One of the key components of any training program is to get people to apply what they learned in their every-day. Irrespective of how brilliant the training might be, if the transfer and application of skills are not evident once training has taken place, then there is no real value in what’s been learned.
To help facilitate this process, we encourage our clients to continue to engage with us even after the training has taken place, either with a quick email here and there to ask for advice or assistance, or more specifically with an official consult.
I remember back in the early days after one of our first Excel Advanced courses, where we revisited one of our financial services clients to help assist their staff implement the skills that they learned during training to their broad range of tasks in financial planning, asset managements, tax and legal documentation. There was one lady that I remembered in particular who was manually assigning data from a downloaded transactional CSV file to a Master Client List in Excel. She knew that the VLOOKUP function she had learned during training could help speed up the process but just wasn’t able to implement it as a solution.
Once she had briefly explained her requirements, it took us about half an hour to build an Excel Template to dynamically assign the downloaded data to the Master List. A daily task that was sometimes taking her up to 2 hours to complete every morning was now taking a couple of seconds!
I phoned her the other day out of curiosity to see if she was still using the template that we created over 4 years ago, and she proudly told me that she still uses the very same template every day.
If we conservatively say that this little template has saved her 1 hour a day for the past 4 years, with approximately 250 working days in a year, that’s a well-rounded 1000 hours saved and counting. Not bad for a 30-minute consult. This is a simple example of how a little bit of Excel can save you a whole lot of time (and money). This then begs the question: How many hours could you be saving?
