workers feel safe during their work, they may engage in unsafe practices that may lead to explosions.
A virtual assistant is as essential as an in-office employee who performs various administrative tasks. They perform all the tasks like managing schedules, meetings, tasks and many others from a remote location.
Use the template below to guide your new hire through the process of creating an email address with the office domain, setting up remote access, accessing files in cloud storage and answering frequently asked questions.
Virtual assistants support your business by completing non-essential or repetitive tasks and help you focus on more crucial aspects of your business to increase productivity.
In fact, statistics show that companies save costs by up to 78% by hiring virtual assistants. Use this training manual template to ensure your virtual assistant is well-prepared to do their best work.
When it comes to thriving your business in the digital world, graphic design and marketing go hand in hand. Every business needs graphic designers to create stunning marketing materials like flyers, brochures, posters, logos, infographics and more.
Graphic designers also play a crucial role in developing a unique brand identity for your business. They should be familiar with your marketing and branding strategy, as well as your design requirements.
Alternatively, you can also use our brand design tool to automatically generate beautifully designed marketing materials that align with your brand identity.
Above is a template that includes the unique design requirements and helpful instructions of the organization for which it was prepared.
The human resources (HR) department plays a crucial role in developing, reinforcing and maintaining the work culture of an organization or business.
From recruitment and performance management to employee training and development, everything falls under the purview of HR.
Therefore, if you are hiring new employees for your HR department, make sure that they quickly get a clear picture of every aspect of your organization.
Use this comprehensive training manual for new employees to streamline their onboarding and ensure they understand your company's HR processes.
Customize the template below to help your HR team plan better, provide employees with career assistance and recruit employees who'll advance company objectives
When you're creating a training manual for HR managers or employees, HR manger Anastasiya Furman shares that you should always do this
"When creating training materials, be sure to include troubleshooting tips. Touch on important basics like legal and security protocols, IT support contacts, and how to file complaints or request inventory and stationery. These details often get overlooked, but they make onboarding much smoother. Employees need to know what not to do just as much as what to do."
A cashier handles the monetary transactions as part of the sales process, making them one of the most important employees of any business, especially for retail companies.
This template includes all the necessary business objectives that your cashier should be familiar with, such as increasing efficiency, reducing fraud, opening and closing procedures, handling angry customers and more.
As one of the most visible representatives of a business, a cashier is responsible for enhancing the customer experience. Moreover, a study reveals that 96% of consumers consider customer service a crucial factor in determining customer loyalty.
Therefore, when onboarding new cashiers, use this staff training manual to ensure they have everything they need to perform their responsibilities in the best way possible.
As you create your training content, use Senior Customer Success Manager, Alan Taussik's go-to tip for training:
"Training tends to be boring, and the content won’t stick with the audience. You’ll lose attention, and your objectives will not be to keep the material engaging by utilizing multimedia resources, such as videos, graphics, and live demos.
Ensure that your audience engages. Use polls, quizzes, role-playing, or breakout discussions. Or share case studies or success stories that illustrate best practices in action.
Depending on what you are training the team on, the following points might also be relevant.
If you are a startup, you might already know that a product designer is in charge of the entire process of creating products and usable experiences. In other words, a product designer in your team is responsible for creating the best version of your products.
To come up with the best version of your product within the resources and time available, your product designer should understand your product's UI/UX requirements.
Since they will be coordinating with the product design team from the early stages of your product development process, you need to ensure they feel comfortable with your work environment as soon as possible.
Customize this template to help the new hire manage tasks effectively, understand your design process, collaborate with other designers and more.
A digital marketer is responsible for developing, implementing and managing marketing campaigns to promote your products and services. They play a crucial role in increasing brand awareness and driving traffic to your website.
A common mistake that most marketing teams make is expecting new marketers to hit the ground running. Head of Content, Victoria Taylor puts it this way:
"Hiring the right person is important—but without a resource focused marketing training manual that includes access to tools, legacy data, procedures, and daily tasks, you’re setting your marketers up for unnecessary roadblocks. You should also include introductions to teammates and people that your marketer will be working with on a regular basis."
