People want to be good at their job. You want your people to do their job well, and we all know that a competent, knowledgeable employee is an asset to the company.

Now, you could take an informal approach to making your staff more competent, and expect them to learn the subject as they go along. That’s how a friend learned their way through SharePoint — read a bit here, experiment a bit there. He said that it was a great learning experience, but also took a long time, and that time could have been better spent. As an employer, can you really afford this hit-and-miss approach? Think of the salary bill you will be paying while waiting for someone to get up to speed!

At a rough guess, it probably takes the average person 6-9 months to get a reasonable grasp of SharePoint if left to their own devices. Add another 6 months to be proficient. It will easily cost a year’s salary before you get someone who can deliver real value to the company and worse, could make several embarassing mistakes along the way.

Formal training shortens that period. It takes about a month to get the average IT person with experience through the basics of SharePoint and apply it in a properly structured program. Add perhaps another month to grasp the fundamentals of supporting technologies: two months versus six months.

I must also stress that formal training alone is not enough — there is no substitute for real practical experience once the basics have been thoroughly learned. Training and experience together are a killer combination, greater than the sum of the parts.

I’m not trying to give definitive numbers here, I’m communicating a concept and a point of view: why you should train your staff. The calculation of long term cost savings, expected increased productivity and so on can be provided by a training needs analysis. It's important that you can make an informed decision.