Training IT Staff

There’s a classic conundrum associated with IT training. If you don’t train, the argument goes, your IT staff will fall behind, and your business will suffer. If you do train, your staff becomes more attractive to other employers, increasing your risk of losing them along with your training investment.

There’s no denying that many IT workers are looking for greener pastures. In a survey released last summer by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), 58% of IT workers said they are looking for a new job. Of those, 73% cited money as a key factor — the highest of all factors cited.

Preoccupation with paycheques can be misleading, however. After all, who couldn’t use a raise? It may be more significant, therefore, that 64% said their current job offers no opportunities for advancement, 58% said they want a new challenge, and 34% said their current job does not pay for or subsidize professional training or education. What these numbers indicate is that IT workers are shunning organizations that don’t help them improve their skills and move forward along a career path.

Aligning to the business

When it comes to whether or not to train, many organizations may have no choice, particularly when they have complex environments to support. According to Colleen Moorehead, president of Toronto-based training provider Nexient Learning Inc., training is becoming a major issue, particularly for younger workers. “When you think of 20 years ago,” explains Moorehead, “we walked through the workforce and learned by apprenticeship, if you will. This environment is moving too fast for that.” As a result, organizations need to take an active role in developing their staff if they want to retain the best. “Ongoing training is part of employee retention,” explains Moorehead. “I think that’s sort of the new world.”

Training IT staff brings up a number of questions. How much training is enough, and how much is too much? How much should be devoted to training on vendor products? What about certifications? What about training in related generic skills, like project management, communications, or vendor management?

According to Moorehead, the key is aligning the training with the business. “When you invest in education, the company has to get a return,” explains Moorehead. “They have to know how it’s going to map to business results. Any company, no matter what size, has to have a business performance framework.”

The employment life cycle

As Brenda Kerton, lead analyst for Info-Tech Research explains, taking a strategic view of training is new territory for many managers. “I’m not sure IT training is a terribly mature process,” explains Kerton. “There’s tons of excellent IT education out there, and IT courses, but that doesn’t mean the process the employers are using is terribly mature.”

Kerton recommends handling training as an essential component of the HR process. “You have to look at training as part of the employment life cycle — the hiring, the maintaining, development, and de-hiring,” explains Kerton. “It starts with hiring the right skills, continues with maintaining those skills and growing the new ones as needs arise, and recognizing when somebody is not able to learn what you need them to learn. So it’s really important to look at training in that whole picture.”

Kerton recommends that organizations look at the roles they require of their IT staff, and then “ruthlessly prioritize” the skills, competencies, and behaviours needed to support these roles. “It’s a lot easier to have the discussion with a financial manager when you can say, ‘here are the people we’ve got, here are the roles, these roles are needed to support these business objectives, I need this skill, and I’ve identified a gap here, and here’s what it’s going to cost us.’”

Certifications

Training also needs to be viewed from the standpoint of the individual learner, and Moorehead recommends that training be incorporated in the performance review process. “Learning paths are generally created as part of the performance review with the employee,” she explains. “Where does this person want to go in the organization over time. What are their goals? And from those goals, what are the skills they would have to add to reach those goals?”

Because of the rapidly changing technology landscape, these goals can be a moving target. “We all know that organizations like Microsoft are coming up with a very large technical agenda in terms of products that are hitting the market as close as a month from now to three and four years out. Are you upgrading to Vista? Office 2007? If those are the technical changes that are going to occur, are you going to have people in place that have those skills?”

Training on vendor products brings in another factor that worries employers — certifications. The perception is that they will be used as passports to higher paying jobs with other companies. Kerton, however, believes that certifications are not as much of a factor as people believe. “What we found mostly is that there isn’t a significant premium on vendor-related certifications,” explains Kerton. “They don’t really command that much in the marketplace. The vendor-neutral or discipline-related certifications have some impact, although frankly, there’s lots of argument as to how real it is.”

Reduced cost, expanding options

Although the need for IT training is growing rapidly, options such as e-learning have done much to reduce training costs. Synchronous learning, a method that is gaining favour, uses a virtual classroom to bring geographically dispersed learners together in a single instructor-led session. This provides many of the benefits of classroom training without the travel costs.

There’s also a lot more to training than courses. “The other side of training,” comments Kerton, “is to recognize that from an employee’s perspective, packaged training or certification are just one aspect of professional development. We need to look at on-the-job training. What kind of roles, what kind of projects can I get on where I actually get an opportunity to do something new or different, or advance the skill that I’m growing. And what kind of expertise do I get to work with?”

Another important area is the practice of skills transfer — engaging outside consultants who implement projects to train internal IT staff so they’ll be able to look after the new technology. The advantage of this kind of training is that it is highly personalized, and directly applicable to the IT environment in question.

Making resources such as on-line books available to employees is another area that should not be overlooked. They are relatively inexpensive, and more important, workers tend to use them. The key in many cases is giving employees reading time. “For a lot of them,” explains Kerton, “they end up using them off hours. But they still consider it a benefit.”

On the whole, the IT training industry is growing rapidly — worldwide revenues for IT training will top $8 billion in 2008, according to a recent IDC study. If the growing role of technology in our lives is any indication, this is a trend that won’t be going away anytime soon. “We’re going to be lifelong learners,” says Moorehead.