Overview
If you have used AI to generate training content, you have likely experienced cases where the results are too generic or misaligned with your needs. To remedy this, use an intermediate document strategy that breaks down content creation into discrete steps that mirror how skilled instructional designers work.
Instead of feeding raw source materials directly into your AI tools to customize the content, first use AI to create focused reference documents such as
- audience profiles
- key points summaries
- learning objectives
This allows you to control the quality and consistency of AI-generated content by reviewing and refining the inputs that shape the output. It also improves results by overcoming inherent limitations in how AI models use the information in their context window.
The case for creating intermediate documents
A context window is how much information a model can hold during a single conversation. You can think of it as available working memory. Larger context windows are valuable because they:
- Increase the amount of custom data you can provide with a prompt to supplement the data in an LLM’s dataset.
- Help models maintain longer and more coherent conversations with less forgetting of what came earlier in the conversation.
- Allow a model to analyze and generate long-form content.
A large context window allows you to easily input course curricula, company policies, product documentation, learner profiles, or other custom data without resorting to complex technical solutions such as RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) that require special infrastructure and technical expertise. However, large context windows are not without caveats.
In general, large language models (LLMs) are good at abstracting and summarizing even large amounts of text. However, by its nature, abstraction means losing detail. The more text that is abstracted at one time, the more risk that important details will be lost. And the less control you have over which parts of the source material you want the model to focus on. As a result, it can be beneficial to do this abstraction process in stages by using a collection of concise, human-reviewed documents in place of raw data.
Intermediate documents in action
This tutorial walks through creating intermediate documents to generate learning objectives and an outline for an L&D course targeting new managers. You should be able to adjust the process and the sample prompts for whatever type of training you develop.
Remember that LLMs are intentionally designed not to replicate the same results when using the same prompt. Your results will vary from mine—and your own if you run the prompt more than once. I recommend running prompts three times and choosing the best version as your starting point. Then integrate any useful snippets from the other two outputs and adjust the intermediate documents to reflect your personal knowledge of the subject matter, audience, context, and instructional design.
The sample prompts and results below use Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model. I strongly prefer this model for most writing tasks. However, you can use an intermediate document strategy with any LLM that has a sufficiently large context window. If you have access to multiple models, consider trying this workflow with more than one model and comparing results.
STEP 1: Create an audience description
The foundation of effective training content is careful audience analysis. This is the best place to start with intermediate documents because your audience description will be useful in making sure all additional content you generate is on point.
I use a learner persona format in this example. But you can use your preferred format for audience description. If you have a sample audience description that you like, include it with the prompt and ask the model to use it as a template.
In your prompt, make sure you are very specific about the details you want in your audience description. Check out the sample prompt for examples of what you might want to include. But remember that the types of details that are useful will vary by your audience and training goals.
LLMs behave differently when you provide custom data than when you don’t. They tend to over-focus on the data you provide at the expense of not drawing on their immense data set. To make sure you get the benefit of both your custom data and existing information in the model, generate your audience description in three steps.
- Create an initial audience description without providing any custom data.
- Collect any data you have about your audience (for example, interviews, surveys, feedback forms, or job descriptions). Upload this data into your chat conversation and ask the model to to create an audience description using the data.
- In a follow-up prompt (same conversation), ask the model to integrate the bullets from your custom audience data created int step 2 into the original audience description. Instruct the model to avoid duplicate points and consolidate similar bullets.
You will want to review and edit the resulting audience description. However, remember that the primary goal of an intermediate document is to be explicit about audience needs to direct the model’s behavior. There’s no need to factor in human comprehension factors such as limiting the number of bullets in a list when you edit intermediate documents. If you want to create a version of the audience description optimized for marketing or other purposes, you can ask AI to create a condensed version of it in a separate prompt.
Your role
Assume the role of an accomplished and experienced instructional designer who works in corporate Learning and Development (L&D). You have a deep understanding of learning research, course development best practices, and how to create training that is
- impactful to learners
- behavior-focused
- experiential
- engaging
You are a subject-matter expert (SME) in HR. Your specialty is leadership development, management skills, and coaching.
Task
I am working on a course to help NEW MANAGERS perform better. The course will cover common management topics such as delegating tasks and having difficult conversations.
Please create a learner persona that can help me ensure that my course correctly targets the distinct needs of this audience. The learner persona should answer questions such as
- What are their typical daily and periodic tasks?
- What are their professional goals?
- What’s stopping them from achieving their goals?
- What job-related problems do they face?
- What are their frustrations, challenges, and pain points?
Follow-up prompt # 1
I am providing additional information from a NEW MANAGER SURVEY conducted by my organization. Please extract key themes from the survey. List them as bullets using the headings from the base learner persona. If a new bullet does not match any of the existing headings, you can add a new heading. Do not include the previous bullets in this list. Some headings may not have new bullets based on survey themes. You can exclude empty headings from your output.
Follow-up prompt # 2
Merge these new bullets into the original learner persona. Consolidate bullets that are similar into a single bullet. Remove bullets that duplicate previous points, even if the duplicate bullets appear in a different section.
[LEARNER PERSONA]
Learner Persona: Sarah, the New Manager
Background:
Sarah, 32, has recently been promoted to her first management position at a mid-sized tech company. She has been with the company for 4 years as a high-performing individual contributor and is now leading a team of 6 people.
Typical daily and periodic tasks:
- Overseeing team projects and deadlines
- Conducting one-on-one meetings with team members
- Participating in management meetings and reporting on team progress
- Reviewing and approving team members’ work
- Addressing team conflicts and performance issues
- Coordinating with other departments
- Balancing her own individual contributor tasks with new management responsibilities
- Managing complex stakeholders across multiple projects
Professional goals:
- Establish herself as a competent and respected leader
- Develop her team members’ skills and career paths
- Improve team productivity and performance metrics
- Contribute to the company’s strategic objectives
- Advance her own career to senior management positions
- Enhance strategic thinking skills, moving beyond short-term quarterly focus
Obstacles to achieving goals:
- Lack of formal management training
- Uncertainty about how to transition from peer to leader
- Time management challenges balancing individual work and management duties
- Difficulty in delegating tasks effectively, especially those she enjoys doing herself
- Insecurity about making tough decisions
- Struggle to balance empathy with performance expectations
Job-related problems:
- Struggling to provide constructive feedback and have difficult conversations
- Unsure how to motivate and engage team members with diverse personalities
- Difficulty in setting clear expectations and goals for the team
- Challenges in managing former peers and maintaining professional boundaries
- Overwhelmed by the increased workload and responsibilities
- Difficulty in onboarding and mentoring new team members
Frustrations, challenges, and pain points:
- Imposter syndrome and self-doubt about leadership abilities
- Stress from being responsible for others’ performance and career growth
- Feeling caught between upper management expectations and team needs
- Uncertainty about how to handle complex HR situations (e.g., performance improvement plans, conflict resolution)
- Struggling to find work-life balance with increased job demands
- Fear of making mistakes that could impact team morale or company performance
- Difficulty in adapting communication style to different team members and stakeholders
- Discomfort with conflict situations
- Struggle to be concise during meetings
- Challenges in storytelling from the client perspective
- Anxiety about potential organizational restructuring leading to increased span of control
- Managing sudden team growth (e.g., team doubling in size)
Areas for skill development:
- Improving ability to have direct conversations and provide constructive feedback
- Enhancing delegation skills and learning to release control
- Developing strategic thinking capabilities
- Refining storytelling and coaching abilities
- Building conflict resolution skills
- Mastering time management and prioritization
- Learning to balance empathy with performance expectations
STEP 2: Generate a summary of key points for source documents
Next, use your LLM to generate a summary of source documents that relate to your desired course such as existing learning materials, employee manuals, knowledge bases, video transcripts, product documentation, etc. You’re looking for documents that contain either content that you want to cover in your course or that illustrate the unique spin you want to put on your topic.
The intermediate documents you generate from this content will typically be in bullet form, but text summaries are okay if they accurately and concisely represent the points you want to make. You want to make sure all key points are represented and that there isn’t extraneous content to muddy the waters.
If you have a lot of documents to work through, you can create a summary for sets of similar documents in a single AI conversation. But you might want to summarize very long documents or particularly important ones by themselves so you can inspect the results.
Make sure you include your audience description document when you create summaries. Ask the model to consider the audience when determining key points. Always check the generated key points and edit them as necessary.
