These were the immortal words written by
Peter Drucker, to many the father of modern management philosophy. Nevermore have these words been important as businesses strive to make cost savings, and as companies look to squeeze more out of their assets and staff.
“If you think training is expensive, try ignorance” has always been our mantra typically where IT equipment and software that has been bought off the shelf or a web page by a business manager and thrown into the workplace. We meet staff who are too often expected to learn it on the fly, to put this logic in perspective it’s like investing in a really expensive car and giving it to someone who not only does not know how to drive it but hasn’t even got a clue how to open the door!
Recently we have found this has been relevant around our range of
SMARTBoard interactive whiteboard products with schools, colleges and businesses investing in the technology but not have any training strategy behind this. Initially there was a rush to get this technology into the classroom due to funding being available, lots of companies without
SMARTBoard knowledge jumped on to the bandwagon and sold it. We noticed this about 2 years ago when the budget cuts were starting to be felt in schools and there was a growing demand to get more out of the technology already in the classroom that we were getting a lot of enquiries around our
SMARTBoard Training. We also witnessed a considerable increase and also training on other related products such as
video conference systems and
Visualiser’s.
The feedback we were getting from staff after they had attended the training was amazing stuff like “didn’t realise it could do this” “why haven’t we had this training sooner” and more importantly “how can I learn more”. This said two things to me, it said there is a desire to learn more about this type of technology which with all its tools is intuitive and easy to use (if your shown !) All too often it has been easier to blame the users, thus eroding their confidence in this type of technology. It also pointed out how with a little more investment in the time of a trainer and the development of a structured training programme, that schools and businesses could be achieving so much more with their assets , improving training, measuring outcomes and saving money in using the technology to reduce travel costs by using the boards for
data conferencing.
Like I quoted earlier “If You Think Training Is Expensive, Try Ignorance ?