5 Ways to Engage Employees During IT Training

Sparrow Rubin

Like many other kinds of training, IT training can feel boring to many employees. Some may feel like they’re a wiz at figuring out the ins and outs of everything from on site printers to SharePoint, while others may feel completely lost in the dust. Often both types of users can convince themselves that training is not worth their time. Figuring out ways to maintain engagement with your user base can help to ensure that this information, that is one key to better IT management and security, is passed onto your employees in a way that assists them in remembering it long term. Here are just a few of the ways you can ensure your user training is a success.

1. Understand your employee’s skill level.

It’s easy to give training that is too basic or too complicated. Look at your user base and see where the average user resides in terms of skill level before seriously considering your training agenda. Things that might assist you in making this assessment include evaluating the most common support questions you receive or sending out a survey to see what users do and don’t know. This vital step in the training creation process can make sure that your sessions are as efficient and direct as possible. If you can, dividing your training between departments or skill level may also help you to organize effective groups.

2. Use practical and relevant examples employees can perform on their own device.

While training templates can be found abundantly online, training without a specific intention can be a waste of time. Most companies who implement training have a specific goal in mind, which is either to eliminate a problem or to address a new security or legal requirement. Either way, you’ll want to make sure your training is specific to the need it’s trying to meet and address topics directly with relevant examples your users encounter on an everyday basis. Make sure to let users play out these examples on their own devices so you can see and address where issues might occur. If you’re not able to have an example for users to experience on their own, try using videos or screenshots to provide key visual examples.

3.?Keep your overview as concise as possible.

Part of the advantage of understanding your user base is that you can make sure you narrow down your teachings to the things that matter. For example, if most of your users already use OneDrive, but you would like them to start storing on SharePoint, you probably will want to focus more on the features of SharePoint that expand from OneDrive instead of starting at the beginning of how to use Microsoft Online storage. This prevents alienating users who have used this product before and puts them in a place to expand their current skills.

4. Provide reinforcement to your users by relating to them and providing outline documentation.

Humanizing yourself in front of users can help them reach out to you if they don’t understand something or if they need additional help during your training session. Be sure to let users know that you understand the material can be complex or even provide examples of things that helped you understand important concepts while you are presenting new information. When users feel like you are sharing information rather than forcing or laying it upon them, they are more likely to remember the material. You can then continue to reinforce those examples by providing outlines for users to make notes on or refer to after training.

5. Check in on users who appear lost.

Build breaks or Q&A’s into your sessions and allow your users to come to you to ask questions at both a group and individual level. This should allow users with different comfort levels to approach you to make sure they understand the material. If you notice someone who looks like they might be confused or disengaged during the training session, try to follow up with them to make sure they don’t need one on one attention.

These tips can help you to ensure that your users have an interesting and engaging training session that sticks with them beyond the conference room. If you’re looking to further educate your user base or identify patterns of behavior that can prevent a security risk within your company, reach out to Deep Core Data to reevaluate your IT needs.