Build your training strategy

  • 5 minutes

A training plan is crucial for driving adoption of new technology in an organization. It ensures employees understand and feel confident in using the new technology, leading to consistent, efficient, and productive use across the organization. A training plan also accelerates users’ acceptance and minimizes resistance. As you think about your training plan, help employees understand why the change is happening, what’s in it for them, and why they’re being asked to change.

Employees will see productivity gains immediately with Microsoft 365 Copilot. But how each user personalizes their Copilot usage will evolve dramatically, so providing ongoing training is critical to optimizing that journey. For successful Copilot onboarding, organizations should encourage a culture of continuous learning. This includes emphasizing community and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Leaders should provide various resources and foster collaboration. Their aim is to keep users informed and to collectively overcome challenges. Such an environment isn't only helpful to learning but also boosts user engagement, satisfaction, and productivity with Copilot.

Before building your training plan, take time to understand the groups who require training, topics to cover, and audience learning preferences. Consider the following questions and examples (ex) given when preparing your training plan:

1. When you're putting together your training plan, you'll need to take into consideration key trainings:

  • Current productivity tools, ex:

    • Microsoft Teams
    • Outlook
    • SharePoint

  • Technology literacy, ex:

    • Employees in general are comfortable with technology. Exception is operations team, which doesn't rely on technology to complete day-to-day tasks.

  • Current change programs, ex:

    • Training has launched for new time-tracking software in operations department. Can apply cadence to introduce Microsoft 365 Copilot.

  • Training preferences, ex:

    • Short, online, easily accessible training modules
    • Microsoft 365 Learning Paths
    • Microsoft Viva Learning
    • Rapid enablement learning materials

2. Who needs to be trained?

  • Groups impacted by the Microsoft 365 Copilot implementation, ex:

    • Sales
    • Marketing
    • HR
    • IT
    • Finance

  • Audiences who will drive the change forward, ex:

    • Adoption managers
    • User enablement specialists
    • Champions
    • Early adopters
    • Stakeholders

  • Support organizations, ex:

    • IT operations or help desk
    • HR

3. How do they prefer to learn?

  • Recommended modalities, ex:

    • Face-to-face training – Sponsors (1 hour), Ambassadors training (1 hour), User enablement specialist (1 hour), Manager (1 hour)
    • Web-based training – On-demand webinars, videos, and online training
    • Self-paced training – Copilot Lab hands-on experimentation

  • Preferred modalities, ex:

    • Incorporate web-based training modules into Company Training portal for easy navigation

  • Ideal timing, ex:

    • Avoid scheduling during end of month/quarter/year for sales team

  • Helpful resources

4. What content will be helpful for your training plan?

Lay the foundation for continuous learning and an intelligent progression of AI skills

We suggest users start by building foundational Copilot skills at an individual level. Next, leverage those skills for more complex department-specific functions. Finally, move to advanced skills that benefit the entire organization through improved workflows and collaboration. This value and skill progression from the individual level to the organizational level is illustrated in the following image.

Infographic illustrates the foundation of continuous learning and progression of AI skills.

  1. Foundational skills: Start with top 10 generic skills from Copilot Lab that that deliver immediate success (e.x., summarize a meeting, email thread). Copilot Lab is a feature available both in product and online that helps users learn how to work with Copilot in their organization. This will accelerate a user’s deeper understanding of what Copilot can deliver in their specific scenarios creating the "aha moment."
  2. Departmental skills: Use the Copilot Scenario Library to train users on new departmental use cases and process improvement to impact departmental KPIs.
  3. Advanced skills: Extend to line of business systems to streamline and automate for organizational level impacts on revenue and costs.
Rapid enablement training

Our rapid enablement training plan is designed specifically for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot offers a special adoption opportunity to accelerate user satisfaction, creativity, and productivity by quickly enabling interactive learning with the product itself. This training prioritizes personalized interactive learning directly with the product to ensure a fast and effective implementation within the organization. It allows for rapid user onboarding, rapid feedback cycles, and in-product skilling tools as the main way to support adoption. The goal is to help users rapidly move from anxiety and/or confusion about the new experience to excitement and understanding through interactive learning with the new technology.

Our rapid enablement plan is meant for users to develop foundational knowledge before moving on to more advanced skills. It’s broken down into three parts: foundational learning, Copilot for you, and Copilot for your team. This plan complements the value and skill progression that is suggested for continuous learning.

1. Foundational learning

  • Responsible AI Principals
  • Copilot capabilities
  • Understanding and identifying AI-ready scenarios.
  • Where do I find Copilot? What is it’s future?

2. Copilot for you

  • Lead with Microsoft 365 Chat and Teams
  • Utilize Copilot Lab in product
  • Pivot to “Stay on Top” for personalized prompts
  • Practice the "Top Ten" tasks

3. Copilot for your team

  • Extend to Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint
  • Focus on content creation and sharing
  • Extend prompt skills
  • Highlight “/” capabilities for including relevant content

Use the content within Microsoft's Rapid Enablement Guide located inside our Copilot Trainer Kit to help facilitate rapid enablement training for your employees.

The following list has more training resources to help your organization get started: