Creating a training plan for going paperless in agriculture

1. Identify your training objectives

The broad goal of your training plan is to educate your team on how to be paperless, but what are the specific outcomes you want from this training plan? Your outcomes will closely relate to what technology you will use for your paperless workflow, they could look something like:

• Health and safety incidents will be reported in Locale Central.
• Our field checklists will be filled out by our on-site team in Locale Central, and managed by our admin team.
• Invoices, purchase orders, and receipts will be managed by our admin team in Xero.
• Emailed statements, correspondence, or letters will be saved by our admin team in Google Drive.
• Legal documents will be digitally signed by our admin team using Adobe Acrobat, and saved in Google Drive.

2. Break down your training objectives into business requirements and processes

Once you have your objectives, the next step is breaking down your training objectives into the individual business processes your team will need to know how to do, and the prerequisites to carrying out the business processes. It’s also important to distinguish what groups of people are relevant to each prerequisite or business process.

For example, if we were to look at the objective “Our field checklists will be filled out by our on-site team in Locale Central, and managed by our admin team.”:

Prerequisites:

• Each administrator and on-site staff member has set up their Locale Central account.
• The on-site team has installed the mobile app onto their phones.
• The field checklists have been created by yourself or an administrator in Locale Central, ready to use.

Business processes:

• On-site team fills out and submit a new completed checklist on the mobile app.
• Admin team views the completed checklist on the web app.

3. Design and implement your training plan

Your identified prerequisites can either be addressed before you start the training, or if applicable done as part of the training session. Typically, anything that involves downloading an app or signing up for an account is best done as part of the training session so that you can help each other with any hurdles, and so that your team can follow along on their own devices if applicable.

Next, you want to create step by step instructions for each of your business processes. Then, split your team up into groups, which should be divided up according to what you need to teach, e.g. you’ll have a group for your admins where you teach the admin tasks, and a group for your on-site team that teaches them how to use the mobile app. After you’ve done that, arrange a time to have a practical, hands-on learning session with each group where you go over the step by step instructions you wrote down earlier in a live demo.

Ideally, put those instructions after the training session somewhere accessible such as Notion or Google Drive so that your team can easily refer to them later if they forget how to carry out any of the tasks. The added benefit of keeping your business processes documented is that if the steps change, e.g. you add an extra step, you can update the documentation so that everyone can easily stay on the same page.