How much SharePoint training do end-users need?
In my 11+ year journey of a SharePoint consultant I’ve seen organizations deploy every variety of SharePoint training possible. I’ve seen it all – from the surprisingly common and least effective no-training-at-all approach, to rigorous hands-on lecture labs over many hours and weeks.
Gravity Union has trained 1000’s of users through the on-boarding of hundreds of departments across dozens of organizations. We’ve observed what works and what doesn’t when it comes to getting users comfortable with the SharePoint platform. This post highlights our thoughts on how much training end-users need.
Do we even need training on SharePoint?
You would be surprised to find out how many organizations rollout SharePoint with little to no training. Perhaps they’re assuming that like Email and Network file storage, end-users will figure it out on their own and be relatively successful. Unfortunately, SharePoint is far more sophisticated than Network file storage and Email. As a result, it requires some training for organizations to successfully adopt the platform, use it correctly, and ensure that SharePoint is providing the maximum ROI over the long run.
Our goal for training
Before we go too deep into our blog, simply put, we want end-users to be just as comfortable with SharePoint as they are with email, network file storage and tying their shoes.
Repetition is key, Repetition is key
IT training in general has always surprised me. Whether it be learning guitar, cooking, karate, grade 10 math, golf or driving, in most other areas of our lives, learning takes on the form of a couple of hours a week over a longer period of time with a mix of lecture and hands-on practice (I have yet to see a driving school that only teaches theory). Yet when it comes to most IT training, we’re often sent off-site for a day to drink from a firehose of information.
There’s good reason for this several-hours-a-week-over-a-longer-period-of-time-model of learning that human civilization has come to adopt: our students have a tendency to forget what we teach them.
“Within an hour, student will forget 50 percent of the information you presented. Within 24 hours, they have forgotten an average of 70 percent of new information”
Source: Brain Science: The Forgetting Curve–the Dirty Secret of Corporate Training
Why do we forget so much? Well, most of the information making it’s way into our cerebral cortex doesn’t provide much value over the long run – the price we paid for coffee, the colour of Bob’s sweater and the items on the news feed of our favourite website along with thousands of other bits of information are taken in and processed on a daily basis, and yet we would seldom need to recall these facts in the future. Our brain, being smart and efficient, will throw away the low value stuff. Only those things that it deems more important are committed to our long-term memory banks.
One indication our brain uses to measure the importance of a given memory is repetition – i.e. how often are we seeing, doing or hearing the same thing.
“The more that short-term memory is used or repeated, the more likely it is to be committed to our long-term memory banks.”
Source: 5 Differences Between Short-Term and Long-Term Memory Loss
This is true regardless of the importance of the memory itself, which is why we have 100’s of marketing jingles burned into our long-term memory.
Same goes for SharePoint, as simple as the topics may seem to us SharePoint experts, key topics such as adding, editing, deleting, views, search and metadata need to be taught, retaught and reviewed several times until it sticks.
Spread it out over a couple of weeks
You want to spread training out over a couple of weeks, both to support the notion of repetition, and to allow less proficient people to practice on their own time.
Furthermore, one of the common hurdles during SharePoint digital transformation projects is the business pushing back on the amount of time that they're engaged. Sometimes, it’s a fear from the project sponsor or project team from placing too many demands on the business.
Yet the more time spent working with the business, the more successful the project will be. It’s a bit of a paradox. Obviously, a SharePoint project can’t bring business operations to a halt, but an organization needs to invest some amount of time to maximize the ROI of a digital transformation project. Typically, the business needs to spend a couple of hours per week engaged with the project, where one of those hours is dedicated to training.
Go deep
It’s often useful to understand technology one level deeper than you need to use on a regular basis as it helps support a higher level of mastery and understanding over the basics. One my favourite stories about this be found here.
Nevertheless, SharePoint is a large platform and can be quite scary and overwhelming when first using it (especially if you aren’t trained).
For end-users to understand that Search may take a couple of minutes to index their content, that their deleted items can be fetched from a recycling bin and that items with required metadata will be exclusively checked out to them until all the metadata is applied, can help alleviate anxiety when documents go missing or don’t show up in their search results right away. Our experience, while not true for everyone, is that exposing some of the inner workings of SharePoint can be comforting and empowering for end-users while making them more patient when learning to use it.
How we approach training
We’ve used the need to repeat, the need to spread it out over a couple of weeks, and the benefits of going deep as a basis for experimenting with different methods of training. Our experience and the feedback we get from end-users tells us that this is the most effective training regimen for SharePoint.
We’ve come to a proven training program of about 8 hours of in-person training – 4 hours of lectures and 4 hours of hands-on labs spread over 8-1 hour sessions executed over 5-6 weeks. We’ll cover everything from adding documents, setting metadata and creating views through advance search querying and how SharePoint security works. Short bursts of information over a longer period will go much further than cramming it all in one day!
On average, we’ll also do 1-2 hours of solution specific training for PowerApps or Flows that we’ve added. We’ll of course augment our training with recorded training session videos, how-do-I pages in SharePoint and quick reference guides, but by far hands-on, in person lecture\lab combos is the most effective delivery method for training.
In short, a little bit of training over a longer period will go a long way to adoption and a healthy return on your technology investment. We hope this inspires you when you’re planning your next IT training program!