Need-based training goes a longer way than generic training

"Time and time again, I have run into companies where despite general Google Workspace training sessions made available to employees, users kept having difficulties with using the tools efficiently in their own work as well as in collaborative work, causing them to grumble about how bad the tools were compared to the old tools they used to use. In some situations, the grumbling got so loud that the company considered moving away from Google, back to their old tools!

🤔 It got me thinking: if the people went to the training, what made them so disillusioned with the tools?

I thought back to my own past of having been at the receiving end of software training, a good long while ago: Adobe Dreamweaver (a web development tool to create websites). I was surprised at how little I remembered about what I had learned in that training. 

Why?

🛟 The answer lies not in whether or not I got trained, but a lot deeper in human learning: whether or not, and how soon, I applied what was taught. Learning, or the retention of the material taught, is NEED-BASED: if you have the need to learn something and can immediately apply it in your work or life, you retain the knowledge much better than if you are taught something just because at some point you might use it.

Remember the saying "use it or lose it?" It's the same concept. You learn something, but if you don't put it to use immediately, you will not remember it. 

📅 At that time in my life when I got trained in Dreamweaver, I did absolutely no web development. The most I had to do was occasionally find my way around html code enough to correct translation issues or parts of missing html tags. And I could do that in a plain text editor; I didn't need Dreamweaver for it. Was the training interesting? Sure! Dreamweaver was "cool" at that time, and I remember feeling that I had learned a lot. But not using it meant that I retained, at best, just some jargon.

💎 That is why when I started KloudGem, I decided that our training is going to be much more than "just training." 

💎 We CONSULT with the users or teams to first understand their workflow needs so that we can then laser-focus on fulfilling those needs, and teach how to do exactly what they are trying to accomplish day-to-day.

💎 And when we do GROUP TRAINING, we train only on features that are available and used at the given company, so that the material fills a need and can be immediately applied." — Gabriella Laszlo, Founder, KloudGem