I have been tasked with overhauling our current IT Systems Induction offering.
Our organisation is heavily committed to training and development, and feedback after recent inductions suggests our current offering is too intensive.
Currently our IT systems training (CRM database, mostly) is over 2 consecutive days and is fairly intensive, admittedly, but is logically set out and gives delegates the bare bones of what they need to go back to their desks and start doing their job.
I have an idea to split the 2 days apart, and do one day in the delegate's first week and then a follow up day 2 weeks later, to include more content.
However, the issue we have is that our offices are spread around the UK and Europe, and we need to keep travel / accommodation costs to a minimum where possible.
I understand the obvious answer may well be e-learning, but we had tried e-learning with soft skills training a few years back which was met with some resistance, and basically left a bad taste in the mouth: we had a very poor LMS, which our IT infrastruture at the time coudl not fully accommodate. It will be an enormous uphill struggle to get the buy-in from management to go with an e-learning option, given our previous negative experience.
Does anyone have any suggestions they could offer as alternatives, or has anyone else been through the process recently?
Beth Evans
One Response
Past experience
Beth,
I’m not an expert in IT systems, but I do know a thing or two about inductions more generally. I see induction as a more lengthy process than most people do, and believe that it ends when people are competent in the core elements of their job.
I’m not sure how useful it would be, but I am happy to send you an overview of a couple of inductions I have written in the past that seemed to work well. One of them did incorporate a reasonable amount of IT systems training, but people were all based at the same location.
Could you train ‘champions’ at each of your locations to provided technical help, and then just get people togather at the start and the end of the programme to set the scene and ‘sign them off’?
This approach combined with some other techniques may work.
Please drop me an email, and I will be happy to send the overviews.