Thursday, January 21, 2016

Darwin 10.66 is available on the ThinkWare website. The release contains updates for 1099s and the OSHA 300A form in Darwin 10.

Friday, January 1, 2016

NEW LEARNING OPTIONS IN 2016

With our new Leader of Training and Consulting firmly entrenched in his work at ThinkWare, new programs and new learning options will be released in 2016.

One of the improvements will be the variety of learning options available.  Most of the knowledge transfer done for you as clients has been through phone training.  Phone training is where one of our technical staff is with you or one of your co-workers on an online web session. In these sessions, a primary focus is for our subject matter expert to show you how a particular use of the software.  One example is to show you how to export information from Darwin software to a time sheet.

Periodically, in the past, we have provided some hands on training in Cincinnati.  One example of this is the year end workshop.  We will continue offering these hands on training sessions.

In 2016, we will be adding more hands on learning options.  These will be online programs.  The methodology of these programs is having the participants spend a high percentage of the time doing exercises repetitively to help accelerate their learning.  One example of this will be a class on processing a payroll.  In this class, we will first have the learner walk through a simple payroll (e.g. all salary staff) together with the trainer.  Then they will run a similar payroll on their own.  Then we will walk through a payroll with time sheets.  Again the participant will do it on their own.  Progressively, we will add more complexity to each round of running a payroll.  By the end of the session, the attendee will have run numerous payrolls on their own.  We know, from experience, that will will help build skill during the training.  Our objective for this type of learning is not only to build knowledge (I understand how this is done); but to build skill (I know how to do this).

These online programs will primarily be on areas needed for a new employee at your company. For example, if you hire a new payroll processing person who has not processed a payroll using Darwin software, they would attend the payroll processing program.

We also plan on releasing "how to" web sessions.  These are a demonstration of how the software functions.  These will be primarily focused on new releases.  This mode of learning will primarily be used when the complexity of the process is low.  One example is the new DNet interface.  Because our developers made the interface more graphically simple, we expect many of our clients will acclimate to the new interface readily (and maybe even without any help from ThinkWare learning tools).

We expect our work on developing new learning programs for you will lessen the amount of time you spend using the software because you are more adept at using the functions of the software.


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