Your role
Assume the role of an accomplished and experienced instructional designer who works in corporate Learning and Development (L&D). You have a deep understanding of learning research, course development best practices, and how to create training that is
- impactful to learners
- behavior-focused
- experiential
- engaging
You are a subject-matter expert (SME) in HR. Your specialty is leadership development, management skills, and coaching.
Provided information
I have included the following information to help you accomplish the requested task:
- A TRANSCRIPT of an audio presentation containing tips for new managers.
- A LEARNING PERSONA that describes an example of the intended audience for the audio presentation.
Task
I am creating an instructor-led course for new managers. I want to incorporate key ideas from the TRANSCRIPT into the course.
Adopt the perspective of a new manager as described in the LEARNING PERSONA. Use this perspective to summarize the TRANSCRIPT into key points that will resonate with a new manager audience.
[KEY POINTS]
Transition from Individual Contributor to Manager
- Recognize that management requires a different skill set than being an individual contributor
- Be prepared for the challenge of balancing individual work with new leadership responsibilities
- Understand that leaving your old role behind is crucial for success in your new position
Clarify Expectations and Deliverables
- Gain clarity on your role, team’s objectives, and how your performance will be evaluated
- Align your priorities with your manager’s expectations
- Ensure you understand key processes and success metrics for your team
Develop Essential Management Skills
- Focus on improving time management and prioritization skills
- Learn to delegate effectively, even tasks you enjoy doing yourself
- Enhance your communication skills, particularly in providing clear and specific instructions
Build Your Team Relationships
- Invest time in getting to know your team members individually
- Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to build trust, provide feedback, and offer guidance
- Observe team dynamics to understand how your team functions as a group
Establish Your Leadership Presence
- Be aware of how your behavior and reactions influence your team
- Remain calm and collected under pressure to build credibility
- Communicate expectations clearly and explain the reasoning behind decisions
Navigate Challenges of Being a New Manager
- Be prepared for potential discomfort in managing former peers
- Avoid making significant changes immediately; take time to understand the current situation
- Don’t speak negatively about your predecessor, regardless of the circumstances
Practice Effective Leadership Techniques
- Learn about different leadership styles and identify your natural approach
- Explore situational leadership to adapt your style to different circumstances
- Use leverage to maximize your impact with limited time and resources
Maintain Work-Life Balance and Personal Well-being
- Remember to enjoy the journey and make work enjoyable for your team
- Look after your own well-being to avoid burnout and maintain effectiveness
- View leadership development as a long-term journey, not a sprint
As you edit the resulting key points documents, try to eliminate duplicate, confusing, or contradictory key points that appear across the collection of documents you intend to use. These can skew the AI output in undesirable ways. You can upload your key point summaries and use AI to help you find elements to consolidate, correct, or eliminate.
STEP 3: Generate learning objectives
Use your audience description, key points summaries, and any additional intermediate documents you have created when generating learning objectives for the course. In the example below, I added two short intermediate documents that describe the servant leadership philosophy to show how additional documents can shape the output.
Once again, make sure to review and edit the AI-generated learning objectives before proceeding to generate a course outline.
Your role
Assume the role of an accomplished and experienced instructional designer who works in corporate Learning and Development (L&D). You have a deep understanding of learning research, course development best practices, and how to create training that is
- impactful to learners
- behavior-focused
- experiential
- engaging
You are a subject-matter expert (SME) in HR. Your specialty is leadership development, management skills, and coaching.
Provided information
I have included the following information to help you accomplish the requested task:
- A LEARNER PERSONA that describes the audience for a new instructor-led course
- KEY POINTS that provide an example of the type of content the course should contain.
- Information that describe the SERVANT LEADERSHIP approach to management used by my organization.
Task
Please use the provided information to create five learning objectives for a 2-hour instructor-led course that will help new managers be successful in their new role.
The course will not be able to cover all potential topics in two hours, so pick the ones that will be most impactful for this audience based on the LEARNER PERSONA. The learning objectives should be phrased as things the learner will be able to do after taking the course.
[LEARNING OBJECTIVES]
Learning Objectives for New Manager Course
By the end of this 2-hour instructor-led course, participants will be able to:
- Use time management and prioritization strategies to balance competing demands and maintain work-life balance in their new leadership role.