Here is a template made to help the new digital marketers in your team understand their daily tasks, develop marketing strategies, manage campaigns, content creation and optimization processes and more.
The digital marketer will be managing all aspects of your digital marketing strategy, such as data and analytics, design thinking, SEO, SEM, PPC, content marketing and many others.
And to perform these tasks, they need to understand your business and its branding strategy.
The data entry operators are responsible for entering critical data and keeping records up-to-date.
When you're creating a manual for people who manage and handle data, you want to keep it simple.
Use this template and help your operators manage time efficiently, increase accuracy, decrease work pressure, focus on revenue-oriented activities and more.
Having accurate data is the backbone of every business. Any small error in the data entry process can lead to a significant issue in your business.
Therefore, provide clear instructions to your data entry operators during their onboarding process at your company.
With Visme's dynamic fields, you can easily customize your manual for different purposes. Save your fields, such as contact information, policies, prices, or any other information that must be updated regularly. Then, any time you insert values into these fields, they will be automatically updated across your document.
A production supervisor is an employee in the management team who oversees the production department. Production process management and staff management are the two core responsibilities of a production supervisor.
A production supervisor will ensure that your company's production process is as efficient as possible without sacrificing employee safety.
Furthermore, they will be responsible for maintaining and implementing workplace safety, ensuring quality, efficacy and sustainability of your products.
In order to perform the tasks mentioned above, your production supervisor should have access to a detailed company manual. This manual should include information about the type of materials used in your products, the best practices you follow for product supervision and the impacts of materials, machinery and safety practices.
The product manager is the person responsible for identifying the customer's needs and the business objectives behind a requested product or feature. They articulate the success of a product and rally a team to turn the company's vision into reality.
Use the product manager training manual template below to help them strategize, evaluate ideas, prioritize features, build roadmaps and many others.
Like the CEO, product managers set goals, define success, motivate employees and perform many other critical tasks without having any special authority.
In simple words, a product manager sits at the core of UX, technology and business of your organization. And as a responsible employer, you don't want to compromise on the onboarding process of such a valuable employee.
Are you looking to create a training manual on short notice? Visme's AI document generator can help! Provide a brief description of your topic, and the tool will suggest outlines, sections and draft text. You can customize the layout, add images and include interactive elements for a polished final document. This enables you to do interactive learning with employees.
Turning raw data into meaningful insights to improve a business is the core responsibility of a data scientist. From extracting and analyzing data to using data mining and machine learning techniques, they do everything to make data more accessible for you.
So, empower them to use their skills using the template below.
Since the role of a data scientist is crucial, make it clear to the new hire that they should always be transparent about their progress and never be ashamed to let you know about their challenges.
Furthermore, a new hire in your organization will come with a strong understanding of concepts, not the tools you use.
The training manual template above will help them understand your data security policies and business matrices, collaborate with the data engineers and efficiently manage daily tasks.
When onboarding new developers in your team, from workflows to team culture, from the codebase to code standards, there is a lot to bring them up to speed.
To help you achieve this, we have developed the web developer training manual template above that already features some critical information, such as code synchronization, code management, documentation and more.
An effective onboarding process is crucial for avoiding disasters at work and for integrating your new hire as a productive employee.
Additionally, take advantage of SCORM and xAPI compatibility for seamless integration into your learning management system (LMS).
The SEO executive will be responsible for all your SEO activities, such as content optimization, link building, keyword research and off-page and technical SEO.
To help you with that, here is a training manual that you can customize for your new hires, making the onboarding process smoother.
Furthermore, an SEO executive will manage your SEM campaigns on different platforms to maximize ROI. Such tasks require an in-depth understanding of a company's business processes, marketing requirements, and branding strategies.
And if you are a digital marketing agency, client objectives are the most important thing. So, use the manual above to ensure your SEO executives perform well.
You can also use this template to educate your employees about your new product rollout. Once your digital training manual is ready, Visme provides various options for sharing and publishing it. You can download the manual in PDF, JPG, PNG or HTML format or generate a public or private link for online distribution.
