The advantage of imparting specific IT training to staff which is not directly related to the IT department or any other IT related task is not that apparent. Why exactly would a firm teach an employee something which doesn’t relate to their immediate job task? Doesn’t it sound like a directionless expenditure of valuable resources that could be put to use more productively elsewhere?
While this might be true in other cases, the same doesn’t apply to training related to IT matters. Sure, training an employee who works in supply chain about human resource processes doesn’t make sense, but training that same employee on how it can leverage diverse technologies to perform better at his job does. And that’s where firms need to understand the importance of imparting IT training to all employees in the organization irrespective of whether they are in the IT department or not.
IT literacy is crucial towards powering a modern workforce that is capable enough to meet business goals in today’s fast-paced environment and if you are still a bit unsure of its importance, here are some core advantages of investing in IT training for your non-IT staff and employees:
Make Your Cybersecurity More Robust
If you have an understanding of the biggest pain points in ensuring top-grade cybersecurity in organizations, you will definitely opt for providing your employees with online IT training. This pain point is related to the ends left unchecked and unauthorized access transfers that usually become one of the easiest points of entry for cyber-attackers.
An employee who doesn’t know much about things like the importance of sensitive access to company networks or how to keep its credentials safe will definitely do something that will create an opening that cyber-attackers can easily exploit.
Sure you can create a system with walled-off access, but its better to ensure that attackers don’t find an opening rather than focusing on controlling their actions once they enter your networks. That’s exactly where IT training can help. It can foster cybersecurity literacy amongst everyone present in the organization, thereby making sure that they understand the basics of enterprise security and work along the lines the firm wants them to.
Makes Employees Better Equipped To Deal With Newer Technologies
Industry 4.0 technologies like IoT, big data, Cloud resources, AI and machine learning will become increasingly dominant as we go deeper into the next decade and their impact on businesses will inadvertently become more profound than ever before. This will require employees to work with these technologies and leverage them to gain high-end business value.
But, you cannot just expect your employees to work with these technologies right from the word go without them having the basic skills required to run them. Most managers or senior executives won’t understand how there is a connection in making employees do an office 365 certification and learning how to work with relational databases, but just like everything else, the development towards high-end technologies should be pre-empted by training in basics first, or the more advanced level technologies will not be well received by employees.
Allows Employees To Generate Better More Accurate Reports
One key aspect of any business-related task is to view just how well the task itself is progressing and how much it has achieved. If you don’t provide your employees with relevant online IT training courses, their reports will not be detailed as they won’t know how they can generate the data required for beyond surface-level reporting.
Businesses where employees know how to use tools like Microsoft Office, AWS, etc. can stand to generate better reports on tasks of importance going on in the organization. This makes things clear and allows the firm to plan actions better. It also helps employees to monitor their own progress and see how they can fulfill the remaining requirements without going overboard in terms of time or resources.
Better Integration and Transparency Throughout The Firm
Each task that a business accomplishes is invariably primed to affect the firm at other levels. For e.g. if the sales team is not generating the required numbers, soon the marketing team will be questioned on why isn’t there enough leads that the sales team could convert them. If the marketing team wasn’t aware of the low numbers by the sales team beforehand, it could never have altered its own strategy to ensure that the correct course is taken.
If this organization had acquired Microsoft 365 free training, then its sales team would have known how it could get its numbers on excel sheets in a manner that anyone in the organization looking at them could acquire a complete picture of what exactly is going on this department.
IT training for non-IT staff is integral towards ensuring that the different departments of the organization are working in unison and there is transparency across the board on the overall health of the business as well as that of each department. Firms who lose out on this or don’t implement it in the way it should be, are sure to face losses not because they are not producing the right products but because they don’t know where immediate action is needed.
Wrapping Things Up
IT training has numerous other advantages and their list certainly doesn’t end here. Through imparting IT training to non-IT staff, firms can leverage more value out of employees, power greater efficiency in tasks, reduce turnover rates and increase motivation among employees.
Most firms shy away from conducting such trainings because they lack the vision to see the more concrete advantages that can ensue out of such investments and you should definitely not be among them. So plan out your IT training for your non-IT staff today and start reaping its tangible advantages to your business almost immediately.