Training with Ease

As with online help, in theory, if you create a software package that is incredibly easy to use, you shouldn’t need training. But you should have it anyway. For one thing, regardless of how easy your product is to use, large corporations love to send their people off to training sessions. I’m not sure why this is, but every large corporation that I’ve dealt with has had some kind of strange fixation on training. I think the VPs in charge of the divisions find it important to make sure that their workers have a certificate claiming competency in a certain topic or software application.

Now my own experience in attending training sessions is that some sessions are great; some are, frankly, horrible. The weeklong sessions tend to be far better than the daylong sessions, because many topics simply can’t be taught in a day or an afternoon. In this section, I talk about training programs and how you can have a great training program, as well as what you should consider in building your training program.

Choosing Types of Training

Here are three possibilities in the training that you might offer:

• Onsite, in-person training This is where you send somebody to the customer’s site to train users how to use your software.

• Offsite, in-person training This is where the customer comes to you (or some facilities you have rented) to get training on how to use your software

• Online training This is a new form of training that not many companies offer yet, where you offer online courses in how to use your software.

You might also consider sending in a consultant who will mentor the users. However, be careful suggesting something like this, because companies tend to be a bit suspicious of such a notion. A lot of companies figure that if a consultant comes in to help teach how to use the software, that person might not be working very hard for the money being paid out (that is, they see it as a money-making scam) or the software might be too complex. So be careful even suggesting such an arrangement unless a customer specifically asks for it.

Typically, the customer will want to choose whether to have your teacher come to them or to send their students to you. Therefore, you will often want to offer both types of training. Different customers will see different values in both. Some might see bringing in a trainer to their own place as a cheaper alternative than sending out a group of employees to another city, which requires plane tickets, hotel rooms, and a rental car or two.

But on the other hand, some customers might not have any place to hold a training session, and even if they do have the space, they might not have a dozen or so extra computers to put in the training room. These customers might be more inclined to send the employees to your place for training. (Plus, some employees like to go on business trips and explore other cities and the local nightlife, and they see such training sessions as perks.)

As an alternative to both onsite and offsite training, you might consider a newer option, online training. Online training is useful because nobody has to go anywhere, and students can complete the courses in their own time. You can even offer certificates after students complete the online training course.

Typically, you will want an online training course to be self-guided, without real-time instructor interaction. In other words, no text or voice chat would be available. But you could have an instructor answering questions in an online message forum. Of course, you’re free to offer live text or voice chat, but that would require a more fixed schedule.

Tip

If you offer in-person training, you must decide how long to have the training. Weeklong sessions are common, but so are single-day or half-day sessions. Normally, if students are going to fly to your city and attend training at your site, they will expect something more than a day, perhaps even an entire week.

Building a Highly Useable Training Course

Remember, the more professional your course is, the more respect students will give to you, your organization, and, in turn, your software. And that’s the goal: To make millions of dollars by having the most useable software on the market. How do you make your course professional? By making it highly useable, of course. This includes two aspects:

• A professional presentation

• A great course that teaches the students what they need to know

Please don’t underestimate the importance of a professional presentation. Indeed, the course has to be good as well, but you want the students to be impressed with the overall look, so they take the course seriously. This includes:

• Binders with nicely printed notes that the students can take home with them.

• Possibly a free manual or instruction book (professionally printed) that they can read on their own time.

• Quizzes, perhaps where the students score them themselves without turning them in, or possibly turning them in for scoring by your organization. These quizzes could be printed or on the computer.

• A projection system showing professional-looking graphics in full color. (Here’s a hint: Make use of nice colors and clip art, which is available free with programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint.)

Remember, and this might seem trivial, but please make sure that all the paperwork you give to the students, including the binders with the notes and the written quizzes, is printed as professional quality, either on your own laser printers or at the local printer’s or copy shop. Please don’t pass out cheap-looking photocopies. You want to impress the students.

