Many organisations buy good reporting tools, run a day of training and find, a few months later, that people still ask for a spreadsheet. The training wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t connected to anyone’s actual job.
Start with the decisions, not the tool
The most useful first session isn’t about which button does what. It is about the three or four decisions each team makes every week, and which numbers they need to make them. Once people can see why a report matters to them, learning the tool is the easy part.
Use your own data
Training on sample data about a made-up shop is easy to forget. Training on your own sales, your own customers and your own reports means people practise on exactly what they will use the next morning.
Teach people to question a number
Data literacy isn’t about advanced statistics. For most staff it means three habits:
- checking what a figure includes before quoting it
- comparing like with like, such as this month against the same month last year
- knowing who to ask when a number looks wrong
Follow up
A short session two or three weeks later, to answer the questions people only discover once they start using the tools, does more for adoption than an extra day of initial training.
We build training around your own data and reports, for managers, analysts and everyone in between. Ask us about training.