June 8, 1998
Train At The Speed Of Change
As traditional approaches to instruction continue to break down, IT shops are being forced to find innovative ways to teach employees
By Rich Levin
nformation technology shops are taking a new look at training. As the pace of change accelerates and the IT skills gap widens, business leaders are discoveri
ng their traditional approaches to training are breaking down.
Higher education and certified trainers aren't boosting the IT talent pool fast enough. Internally developed, instructor-led curricula are too costly for ongoing needs and can't keep up with new technology adoption rates.
"The pace of training is only as fast as a human is able to learn," says Joseph Greulich, MIS director at Roberts Express Inc., a provider of transportation, logistics, and supply-chain management solutions worldwide. "The technologies are literally evolving overnight. There's no time to develop an effective curriculum."
High-tech mass-training solutions, such as CD-ROMs, video courseware, and Web-based training systems, meet the need for end-user application training, but they don't provide the interactivity programmers demand when tackling new technologies such as Java, XML, and component-based development.
"We're moving toward a three-tier architecture," says Lambros Tzerefos, director of th e systems support group at the U.S. Navy's weapons-support facility in Mechanicsburg, Pa. "We found the minute you do that, you've opened up a unique set of training requirements. These are completely new programming techniques, and you need hands-on labs in an instructor-led environment."
Rising Tide
Training is yet another aspect of the IT skills crisis. To survive, IT leaders are leveraging virtually every training approach and technology at their disposal in an effort to keep developers, users, and business systems afloat. Once almost an afterthought, training programs are becoming the IT organization's primary weapon against a rising tide of change.
In the process, IT leaders are discovering that by making nonstop training paramount, they can attract and retain top programming talent and get rid of the hidden costs of distributed computing. Training also helps boost business users' ability to maximize the new, custom information systems being built by the IT development team .
"Today you have to always be in a state of learning," says Mary Pellerito, performance technologist for General Motors' Powertrain electronics integration and software group. "We have a very short window within which to teach people because things are changing fast, and we have real-world production schedules to meet."
Pellerito's team found that total reliance on outside training organizations had broken down. Students weren't able to transfer the generic skills learned in outside courses to GM's unique business processes. But it wasn't feasible, from a cost perspective, for GM Powertrain to fire up its own dedicated training organization.
"We sent people to training, and they'd come back unable to transfer any of the skills," Pellerito says. "We hire smart engineers. They don't have problems figuring out how to use the tools. But how to use the tools to get the outcome that's expected of them--that's where the education is needed."
To close the skills gap and maximize r eturn on outside training investments, GM Powertrain introduced a real-time mentoring system that uses its own expert developers. Students still attend outside, instructor-led training courses--but when they return, they attend what GM calls an "info session" with an expert in the language, tool, or technology. The info sessions focus on how the new skills get applied within GM's unique business processes.
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Illustration by John Bleck
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