Training: Just for You

So, you’re not sending the troops to Cleveland for some generic class. Great. However, it’s not enough to simply bring a trainer to your site. That will save you money and you won’t have to listen to other people’s irrelevant questions—just some from your co-workers. Still, that’s not enough. You want custom training. You want your data. You want it focused on your needs. Here’s an example of how that can work, a case where we cut the budget from about $35,000 to $10,000 for training and the time commitment from three weeks to three days.

A mid-sized food distributor had purchased new software. While not a small company, they were pretty “virtual” in that they didn’t control the warehouse or the manufacture of product. They had a simple process of ordering goods from their supplier and shipping them to customers.

The software company wanted the team of five to attend three weeks of training. They would learn the order entry, inventory and purchase order modules from soup to nuts. That would be both expensive and time consuming. There weren’t a lot of extra people around to keep the company running while everyone went to training. A few days of analysis determined that really, we could do it all in three days because they only needed part of the software. There are the cost savings I spoke about. The training focused on their company and their example so people left with a very good idea of how the system was going to work. As a result, we had the software up and running in three months. And remember, this was a $200,000 package, not QuickBooks.

Not everyone is going to have similar results. Some people do need to use more parts of the software. But by giving real examples and focusing on what people needed, we both saved a lot of money and got everyone up to speed rapidly. If you let your trainer come in armed with a general approach and generic manuals, you might as well send everyone for a week’s vacation. They’ll at least be relaxed when they come back. They probably won’t have learned much less.

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