Plug the digital skills gap with training & user adoption

A skills audit is the foundation for developing a customised training and support programme that will resonate with the staff and be effective across the varying levels of skills and confidence within your organisation. This is much more than the one-size-fits-all approach of traditional training programmes.

Furthermore, this information will also provide key performance indicators that will be used later in the project to show progress and value.

What does a skills audit look like?

The skills audit encompasses an information discovery, a staff survey and a report.  More specifically, it covers:

• A review of the existing technical usage analytics held within Microsoft 365 to identify patterns and trends in the technology’s usage. This information also helps to identify any areas where users may be facing challenges using the tools and apps.
• The design and creation of a comprehensive skills survey to be issued to all staff. This will identify what they know, how they use apps and tools, and how effective they find them in getting their job done.
• Delivery of a comprehensive plan that will identify the approach and steps needed to effect your training and communications programme, as well as detailing how adoption of Microsoft 365 applications can improve productivity, collaboration and communication both internally and with your partners.
• Development of a dashboard that visualises the results of the skills audit as a baseline, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of training activities and identify future training requirements.

The best way to confirm your organisation’s readiness is to run a ‘readiness audit.’

This covers a range of areas including:

• Identifying what training has already been delivered and against what needs
• Ascertaining what communications users have received
• Determining the existing business rules on application usage across the organisation
• Identifying the technical environment for your users
• Understanding how governance is implemented
• Establishing the availability and effectiveness of internal support structures such as c-suite, communications, people and training.

Ultimately, the primary objective of the readiness audit is to bring together the various disciplines required to embark on a training and adoption project, identify the key elements that will support the programme, provide an understanding of the organisational commitment required and define an appropriate and relevant plan, which is essential to the successful delivery of your programme.

In the case of Microsoft 365, the large number of applications, the high rate of change and the flexible choices that people can make about how to use its tools mean that traditional training is typically unsustainable and more dynamic and ad hoc approaches are required . This means using methods such as self-help, peer-to-peer assistance, colleague encouragement and self-learning

However, it is very often the case that the initial understanding of an application’s capabilities and features gained by users is limited as it is not underpinned with comprehensive, relevant and reliable training material held in a single place. Even if you do develop your own training material, it can be time-consuming and expensive to keep it up-to-date, particularly for cloud applications like Microsoft 365, which are continuously enhanced.

Microsoft Learning Solutions for Microsoft Apps

To help with this situation, Microsoft has developed a couple of supporting solutions – Learning Pathways and Viva Learning.

Learning Pathways
Microsoft Learning Pathways is a free, customisable, on-demand learning solution that runs on SharePoint. Learning Pathways connects to an online catalogue of Microsoft training content and includes several features that help you manage your people’s learning opportunities and personalised experience, including:
• Pre-built learning paths for key topics including Microsoft 365 fundamentals, Teams, SharePoint, Office and more.
• Custom learning paths for different roles or departments.
• Flexible module availability within learning paths.
• Tracking and reporting of employee progress and completion rates.

Viva Learning

Microsoft Viva Learning is a knowledge hub hosted in Microsoft Teams that lets an employee seamlessly integrate learning and skills development into their working day. With Viva Learning, an employee can discover, share, recommend, and access content developed internally, by Microsoft or third parties and all within Teams.

Viva Learning allows an employee to:

• Easily find relevant learning
• Get personalised learning recommendations
• Share and recommend learning to others
• Create and assign learning paths to colleagues.

For the organisation, Viva Learning enables:

• The addition of custom learning content
• Creation of custom learning paths
• Definition of prerequisite learning
• Tracking and reporting on progress.

Viva Learning or Learning Pathways? Which is the right one?

Ultimately, Viva Learning and Learning Pathways support a similar end goal: to provide a centralised location for the hosting and dissemination of learning content to help your organisation’s users get the best from Microsoft 365. But which is the right one?

