“Hurley Write changed the structure of our organization for the better. While we are still evolving, the new guidance and templates Hurley Write helped us develop have definitely reduced the burden on management to train our new hires. Highly recommend Hurley Write!”
The company was growing fast and hiring lots of engineers, many of them new college graduates. While management believed that these new graduates would be able to hit the ground running in terms of writing, they needed more oversight than anticipated. To train new engineers to write to company expectations, they were given a report that they were supposed to use as a model; what wound up happening was these new engineers would cut and paste, resulting in documents that didn’t meet readers’ needs and that included information that wasn’t pertinent to the client and was often erroneous.
This company needed two things immediately: a way to train new writers that could be standardized and that wouldn’t require additional time from managers to implement. Because these engineers were college graduates, the firm had an expectation in terms of their ability to write quality documents; the reality was that how much writing these graduates had to do while in school varied greatly. In addition, because the company had nothing in place to train them properly, the thought was that giving them a document that management considered quality to learn from would be sufficient. What management failed to do was to provide any support or guidance.
We analyzed the documents new engineers were being given and interviewed management to discover how they were training new engineers and relaying expectations. We also reviewed strategies the firm was using to get new engineers up to speed in terms of their writing.
Based on our analysis, we created a standard to train new writers, including mentorships, guidance documents, and designed and taught a series of customized writing workshops that focused on helping their writers write for modern readers.
At our three-month follow-up, The company reported that they were spending less time training new writers on company standards and that the more experienced engineers were mentoring new engineers and contributing to guidance documents and templates.
The company also reported that the newer engineers were teaching some of the more experienced engineers some of the strategies they’d learned in our workshops.
“Hurley Write changed the structure of our organization for the better. While we are still evolving, the new guidance and templates Hurley Write helped us develop have definitely reduced the burden on management to train our new hires. Highly recommend Hurley Write!”
