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Case Study #1

The trouble with training

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The Trouble With Training

In small offices or departments within a larger company, staff are often given little or no training on the computer with the programs they use extensively.

When training is available, it is seldom closely related to the specific problems with which your staff are dealing daily. Self-starters will undertake their own training, but today's desktop applications have so many features that users may pick the wrong ones to study, and waste what little spare time they can squeeze from an already hectic schedule.

For the company, the training often fails to deliver on its promises.

First, training costs are high: a one-day training seminar can run $200-$300, about $25-$35 an hour. Costs for training in computer-equipped classrooms can range from $400-$650 a day ($50 - $75 per hour).

Second, the training curriculum is generic, covering a set of features. But students are not given the ability to distinguish "best practices" from "cool" tricks. And in very few cases does the training closely align with the challenges faced by your staff.

Third, the training requires that staff be away fro the office for a day or mnore. This is less than optimal for several reasons:

- it puts more pressure on everyone to cover the work left undone while a staff member is off-site;
- few of us can maintain a productive "training mode" for eight hours;
- without the ability to apply techniques we have just learned within a very short time, we lose many of the sublte nuances of the training; by the next day, back at our desks, we may have already forgotten the order of steps or even miss out on steps we thought we knew .

A Better Solution?

Our solution is simple:

- on-site training;
- training sessions last between one and two hours;
- specifically directed at existing challenges;
- reasonably priced.

We ask for a few commitments on the part of our customers, to ensure that our training is efficient and effective.

1. We like to meet with the manager and the staff to be trained. This discussion ensures that the training will solve a real problem for both the manager and the staff.

2. We may sometimes require a short time to develop the optimal solution prior to actual training. This will happen especially when the solution involves using two or more programs in concert.

3. We will ask that-for the duration of the training session-the trainer and trainee not be disturbed. This means no telephone calls, and no requests by other staff or management. Although this sounds like a "no-brainer," we have found this requirement to be the hardest to fulfill during on-site training.

If you haven't already done so, please take a look at the case study for an example of the benefits previous customers are enjoying today.