- Conduct productive one-on-one meetings that build trust, provide constructive feedback, and support team members’ growth and development.
- Delegate tasks effectively, considering team members’ skills and development needs while overcoming personal reluctance to relinquish control.
- Apply active listening techniques to understand team members’ perspectives and concerns, demonstrating empathy while maintaining professional boundaries.
- Develop a personal action plan to transition from peer to leader, addressing potential challenges in managing former colleagues and establishing leadership presence.
STEP 4: Generate a course outline
Include your audience description, key points summaries, and learning objectives when prompting your LLM to generate a course outline. Also add details about the course such as format (e-learning, video, text, or instructor-led) and the number and length of individual sessions or modules. You can add these details as an intermediate document or directly in the prompt.
Even though LLMs don’t do math, it’s useful to add a desired course length to a prompt because it will help the LLM focus on content in its dataset that has a similar level of detail. Specifying a two-hour course will likely not get you exactly two hours of content. Nor, if you ask for the model to include the amount of time to spend on each section of the outline, will the total necessarily add up to the duration you requested. But specifying a duration should get you in the ballpark in terms of the number of topics and desired level of detail. Asking for a two-hour course will typically give very different results than asking for a full-day course.
If you want the course to include hands-on exercises or small group breakouts, add a description of the number, desired length, and format for these to the outline prompt. Or, skip these in the initial course outline prompt and then use the generated course outline as an intermediate document in a separate prompt to ask for examples of possible breakouts so you can choose the best.
Your role
Assume the role of an accomplished and experienced instructional designer who works in corporate Learning and Development (L&D). You have a deep understanding of learning research, course development best practices, and how to create training that is
- impactful to learners
- behavior-focused
- experiential
- engaging
You are a subject-matter expert (SME) in HR. Your specialty is leadership development, management skills, and coaching.
Provided information
I have included the following information to help you accomplish the requested task:
- A LEARNER PERSONA that describes the audience for a new instructor-led course
- KEY POINTS that provide an example of the type of content the course should contain.
- Information that describe the SERVANT LEADERSHIP approach to management used by my organization.
- LEARNING OBJECTIVES that show the desired learning outcomes of the course
Task
Use the provided information to generate a course outline based on the LEARNING OBJECTIVES. Make sure the content addresses the specific needs of the LEARNER PERSONA and matches the SERVANT LEADERSHIP philosophy.
Each section of the outline should include three bullets that highlight the main points that the instructor should cover in that section. The course duration is two hours, so make sure the scope of the content is reasonable for that amount of time.
Include three 15-minute small-group breakout sessions in the outline. The breakouts should be suitable for virtual instructor-led delivery using video conferencing technology. Breakouts should provide an opportunity for participants to use feedback from peers to reflect on how to apply principles to their specific situation or the opportunity to use roleplays or other collaborative methods to practice new skills. Choose breakout topics that would most benefit from small group collaboration and practice. Insert a description of each breakout in the outline after the relevant topic section.
Create the outline as a table. Put the section number in the first column. Put the title of the section or breakout in the second column. Put the section content bullets or breakout description in the third column.
