Training is seen by many employees as an integral part of their overall compensation – it demonstrates a belief in the employee and a willingness to help them develop and grow. The crux is that training employees can be incredibly expensive to an organization, but not training them can be even more expensive in the long run.
“Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”
~ Richard Branson
In harsh economic times companies look for ways to save money and one of the key areas that often gets hit is training. Unfortunately, cutting training budgets usually does more harm than good.
- Training shows that a company is willing to invest in its employees. While there is the potential that a trained employee will leave for a different job, the fact that the company has spent time and money investing in them causes most people to have an increased sense of loyalty to their employer.
- Training improves the skill-set of employees, making them a more productive and valuable asset to the organization. Training in the correct tools and techniques will make the employees better at and more efficient in their roles.
- Regular training ensures that employees have up-to-date knowledge of tools and technologies.
Training can be achieved through formal or online classes or it may be more informal through hands-on coaching, books, and user groups. However, once the training has been accomplished both the employer and employee will begin to experience benefits.
Casual software users can get by without training, however, to truly get the most out of these tools, it is important for users to gain a deeper understanding of the tool and learn how it can be better utilized at their organization. Consider Microsoft Office –at best, most of us use 20 percent of the functionalities available– mostly because we don’t know what features are there or how to best use the features that we do know about. Few of us have been formally trained in Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint; a few more of us might have read a book or two; mostly we muddle along trying to get the tools to do what we want and get frustrated when something happens that we didn’t expect. Project management tools are even more complex, and muddling along trying to make sense of the tool won’t get you very far. At ARES PRISM, we recognize that in order to get the best out of our tool set, the users need to be properly trained.
For companies that are new to our products or who have deployed a new module, we can provide on-site training courses which are customized to meet the specific needs of the client. These courses are a great way to get a team of new users up-to-speed with the technology.
Once a team is trained, there is a gap to be filled as new team members join. Often peers are used to provide on-the-job training which can work well, but will only expose the employee to a small subset of the products capabilities or show them “this is the way we do it”. In addition, the PRISM software is continually being enhanced to meet the needs and expectations of the customers. At each major release new features are made available and over time a trained employee starts to fall behind the best practices within the tool. To counter this, further customized on-site training can be requested to bring everyone up to speed with the latest versions.
An alternative to the on-site, client-specific training are the public training courses available in our Houston training center. These PRISM courses provide the Fundamentals to PRISM G2 and Cost Management over a 3-day period. These are great ways to quickly get up-to-speed with PRISM G2 and at the same time network with people from other companies to learn about their project controls techniques. Additional public courses in other PRISM products and modules can be provided upon request.
In addition to the formal training courses, your ARES PRISM representative can provide you with short workshops to help your organization work through and address specific issues or target certain features for training. To learn more about our PRISM training courses in Houston or on-site, click here. Or ask your local ARES PRISM representative to learn more about on-site training and workshops.