Is your training program in a funk? Have PowerPoint presentations and PDFs lost their appeal? Are you hearing the line, "I wasn't trained on that!" too often? If so, we have some advice that may help you break the monotony of everyday training.In 2010, the group responsible for training student consultants at the CITES Help Desk undertook a daunting task. We needed to detail each service and application we supported as well as all of our policies and procedures. Every facet of our business had to be recorded then imparted to a newly re-positioned and nontechnical group of Help Desk consultants.In teaching this information we discovered what we already knew, but could rarely physically demonstrate: a Help Desk consultant can never fully understand the scope of what we truly do. "I wasn't trained on that," becomes an unavoidable reality. So, our training took a different approach. Instead of focusing on the "facts" of our business as we had relied on heavily in the past, we invested more time in developing critical thinking, effective search habits, troubleshooting and problem solving skills. "You don't know everything but you can find anything," became an unofficial mantra.Online coursework, job shadowing, lectures, and training games are just some of the methods that have been used in our training programs. This paper will explore the pros of each tool, but also show how they might be over-used, under-used or simply abused by the teacher or the student.
One of the greatest struggles for our Help Desk was handling regularly scheduled events like account deactivations or the distribution of financial aid letters.Year after year slightly different versions of these events caught us off guard causing confusion amongst the staff which in turn led to poor customer service. We were exclusively reactive to these situations. Our responses were not standard and would pass without a proper dissection of how the event should be handled in the future.
In 2009, the Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) Help Desk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began taking a more active role in supporting many of the services provided by CITES. The introduction of new services is inevitable. Providing excellent support requires collaboration from the early planning stages through implementation and beyond.The Help Desk experienced varied results during the integration of new services. Join us as we explore the importance of communication and collaboration between service managers and the Help Desk. We will discuss our successes and failures, past and present.Our approach contains requirements that must be satisfied before the Help Desk takes on support responsibilities. We are the face of the organization. We must be an advocate for our customers.We have a vision of how this organic process should work. Gaining trust and cooperation will be the foundation of a worldclass institution.
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