How should we train our IT staff?

How should we train our IT staff?

How should we train our IT staff?

If you have internal IT staff, training is a big expense and you need to get it right.

In an SME environment, training is essential to motivate your staff and ensure you have the latest skills in your team. But, if IT is not your core business, training IT staff can be a challenge.

• When should you train them?
• What courses should you send them on?
• What are the alternatives?

Training is something that even IT-focused businesses struggle with, and it’s much harder for companies with a small IT department of less than five employees. Your people need to have the range of skills to design your future solutions, manage and run the projects to implement the new solutions, and be able to maintain the systems once they go live.

Training is ideal for companies that have found a strong group of technical people that include both strategic thinkers and tactical doers. If these individuals work well together and get each aspect of the jobs done, then it’s worth investing in training to ensure the team continues to perform and deliver the right solutions.

When you should train them will depend on your business cycles. If you’re in a stable or declining cycle, then there isn’t much point training on new technology that you do not have the budget to implement. You want to withhold your training budget for a time when growth is at least anticipated and the systems need to be refreshed to cope with the anticipated increase in load.

If your systems are reaching end of life, and there are new solutions available, send your strategic thinkers to tradeshows to see the latest gizmos, gadgets and tools. This will allow them to start making plans and doing product selection. In-depth training offering a deep dive into technology is not appropriate yet as this learning is quickly forgotten if it’s not used regularly. You should also be aware of the costs; multiple days and lots of course work or intensive study are a distraction away from day-to-day operations.

As you gear up to product selection, it’s worth doing some more intensive product knowledge training to ensure the selected solutions really meet the anticipated business requirements.

Once the product selection and pre-purchasing is done, testing can start. It may be time to do technical training now to ensure the product is suitably tested and not glossed over at a high level.

If the product passes the testing phase, more time can be put into technical training to ensure the implementation phase goes as smoothly as possible.

It’s vital to have a sufficient cross section of your team trained on the products; either by inclusion in the training or some team level hands-on supervised learning to ensure the quality of on-going maintenance is reasonable also. Certainly if the installation team is trained but the maintenance team is not, there will be very poor accountability for problem resolution once the project is completed.

So, the courses to send people on will typically be vendor lead, unless you are dealing with global companies like Microsoft and Cisco who have set up course standards that are taught by independent training institutes. There is also very good computer or book-based training programs available that can work very well for people who don’t like classrooms. It’s best to understand how your team prefer to learn.

The alternative to training your own people is to outsource specialist tasks to experienced contactors or consultants who come in to do focused components of the work.

Of course, there are costs and risks to both methods. Think about losing a newly-trained employee in an industry famous for its high job churn rates, or demotivating staff who want the opportunity to train on a new system and fail to respect the consultant brought in.

Balancing your team and getting the right people trained at the right time is complex, so plan ahead, have a training budget assigned to each major change you wish to implement, and consider whether you should be doing that job in-house or outsourcing it. The result of your decision will have a lasting impact on the cost of IT in your organisation.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.