A Better Way to Design Employee Training with AI

Four prompts that produce training content worth using

Hey Adopter,

Someone asks you to design a training program. You’ve got two weeks, limited budget, and no instructional design background.

You turn to AI. You find an elaborate “mega-prompt” with emoji headers, nested sections, eight detailed steps. You fill in the blanks, hit enter, and get generic filler. Needs assessment templates that could apply to any company. Module outlines indistinguishable from the first page of Google results.

The structure looked impressive. The output isn’t usable.

This article gives you something better. Four focused prompts with learning science principles built in, producing training content specific enough to actually deliver. Works for any skill: data analysis, client communication, software onboarding, leadership development.

The problem with doing everything at once

When one prompt handles needs assessment, curriculum design, timeline, assessments, and reinforcement planning simultaneously, everything gets shallow treatment. The model also makes assumptions early that compound into errors later. By the time you read the output, it’s easier to start over than to fix.

The fix: staged prompts. Each one does a single job, produces output you review, then feeds the next stage with your corrections included.

Stage 1: Skill decomposition