Your choice may depend on several factors and considerations, but a key differentiator is whether you might prefer the SharePoint-hosted experience of Learning Pathways, or the more social experience, AI-driven personalisation characteristics and learning insights provided by Viva Learning (but that may have some additional licensing implications).

Either way, using Learning Pathways or Viva Learning as a central hub for Microsoft 365 knowledge and skills development provides a low-cost resource for hosting training content, communicating your plans, promoting training opportunities, and identifying app enhancements to staff. In due course, your organisation will reap many benefits, including:

• Productivity will be increased as employees learn new skills or more efficient ways to complete existing tasks
• A positive learning culture will be appreciated by the employees.
• Employees who find it more difficult to pick up new applications and features will be less frustrated
• Support costs can be reduced as employees answer their own or colleagues’ “how do I?” questions.

As part of the creation of a training and adoption programme, the use of a learning platform is a key element in providing your organisation’s employees with efficient and effective access to timely and relevant learning content.

Of course, you may already have a learning management platform in place, which can support your learning goals, albeit with some additional preparatory work to select and deploy the learning content and paths. However, in the absence of such a solution, the deployment of Learning Pathways or Viva Learning are great solutions.

A champion network is a group of employees who are enthusiastic about and advocate for new technologies or processes. They are in-department evangelists able and willing to help their colleagues learn to use new applications – learning via co-workers is considered to be one of the most successful methods helping to drive the use of new solutions in an organisation.

Champions within business departments understand what their team is trying to achieve, and with the appropriate skills and personalities, they can reach their direct audience more effectively than a central training team.

Investing in Microsoft 365 champions reduces the burden on your project or training team and helps to drive engagement across your community. Champions can help to build awareness of Microsoft 365, identify new ways of working, improve processes, inspire their colleagues, resolve their colleagues’ challenges, and provide tangible feedback to the central project or training team to shape future strategies.

In short, champions are essential to the success of adoption programmes.

What makes a good champion?

Of course, it’s not quite as straightforward as asking just anyone to be a champion. A champion requires specific attributes, and your organisation needs to put in the right foundations that support and nurture people to be effective champions.

People who are going to act as champions need to be enthusiastic about the technology, be willing to give up their time and knowledge to help others and be empathetic to other people who may not find it as easy to get to grips with new technologies, processes or ways of working.

Underpinning the champions network, there needs to be a full range of supporting elements, including a clearly defined set of responsibilities and expectations, full and effective training, and supportive materials such as user guides, FAQs and similar resources.

Finally, considering the extra effort they are putting in and the benefits to the organisation, the champions should be considered for additional recognition and rewards.

Champions are a winning addition to your adoption programme

By utilising the enthusiasm, knowledge and expertise of internal advocates to support and encourage their colleagues, an effective champion network can help to build, grow, and sustain your adoption programme far beyond the initial implementation, leading to happier users, increased workplace efficiency, and maximised organisational value.

Even though Microsoft 365 takes away a lot of the burdensome management and administration associated with legacy on-premises solutions, there are still many tasks and activities that need to be completed. However, in our experience, many organisations introduce Microsoft 365 without full consideration of the management and support processes that are needed to ensure the smooth running of the environment.

We are all familiar with the teams that are formed to implement a new enterprise-wide system, involving analysis, configuration, testing and support. These teams endure throughout the life or use of the product, yet we see little evidence of any similar levels of management and control over Microsoft 365.

Without establishing operating principles, it is going to be difficult to effectively identify and mitigate risks inherent in the use of Microsoft 365, integrate Microsoft 365 applications and features to support your organisation, and effectively respond to any changes that arise both within your organisation and from Microsoft.

Get on the path to operational excellence

By implementing an appropriate operational support model, your organisation will be in the best position to support your overarching training and adoption programme.

You’ll be better able to understand and manage the risks and opportunities in cloud productivity and improve the employees’ adoption of the applications and features, all working towards the ultimate goal of getting the best value from your organisation’s investment in Microsoft 365.