Training New Personnel In Record Time Without Having Them Feel Overwhelmed

We small business owners get into this situation every now and then - having to train new personnel to replace a key individual who has resigned, retired, etc. How can we make that training as efficient as possible without it becoming a real "pain?" Well folks, I'm going to make your life a whole lot simpler with another freebie courtesy of Lifehacker.com. This great "goodie grab" is called Camtasia and you can get a perfectly good version of Camtasia 3 right here and at no charge! Sure it's 2 versions behind, but I still have it on some older computers around my studio and it works great.

You ask what is Camtasia? It's the software I use to create my "Technique Tuesday" tutorials. I know what you are thinking - I don't need to make tutorials. Think again, "Grasshopper" - my studio manager of over 8 years just retired about 2 months ago. We just hired a wonderful new person, Jennifer, to fill that position. Here is the question - How do you get that new person up to speed without taking hours and even days of your own time to train them?

Well, I have been creating training tutorials like crazy. These training tutorials include several of our studio processes, Photoshop lessons, in fact anything relating to our computer production processes. We have over a dozen created so far. I've even put Camtasia on all of the staffs computers so they can create their own sharable videos that relate to their own work responsibilities. That way if someone needs to jump in to a less than familiar job, they have something to quickly review before wasting tons of time trying to figure it out on their own.

We are creating an entire "knowledge base" for my studio. Now any "new-hire" has the training right at their fingertips. Sure, there will still be questions to be answered, but all of our tutorials sure off loads most of the training time from myself or my experienced staff's shoulders.

Is the importance of this - training - starting to sink in? Think of businesses that are well run. What is key to their success? Product of course. But it's also a well trained staff. Just check out any new restaurant chain that opened in your area. Most of the "new hires" go through at least 2 weeks of fairly intensive training. That's why they feel comfortable and the place runs pretty much like clockwork even on their first day. We small business owners can experience the same kinds of success by following the "big guys" example and set up in house training programs ourselves. Camtasia lets us do that fairly easily.

If you commit to producing two 10 minute tutorials a week, you will end up with your own training library in no time and a great job training resource. Make it a New Year resolution for 2008 - grab Camtasia 3 right here and get started right away. They have plenty of online tutorials themselves to get you up and running. Hey, more good news - you can upgrade to Camtasia 5 for only half price. Now that's a sweet deal.