Upskilling Your Office

When new poeple start in your office, it is the perfect time to make sure that they know Vectorworks well. Since they will be working for you, it's important that they know how to use Vectorworks first, then they need to understand how you are using it.

It is really important that you have a structure for new users. I have been to several offices where they forget to tell the new users what to do, so the new user struggles on the best they can. Unfortately, they tend to be unproductive at best, and in most situations they make loads of mistakes that take the other more experienced users time to sort out. Vectorworks have Getting Started Guides that you can use to learn from. They work reasonably well and they are free, so you could use those guides to make sure your staff are working effectively.

Of real interet to me was a couple of visits to offices that have my Vectorworks Essentials Tutorial Manual.

The situation in the first office was that new users were not becoming productive early. There were just like I described above, they were worse than unproductive, they were dangerous. Several months ago I suggested that all new users be given my Vectorworks Essentials Tutorial Manual and one week to work through it. Last week I visited the office and the results are stunning. The new users are not just productive, they are more productive than the existing users that have not worked through the manual. That have also noticed that all users are now starting to read the manual. In the past the manual gathered dust on the shelf in the library, now it is always on someone's desk. It was great to see the manual looking used and dogeared.

The situation in the second office was slightly different. They didn't even know of my manual. When I visited they had many, many questions. When I looked around I found a couple of my older manual in the library collecting dust. When I got the manuals out, all of which were answered. They really couldn't believe that there could be much valuable information in the manuals. The next time I visited, they manuals were out on the desks and being used.