A resource written for an auditor will be read by neither trainer nor learner
Materials in this sector are drafted to demonstrate coverage. Coverage is necessary and it is not the same as something a person can teach from or learn from, and the two pull in opposite directions.
Open almost any commercially produced training and assessment resource and the structure announces its purpose. Content is organised by unit, then by element, then by performance criterion. Each section addresses a criterion in turn, in the language of the criterion, and a mapping document at the back demonstrates that every requirement has been covered. It is a complete and defensible document, and it is organised for somebody checking rather than for somebody teaching.
That is not a criticism of the people who write them. The commercial requirement is that a resource survives audit, the buyer's first question is whether it maps, and the fastest route to a defensible document is to follow the structure of the thing being mapped to. Everything about how these materials are bought rewards that shape.
The cost is paid twice. A trainer opening it finds a document with no narrative, in which the interesting parts of the work are scattered across criteria and the ordering is determined by the sequence of a standard rather than by how anybody would learn the job. Most experienced trainers respond by using it as a checklist and teaching from their own material, which is a reasonable response and means the resource is doing nothing.
The learner pays more. Text written in the language of a performance criterion is not readable prose. It contains nominalisations, passive constructions and a vocabulary chosen for precision against the standard rather than for comprehension, and it lands in front of somebody who may be reading in a second language, may have left school early, and is reading after a full working day.
The alternative is not to abandon mapping, which is a genuine requirement and protects everybody. It is to separate the two artefacts. Write material organised the way somebody would actually learn the work, in language a learner can read, and maintain the mapping as a separate document that demonstrates coverage. The mapping is then evidence rather than structure, which is what it was meant to be.
The second thing that separates a usable resource from a compliant one is that somebody has taught from it. Materials written by a writer who has never delivered them contain the characteristic faults: activities that take four times the estimated duration, an assumed sequence that collapses when a learner asks the obvious question, and assessment tasks whose instructions are ambiguous in exactly the place that matters.
The practical test is short and worth applying to anything before it is bought or released. Read three consecutive pages as a learner would, out of context, and ask whether they teach anything. Then hand the assessment task to somebody who has not seen the course and ask what they would submit. Most resources fail one of those, and the failure is visible in minutes.
A final observation about why this persists despite everybody knowing it. The person who buys a resource is rarely the person who teaches from it, and the buying decision is made against a mapping document and a price. Trainers discover the quality after delivery has started, by which point the money is spent and the alternative is to write their own in unpaid time, which is what a great many of them do. Until the trial delivery happens before the purchase rather than after it, the market will keep rewarding the document that maps well and teaches badly.