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Why your training needs to involve Microlearning

Microlearning is an ideal method for delivering Just In Time Training (JiTT). This is individual task or transactional based training, offered at the time of need. Microlearning can also be used for soft skill or conceptual teaching.

Increasingly, we are working with clients to build whole libraries of bite-size content. Organisations typically adopt this approach to supplement classroom training. However, we are discovering that some people find this ‘self-serve’ model of training so effective that they now use it as the primary training mechanism.

One of the added benefits of having the bite-size library as part of your training approach is that the material becomes an asset what will be utilised far beyond the initial launch of the project or system your are training. That’s the long-term investment not only to your training but employee engagement as well.

Click here to find out how GuyKat can help you nail the Microlearning.

This is a brief article of our ‘The Inevitable Rise of Microlearning in the Workplace’ White Paper. Get the Full Copy contacting rugile.sikorskyte@guykat.com.

by Rugile

Looking Back at Learning Technologies 2018

For the past four years at Learning Technologies the GuyKat team have co-manned the Docebo stall. We’re proud to partner with Docebo and the arrangement meant our pitch has always previously focussed on our LMS product. This year we wanted to raise awareness of the other big part of our business; bespoke eLearning. So, for the first time we exhibited on our own stand, under our own brand.  

We marked this milestone with the UK launch of our white paper on the importance of microlearning in the workplace. On the back of this release many people came to see us to find out more, most specifically how to access help in implementing a microlearning strategy in their own organisations. If you weren’t able to attend and want a soft or hard copy of the white paper, do please get in touch and we’ll be happy to send one through.

We also had some great conversations with Docebo customers who had heard about some of the customisation work we’ve been able to do for for other clients and wanting to know if we could help take their installation to the next level. We’re looking forward to working with them.

One thing that attracted a lot of comment was our tag-line. The most common question from walk-bys to the stand was “What do you mean by ‘Beyond eLearning’?”  We were asked so often that the answer, which gets to the very core of what GuyKat is all about, justifies an entire dedicated future blog post. Watch this space.

It’s always great to be part of this key industry event. Being surrounded by your clients, potential clients, partners and the competition is energising. Looking at competitors left us with a healthy balance of feeling very, very self-assured about the quality and pricing of our work, whilst still giving a gentle nudge that if we want to keep that feeling we need to retain our level of innovation.  We’re up for the challenge.  See you at LTUK19!

If our services sound of importance to you, please get in touch with me at george.atkin@guykat.com and we can discuss your next steps in eLearning!

Finally, congratulations to the two lucky winners of our prize draws for the Amazon Fire!

by Hannah

Why buy SaaS as a VAR?

Why would anyone buy a B2B SaaS product from a VAR (value-added reseller) rather than direct from the vendor? This is something I’ve been grappling with for two good reasons; Firstly, my own business uses SaaS solutions for all sorts of non-core, yet still crucial, business processes. Our accounting, CRM, email, file-storage and HR processes, amongst others, are all underpinned by various SaaS products. I’ve a huge vested interest in getting the best value from these ongoing investments. Secondly, my business itself is a VAR for a SaaS product. If I can’t articulate the benefit, I don’t deserve to be in the game.

Thinking of the products we’ve bought into, my answer has to be nuanced. Sometimes it makes sense to go direct, sometimes it makes sense to go with a VAR. I think of it like this: The closer your requirements are to the vendor’s standard use-case, the weaker the case for a VAR. There is nothing remotely unusual about the way I use my accounting, email or HR packages. I’m not integrating them with any other system. I’m entirely happy with the level of look and feel customisation I can do myself. The software is straightforward enough I can do everything I need to without training or guidance. So, the only reasons I would go with a VAR would be if they could beat the direct sales force on price (unlikely, but sometimes possible), or if I needed to contract in a particular currency, or with a legal entity in a named geography, and the direct sales operation were not set-up to support that.

However, once you get a little further away from the providers’ standard use-case scenario, or the closer the service is to a genuine core or customer-facing function in your business, the case for using a VAR begins to swing back in their favour.

• Do you have complexities of integrating with other systems?
• Do you want different payment terms to those that may be offered by the vendor directly?
• Do you have concerns about training your team to administer the product?
• Even if fully trained, do you have concerns about the capacity of your team to administer the product? Does this create an opportunity cost in time against their primary role?
• Do you want to customise the product’s look, feel or even functionality beyond the standard offering?
• Do you want a partner who has the time to more deeply understand your individual business, available resources and unique success criteria and then best mould the solution to reflect them?
• All SaaS products evolve over time. Do you have the headspace to think through how the product roadmap and future releases will introduce both risks and opportunities to your solution. Do you fear not having the bandwidth to spot and plan for these?
• Do you need support in bridging the gap between what the SaaS product delivers, and the manual and people factors outside the software that link together and make your overall business tick?

Answer yes to any of the above, and it is certainly worth thinking about a VAR. In our case, our CRM software could have been bought off-the-shelf, but we also needed guidance on process changes - ideas for content marketing, and an implementation strategy tailored to our business. These things wouldn’t have been well served by the generic online self-help, or the standard installation package from our chosen CRM vendor. With only a marginal uplift in initial cost, a VAR offered the opportunity to get a deeper level of tailored implementation support. This went beyond just a CRM implementation, and became a whole re-engineering of our end-to-end marketing, sales and customer success processes that happened to leverage a particular CRM tool we had our eye on. So for us, when looking at CRMs, a VAR was absolutely worth talking too.

Before I started my business, I used to work on big change management projects, often revolving around IT solutions for large, complex, multi-national organisations. We had a saying that change was all about getting all three components of people, process and technology right. Any project that focussed on the technology, but neglected the people and process, was doomed to fail. Buying a SaaS solution will often nail the technology part, but if you want to release the full benefits of the solution you need to get the supporting people and processes right too. This is where an experienced VAR puts the ‘V’ for ‘Value’ into the acronym.

GuyKat are a VAR of Docebo, a SaaS Learning Management solution. In a future post I'll explore the value we can add to your project to implement a training and content strategy or partner-enablement program, above and beyond the procurement of the software.

This post was written by GuyKat CEO Guy McEvoy, to find the original piece, click here

by Hannah