If you’re not actually applying it to a real-life scenario, you’re not getting the full experience. When Steve and Linda from a local automotive dealer walked into their first Train the Trainer session with Mytech Partners, they didn’t know what to expect. The trainings were meant to educate them on Microsoft 365 usage so they could train the rest of the team, but they’d only recently made the change from on-premise and simply had no idea how much of a game-changer the new platform was. As Steve puts it:
“Looking back, I’d made the mistake of telling my team: “We’re updating to the latest version [of Microsoft Office], it’s online in the cloud but that’s the only difference. Don’t get too worried; you’re not gonna see a lot of changes.”
As they started the trainings, though, they quickly realized how much more Microsoft 365 could do.
“You can’t get that from a YouTube video.”
For Linda, the training sessions were an invaluable chance to learn – both as an individual, and as a team.
“For me, there were a lot of new terms: I wasn’t all that familiar with SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams…I didn’t know how those can interact [in Microsoft 365]. These trainings helped us get everybody on the same page quicker…It’s a great tool to bring into your organization. It offers so many opportunities to communicate with each other and problem solve. That was an unexpected takeaway of this group training.”
In particular, Linda found great value in the nature of the sessions: in-person, off-site training experiences with multiple team members learning together in the same room.
“With a YouTube video, you’re getting tips and tricks on how one person sees something. Whereas when you’re learning with colleagues in an interactive environment…you get other departments chiming in, saying “hey, what about this?” and that triggers another conversation, and suddenly the departments are building on each other’s work. That depth and breadth of interaction and experience really makes it a no-brainer.”
Solving concrete business challenges
Linda encourages any organization new to Microsoft 365 to consider these training sessions. She also highly recommends brainstorming some of the common problems you’re facing now – the more you bring to the session, the more you’ll get out of it.
“This was very new to us, and we didn’t know what to expect. I wish we’d walked in with more concrete problems we wanted to solve…Something to get the ball rolling. If we’d invested a bit more time beforehand, we’d have spun off more questions that we could’ve asked and found solutions for. What helped me was to actually apply what we were learning, get the team using it right away and get their feedback. If you’re not actually applying it to a real-life scenario, you’re not getting the full experience. Don’t just do it for the sake of something new.”
“I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
After several rounds of Train the Trainer sessions, the team is now much more comfortable with the tools they pay for – and have learned how to recognize a solution to the real-life challenges they encounter! By intentionally developing familiarity with Microsoft 365 through these sessions, they are getting far more value from their Microsoft investments. Steve says:
“We would go back to our workplaces and try to implement those ideas, struggle with them a little bit. Then come back to the next session and go “gee, this part went real easy, this one was harder, maybe we’re not grasping this other concept”…we started to see some real traction. Once we got used to the tools, we could see how they applied to some real-life ideas we were trying to implement.
If we hadn’t had these sessions, we would not be using any of these new features. We would’ve migrated to 365, but kept doing things the same way we always had. And we would’ve gotten nowhere near where we are today. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
