5 Free Templates for Popular External Training Topics

If you’re like many learning and development professionals, your main focus is building training for internal employees. But more and more, companies are starting to create educational resources for external learners—such as contractors, franchisees, seasonal workers, and even customers. If you’re noticing this trend and looking for examples of external training courses, you’re in the right spot.

In this article, you’ll find five examples, organized by industry. At the end, you’ll also find instructions for customizing templates with your own content and branding.

1. Healthcare: Patient Medical Procedure Education

Do you work in the healthcare industry and need to educate patients about an upcoming medical procedure? We’ve got two templates that are perfect for you: one with a Pre-Surgery Checklist and another for Post-Operative Care Instructions. Combined, these resources walk patients and caregivers through everything they should expect—including detailed do’s and don’ts to promote recovery and prevent avoidable complications.

2. Marketing or Public Relations: Media Kit

Need to make it easy for journalists, marketers, or other collaborators to promote your company? Develop a press or media kit with inspiration from this interactive template. Based on the fictional brand “Hotel Bio,” this template features placeholders to add your company history, news, impact, brand guidelines, and downloadable assets.

3. Nonprofit: Fundraising Toolkit

If you work for a nonprofit, you probably know that peer-to-peer fundraising toolkits are a good way to extend your fundraising reach. And with this handy template, you can empower volunteers to start their own fundraising campaign in four easy steps. It also includes a place to add your nonprofit’s media assets and customized messaging scripts.

4. Finance: Customer Financial Literacy Education

Those working in the financial sector might be looking to help customers better understand how credit scores work. If that’s the case, you’re in luck: We have a template that will help them do just that. Providing your customers with this training will not only give them confidence in improving their financial situation, but it will answer basic, repeat questions—freeing up staff’s time to address more complicated questions clients might have.

5. Technology and Sales: Product Training

Do you need to help resellers get up to speed on your products? Then this template is a great place to start. You can easily customize it to include your product’s features and benefits, target audience, and competitive positioning.

How To Use and Customize These Examples

If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber or trialer, you can access and edit all the examples linked throughout this post directly from your Rise 360 dashboard. Simply click Create New, choose Course or Microlearning, and search for and select the template you want to use, as shown in the video below:

How To Share With Learners

If you’re used to creating internal training, you’re likely thinking you’ll use your Learning Management System (LMS) to share your external training as well. And in some cases, that works fine! But in other cases, it may be hard to get learners access to your LMS because they don’t always have corporate email addresses—or the cost to add external learners is too high.

Whatever the reason, if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to distribute your courses and track learner activity outside of your LMS, then you might want to check out our new premium add-on, Reach 360, which you can learn more about below:

Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial. And subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest product updates, e-learning examples, and expert advice sent directly to your inbox. If you have questions, please share them in the comments.