We will have all our maintenance employees go over there maintainX trainings once a year just as a refresher. I will have them do this at the same time we do all other trainings. 

Thanks @pat smith - this is helpful insight. If I may press you for a few more details, when your maintenance employees are going through their annual training, do they typically have access to a computer? Do the other (non-MaintainX) trainings require access to the internet?

they do have access to a computer, but all the other training we have to do is all on paper for now. we are looking at digitizing everything very soon. one thing I will do on the maintainX side is when we do the trainings I will create a work order for the training session, and it will have everything that we go over in the description I will then assign each person to it that way I can have a quick point to look at without having to drag every piece of paper out. also, I will scan and attach each training module that is on paper to the w/o in the file area.

I could see keeping an up-to-date “refresher” level training guide that get’s people up and running while also reminding regular users if you perform annual training. It’s nice to have offline training materials for reference. But I am not sure how great a need there would be. Of course, I always think it’s better to give the customer more options, but I don’t know how that might constrain your design team.

Oh! Also, a handout for requester best practices or anything like that for requesters as well as including a blurb about how and why using MX benefits both parties would be nice to have, but that’s almost more like marketing material at that point (2 birds?).

Is there a downside of having a printable offline version for reference? We have yet to implement user trainings but for us, one of the biggest blockers in training operators would be that the majority of them use a shared tablet in workstation mode to access MaintainX since they’re not issued laptops or phones. An offline alternative would really be useful in this situation. As far as certificates or proof of training, I would recommend having a quiz-only version for those doing the trainings offline.

On the topic of training, this might be a bit of a stretch for this platform since it’s not primarily an LMS but it would be super helpful if users could have certifications or trainings attached to their profiles. Even better if those tags would authorize/restrict being assigned to certain tasks. 

I appreciate the additional insights on this topic - thank you!

@DrDoctor re: a handout for Requesters - this is great feedback. As it happens, my team is currently working on training material for Requesters, aiming to publish within the next couple of months. Some of the assumptions we are looking to validate are whether Requesters would benefit more from shorter training material that is hosted offline (or at least outside of our Academy), due to their more casual relationship with MaintainX. We can definitely consult our Marketing team to incorporate language on the benefit to both the Requester and their organization, if it would help them see the relevance of MaintainX.

@Mike there is no outright downside, but as @DrDoctor suggests, it is more a question of design resource allocation. My team can put effort into maintaining offline training resources, but it would come at the expense of creating new online training material hosted in our Academy. Ultimately, we want to make sure that each learning audience has the best options available to them when it comes to accessing training material (be it online or offline). I think your suggestion to pass training/certification data to a MaintainX user’s profile is really innovative. It would be up to our Product team as to whether functionality such as this could be incorporated into the platform, but I can definitely pass this feedback along. In the meantime, we are working on having users’ training/certification data from MaintainX Academy reflected in MaintainX Community in the form badges (not the same as what you are suggesting, but in the same vein).

I’m sorry to be getting back to you so long after the fact, but I can tell you that keeping their casual relationship with MaintainX in mind is a worthwhile effort. Where I’ve worked Maintenance software (and previously, Maintenance tickets) were seen as the maintenance teams tool and responsibility. They see it the way I might see a self-checkout. “It’s just supposed to work the way I expect it, and give me the desired result. When it doesn’t, it should be clear why, and quickly resolved.” Which makes sense. It’s performing work for MY benefit and replacing an interaction between my customer and myself, just like self-checkout does.

So training from the perspective of “How do I make sure my request get’s seen, approved, and completed, and how to avoid headaches with this system.” Would be a great approach in that regard, I’d think. Maybe illustrate the lifecycle of a poorly filled out request vs a helpful one. I don’t know.

If the training is through your site, it would be a neat feature to allow someone to have a requester account, but remove their ability to make requests until they complete a request training/tutorial. Maybe the new work order they make is a request for the Maintenance team to welcome them to MaintainX.

Let me know if you have any marketing openings, haha. I have a graphic design background! ;)