Tip

You can be most successful in building a highly useable course if you recognize this important fact: Your students cannot possibly learn everything there is to know about your software during one session, even a weeklong session.

Okay, that’s enough about the presentation aspect of the course. I could fill pages and pages with tips, but you get the basic idea: Make it look good. Now on to the course itself.

Suppose you’re teaching a course on installing and maintaining a network for a 2000-employee organization. Can you really take students from square one all the way through advanced template programming in a single week and expect the students to retain the material after the week is over? Speaking as a professional teacher with a great deal of experience, my answer is, Of course not. Now you certainly could cover all that material during a week; that’s not the problem. The problem is that if you do, the students will become so overwhelmed that their heads will probably explode somewhere around Thursday morning, with a few die-hards making it to Thursday afternoon.

Instead, you need to offer a course that will get the students up and running with your software so they are comfortable using it and know where to go when they need more help. Therefore:

SUGGESTION

During your training session, keep showing the students how to refer to the online help and other online reference guides.

Doing so will help them get accustomed to finding out the answers for themselves once they are alone, back at their offices, and are using your software for real, not just for practice.

For a weeklong course, I recommend that you spend Monday through Wednesday getting the students up and running. Focus on the essentials, and be thorough. For example, in a course on using Microsoft Word, you might spend the first three days showing how to manipulate files (open, save, save as, close, new, create from a template, and the various wizards), set fonts, create styles, create templates, print, edit, use AutoCorrect and AutoFormat, create tables, and so on. In other words, the basics. Three days is plenty of time to go through the basics. Then, on Thursday and Friday, you can venture into more advanced topics. Here, you won’t be thorough. Instead, you’ll introduce the students to as many advanced topics as possible. You’ll show the students what the advanced features are, how to get to them, and maybe a couple of examples of using the advanced features.

Of course, if your software isn’t terribly complex, you might be able to go through the entire package in great detail in a single week. However, remember not to overwhelm the students. If you go through a million features in complete detail, by the time the student returns to her office the following week, her boss might come to her and say, “Show me how to use the software.” She might stare at the computer and say, “Uhhhhhhhhh…” because in getting so overwhelmed, she forgot the basics.

And when that happens, the boss isn’t going to blame the employee for not paying attention or perhaps for skipping class. Instead, the boss will blame you and your organization for charging a ton of money and doing a poor job of training the employee. So much for a highly useable course!

Now if you’re offering only a daylong or half-day course, then you have to really tighten everything up. Instead, focus only on the basics. Spend the whole time getting the students up to speed on the basics, and then spend maybe a half-hour or an hour briefly demonstrating some of the advanced features. As with a weeklong course, focus on how the students can get help when they’re back at work. And your goal should be to teach the students how to get up and running with your software and how to perform the basic, most common functions that focus on their own goals and needs. Then, when the students return to work, they’ll understand the basics of how to use your software.

Setting Up (and Being Ready for) a Training Session

Let’s say you bring in two dozen people from all over the planet for your first training session. These people are eager to get started learning to use your software. (Or, more realistically, their bosses are eager for them to learn how to use it. They’re probably there just for the free trip and pastries.)

Now let’s say everybody sits down and you’re ready to start the training session, but wouldn’t you know, the projector won’t work, and two of the computers can’t seem to get on the network. You have to call in the MIS guy, and he fiddles for an hour, while you (or whoever is teaching) mingle embarrassingly. How will this look to the students? Believe it or not, most likely the students won’t be concerned about the money they’re spending because they’re likely not the ones spending the money. They don’t care. But they will become impatient, and they’ll become a bit distrustful of your software. And then when you finally get the class going, they won’t be in a very good mood (nor will you). So make sure all your equipment is running. Test everything out in advance. If it’s Monday morning, come in at 7:00 (or Sunday evening) to make sure everything is in order.

