| While IT professionals are constantly reminded that upgrading
their skills is paramount to being and remaining an IT worker
- especially in this ultra competitive IT market, training
has surely become the Cinderella of IT corporate budgets.
How can the IT worker make sense out of this and what's really
the consequence for organizations? How does the training equation
add up?
In the current economic climate, many organizations must
cut costs and find new strategies to stay alive; costs associated
with information technology are not an exception and IT
training is more often seen as an expense rather than an
investment.
Traditional training
Classroom training led by an instructor is the traditional
form of training. It is an expensive form of training and
the return on investment (ROI) for companies is not always
apparent (some studies show that only 8-12 per cent of attendees
can trace measurable performance improvements to having
attended these classes).
Sometimes the ROI is not there because of poor project
planning. For example, a company decided to rewrite a mission-critical
system and told their developers that they have to retrain
in Java or six months down the road their jobs will be gone
- the company even paid for the training at a local college
- but as soon as the fresh Java converts returned to their
desks, the project was shelved due to performance problems.
The buddy system
The buddy system is a tried-and-true approach to training.
Often, because many tasks require only a minimal subset
of a tool's capability, it is possible to get by (at least
for a while) with picking up a minimal set of survival skills
from an internal expert on a language or package. A new
twist to this is the Internet. Thanks to the availability
of a wealth of information, forums and experts, some project
managers feel that a new language can be learned by most
staff, on very short notice, with only a few Internet links
given to them. The employee's time then becomes the whole
cost for this training.
E-learning is a more respectable option, and an attractive
one because of its flexibility and multitude of flavours
(desk-top based, intranet based, distance learning via internet
- to name just a few), but it is not necessarily cheap or
more effective.
Mentoring
Mentoring appears to be the new darling of many companies
on the lookout for new, inexpensive and effective ways to
train their IT staff. This can certainly be attributed to
its minimal cost, and to the fact that very specific knowledge
can be passed on to the mentored. Knowledge that is not
strictly technical, but also business related. Having a
basic understanding of business is becoming more and more
a desirable asset for IT technical staff, yet the training
options are far less than for purely technical skills. Many
times, skills that are essential to operating a business
are niche skills and mentoring offers an opportunity to
share experience as well as knowledge.
Doing it yourself
Another trend in IT training is to place the responsibility
squarely on the shoulders (and purse) of the employee under
the guise of career empowerment. This approach may work
for freelancers, but it is difficult to measure how well
it enables the alignment of the interests and efforts of
employees with those of the company.
And now what?
Although measuring the benefits of training is still more
of an art than a science, the cost of not training is the
real challenge. For example, how much time and productivity
is lost because employees, not having been formally trained,
do not understand the full capabilities of a utility, or
simply do not use or choose the right tools for the job?
Not planning time for training and review on how one is
performing the tasks, or not fostering a culture where people
are encouraged to challenge themselves and their peers in
order to find or share ways of improving their performance,
in fact carries a high price tag. Even the most sophisticated
training method can't make up for pitfalls in planning and
timing or for poor integration between the IT training and
the company's overall strategy. But on the other hand, simple
strategic methods can go a long way towards improving employee
and corporate performance. Carefully planned synergy between
what IT professionals on one hand, and employers on the
other, want and need in terms of training - will go a long
way to improve the company's overall performance.
Tatiana Andronache is IT technical staff
for a large information technology company in Toronto, Canada.
She can be reached at tatiana.andronache@sympatico.ca
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