It's probably obvious that when you introduce a completely new software platform at your company you should have a training plan ready. But what you might not have realized is the importance of establishing such a plan when you're rolling out a newer version of something familiar—such as Office or email software.

The truth is when migrating to newer versions of software, training can help prevent productivity loss. Beyond that, short training sessions can help users maintain their skill sets while highlighting new features that can boost their capacities of using the software.

We’ve all had those moments with software or other technology where we just don’t get it. Sometimes adapting to new technology is hard. But it’s also critically important.

When you are in a position to lead an organization through technical change, it’s your role to help everybody on your team work their way through the stumbling blocks and adapt successfully to the new software platform.

"By its very nature, technology evolves quickly, racing to address the new situations and problems created by the implementation of previous technologies, so that even young employees who enter the workplace with advanced technological skills can find themselves quickly falling behind the technological curve," writes Edward Mercer in a contribution to Chron.

There's no denying the fact that training employees on new software can take a tremendous amount of time and effort. This problem is only compounded when the software you're dealing with isn't particularly popular and there aren't that many resources out there to help you. The solution for this predicament could be to create a custom curriculum. While this sounds like it could take a lot of work, you'll reap some major benefits in the end. In this post we'll take a closer look, so you can feel empowered in putting together a custom training agenda for your employees.

For those implementing new software programs at their businesses, time is always a concern—the time it will take to develop what kind of training you want to use, the time it takes to research the best methods to set this up, the time it takes for everyone to complete the training, and so on. The good news is that if you take the time to create the right process from the beginning, you can expect a lot of these actions to fall into place efficiently and within your deadline.

It's probably obvious that when you introduce a completely new software platform at your company you should have a training plan ready. But what you might not have realized is the importance of establishing such a plan when you're rolling out a newer version of something familiar—such as Office or email software.