• Focus on Features, Not Change: Vendors typically focus on showcasing system features – in exhaustive detail and using non-user-friendly formats. Vendors rarely assess and document impacts to your teams’ daily workflows, much less produce a strategy for mitigating resistance.

But your change is built on a new way of working – the behaviors people need to do differently for the business to work. You need training that gives learners a roadmap to get from how they do it now, to how they need to do it with this new system. They need training based on how this change will affect them, specifically.

• Use a One-Size-Fits-All Approach: Vendor training is designed for the masses, not your specific needs and workflows. Vendor training and procedures are often organized around system functionality, not job tasks. Vendor training focuses on features, functions, and screens. It doesn’t teach job activities, isn’t set in the context of your work process, and doesn’t cover what happens before or after someone interacts with the system.

Users need training built The vendor’s system procedures are useful, but employees need to know when and why to perform a task, and what happens if they do or don’t complete the task. In other words, they must know what is at stake based on their performance of that task.

• Limited Support: Vendor documentation will not provide the on-demand support your people need. After the initial training, ongoing vendor training support is generally scarce. Hypercare often covers technical system issues, not ongoing user adoption concerns.

You don’t just need support for system transactions, you need help for your users as they try to do their jobs on Day One and beyond. And you need it on demand, not via traditional help requests.

How will you fill the gaps?

As seasoned OCM/L&D partners, we exist to help clients fill these gaps. In fact, we frame the entire change from the user’s point of view. This drives an entirely different set of priorities and activities.

Here are efforts you can’t afford to neglect:

• Change Management: We work toward a smooth transition to performance. We help you assess your readiness for the system, construct messaging that resonates, analyze change impacts on each stakeholder group, and identify the behaviors that drive your outcomes. Then we develop communications that focus attention, activate change champions on the ground, mitigate resistance, and engage the workforce. We train them to do their jobs and support them through and after go-live.

We think about this differently than other change management practitioners. We use our knowledge of human behavior to engineer adoption by making the change feel familiar, controlled, and successful. For example, we find past initiatives to reference for comparisons – both positive and negative – to create familiarity. We offer control in the form of clarity on the way forward and choice of paths. We help users experience small wins along the way to adoption, which feels like success.

• Custom Learning: If there’s vendor training, we use that as our starting point. But we first seek to understand your desired business outcomes, your company culture, learning ecosystem, user needs, and core workflows. We use this information to take the vendor’s training apart and put it back together again, centered on user roles and jobs. We build learning around before and after workflows and realistic scenarios and data, so users learn how to do their jobs, not just use the system.

We think about training differently. For example, prioritize tasks and behaviors based on their value to the organization and train on what’s “common” (daily or weekly tasks), “critical” (tasks that are essential to key business processes), and “catastrophic” (tasks that will cause a serious problem if not done properly). We also construct learning programs using our “ABCs”: focusing learner attention, teaching critical behaviors, and teaching in the right context.

Our learning programs are typically not limited to “training” – we focus on how to sustain learning after cutover. We incorporate on-the-job performance aids and coaching that go beyond go-live and help users to full proficiency. We know employees learn best at the point of need, so we build “just in time” support into our programs. We also understand that organizations need training for current users (who need to cross the bridge from the old way to the new way) and new employees (who have no “old” context and start fresh).

• Measured Adoption: You cannot manage what you cannot measure. We design comprehensive evaluation plans based on the Kirkpatrick model to track user adoption, sentiment, performance, and KPIs. This goes beyond basic knowledge checks to assess behavior change, impact on productivity, and overall project success.

We think about measurement differently too. We measure based on the organization’s needs and wants (ranging from satisfaction to KPIs) based on the consequences of failure in a particular task. The more critical the task, the more rigorous the metric should be. We also measure differently based on user role. Different roles require different types of competence, like binary (pass/fail), certification (hitting a certain level of proficiency), and mastery (ability to understand, do, and teach).

The key to success is a holistic implementation approach championed by an experienced partner. Including an OCM/L&D partner shows that you understand the unique challenges of user adoption in your organization, and that you’re committed to realizing the new system’s ROI.

Use this tool to do a quick assessment of your vendor’s training to see where it meets your needs.