5 steps for creating an effective DAM training programme

9th January 2025

The implementation of a Digital Asset Management system offers a wide range of benefits to organisations across every industry, but realising those benefits requires an effective DAM training programme.

However, this isn’t necessarily easy to develop, and only around 30% of companies successfully navigate a digital transformation project such as this.

To ensure the implementation goes smoothly and that the platform is adopted by the entire organisation, follow these five steps for delivering DAM training.

Step 1: Define your training goals

First of all, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve with your Digital Asset Management training programme.

This might sound like an odd question—after all, you want to ultimately train employees to use the system—but the training goals should be more granular.

For example:

What departments and individuals need to be trained first? Think about who the ‘Power Users’ will be and who will only engage with the platform in a limited capacity.
What features are most important to the organisation’s specific asset management workflow?
What’s your required timeline for getting specific users and departments up to speed with what they need to know?

Understanding your training goals will help you to develop a comprehensive roadmap, and this is key to a successful implementation. Trying to train everyone on every feature all at once will be confusing and hard to absorb, so prioritise the most important information first. To make this easier, think about the primary uses the DAM will offer each department and which features are most relevant.

Step 2: Adapt training to specific user roles

Once you’ve developed your training programme timeline based on each stakeholders’ needs, you can start to map out the training materials for each specific user role. This can be done based on user group permissions (once these has been defined), ensuring employees will be trained on the functionality they’ll actually be using, rather than overwhelming them with too much information they don’t need to know. For example, most users won’t need to understand how asset analytics work or how to manage metadata tags, as this will be the job of the DAM Manager.

Digital Asset Management training sessions should also be tailored to technical ability and experience. If someone has never used a DAM before they’ll need a much more basic level of training compared to employees with lots of DAM experience.

Step 3: Provide hands-on training

One of the most effective training methods for getting people used to the new DAM is to offer hands-on training. Although the reasons for implementing a DAM and the concepts of how it works can be communicated during training sessions, when it comes to actually using the system it’s best to give people practical training.

Set up ‘test’ assets and tasks for different teams to practice on, for example on-the-fly image editing, sharing with internal and external stakeholders, and using metadata tags.

These practical sessions are also great for building stakeholder buy-in, as they’ll be able to see first-hand how the system will solve their day-to-day challenges and simplify asset management processes.

Step 4: Deliver training in manageable phases

There has been lots of research into how humans learn best, and one of the fundamental principles of this is known as ‘chunking’—the delivery of information, particularly on complex topics, in smaller phases.

This concept is rooted in ‘cognitive load theory’, the idea that the brain has a limited capacity to process information at once. Chunking involves organising information into cohesive clusters based on relevant associations, and you should apply this concept to your DAM training sessions and materials.

Putting this into practice:

Keep training sessions focused on a specific DAM feature set, or a few closely-related functions.
Break training materials into bite-sized modules, and avoid including too much complex information on a single page or slide.
Simplify the language you use as much as possible, particularly for user groups with limited technical skills or no previous DAM experience.
Use mnemonics and visualisation wherever possible to help learners memorise and understand the new concepts.

Step 5: Develop a maintenance plan and provide ongoing support

Like all software, a Digital Asset Management system needs monitoring and maintenance to ensure it’s working effectively from a technical perspective as well as a user perspective.

With this in mind, a maintenance plan should be developed as part of the training programme so every user understands how to ensure the new system remains efficient and delivers on the organisation’s goals.

Start by identifying the users who will be primarily responsible for maintaining the DAM. This will include the DAM Manager, IT team and any other power users identified during step one. Define routine maintenance tasks, who will carry them out, and what training is required to make sure they’re delivered correctly each time.

Secondly, develop the internal processes and policies each user will need to follow to keep the DAM organised and secure, and create tailored training based on these processes. The success of your DAM implementation will rely on the system being used correctly, so this step is absolutely essential if you want to maintain stakeholder and user buy-in.

Thirdly, think about how you can provide every user with ongoing support. This might be in the form of additional training sessions, nominating a DAM ‘champion’ who is responsible for troubleshooting and triaging issues as they arise, as well as providing opportunities to deliver feedback on how the system is working and what can be improved.

How we support customers with training needs

We pride ourselves on providing ResourceSpace users with unrivalled support, and our friendly customer success team is always on-hand to deliver expert advice on best practices and how to overcome challenges.

To find out more about how ResourceSpace works, why not request a free demo below? We’ll explore all of the core features of the platform, as well as discuss how we can support the implementation within your organisation.