Great question. We’ve had to deal with this a lot as we’ve been making new hires and adding consultants to our team, and part of my job is to make sure that all of them can use Asana. An approach has worked well for me is to create a training project full of tasks, where each task teaches the person to do one thing in Asana, and by the time they’ve finished all the tasks in the project they have done everything action they need to know in order to use Asana.
The tasks in the project start out very simple, in order to build confidence, and then become more challenging over the course of the training. Completing the project takes 1 hr as part of a training, at the end of which the trainee has all the core skills.
For example, the first task in the training project is called “Complete this task,” and all the person has to do is check the check box and finish the task, teaching them that Asana is about checking off tasks. Then the second task is to change view so that they can view their completed task, teaching them that Asana has different views and that tasks never really disappear. Then the third task is for them assign themselves to a task, and then they switch to “My Tasks” and see how that task now pops up there, teaching them how “My tasks” pulls together everything assigned to you, and that assigning tasks to teammates will make that work show up in their “My Tasks” view and so on.
The training project goes on like that, and by the time they finish all the tasks in the project, they will have used all the core Asana skills, “learning by doing.” For the last section of the training, I show them the specific Asana projects and teams that they will be working in, and let them see how it works and take questions.
After the training, they can follow up with me or refer to the info stored in their training project if they forget how to do something.
This way, whenever we have a near hire or consultant, all I have to do is clone the training project and do a one-hour training with them and we’re good to go, which is super time efficient. In between trainings I update the training project template whenever we change something about the way we use Asana.