Your Personal Software Trainer

Customized training material can also be delivered in downloadable form, say on CD-ROM or DVD, or loaded on a company intranet or a dedicated server. AppDev, for example, offers a training solution called KSource, a server that its customers can plug into their existing networks. KSource is essentially a virtual library of training materials that a company hand-picks for its employees, who can access the content right from their desktops. “A customer of ours just installed our KSource server to help their employees customize their training—at the level they needed, for the topics they needed, and when they needed it,” Jensen says.

Roland agrees that e-learning can be a convenient customized training option for companies. Even so, she adds, “there is nothing better than customized classroom training with an instructor who’s worked in your industry and has years and years of experience, giving you real-world examples of how you can use a specific tool, and who is right there to answer your questions when you have them.”

Jensen says businesses must set up training programs around their specific needs or problems, not around the desired delivery method. “[Companies] tend to look more at the delivery vehicle than at what their problem is and how they’re going to solve that problem,” he says.

A credible training provider can help you with the essential discovery phase, in which you identify who in your organization needs what kind of training. It could be that you have a new group of employees who need to learn specific parts of the Microsoft Office suite. Perhaps you’ve purchased the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and you need to get your staff of seasoned designers up to speed on the upgrades. Or maybe you have two administrative people who need to learn the most advanced levels of Excel.

Once you’ve identified potential trainees, you must determine what their skill level is with the applications in question, and where you want them to be once they’ve completed the training. “It’s a gap analysis,” Nordquist says. “What do you know today, and what do you need to know tomorrow to do your job more effectively?”

With your instructional goals in hand, you can build the course content and decide how it will be delivered. “Smart companies will say, ‘Here are the projects we have, here are the needs we have, here are the employees we have in the various stages of learning, and here’s where they need to be as effective and efficient as possible,’” Jensen says. “Then we’ll help them develop a training program that will cost them less because it’s customized.”

That’s a key point Roland encourages all businesses to recognize. “A big misconception is that customized training is more expensive,” she says. Though the upfront cost of a tailored training program might seem high, she adds, it’s important to remember that customization helps you streamline training so employees spend less time away from work learning only what they need. And, by making your employees proficient in the applications they use, you can reduce operational inefficiencies that slowly erode your bottom line.

“The ultimate goal,” she says, “is increasing productivity.”