Availability of BADER training

I’m interested in knowing whether any wings provide training on how to use BADER, other than the resources on the helpdesk.

eg. how to put an application through on SMS, or how to correctly post announcements as Wing Staff, etc.

Responses are much appreciated.

IIRC, there was an element of Bader training included in BASIC last time I did it. It was also covered more thoroughly on our old - much missed - Squadron Executive Officers course (not just an officers course - but a course open to anybody holding an “executive” role on squadrons. This has now been split to a series of 1 day seminars which cover each of the role in more detail - I’d like to think this includes the relevant SMS/SharePoint areas within the training package.

I personally feel that not enough Bader training is provided. When Bader first took off I was involved in the Wing roll out and did a series of evening training sessions - with offers to go to squadrons and support as required (along with a small team of us). NONE of us were taken up on the offer - yet most of WExO’s venom in recent months has been directed at poor Bader admin. Sigh.

We did some online training sessions on the SMS AT module when it was released. Nothing beyond that really.

Recently had a training session on Bader and Ultilearn at WHQ with staff from the Bader team and a “ultilearn specialist”. It was very informative and productive.

Pretty much like others thus far, apart from the roll out, nothing, and just left to feel your way through it. The documentation provided was very techy and put a lot of jobbing IT users and older staff off from the start. I didn’t bother with it and just started my usual thing of fiddling around to see what it did. As long as there’s a delete and undo, no worries.

I’ve sat down with staff and done some training to help them along with finding thing on s/point and setting things up on SMS. But even setting up other staff accounts is a complete palava and nowhere near as easy as what I experience at work, doing the same thing.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t keep fiddling with the layout of SMS as in recent months and when there are changes/updates these are emailed to all accounts. Saying exactly what they are and how, why and what they improve. If they don’t improve something why change it? Although an improvement should be in the “eye of the user” not the IT/software techy type.

About 2 and half years ago I attended a SW Region Bader evening ran by Logs4c which covered some bare essentials on the Activities approval but that’s come a long way since.

I run a Bader Training Day for our Wing a few times a year. I’ve run 5 courses now and most people give some good feedback from the course and the general comment is that they didn’t realise that Bader did everything it does. Most people go away with less frustration (except for the one course where Ultilearn went down during it)!

A couple weeks back I spent an afternoon with Plymouth & Cornwall WExO to help them get kick started with Bader too.

I would argue that - outside of complete technical biffs - the fact that there’s any training required for Ultilearn just shows how bad it is.

Perhaphs somewhat ironically, I think what’s really needed is not so much training for the user, delivered by the local “Bader experts”; but training for many of the ‘experts’ on how to properly set up and use sharepoint and ultilearn.

Correct information management, file structure, file naming, &c from the higher levels would enable users to more easily find what they need…without having to sift through heaps of poorly located, duplicated, out of date, and badly written documents and files.

There’s little point in investing time teaching people how to ‘work around’ the problems, especially when the layout and document location on some Wing sites seems to change regularly, and there’s little parity between sites. Far better to get those people with upload rights using the system correctly in the first place.

It wouldn’t totally alleviate the problems - it wouldn’t help fix Ultilearn’s broken functionality, nor assist in getting SMS to properly do reports - but it would be a step toward solving the biggest issue sharepoint poses: the fact that it just plain isn’t used properly.