Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
Alteryx is a highly sought-after tool once people try it once–and with that demand comes the questions to the internal users of Alteryx: Can you train us to use it ourselves? Good news! You can! Here are some tips and tricks to help!
Get your trainees trial licenses ASAP!
The best way to learn Alteryx is to have Alteryx and a license to operate it. Theory can only take you so far, a hands-on approach helps tremendously in going the extra mile. With that in mind, reach out to your Alteryx official partner to inform them of the request!
Whilst doing so, make a list of users with their names, emails, designations, their skill with data analytics and engineering, and provide a brief introduction of their personas if you can. The list will be tremendously helpful to Alteryx and your own internal team to keep track of usage and conversion statistics down the line! It also serves as a fun reminder for to-be Alteryx rockstars down the line if they came from this path!
Once a trial license is procured, do not wait till the training period to get them onboard! Get the user to sign up for a Maveryx account and follow the next point.
Get users on Maveryx and enroll them in the Launch Pad!
Remember the previous point on not waiting to onboard trainees? That is where the Maveryx community comes into play! If you are reading this blog, congratulations! You are already here in the Maveryx community. What you need now is to direct the trainees to the Launch Pad – an excellent resource that is curated to help beginners as an introduction to Alteryx.
Source: Alteryx Launch Pad Site
The Maveryx community is a great one-stop site for you to manage and follow the progress of your trainees with their progress metrics in the Maveryx site measured for you. You can also include fun games and side quests for trainees with the badges program on their profile or even Weekly Challenges once they are up to speed! You can even gamify the whole process to make it entertaining and fun for your trainees.
Launch Pad is a great resource that I have personally used as well. It gave me foundational knowledge of Alteryx and always challenged me to think about the possibilities with Alteryx. The in-house training methods are effective in communicating the basics without having end users feel overwhelmed. Its interactive nature as well enables users to play with Alteryx in a safe and fun environment! Once they are done with the Launch Pad, you can also consider the full Maveryx Academy suite for free!
Consider Alteryx’s Strategic Customer Success help!
If your company is signing on officially with Alteryx, you may want to consider its customer success and services (more information here). This is something that I can personally vouch for, as my company has a dedicated Strategic Customer Success manager (@GaneshBo) who has been very helpful in helping us get the groundwork running in terms of training.
This is a great service by Alteryx specifically because of its ability to train large amounts of people whilst covering the basics of Alteryx in a beginner-friendly and analytics-level agnostic approach. They provide high production value content and cover areas that are specifically targeted – for example, if your goal is to get users acquainted with Alteryx, the customer success team can curate their content to suit your end goal. They also record their training sessions so that they can be reused multiple times for new joiners!
In one of my training requests with them, I emphasized the need for certification focus to get users micro and at least core certified by a certain quarter, and we worked out a plan together to understand the requirements to make it happen. It goes beyond the help documentation provided here, and I am thoroughly happy with how Alteryx helped get us 30 user certifications (micro and core!) in that short period. It also helps Alteryx better understand your needs if your company takes the free analytics maturity assessment to better gauge your company’s overall standing.
Overall, this has been an excellent addition to our internal Alteryx journey – and I am surprised that not many Alteryx customers know of this yet! I would say that this is one of the better support structures I have seen in any tool, and Alteryx does not disappoint at all. The end users that have engaged with this training have provided great positive feedback, and we even stemmed this out to have “data clinics” so that trained users can further consult our Alteryx Customer Success partner to better understand and brainstorm Alteryx ideas into reality!
Utilize Alteryx Designer’s internal Help tab!
Within Alteryx Designer, there lies the lonely Help tab. That Help tab contains a myriad of information and sample datasets/workflows that trainees can use and play around with. It has one feature that I think is criminally underused: Learn One Tool at a Time.
Source: Screen capture of my own Alteryx Designer
Alteryx has documented each process and tool extensively in their documentation hub and on the Maveryx Community blogs. The level of detail and granularity of each post is truly amazing – and I think it is worth exploring on your own!
It is also hyperlinked to the appropriate documentation site and has detailed explanations along with sample use cases of each tool. Alteryx also provides a list of sample workflows that are commonly asked by users, such as how one can clean and prepare data or how one should best describe what is happening in the data. For more bespoke use cases, you can visit the Alteryx website here to get other starter kits!
Go old-school with Presentation Decks & Bespoke Training
I get it. Some places are old-school with their presentation decks and bespoke internal training. The problem is, how do you do it? Sounds easy, in theory, to train someone internal using someone internal who knows the software well. But it is not that straightforward.
There are a few things to consider – primarily the method by which you deliver your training. Some Alteryx trainers go full theory or practical, whilst some balance practical with theory. You must understand that Alteryx training works best depending on the outcome which you desire. If it is a show-and-tell sort of training, then the sharing should focus on the theory components and wrap up quickly. If it is an enablement training, then practical and theory mixtures are important.
Secondly, the content matters greatly here. I will say, do not reinvent the wheel too much. Alteryx has sample datasets, and you can focus on several basic tools from the Favorites tab as a starter pack for beginners, then move up to more advanced training once the trainees are at least core certified.
Thirdly, your presentation decks need production value. What I mean by that is that the visuals you use are important. How you convey your message and how you visualize your points matter. Do not put a whole presentation deck full of essays on Alteryx – it needs to be curated properly for the eyes to enjoy. Alteryx has great presentation decks that you can refer to as well – and you can request this from your Alteryx teams to help you too.
Finale
Whatever training is provided, there are things that are important: Content, presentation style, flexibility, and goal. But we often forget that the best trainers are the ones that cater to the trainee. Take all that is important but have the trainee in the heart of it all – otherwise, your training will not make a strong impact.
Thank you for reaching the end of this blog post! I really appreciate that you took the time to read everything. Do you have any tips you wish to add to this? Comment down below what you are doing in your organization so that we can all learn from each other!
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