The changing face of end user training

I've made a career out of face-to-face training: primarily teaching end users how to use and get more out of Microsoft Office. But times have changed since I was making a living doing Word and Excel one-day intro courses nearly 20 years ago.

Sure, I still run half or one-day tailored product training courses, but what I've noticed is that these days users have (of course) often been using the products for many years - and they don't know exactly where their gaps are.

We don't know what we don't know!

Sometimes they merrily get booked onto a generic advanced course because, say, they've been using Excel for 10 years, but if the course hasn't been tailored they find themselves learning about obscure features which they can't see how to apply to their day to day work. Or sometimes it never occurs to them to book onto a course at all because they can do what they need to do, and that's that. Or maybe the organisation would rather users self-learned using online material - because they didn't see any improvement in productivity the last time they sent users on a face-to-face training course. Or perhaps the business can see that users aren't being as productive as they could be, but can't afford to let people out of the office for a whole day.

It's a tricky challenge to improve productivity across different products and different user types, but to address this I'm finding that short, fast-paced tips and tricks sessions really fit the bill. For a start, it means that the users might be only away from their desk for a hour, and if each user finds just one tip that will save them a minute a day then it was worth doing. In reality, people have several eureka moments, not just one! And my most creative customers might concoct a very interesting agenda for a training day - perhaps 2 repeats of a general 45 minute tips session in the morning, followed by an Excel-only hour for the finance team, and then Outlook-specific sessions in the afternoon for PAs. Or whatever. You get the picture.

Of course, this all makes my job as a trainer much more challenging (the preparation! eeek!) rather than just turning up and churning out the same old PowerPoint course, but, do you know what, it's much more fun, and far more rewarding.

I'm rather liking this new face of end user training!

Contact me directly to talk about training your users on Microsoft Office and other in-house systems: Simona.Millham@millhamconsulting.co.uk