In the course of managing and planning for projects, you will inevitably need to cater for training the users to use your system. What usually happens is that you will not be able to get all users to attend the training for the rollout of your spanking new system as they have their daily work to handle. You will either have to conduct multiple training sessions in order to reach all your users, or you will instruct a few users and leave them to pass their knowledge on to their colleagues.
Both choices are not very ideal. The former is not a conducive use of your time, while the latter is not a reliable method — let’s say your users can retain 80% of their knowledge (which is already obscenely optimistic…). At first glance, this may not seem to be a bad thing. However, note that these same users are expected to pass on their knowledge, and they may not have the proper presentation or training skills. If their colleagues have an 80% knowledge retention as well, then the end result is only 64% of what you originally taught!
Through my experience, one feasible way to improve knowledge retention and facilitate training is to use a screen capture software like CamStudio. You can take screen captures of various system scenarios and upload them to a corporate website where users can download and view if they need a refresher in the future. Although this may seem to be time-consuming, it is an invaluable resource especially if you are rolling out a brand new system that no one has seen or used before.