How should you set up your training room? Most training rooms have a separate computer for each student to use. That way, they can get hands-on training rather than just sit and listen to the teacher lecture. In general, if you have computers for the students, make sure each student has his own computer. There’s a practical reason for this: Some of your students might work for competing companies. As crazy as that sounds, their bosses might be a bit distraught if they find out they were sharing a computer at a training session with a competitor.

Now if you do have a computer set up for each student, you might wonder if you should allow Internet access. And should you allow other programs such as chat programs? Of course, only you can decide whether you want such programs, but I would suggest yes to the Internet access (or at least partial access where the students can get to the Yahoo! mail and Hotmail sites so they can check their e-mail). And as for chat, maybe or maybe not. Some students like to be able to talk to one another during the training session. If you think the students might be having important, valuable discussions about the course, then chat might be a good thing. If you think they might just be wasting time and ignoring the class, then chat probably isn’t a good thing. It’s up to you, really, but weigh the options.

Some students might bring their own laptop computers. Use your best judgment on this issue, especially relating to the copying of your software. You might want to put the software on the students’ laptops and then network the laptops into your own network. The obvious problem here, however, is that you just put your software on their computers, and they might not have paid for a license for these particular computers. The licenses their organizations purchased might be for desktops back at the office. A good solution is this:

SUGGESTION

Tell the students they can use their own laptops provided they bring the laptops with licensed copies of the software already installed.

But you will probably want to add that you’re not going to spend time installing the software on their laptops. Your job is to train the students, and your sales engineers would be happy to help them install the software at a different time.

Finally, what if the training is to be held at the customer’s site? In this case, you will probably want to ask them to have a room with computers set up, each with the software installed. But you might have a problem, because the customer might not have purchased licenses for the computers in the training room they’re providing. Further, you might get to the customer site and find that they have a disaster: The computers are there, some have the software installed, some computers are not functioning, none of them seem to be able to get on the network, and their MIS guy is running around at 9:30 on Monday morning, frantically trying to get everything up and running.

Be prepared for the worst if you’re teaching the course at the customer site. Plan to have your laptop, your projector, your binders, and notes, and be ready to teach from just those, without the help of the customer’s computers. Consider the computers perks that might or might not be present. That means building and planning your course without requiring the students to do any hands-on work.

Finally, I’d like to say a note about your projector slides. Most people use Microsoft PowerPoint for such notes. And remember, PowerPoint is great for just that: notes. Don’t expect to fill in all the details on your slides. If you’ve seen a lot of PowerPoint presentations, you know that you can put a handful of bullet points on each slide. This leaves little room for detailed instructions.

But having only bullet points on the slides means you don’t want to offer up just these slides to the students as their own notes. Suppose you have the following notes on a single slide for a course on Microsoft Word:

Setting styles includes:

• Choosing a name for the style

• Selecting font information

• Applying the new style

This is hardly a detailed description of working with styles in Microsoft Word. If you’ve ever gone online to find information about a topic that you know nothing about and found a PowerPoint presentation, you’ve probably seen how worthless such notes are without a teacher explaining each point.

I recommend that you include printouts of the PowerPoint presentations at the back of the binder but also include considerably more detailed notes in the binder. This means, of course, spending some time on the notes, having you (or the tech writers) creating the notes. But the time will be well spent when the student is finished with the course, back at work, gets stuck, and has something to refer to. A bulleted list won’t help the student much, but detailed notes will.

Running a Training Session

If you’ve done all your work in advance, actually running your training session will be a snap. Of course, you’re going to run into problems along the way. But if you play the game right, the students will be patient, and you’ll quickly recover from such problems.

For example, what if you’re the teacher, and a student stumps you with a question that you can’t answer? What do you do? Lie? Take 45 minutes to fiddle with the software to come up with the answer?

