Make or refine a program for individual employees or entire departments.
Establishing a training plan, whether on an individual basis or for an entire tech department, requires goal planning, analytical assessment of current skills and future job requirements, and, most of all, a serious time commitment on all levels from setup to course study participation.
Considerations
The first steps should include planning and analysing the training goals, objectives, and student roles and responsibilities, advises Lisa Neal, a senior research engineer at EDS, a professional services firm in Plano, Texas.
In the corporate landscape, this strategic planning focuses on skill sets needed, and on determining the staff to be trained. On a personal level, it means decision-making on career goals and setting a pathway to achieving a certain position or certification level.
No matter who's looking for training, Neal recommends a phased-in approach, as it's a good way of determining the appropriateness and effectiveness of a proposed solution, she says. Once planning is done, the consultant recommends "scenario building," which includes defining the participants (including students, teachers, technical support, and even in-house resource staff such as librarians), and their specific needs.
Additional issues to be considered, she adds, are access to computers, ability to use technology that allows the focus to be on learning rather than on delivery, and the physical learning environment. All these factors impact the success of a training initiative, she says.
"Part of planning includes what are the measures of success and may include the number of students enrolled, the dropout rate, the evaluations, or even the test scores," she says.
Have-to-do training
Jim Hunt, a training consultant, stresses that the first step is defining the top goal and incorporating a metric for measuring whether the goal has been met.
"In other words: What is the result you're looking for, and how are you going to measure for it?" he says.
That may not be as easy as it appears, however, since IT management often has several needs when it comes to training. On one hand, there's a continuing need to beef up skills and build core competencies on a staff. Then there's the increasing need to get trained on cutting-edge technology that may come into play down the road, and also keep staff on board in a tight labor market.
"Employers are faced with such turnover these days, as well as demand to upgrade systems, that they need to boost competencies as well as get trained on the next, latest technology. Training no longer is a nice thing to do, it's a 'have-to-do' at this point," says Millie Boyd, president of the Greater Baltimore Advanced Technology Center, a workforce training and development consortium.
Obstacles to effective training
And while many training plans get started on a good footing, they're often derailed by several factors, say the experts. One common mistake is being lured directly to e-learning technologies before determining whether it meets training objects and students' needs, says Neal.
While the emerging electronic learning models promise to make a student's learning time more efficient (since there's no traveling or productivity loss), time is still a big factor in any training, warns Neal.
"When you travel to a class, you're stuck there with little else to do, so you're getting it done. A distance learning class takes a strong personal time commitment since it's all too easy to say 'I'll get to it later,'" she warns.
Hunt notes that a big hurdle in any training initiative is getting full and uncompromising support by the top management tier.
You have to start somewhere.
"The best way to get started is having someone championing the idea who can do three things: Write the check, provide needed resources, and be willing and able to use the carrot or stick to get the job done," he says.
The second hurdle, says Hunt who's worked as a training specialist for more than 20 years, is determining the right platform. Management first must access how students have learned best in the past, and how accessible the participants are to each possible platform.
At the start, using a mix of training materials may work best, he says.
"This may be a good idea until you get a better handle on time constrictions for the participants and also some of the platforms lend themselves better to being able to be used as future references or materials," he explains.
Like Neal, however, Hunt also believes that new isn't always best.
"Web-based isn't always an automatic or right answer for all types of training. For those things that you need repetitive access to, online is probably good, but for the practical everyday 'how to get it done' from somebody with experience, the classroom is still the best."
