Why IT Leaders Are Abandoning Old School Software Training

Most IT Directors, VPs, and CIOs are good at four things:

🟢 Keeping systems running
🔐 Ensuring everything remains secure
💵 Staying within their allotted budget 
👍 Making their internal customers (aka business sponsors) happy 

But the most successful among them are especially good at the last two.

What’s central to staying within budget AND making people happy? Nailing every software purchase, rollout, and return on investment. 

To understand more, we spent three months interviewing enterprise IT leaders with a knack for doing just that. Here are their top five tips for up-and-coming IT managers overseeing internal software training. 👇

Tip #1: Get clear on the problem to be solved with new software

You’d be amazed at how often people champion (and buy!) software that never solves an underlying business problem.

Before you start crowdsourcing best-in-class solutions, scrolling through G2, and signing up for product demos, make sure you understand: 

• Where things are falling apart, at an operational level
• What processes and procedures will be required to drive change, solve issues, and achieve your ideal state
• Which systems and rewards you’ll need to implement to convince people to get on board

That’s part of your due diligence. Skip any of those steps, and your new software purchase will never pay for itself.

Tip #2: Empathize with end users

Put yourself in the shoes of an ambivalent adopter following a process for the first time.

Unless they’re already using a Digital Adoption Platform like Tango (😇), it’s highly likely their heads are on a swivel, and they’re flipping back and forth between a tab with how-to instructions and a tab with the software they’re trying to use. 

Learning that way is exhausting. End users have to: 

↳ Read the instruction
↳ Look at the corresponding screenshot
↳ Figure out which part of the screenshot matters 
↳ Process the information
↳ Double-check they’ve understood what to do
↳ Return to the tool where they got stuck
↳ Reorient themselves so they can pick up where they left off 
↳ Translate the instruction into an action

..and that’s just for one step, in what’s usually a multi-step process. 😵‍💫

Tip #3: Make everyone’s day and ditch the mandatory trainings, wordy PDFs, and long videos

If you’re rolling out new software and you’re under the impression 100% of your end users are hanging onto every word in your two-hour training…

You might want to take a closer look. 🎧 

Pulling people away from their jobs to show them how to use software isn’t going to help you win friends or influence people [to change their behavior]. And neither will using other “tried-and-true” approaches.

Traditional software training methods ask end users to:

💀 Break flow to attend boring trainings
🤯 Embrace information overload (with knowledge that can’t be applied in the moment) 
💭 Try and fail to recall SOPs from memory later on
😤 Search multiple tools to find the one nugget they need in dense documentation and long videos
🤞 Hope that out-of-context instruction (last updated who knows when) will work in context
🫠 Find a workaround, ping someone for help, or just give up when it doesn’t

Say you work for a company with thousands of employees. Imagine how many of them will be happy to hear that old school software training is no longer the only game in town. 

Tip #4: Use Real-Time Enablement to enable self-service, reduce tickets and response times, avoid additional hires, and save $$$ 

Now let’s consider your side of the equation. How many touchpoints (and how much time) does it usually take your help desk team to teach an end user how to complete a new SOP? 

If you’re still using a traditional software training playbook, your answer is probably in the double digits. After all, you have to factor in:

🙃 The employee’s ability to log in successfully 
👀 The complexity of the tools involved (plural, since business processes are often cross-app) 
❓ The employee’s familiarity with them 
😵💫 The level of customization you’ve introduced over time
💭 The scope of the standard operating procedure at hand
🪫 The number of places the employee needs to look to find answers when they get stuck
😅 The odds of existing documentation being current enough to help them self-serve 
🙈 The quantity of unnecessary fluff in your software training videos 
🫠 The number of missing steps, screenshots, and crucial details in your how-to guides
💬 The amount of other constituents and stakeholders involved

You could do that math (and answer all of those tickets)…or you could serve software knowledge up on a platter, inside of the business applications your end users use most. 

This more modern, employee-first approach to software training (called Real-Time Enablement) allows end users to:

• Access standardized, step-by-step instructions at their fingertips
• Learn how to use your software while using it (with minimal change) 
• Adopt SOPs with fewer false starts and FAQs

And that’s just the beginning. Implementing Real-Time Enablement will also help you provide ongoing support at scale, without blowing your budget. You’ll be able to:

• Enable more self-service
• Reduce ticket volume  
• Decrease average response times
• Increase first-touch resolutions 
• Avoid additional help desk hires 
• Save your company money 

…and that doesn’t even get into the benefits for your own career and individual reputation.

Tip #5: Stop relying on anecdotal evidence to show ROI

If you want the ability to show real business impact—and you care about whether your end users are *actually* adopting new processes—you can’t rely on traditional software training to show ROI.

By introducing Real-Time Enablement and embedding training in-application, you can:

🌟 Help end users go from “hoping for the best” to “becoming tech savvy in seconds” 

📊 Stop talking about your number of trainings and how-to guides completed and start pointing to company-wide process adoption achieved