Tool for training needs analysis

Brass Contributor

I'm not sure if I'm in the right place to ask this...

 

Part of my role is to drive adoption of O365 in our customer's organisations. I'm looking for a cloud-based tool to assess who needs training, which aspects of the suite they need training in and possibly even how best they like to learn (instructor-led, video, self-paced etc). Ideally the tool would give me a good idea of the digital literacy of each employee and where their strengths and weaknesses lie with each app (e.g Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint etc). 

 

Any help with this from the community would be greatly appreciated!

19 Replies

@TStyles - following. Really interested to hear answers - it would be really useful to us to have this too!

@TStyles I am interested too.  @MICROSOFT, this is definitely an unmet need.   

I think might be able to help. I work for BrainStorm (www.brainstorminc.com); we work with MS customers to drive O365 adoption using our cloud-based platform (QuickHelp - http://welcome.quickhelp.com/) with instructor-led, self-paced, learning. High level, we seek to understand a company's strategic objectives and align software adoption accordingly--it's a change management focus. We rely on data heavily to guide trainings and measure success. And we use polls/assessments to get user feedback as well as test knowledge. That said, we don't specifically have a "pre-assessment" that you're asking about. If you're curious, I'd be happy to answer any questions or point you to the right folks.
Trying to assess who needs training is a very unenviable task. That's really hard to do unless people are willing to ask for help or training. For driving adoption in my organization, Yammer has actually been fairly well received. A few times each week I drop a tip or trick in there, and I've been surprised by the reception and response. It's also spawned a couple of interesting discussions where I've had the opportunity to ferret out the fact that users need additional assistance.

That's a tall order! I'll look forward to hearing other responses.

A. Jay
That's an interesting answer. I'll be looking more into Brainstorm Inc. Thanks for sharing that.
We use the skill paths in Quickhelp and we have also integrated into our ServiceNow self help portal. When someone asks a question in SN, Quickhelp videos and PDFs are in the search results.
Hello Theresa, I will be using the MOCA individual assessment in a few weeks with a client to provide me with the required answers. My expectations are that scoring the use cases, lead me to prioritise specific service training and relevant scenarios. The assessments needs adjustments, since it doesn’t provide me with aggregated insights. Also I would like to assess if a scenario is not applicable to an employee / the organisation, there is urgency to improve this. Hope to share positive experiences and learnings in the upcoming months. What are your thoughts on the MOCA?
Thanks for your response. Since posting this we have implemented a similar platform to support our customers, however it doesn't yet have the TNA option. I've reached out to them and hope they'll be able to help us.
Thanks for your reply. I've never used Yammer, but for the SMBs we work with, Teams works well for pushing out tips and tricks.
We use ClipTraining - our customers love it!
That sounds great. We have our ClipTraining integrated into Teams so we can search topics in there.
Thanks for your respose Corine. I haven't heard of MOCA - could you please send me a link to take a look?
https://adoption.microsoft.com/enabling-modern-collaboration/ more specifically the Individual MOCA Assessment. Happy to hear your thoughts.
How about this for starters?
https://adoption.microsoft.com/microsoft-365-learning-pathways/
You can expand the page as you wish.
It's important to separate needs assessments from training tools. I always like to tie the end users needs to business objectives? Do you need to ensure more streamlined collaboration? Better customer service? More efficient handling of trouble tickets? Find the business process that is in need of assistance and then train, specifically for that.

Also remember that many people have not had good training in a long time. They learned email and some line of business apps but often did not learn more about Word, PowerPoint, Excel not even delving into additional tools like Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive or Forms. Many Microsoft Partners (like those listed on our Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways page) can help with this but a safe strategy is:

Make basic application available on demand (like with M365LP)
Curate custom training playlists (in our tool or another) for specific roles or processes
Include a Form in your training portal to have people ASK for what they'd like to learn next.

That's a healthy start. Please come back and tell us how you are doing!
https://aka.ms/M365LP is our tool that accomplishes the above

@Karuana Gatimu Thanks for your wisdom! I strongly believe in asking the question "what are you trying to achieve?" as a starting point for any adoption process, then working backwards to find the right tool. 

 

One of the things I frequently come across is people knowing the basics of a tool like Word, Excel, and Outlook, but because they don't know what they don't know, they're not using the most efficient aspects of it to achieve what they want - often quite simply because they didn't know there was an easier way.

 

I'd like a tool that not only gave their managers or HR a heads up of what they know, but more importantly, a nod to what they could still learn to make their work-life easier. From there I think they'd be more likely to request training and could utilise a form for this as you suggest.

 

We've been rolling out an on demand platform with curated playlists of M365 content for our customers over the past month, so we're on task with that aspect.

 

As a Microsoft partner MSP, we'd love to explore how we could incorporate the M365LP to further support our customers - would you mind contacting me individually to discuss this further?

 

Regards, Theresa

Love this idea: Include a Form in your training portal to have people ASK for what they'd like to learn next.
We are implementing MSLP for a custom right now. Our persona’s, their business scenarios and MOCA use cases will be incorporated to guide employees from their goals/needs, via the product to the tools.

@TStyles 

 

For anyone that is across Australia and New Zealand and is looking for a team breakdown of what courses their team need to take to close the skills gap for Azure, I work at Bespoke Training and we are an authorised training partner for AWS & Azure. I would be more than happy to help map out what courses your teams need to take based on their current skill level and where they need to be for their role or any future role!

 

Any questions feel free to email me: email address removed for privacy reasons