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One of the chief benefits of booking in-house (on-site) training, as opposed to sending your people off to a training centre to attend a pubic course, is that the training can be customised to suit the specific needs of your organisation. When booking in-house training courses, be sure to make this clear to the training company and brief them fully on your requirements. Produce a list of key topics that need to be covered after discussing the matter with the people who will be attending the course, their manager or someone in your organisation who already has the skills the trainees are looking to acquire.

Provide examples of your work to the training company before the course so that they have a good idea of the kind of documents your staff will need to create or modify (Naturally, you should first remove any sensitive or confidential information!).

Every good software training session offers users opportunities to practice the skills they are learning. Ask the training company to include your company’s documents into all practical exercises given to delegates during the training. For example, if your trainees are learning how to create corporate brochures, have the trainer show them how to create pages from some of your typical brochures during the course to verify that everyone is mastering the most important techniques.

You will need to find a suitable room where you can realistically conduct a training session and where the trainees can concentrate on learning without being interrupted or distracted. If your organisation does not have a dedicated training room then a meeting room can be modified for the purpose. Delegates should be able to see the trainer from their seat without having to perform any contortions. Each delegate should also have the use of their own workstation or laptop for the entire course and enough space to use a keyboard and mouse.

The appropriate version of the software should be loaded on each person’s machine and, ideally, everyone should be using the same version of the software. For example, running a course on Microsoft Word where some delegates have Word 2003 and others 2007 would be a nightmare, since the two versions have such major differences.)

A workstation or laptop connected to a screen projector for use by the trainer is not essential but is extremely useful, especially with a large group (say, more than half a dozen people). If your company does not own one, they can be hired for around 25 per day. A whiteboard and pens are also very handy.

For your training to be effective, delegates must be available for the duration of the course and must be off-limits to other members of staff. Ideally, they should be treated as absent from the office until their course ends. Equally, they should be motivated to do the training and agree that it will benefit them and that acquiring the new skills provided by the training will help them to work more effectively.