Imagine going to work without your smartphone. Without your laptop. Without email, a browser, the Internet. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? And yet all those technologies only became mainstream over the last two decades. Some, like your smartphone, only really came into their own over the last ten years.
If you have a diversified and large workforce, not all your employees will be digital natives. Even millennials or Gen Zs, who grew up with a smartphone in hand, cannot be expected to be entirely fluent in the many technologies that you might use in your company. Plus, it’s highly likely your organization is adopting new technologies regularly that touch every employee and require onboarding – and, likely, a learning curve for many. For these reasons, and more, offering IT training to all your employees is a good idea. This article will list some of the most significant benefits that can come from doing this.
7 Ways Your Company Benefits by Offering IT Training
Fewer Mistakes
Your employees will make fewer mistakes. If an employee doesn’t entirely understand the software they need to use for their work, it’s easy for them to make a mistake. For example, someone from marketing could accidentally send a test email to your entire customer base. Or someone from sales could accidentally delete one of their deals in your CRM. Or perhaps a crucial error was made on accident in the budget or an expense that isn’t caught until it’s too late. When you train your employees appropriately, such mistakes will be fewer.
Increased Efficiency
Your employees will become more efficient. This ties to the above benefit. If your employees better understand the software they are expected to use on a regular or even infrequent basis, they’ll be able to be more proficient. For example, your sales team could create a process in your CRM instead of doing things manually. Your marketing team could create templates from some of the emails they’d otherwise craft manually. Deeply understanding the software and technology tools they’re working with will make employees much more efficient and, ultimately, make your business stand out from the competition and become more profitable.
Greater Security
You become a more secure company. Human error is still one of the leading causes of hacks and cybersecurity breaches. Sometimes, a simple phishing email is all it takes. When you provide IT training to your employees, they’ll have a better understanding of such external threats and you’ll become less vulnerable to cyberattacks. Plus, they’ll begin to bake in new habits to future proof the business from weaknesses that attract hackers to begin with.
Less Reliance on IT
Your employees will rely less on IT. If an employee is unfamiliar with the hardware or software they’re working with, they’ll have no choice but to contact IT or submit a ticket for the smallest issues. Their screen doesn’t work, they receive an error they cannot solve, they don’t know how to set up certain permissions to access software, they don’t know how to adjust the HTML in their email template, etc. Understanding how to solve such issues will make all departments significantly faster.
Ability to Focus on What’s Important
Your IT team will have more time to focus on what’s important. This is a natural outcome to the above. Not only will your departments be able to move faster, but your IT team will spend less time solving small issues. Instead, they’ll be able to focus on the strategic initiatives that will move your company forward.
Greater Agility
You become a more agile company. The more resourceful every one of your employees is when it comes to IT, the more agile you become as a company. If every employee improves their productivity by even only 5% because they understand the software and hardware they’re working with, imagine how much faster you’ll be able to respond to threats and opportunities.
Reduced Friction
Your employees will be more motivated. There’s nothing more frustrating than an IT issue that stops you dead in your tracks. Being able to solve a problem yourself instead of having to file an IT ticket that might take days or even weeks to be addressed is gratifying. It will make every employee’s work more motivating, because they’ll be able to get more done in less time. Plus, these IT skills might help employees make the leap to expand their position or encourage them to take on the initiative to further upskill or reskill themselves which will no doubt improve employee retention and your ability to stand out as a company at large.
How to Get Started
These are only a few of the ways your company would benefit from offering IT training to your employees. These training sessions don’t need to be incredibly in-depth or complex either. We’re not talking about teaching every employee C#, Python, or machine learning (although those are skills certainly worth offering too).
Because technology is ever-evolving, these training sessions should be part of a continuous L&D model that teaches your employees IT and other relevant skills on a continual basis. If you want to develop such a model and start taking advantage of the benefits that IT training can offer you, Skill-Up Technologies can help.