SharePoint Training – What are you missing?

Being in the training industry for five years gives you a lot of different angles when having discussions about how to best train with SharePoint. The following are my observations that can help organizations who are looking at training internally or finding external training for their users.

There are different types of modalities when it comes to training for the organization. These include specific and guided training when needed, provide self-service resources for users and continue training with ongoing support and updates.  The wide range of training materials now available will assist City of Bloomington at fulfilling these requirements.

Modalities:

• Classroom Hands On – This type of training can be done internally of your organization or through a training company. If training is provided by a training company, the course should include hands on demo environment that is not the same as your internal SharePoint environment. Information provided in a training company course will be general to the overall feature set of SharePoint.
• On Line (Instructor Lead) – Similar to the Classroom Hands On, but participants watch the instructor via the web and will remote into a virtual environment to work on SharePoint.
• On Demand Video – This training gives flexibility to the participant on when they want to take the training. This utilizes some video sessions that are pre-recorded and available at any time. This type of training will usually not have any type of demo SharePoint environment available for use. This type of modality is essential for the continued maintenance of training after the initial training.

Within every organization there are different levels of instruction that will need to take place. This will range from general use of SharePoint to specific targeted training at the department or process level.

Training Levels:

• General SharePoint training – This training gives the participant training on how SharePoint works, terminology, etc.
• Organizational SharePoint training – This training provides information on organizational specific features within SharePoint. This may include specific forms, calendars, libraries or customizations that are built the organization’s SharePoint environment.
• Department/Division SharePoint training – Departmental specific modifications which can include metadata, processes, etc

Now if you take a look at a typical Roles Matrix (as I talked about in a previous post) you can see the different roles and in general what type of training is available for them.

Role	Description	Training Format
SharePoint Farm Administrator	Base documentation from Microsoft Microsoft Official Curriculum training course Knowledge transfer sessions Operations documentation	Classroom Hands On Training Online
SharePoint Business Analyst	SharePoint Site Owner/Power User course from Microsoft training provider Classroom Hands On Training	Classroom Hands On Training Online
SharePoint Designer	SharePoint Branding course (covering CSS and MasterPages) SharePoint Designer 2010 knowledge SharePoint XSLT knowledge JavaScript or JQuery knowledge (optional)	Classroom Hands On Training Online
SharePoint Site Collection Administrator	SharePoint Site Owner/Power User course from Microsoft training provider Operations documentation Classroom Hands On Training On Line	Classroom Hands On Training Online
SharePoint Site Owner	SharePoint Site Owner/Power User course from Microsoft training provider Operations documentation	Classroom Hands On Training Online
SharePoint Contributor	SharePoint end user training from Microsoft training provider Internal knowledge transfer sessions	Classroom hands On Training On Demand Video Online
SharePoint Viewer	SharePoint end user training from Microsoft training provider Internal knowledge transfer sessions	Classroom Hands On Training On Demand Video Online
SharePoint Approver	SharePoint end user training from Microsoft training provider Internal knowledge transfer sessions	Classroom Hands On Training On Demand Video Online

Hopefully this will help you as you move forward on training considerations within your SharePoint implementation.