Why You Need to Train Your Interns: Harnessing the Potential of interns

Last Updated on

August 9, 2021

Alicja King

Training your employees is a given, whether it's onboarding new hires, or offering training schemes like online courses or face to face learning to motivated workers. The internet is literally littered with guides to help you do this, and explaining why it's a good idea. However, the same can't be said for training externs, (in fact, while researching this topic, 'externs' rarely came up in the correct context) but myskillcamp is about to show you why it's imperative you do it, and how to start.

What's an extern, and why train them?

Externs are anyone who are outside the business but have a direct impact on how your business performs; clients/customers, suppliers, and partners. Let's go through them...

Clients and customers - As any customer success manager will tell you, a good customer journey is everything if you want repeat custom, large ROIs, good KPIs, and probably many other acronyms. A way to achieve a good customer journey is by training your clients to understand your service, and updating these courses when new features and patches occur. Not only does this allow your client to feel 'at home' on the platform, but it reduces any teething issues or struggles they may have... incidentally meaning your customer service team receives fewer angry messages. Win-win!

In fact, we bet you've received this kind of training. Many scheduling platforms offer courses, such as Hootesuite, AgoraPulse and many more (sometimes without even signing up). Not to mention courses like Twitter Flight School, and Google AdWords, for those who want to get to grips with social media platforms.

Suppliers - Training suppliers is paramount for two main reasons, firstly, logistics. Knowing when your materials are arriving, and ensuring suppliers follow your schedule (and not the other way around) means you can operate your day to day without delays. The second reason is quality of components. A great example of this is Apple: They need suppliers for many elements of their products, to ensure these components are up to their precise specifications, they train suppliers on how to create, and deliver parts.

A supplier can also be an operator; those who work in or near certain facilities need to receive training to ensure safety. A great example of this is Elia, who give structured, dedicated training to keep their operators safe.

Partners - If your product or service is sold in other stores, then providing partners with training enables them to successfully sell it. By providing education (not only at the start of the relationship but throughout) you can make good connections, ensure correct brand identity, as well as communication of existing and new features to potential customers.

How to train externs successfully

A good thing to keep in mind about training interns and externs is that not everyone needs the same training. A partner doesn't need to know when a component arrives, a customer doesn't need to know what to mention first in a sales pitch. So, create a catalogue that offers the right training to the right people. You can give and limit accesses, create new training, and offer personalised courses for different externs. This means you train effectively as a particular person can only take courses designed for them.

Oh, and at myskillcamp, we follow our own advice! When you sign up to use our learner experience platform we ensure you have a demo, e-learning courses, (so you know how to use the platform to its fullest) and have great customer service on hand to help if you need it.

Another great thing about the myskillcamp platform is the option you'll have to create these specific courses for your partners, suppliers and customers, while being able to add, edit and change user accesses when you need to. Giving you complete freedom to build an e-learning academy for your business. Ready to start?