The IT industry attracts a certain type.
Of course, I’m generalizing, but technology is complicated, and the detailed–oriented nerds of the world excel here. As is the case with any strength, the love of complexity prevalent in the MSP industry can be a weakness when it comes to building non-technical organizational competencies. Training falls victim to this.
Technology training for the average business professional is not complicated (and not easy). I’ve had many conversations with MSP leaders in the early days of PoplarMSP and I see some decision making that resembles the thought process behind picking a backup or security vendor — let’s keep it simple.
MSPs don’t need to offer dozens of different types of training. If you’re doing very little today, you really could make good progress by starting with just a core set of simple topics. Even one is greater than zero. Think about the people we’re trying to reach. They all have a core set of basic needs, and there are a lot of them.
Most business professionals are interested in knowing about the IT landscape —– the cloud, trends, etc. They are also very concerned about security (as they should be), both from a user-perspective and from an organizational and cultural perspective. Lastly, people want help with how to use their core technology better (Teams, Excel, Word, etc).
Smart Dolphins IT Solutions (my MSP) has got a ton of mileage out of User Security Awareness, Teams and Office Suite training sessions.
We’re regularly talking about what more can we do and developing new content and processes. However, we didn’t wait to have 10 topics refined before we got started. Likewise, our PoplarMSP clients typically start with three core topics and could quite easily just repeat those for the first year or two and get a lot of value from this very simple approach.
MSPs have a lot of complexity to master. Training isn’t complex. There is a sea of people out there that need and value basic technology training. Whether you use PoplarMSP or not, don’t overthink getting started in helping them. We can help, but so can you. Start!