Your Personal Software Trainer

Options Aplenty

These days, Jensen says, many clients opt for “a blended solution”—a training strategy that might, for example, start by distributing self-study materials to students who do their homework and then apply their newly acquired knowledge in a customized classroom course. Once students complete the class, they are armed with reference material they need to employ what they learned. “Companies simply have a lot more options than they did in the past,” Jensen says.

One increasingly popular option for training clients is to fortify customized classes with a series of follow-up coaching or mentoring sessions. FirstTech Computer, for example, offers a roaming trainer service. “We can do it a week or two after a customized class,” explains Nikki Roland, professional services representative for Minneapolis-based FirstTech, a computer sales and service company. “The instructor who taught the class will actually go and roam the customer site for four hours, or however long the customer wants them there. The employees who got the training will be working on the new application or the new version of the application they got trained on, and the instructor is right there, in their environment, as they work on real projects that actually have deadlines.”

Easel Training has developed a similar concept that it calls coaching. Once Easel provides classroom instruction for a client’s employees, the client then can purchase coaching sessions with an applications specialist. “It’s a stepped approach for companies to achieve the full customized training,” Schomaker says. “You get two hours a month with an expert in whatever product you’re working with, and that instructor will help your people with the specific issues they’re dealing with so they can continue to grow and get better at what they do.”

Schomaker says that Easel’s coaching sessions can be delivered in person, or using Breeze, a Web conferencing system that’s deployed by using Macromedia Flash. Breeze is designed to enable businesses to conduct meetings, training courses, or presentations on line.

“The demand right now is for e-learning,” Zissler says. “Companies are looking for, ‘What are the ways we can quickly and less expensively deliver information, knowledge, and skills transfer to our work force?’”

E-learning, Zissler explains, “means different things to different people.” Web-based tools and services, like Breeze or WebEx—a technology that facilitates meetings over the Internet—can be helpful for companies whose work force is scattered throughout the country or the globe.