InformationWeek

Standardized Web Training

Consortium plans vendor-neutral courses to reduce time and costs

Edited by Marianne Kolbasuk McGee
Issue date: Jan. 6, 1997

Jobs requiring Internet and intranet skills will be among the hottest positions for IS professionals in 1997. To help combat a continuing shortage of people with such skills, a group of vendors has formed a consortium to help make Web training easier, more efficient, and less expensive.

Last month, IBM, Lot us Development, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and Novell formed a worldwide training and certification consortium that will establish standards for Internet-related educational programs. The goal is to eliminate redundancies in the curricula of Internet and intranet courses offered by vendors and their third-party training partners. Currently, much of the content in any given course overlaps with that in other courses.

The consortium plans to identify early this year what material should be offered in a vendor-neutral, generic set of classes that can lead to professional certification in five broad Internet and intranet areas: electronic commerce, security, application development, connectivity, and enterprise messaging. The program is expected to be introduced later this year.

In addition, members of the consortium and their training partners will continue to offer their own classes for IS professionals to become certified in skills that are focused on specific products.

Details o f the program are being worked out. For instance, consortium members are deciding which skills fall into the "generic" category, says Jim Krzywicki, Lotus VP of education. Meanwhile, other vendors are still invited to join the group, he says.

The plan--if it works--could reduce training time and costs for IS professionals because they would be less likely to pay for and participate in classes that cover skills they've already learned elsewhere. The generic courses would be offered over the Internet, via other multimedia, computer-based formats, or in classroom settings, says Dave Marler, a Novell education marketing manager.

"This effort is designed to encourage IS professionals to receive the training needed for Internet and intranet work," Marler says. "It'll make it easier for them--and for the vendors."

Ellen Julian, an analyst who follows training trends for research firm International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass., says the consortium's efforts are a "landmark development ." Although there have been multivendor training efforts in the past on topics such as network management, Julian says, there has been no such program "with the weight of these companies in such a hot technology area before."

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