The community manager is a bridge between your business and the target audience. They are responsible for tuning your brand voice, moderating your brand through community support, distributing content and more.
This training manual template below is a great way to help the new community manager do their job.
Ultimately, community managers bring digital engagement to build brand presence by creating a community both internally and externally, online and offline.
Use this new employee training manual to train your team to identify your target audience, set goals, distribute content with the right audience, measure your progress, understand your existing social presence and many more.
Once you're done you can create a training matrix and find skills gaps to improve your training for the future.
A content writer is responsible for creating engaging and SEO-optimized content that will drive people to your website.
The training manual template below features the primary responsibilities of a content writer, such as creating content within brand standards, producing engaging content, optimizing content and some important business metrics of a brand.
Use Visme's AI writer to brainstorm ideas or overcome writer's block. This advanced tool can help you generate outlines, text variations, and even entire sections of content for your training manuals. Simply explain your needs to the AI writer; the tool will unleash its magic.
Research has revealed that 71% of B2B customers review a business's blog before and during their business journey.
Thus, making a content writer an integral part of your digital marketing strategy regardless of the size and industry of your business. And we know that you don't want to compromise on the onboarding process of a content writer.
A customer service representative deals with customers to provide them with information relevant to the products and services of a business, making sure they are satisfied.
This is important for the continuous growth of your business because they help you retain customers and extract more value from them.
Provide your customer service representatives with the training manual template above to help them deal with different customer personas, understand their issues and resolve their problems in the best way possible. Add more value to your manual by adding an interactive decision tree or a dichotomous key. This feature will help employees quickly troubleshoot issues with projects, software or even client interactions.
The advantages of training manuals are not limited to the employee onboarding process. You can use them to train employees on SOAR processes, secure document sharing protocols, standard operating procedures and legal procedures to follow before launching projects.
The office workshop template below contains instructions for using tools like MS Word, MS Powerpoint and MS Excel.
You can use it as a written supplement to show your employees what they will learn in the upcoming workshop, as well as a reference guide for employee training.
As we mentioned, a training manual can be used for various use cases other than employee onboarding. Product instruction is one of the critical ones among them.
Here is a template for a project management tool made for employees to help them manage projects using a project management tool.
Use this template to train your new hires about managing projects and provide documentation that can be used for self-paced learning. If you're interested in boosting employee development beyond project management skills, check out our blog on corporate training materials to discover a range of amazing resources that can take your team to the next level.
As you can understand by the title of this training manual template, it is about setting up a food processor.
It will guide a company's technicians through the process of setting up a food processor and making it ready for customers to use.
In addition to these templates, you can explore our blog on training materials and discover additional formats to enhance your employee onboarding and development process.
Several tools exist for creating training manuals, but Visme stands out due to its user-friendly interface and extensive library of visually engaging templates. You can easily incorporate images, videos and interactive elements into your training manuals to create an immersive learning experience.
In addition to strong visuals, Visme ensures your manuals are well-organized, easy to navigate and tailored to your brand aesthetic.
A well-structured training manual follows a few key principles:
A training manual is designed to teach employees how to perform specific job-related tasks and follow company procedures. It focuses on the “how-to” of internal processes within the organization. A user guide, on the other hand, is aimed at customers or external users and explains how to operate or utilize a product or service effectively.
A training manual provides detailed, step-by-step instructions on completing specific tasks or procedures. It’s focused on precise actions. An employee handbook offers a broader picture, outlining company policies, general rules, and the company’s overall expectations for its employees.
Here’s a guide for writing a training manual in PDF format:
Training manuals are crucial for several reasons:
Did you find the training manual template you were looking for? With so many options to choose from, we hope you sure did.
And by now, you might feel like an expert who knows all the fundamentals of crafting training manuals for different positions.
So, it's time to choose a training manual template and customize it according to your needs using Visme's professional document creator.
It allows you to customize a template the way you want with easy-to-use drag and drop data widgets, stunning graphics, tables, videos and many more.
Additionally, read this article on creating an effective training manual with design tips to learn more.
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