IT support is an important part of any company’s technology plan, but there is another important component that should go hand in hand. Employee training is the perfect complement to strong IT support for many reasons. In fact, according to a workplace study, over 65% of employees prefer to learn at work, and more than 55% prefer to learn at their own pace.

There are options for employee training including online courses, face-to-face classes, training offered by your IT providers, and even technology classes at local community colleges or technological organizations. And for basic training, you likely have someone on staff who can lead the charge.

All of these are great ways to give your employees some additional training, which in turn makes your IT support more effective. Plus, employee education has added benefits like reducing turnover and helping employees feel valued.

Here are 5 ways employee training helps.

1. Better communication with IT professionals

Whether your IT support is provided by an off-site managed IT services partner or in-house staff who work in your office right along with other employees, employee training can help communication between teams.

Employees should have some guidelines for communicating tech problems with IT support. The better your staff is at accurately summarizing support issues, the more effectively they can explain those issues to the support team. And when IT support starts with a well-documented ticket, they can often resolve the issue much more quickly.

Less research and legwork means better network performance and faster recovery when things don’t go as expected.

2. Avoid simple issues

There’s a joke in the IT world about the most common troubleshooting suggestion: “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” But here’s the irony. A surprising number of IT issues really can be solved by power-cycling a device.

Of course, IT professionals are more than happy to help if the problem is more complex. But there are several simple tips and tricks that any employee should know to try before contacting IT support. Power-cycling is one of them.

Training employees to check for basic issues before reaching out to IT could save resources and time on both ends.

3. Better security

Your IT team can do everything possible to secure your servers and important data, but if your employees don’t know about the latest phishing schemes, ransomware, and trends in strong passwords it can all go to waste.

Employee education is essential for securing company data, especially with the increasing prevalence of sophisticated modern targeted phishing attacks called spear phishing, voicemail phishing (vishing) and SMS/text message phishing.

4. Get into the cloud

As many businesses transition to the cloud, some employees may get left behind. Help them catch up with some education not only about your specific cloud technology but what the cloud is and how it impacts their work.

Any transitional to a new tech solution can be stressful. But proper training will set your employee’s minds at ease and help to avoid hassles. Any time your company adopts a new technology, it’s important to offer training to employees to smooth over the transition.

5. Stay calm in a crisis

With extra technological knowledge, your employees will feel more confident when things shift into crisis mode—whether it’s a natural disaster, a cybersecurity attack, employee error or a hardware failure. Employee education can lead to less downtime after a disaster, faster identification of a problem by IT professionals, and faster access to data backups to get essential information and keep things running.

Are you ready to take your IT support and employee education to the next level? Contact your managed IT services provider (MSP) for specific tips on things your employees should know about. Your MSP may even offer direct employee training assistance.