Technical Writing or Instructional Design (difference)?

Technical Writing or Instructional Design? This question always comes up. What is the difference? We typically explain to clients that if you are looking to develop a reference guide or something where your employees already know between 50 – 75% of how a process or application works, use the technical writing vehicle where a manual can be written about your application and employees can reference the material when they get “stuck”.

However, if you are interested in training your employees from a proactive approach, go with instructional design. Instructional designers provide “training” materials such as instructor-led materials for classroom training and e-learning for self-paced learning.

Hope this clears things up a bit.