7 Responses

1. IT Training
   Martyn
   Organise some small -perhaps unit based – discussion groups.Focus on merits and demerits of introduucing IT to their part of the organisation and from there the corporate whole.Yourcredit sheet should outweigh disadvantages and create a thirst for tailored but holistic training
   Good luck

2. Promote Training
   Martyn,

   I would have to agree with William’s comments.

   Also, It is essential that everything that they will be learning will assist them in easing their workload in the short term and the long term

   After you have decided how you will best approach the training sessions bombard them with all communication avenues available to you, to promote the training.

   Promote the training sessions with ideas about: career development, personal development, after training support, non-confrontational assistance, job transferable skills, multi skilling etc.

   I suggest that you set up a small group of interested people to run through a pilot session and ask for their feedback after the session. Make the changes and be prepared to learn a lot on the way.

   If your planning and promoting is comprehensive then when your test group returns to the work place, they will boast about their great experience and all of the wonderful things that they have learnt in your training sessions. This will advertise your training course better than you possibly can!

   Good Luck

3. Demonstrate it!
   Working on the assumption that the new IT equipment is user friendly: DEMONSTRATE IT.
   Set up a demonstration area (somewhere people usually wander by) and let people view / play with the equipment. Have someone who knows EXACTLY how things work (and can problem solve when things go wrong) and let them sell the ‘product’ by way of showing what it can do. Advertise the demonstrations at briefings and through e-mail.
   The suggestions about briefing’s and working groups / pilots are very valid if not essential!, however if you have already brought in the product and it is good I suggest selling it through demonstration!
   Feel free to contact me for further information on how this can work.

4. Get Buy in from the top!
   You may want to ensure that IT Training froms part of your company’s business objectives which may well feed into personal objectives for the staff. Raising IT training as a company objective will highlight it to the managers/directors and hopefully gain their support. You may also want to suggest that each department idenitifies a manager to act as a stakeholder. Keeping your stakeholders informed of any training sessions would be good to maintain their support and they can start to let their team members know to attend training or identify who should attend training.

5. Local Authority
   Why not introduce your employers and employees to ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) – learn the modules they need and gain a qualification. All good for personal and professional development

6. Business needs
   Having recently rolled out IT training to our company over the past 14 months I think I can safely share some of the ups and downs that I encountered.

   The key area that we as a technical training team fell down on was in gaining ‘Buy In’ and promoting the courses to the business. We wrote courses for the full MS Office suite, each lasting as day and targetted at managers and specialists. Unfortunately the business always had ‘Other priorities’ so the training courses never really took off.

   In hindsight, if we had have presented the DNA and TNA findings to the Senior Management Team with a clear report on how the courses would benefit the business as a whole then they would have been pushed through from the very top of the business.

   In short, present a case that proves the training to be business critical and have the training approved and promoted from within the business hierarchy, it will make your job much easier.

   Stephen Picton
   Technical Trainer
   IAS
   [email protected]

7. Discover what makes them tick
   Having consulted on training roll-outs with a variety of Public and Private sector organisations I’ve found that there are no quick fixes to your problem. Unless you can encourage your trainees to create personal value from IT training – eg common-interest websites, printing church circulars, sports clubliterature,political discussion groups ie anything that really interests them – you can expect no more than average take-up and high drop-out levels. By managing the motivation process as well as providing the right levels of feedback I have achieved over 90% take-up with minimal attrition.