When your boss says, “We’ve got to scale this,” does your lizard brain thinks something terrible and slightly medieval is about to happen to it?

Scaling learning can be daunting without a sensible approach. Possible motivators for scaling learning include the desire to deliver more courses, an increase in learners, or an increase in employees on the learning and development team.

Using scale to mean “we need to deliver more courses” isn’t helpful. The first question to ask is, “What scale are we measuring against?” If you simply need more courses, determine what that number should be. If you’re hoping to work smarter, your scale is totally different, and you might want to consider making your scale time spent or design quality. It may be that your L&D team is bigger; here, your scale is more closely tied to training overhead, information-sharing and so on, not how many courses your bigger team can pump out.

In many ways, the conversation isn’t even about output. It has more to do with approach than with final result. Let’s say your team is tasked with developing more courses than you have previously, to a tighter deadline. The scale is the total number of courses built. The next question is, “Where can we make efficiencies?” You can’t afford a drop in quality; your subject matter experts would go wild. It’d hurt the company to reduce your careful attendance to brand guidelines. The opportunity here is to look at your process and find those efficiencies without losing hair in the process.

Are you delivering more? Do you want to do less? If you accept the premise that scaling here is more about method and approach than just making more materials, then you may also accept that you need a tool that supports multiple approaches.

Here are the five things you must be able to do to scale well:

1. Templating

Many tools provide you with pre-built layouts, but this a restrictive approach to templating. Your software should enable you to define a template and then use it over and over. It might be about font, color, logo, padding or margins. For others, templating means, “I use the following interactions, in this order, with these gamification elements.” Whatever your definition is, your authoring tool should support that model, not impose its own.

2. Sharing

You may need to show clients work or, if you’re scaling by opening new offices, send material to those offices. You should be able to move work rapidly. Does your tool allow you to export both the course and its theme (brand, appearance)? Will it allow you to share each separately?

3. Reviewing/Annotating

Let’s say your sharing is great, your iterating wonderful and your templates a total blast. Then, your boss sees it and doesn’t like it. Could you have avoided this problem? Absolutely.

One way of avoiding this clash is having the ability for reviewers to approve courses and add annotations. This process should be a simple “yes” or “no” (along with comments). What else do you need? A built-in calendar for when those changes should be made by? No. Several layers of reviewers? No. You want a simple review/comment structure that gets to the heart of what needs changing – nothing more and nothing less.

4. Versioning

Part of a toolset that is agile and works in concert with templating is versioning. Your tools should allow versions of courses without having to create course duplicates. Managing your iterations is simpler this way and reduces friction as you prepare templates and iterate layout ideas.

5. Pasting

Pasting is a simple feature but can be powerful when used correctly. Why not build units of learning and then copy and paste them as you need, changing only the content that needs to be changed? Do you have an interaction that you want to re-use? Don’t waste time setting it up again; paste it.

If your content creation tool is serious, you’ll be able to paste content from anywhere to anywhere. Pasting should be universal, from one course to another, one page to another or even at the micro level, from one interaction to another.

One of the defining features of teams that are great at what they do is that they choose the tools for the job. Follow these tips and choose these tools, and you’ll be able to scale your training content effectively.