We’ve officially made it to the content creation and management section of our How To column, welcome! Today, we’re specifically going to talk about content singularity. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, singularity? Like Einstein’s kind of singularity? Not quite. Instead, it refers to concepts that are shared between different products or instances.
So why should I care, you ask? If your organization creates educational material to help prepare professionals for the next step in their careers, for general skills development, or for certifications, you’ve undoubtedly come across these shared concepts. This is especially true if the products focus on interrelated subjects and processes, but even relatively disparate materials likely feature overlapping concepts.
For example, at Holmes Corporation, we work with associations spanning from the medical field to human resources to supply chain and beyond, and the products we develop for them have many shared concepts between them that are foundational to performance excellence in that industry. These concepts may have a slightly different application depending on the characteristics of the intended audience but are still based on concepts generally applicable to any field. For organizations that offer multiple certifications in the same industry, the overlap is more extensive and widespread between those certifications.
Writing unique content about these general concepts over the years has given us in-depth knowledge and expertise with them, but it has also created a desire to optimize the development and maintenance of such content. Doing so enables us to successfully meet our expectations regarding quality and product excellence. It also helps us create more consistent material presentations for the end users while also making it easier to keep products up to date.
For instance, imagine that you have multiple certifications in a specific industry or products that have similar subject focuses but span varied performance levels from foundational to mastery. New technological developments (hello, ChatGPT) have shaken up the industry and changed the way business is done. As such, the various expectations and requirements for your certifications or products have changed, and your content must be updated to satisfy those requirements. Currently, this means writing multiple, similar introductions to the world of AI and inserting them across products. As the field continues to change, you now must track and execute updates across these products, along with all the other unique changes that may happen from year to year or version to version.
It can become a liability to track, and a reputational danger, if your customers encounter outdated content that has slipped through the cracks and impacts their professional knowledge. So, how do you address this issue?
By combining the benefits of structured authoring and taxonomies (both concepts that we will save for later articles), we’ve found a way. We refer to the idea as “content singularity.” Built upon our model of structured authoring that promotes flexibility through the use of content blocks that can be referenced in larger content creations, we start developing small, referenceable pieces of content that are foundational to various subjects. By tagging the content and leveraging our taxonomies, we can find and pull this content into various products programmatically and then add tailored content linking the common content to the specifics of the discussion around it.
This saves time and effort by eliminating the need to find and copy or write similar content on the same subjects over and over. Doing so enables us to make changes in one source location and push those changes into multiple products. The content is available to be used in multiple places, from web-based e-learnings to printed materials, to test item rationales, and we know that no matter where we reference the content, it is up to date.
Introducing content singularity to your organization could help you better scale your critical resources, like it has helped HC. Leverage your content development resources where they are the most impactful while remaining confident that your content is consistent and current, across all your training and preparation materials.
