As long as I have worked in technology organizations (which, at the last count is 32 long years!), Training has been a struggle. It is an extremely difficult subject for a whole range of reasons. Primarily, training is a partnership that requires commitment from the technology organization and our constituents who need training. When the two sides don’t share the same goals, it fails rapidly.

This has gotten far worse in recent years. With the rapid changes in technology and the ubiquity of it through the use of Smartphones and Alexa like devices, we have come to assume that our users are pretty self sufficient about technologies and therefore they may not need a lot of training in the use of technologies. But this is far from true. To be fair, many of us still offer “training” for classroom technologies, instructional technologies and enterprise systems, but the challenges here are huge.

The primary challenge with the systems we implement and want to train the users is that they are constantly changing. And training is resource heavy and many of us don’t have the luxury of such resources. You need good trainers in the first place. Secondly, you need to produce good documentation and thirdly you need to deliver customized training to your audience. With the rate at which some of these technologies change, the trainers need time to learn the new technologies while they are also doing the training; the documentation that they produced six months ago is already obsolete and customized training, well, it requires an army!

Many spend valuable money in sending their users to training offered by the software vendor, but the result is a hit or miss. In many cases, the training needs to be contextual, and the vendor training, by design, is more general and cannot accommodate that. For example, learning to write a report is great, but exactly how your institution has configured the system has a lot to do with how you write your report. For this reason, we try to offer training by asking some of our best staff members to do this. Whereas they are excellent in connecting the context to the technology, they are not professional trainers and they also do not have a lot of time to develop documentation. Either way, it is a struggle.

And then there are some mandatory training, such as the information security one. Well, what more can I say about them?

At a previous institution I worked, we established a training program, allocated a nice space and hired someone to both do the training and coordinate it,  in response to complaints. Well, it worked for a short while and then the attendance petered out. We even penalized those who didn’t show up after registering, but many didn’t care because it was their departments that were paying the penalty! The space was reallocated to staff offices after a couple of years.

As I said earlier, training is a “commitment”. Those receiving training must commit to devoting time for training. Many complain that they don’t have enough time in the day to do their work, so how are they going to find time for training? I think this is an organizational conversation where the managers have to accommodate enough time for training and there has to be some incentives such as certifications, which in turn should be meaningful. That these certifications play a role performance evaluation or promotion etc. And the training itself should feel worthwhile. In short, those who are getting trained need to see pretty high return on investment.

A better strategy may be to develop a culture of self-learning and help our users on strategies for learning how to work with new technologies. Promote more peer to peer interactions on relevant topics. Frankly, one budget manager explaining how he/she does a particular task in a tool is far more powerful than a trainer telling them how to do it! Let us not spend a lot of time on the mechanics of using a tool, but teach them how to easily find the resources that helps them learn the effective and efficient uses of tools.

Wait a minute! Isn’t this what we do in our libraries??? Ha, now I know who I can talk to. They are right here, in my own organization 🙂