by Bill Cushard

A Customer Request for More Training

On Tuesday, October 15, I attended the Yammer Working Social Tour in San Francisco. I have used Yammer in previous jobs as part of learning programs I have designed, and I was interested to learn how far Yammer has come since then. And since my in progress dissertation is on social learning, I like to keep up on enterprise social networking.

One of the sessions I attended was a customer panel focused on ways to adopt Yammer and a social way of working in organizations. One of the lessons from this session was about training and how much training is needed. One of the customers, Jonathan Anthony, Director of Corporate Communication at Teekay, stated that he wished they did much more training upfront to increase and speed up adoption.

Music to a trainer’s ear, but you can imagine the insult user experience (UX) designers felt. UX designers and product managers believe that they design software so easy to use that no training is necessary.

Anthony’s message was not that more technical training on how to use Yammer was needed. After all, Yammer is a fairly easy product to use. His message was that much more training was needed on the new way of working using Yammer. The training he wished to see more of was not about how to use the tool, but about how to work differently.

I Know, ‘Your’ Software Doesn’t Need Training

There is a lesson here for software companies in the early stages of gaining traction. Depending on the software, adoption depends not as much on how to make use of the product functionality, but about how to work differently using this new technology or product. Enterprise social networking is just one example.

Other examples include:

OpenStack:

Training on how to use a particular OpenStack commercial product might be less valuable than helping people learn how OpenStack is different and/or better. For example, it is valuable to help people understand something as seemingly simple as the need to work with an entirely different hardware stack than people are used to.

Big Data:

Training on how to integrate various and diverse systems to pull data and configuring dashboards might be less valuable than helping people understand how to think about data and how they can make better decisions based on data they already have.

Distributed Version Control Systems:

It is likely less valuable to conduct training on how to use Git and Git commands than it is to learn how a distributed version control system will change your workflow, speed up development, and improve quality and why that is important.

I could go on. The point is that no matter how easy you think your software is, and no matter how strongly you feel that training is not necessary, if your software changes the way people work, you might want to help people learn how to work in that new way. This goes beyond the scope of your software functionality.

When you on-board new customers, what kind of training do you offer? Training on your product or on the new way to work using your product?

About Bill Cushard

Bill became a training guy early in his career when a group of 20 new hires showed up and there was no trainer. When HR came looking to find someone to do the training, Bill yelled, "I'll do it!" He has been a trainer ever since.

Bill has built and led training organizations and eLearning projects at service organizations like E*TRADE, Accenture, and TimeWarner Cable.

He is the author of a blog, The LX Designer, where he shares knowledge on enterprise learning and is active on Twitter in the learning and training space.