| Section | Title | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction and Course Overview | • Welcome and introductions • Review of course objectives and agenda • Brief discussion on the transition from individual contributor to manager |
| 2 | Applying Servant Leadership Principles | • Key principles of servant leadership (e.g., listening, empathy, stewardship) • Practical examples of servant leadership in action • Adapting leadership style to different team members and situations |
| 3 | Time Management and Prioritization | • Strategies for balancing individual work with new leadership responsibilities • Techniques for effective prioritization in a management role • Tools and methods for maintaining work-life balance |
| 4 | Breakout Session 1: Time Management Challenges | In small groups, participants will share their biggest time management challenges as new managers. They will collaborate to brainstorm potential solutions, drawing on the strategies just discussed. Each group will then present their top 3 solutions to the larger class for discussion. |
| 5 | Conducting Effective One-on-One Meetings | • Structure and preparation for productive one-on-one meetings • Active listening techniques and asking powerful questions • Providing constructive feedback and supporting team member growth |
| 6 | The Art of Delegation | • Benefits of delegation for team development and manager effectiveness • Identifying tasks suitable for delegation and matching them to team members' skills and development needs • Overcoming personal barriers to delegation (e.g., perfectionism, difficulty relinquishing control) |
| 7 | Breakout Session 2: Delegation Role-Play | Participants will pair up for a role-playing exercise. One person will play the manager delegating a task, while the other plays the team member. They will practice the delegation techniques learned, then switch roles. The pairs will provide feedback to each other on their approach. |
| 8 | Building Trust and Maintaining Professional Boundaries | • Techniques for building trust with team members • Balancing empathy with performance expectations • Using emotional intelligence to navigate complex workplace dynamics |
| 9 | Transitioning from Peer to Leader | • Establishing leadership presence while maintaining authenticity • Strategies for managing former peers effectively • Techniques for building credibility in your new role |
| 10 | Breakout Session 3: Peer-to-Leader Action Planning | In small groups, participants will discuss their specific challenges in transitioning from peer to leader. They will collaborate to create personal action plans, identifying key steps they will take to establish themselves in their new role. Groups will provide peer feedback on each other's plans. |
| 11 | Conclusion and Next Steps | • Recap of key learnings • Discussion on applying servant leadership principles in daily management • Setting personal goals for continued growth as a leader |
Additional Tips
Here are some useful tips for working with intermediate documents.
Specify your desired output format
By default, most models generate documents in Markdown format, often using bulleted lists. If you want full text rather than bullets, say so in the prompt.
One of my favorite LLM tricks is to ask the model to put complex responses in a table. This reinforces the structure of the content during the generation process and provides output that is easy to visualize and improve. If your word processor doesn’t like Markdown tables, you can ask the model to convert the table into a .CSV file and import the file into a compatible spreadsheet before copying and pasting the table into your word processor.
Format intermediate documents to indicate their structure
LLMs can use a document’s structure to better interpret its contents. In addition to things like heading levels and lists, consider adding a short document name at the top of your intermediate documents. This allows you to refer to individual documents by name in prompts.
LLMs recognize a variety of document structure formatting, including HTML/XML-style code (<h1>Heading</h1>), Markdown, and outlines. You can use pretty much any text that would be understandable by humans to indicate the structure of your documents. Just make sure that you use delimiters or formatting that is both consistent and distinct from other elements in the documents and prompt.
HTML/XML delimiters can be useful for complicated prompts because they make it clear where each element begins and ends. However, you may want to avoid using them for routine prompts because they can cause a model to go into code-processing mode, which generally yields inferior results for language-processing tasks.
Use AI to convert document formats
To create intermediate documents, you first need to get your source documents into a format that your selected LLM can use. AI can transcribe audio files, strip out formatting codes, and convert slides or images to text.
Some models (notably ChatGPT) accept more input formats than others. However, a model that is good for a wide variety of document types may not be the best for generating your content. Don’t be afraid to mix and match models in the same workflow based on what they are good at.
Create a library of prompts and intermediate documents
Intermediate documents take time and effort to create. But they are a reusable resource. The time invested will pay off by significantly reducing time and effort on future prompts and projects that take advantage of these documents.
Maximize the reusability of your intermediate documents by keeping them organized using file names or other methods to manage versioning. When saving a prompt, include notes about which intermediate documents to use with it. If you need to create, test, and manage a lot of prompts, there are tools designed for this purpose.
Wrap up
Learning objectives and course outlines are simple examples of what can be achieved with intermediate documents. There’s no need to stop there. You can use your intermediate documents to turn your course outline into a first draft of an instructor script, a student guide, or other types of learning content. As you explore more complex training use cases, you’ll find intermediate documents even more valuable because the time savings from starting with tailored content increases.
Intermediate documents can even be used as a form of light governance. For instance, you can create intermediate documents that describe your brand writing style, course levels, and distinct audiences, or that contain guidelines for generating content that embraces diversity and avoids stereotypes. Your LLM won’t always get it right. But it will decrease the amount of editing you need to do.
Any document, set of guidelines, or prompt that comes up frequently is a candidate for an intermediate document. You can use as many, or as few, intermediate documents as make sense for your use case. If you’re not ready to go all-in on intermediate documents, start by creating an audience description and see how it improves your AI-assisted course development process. Then expand from there.