How about none of the above? You certainly don’t want to lie. And if you spend 45 minutes fiddling, the other students will become impatient and will, frankly, start to think you’re stupid. Instead, be honest. Say something like, “Wow, that’s a new one. I haven’t come across that one. Let me check with the engineers during the next break and find the answer for you.” And then move on. (Oh, and if you are an engineer who got stuck teaching the class, this is a time to simply swallow your pride and still say you’re going to check with the engineers. These people don’t know you, and why do you care if they think you’re “just a teacher”?)

Here are some additional tips to help keep the session going smoothly:

• Give them free food! Bring pastries and other junk to make them happy.

• Give them plenty of breaks, at least one an hour. I know most people think two or three hours is fine before a break, but some of us have trouble sitting for such a long time. Let us get up and walk around at least once an hour. Please?

• Keep it interesting! Don’t be boring. Don’t talk in a monotone voice. Tell jokes, make them laugh, tell interesting stories of how other customers have used the product, tell anecdotes of funny things happening to customers, whatever it takes. But keep it lively and interesting. If you have to, use goofy, funny names in your examples.

• Offer a specific question-and-answer time, and make sure everyone gets their say.

Regarding the final point, a question-and-answer time can be touchy. First, don’t allow some unruly student to keep interrupting you, taking you down tangents, away from what the other students want to learn. If a student tries, encourage him to save the questions for question-and-answer time.

Of course, you want the students to feel free to ask questions if anything you explain isn’t clear. Just don’t spend more than a few minutes answering each question. Remember, you want to maintain the order and direction of the class.

And finally, when the time comes for the class to adjourn, don’t continue taking questions from the students, letting the course run 20 or 30 minutes late. At two minutes before 5:00, say, “I have time for only one more question. After that, we’ll end class and I’ll be here for another hour to answer individual questions.” Then live up to your word: one more question, a quick answer, and dismiss everybody. They’re eager to go out and have dinner with the new people they’ve met (that’s true especially for the singles in the room). Don’t make them sit through somebody else’s questions.

REAL WORLD SCENARIO: A Note to Teachers: Relax!

I recently attended a training session and the teacher seemed like she was about to have a nervous breakdown. Her voice was shaking through the whole thing and she was quite obviously terrified.

If you’ve been given the honors of teaching a training course…relax! These people aren’t sitting out there as your final judges awaiting just the smallest mistake from you, ready to cast you into Hades. Instead, they look at you as a peer. As one of them. The more you can convey the image of being one of them, the more comfortable they’ll be with you, and the more comfortable you’ll be with them.

Here are some tips to help you relax. (Speaking as somebody with stage-fright issues, trust me, these work!) The best tip I have found is that when students are first coming in, move around the room and introduce yourself. Learn their names and a bit about them, so they become friendly, human beings, not just robots with eagle eyes staring at you.

Next, use the projector to your advantage. Allow that to be the focus of attention so people aren’t staring you down.

Have a chair for yourself at the front of the room with a desk or folding table in front of it. If you get nervous, feel free to sit down and feel like you’re hiding behind the desk until you’re relaxed. I’ve found that having something in between the students and me gives me the feeling of having a shield, which helps me relax.

When you’re standing up, hold a notebook in front of your chest. You will feel like you’re hiding behind the notebook, thereby providing a safe, comfortable feeling. (But please don’t fiddle with a pen, or you’ll appear nervous. Just hide behind the notebook. And don’t put the notebook in front of your face, obviously.)

Keep a glass of water handy and drink up if your mouth gets dry. If you’re jittery, then if necessary, turn your back to the students when drinking.

Next, this might seem like a strange way to fight the jitters, but trust me, it really works: Look the students in the eyes! Don’t stare at the back of the room as those silly public speaking teachers tell us. If you look the students in the eyes, you will see friendly human beings, not just robots. And then it just becomes a room of regular people where you happen to be the one talking, which is a much more relaxing atmosphere than a public-speaking situation.

Finally, remember that people are patient! If you make a mistake or fumble over your words, laugh, let them laugh, and move on. They don’t care. They know you’re only human.