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Asked to Document Your Job or Train Someone? What to Do First

Write down how you do it. Train the new hire. Show the team in the other office. Help set up the AI tool on your tasks. Every other page here answers something somebody said about you. This is the only one where nothing has been said — the request is ordinary on its face, and the meaning is the one you’ve supplied. So this won’t tell you you’re training your replacement, and it won’t tell you it’s nothing to worry about either, because a reader told the first holds something back and a reader told the second writes the thin version. The cheapest question is what it’s for— who will use it, in what form, by when — which any competent person asks before writing documentation for anybody, and which settles more of the fear than anything else. It won’t help you ask whether your job is safe: the person you’d ask can’t answer it honestly. And the document is a description of your job: the steps get written down, the judgement— the exceptions, what you catch, who you call when it breaks — doesn’t, and a document of the steps describes a smaller job than the one you do. You get what the request is and isn’t, the brief to get first, the message at no more than 108 words, what goes in including the part that goes missing, what not to do, the three replies that come back, and four questions this page won’t answer — each with the person, function or document that holds it.

Sample documentation brief

Generated for: Accounts payable lead, asked in a team meeting to “write up how you do the supplier reconciliations by the 30th”, a new analyst started last week, nobody said what it’s for, and there’s talk of a new finance system next year

What this is, and what it isn’t — Nothing has been said about you. You’ve been asked for a document, by a date. What it’s for hasn’t been said, and that is the first thing to get.

The real one is built on what you were actually asked, what the work involves, and what you want this to achieve. The opening of yours is free — no card, no account. One credit finishes it. See what a credit costs.

First one is free — no card needed.

Credits

— credits available

Your Job Title *

What You Were Actually Asked (optional)

Note the question: it asks what you were asked, in the words used — not what you think it means. Almost everybody on this page has already translated “can you write up how you do this” into something frightening, and the note this builds can only answer the request. If nobody said what it’s for, leave that out — it comes back as a bracketed placeholder telling you what to ask, never as a purpose this page supplied.

The Employer, In Your Words (optional)

Who owns a request like this — one manager, a transformation team, a vendor project — is completely different at a 40-person firm and somewhere with a programme office, and that decides who you ask for the brief. A sentence about the place comes back as context for the routing, never as a description of what that employer is planning. No real name is needed and none goes into the draft.

Field or Industry (optional)

Where You Are With It *

These aren’t the same request, and which one you’re in decides what this week is for. Another site or supplier is the one where the instinct to hold something back is strongest, and anything held back is visible to the people being trained and reported to whoever asked. An AI toolis the one where people answer the headline instead of the request: what a tool can do with a job isn’t knowable from inside a pilot, by you or by this page. Heard something separatelyis the one where two things get fused — what you were asked, and what nobody has said to you. Nothing here tells you what the request means, in either direction.

What This Has to Achieve *

This decides which section gets written. Find out what it’s foris the real work and the part nearly everybody skips, because it feels like asking the frightening question — it isn’t: documentation for a new starter, an auditor, a supplier and a tool are four different documents. Describe the whole job is the one that decides how your work is described for years: the steps are written in an afternoon, and the judgement is what goes missing. Agree the scopeis planning, not pushback — a document done in the gaps between the work is the thin version. Recognised as work I didis a version line and a note that it’s done, never leverage.

What the Work Involves, and What’s Been Said (optional)

What is useful here is what the work is— where the decisions sit, what goes wrong, who you go to — because that is where the part that goes missing from a document is found. Say what was asked and when, and if you’ve heard something elsewhere, say so: it’s kept apart from the message, never folded into it. Nothing here rules on what happens next— not whether you can decline, not who owns what you write, not whether a recording is permitted, not what any tool can do with the work, and not what is planned for your role. Those go to whoever owns that process, to a representative where one exists, and to somebody qualified where you live. And nothing here helps you leave something out, slow it down or make yourself indispensable: anything held back is visible to whoever uses the document.

Also explore:

Told Your Role Is at Risk →Saying No to Extra Work →The Job Isn’t What You Were Hired For →How Do You Use AI in Your Work? →