By Milind Gurjar

November 14, 2017

Training as agile as technology: A business requirement. Digital transformation is

happening so quickly that in a recent survey by Gartner, half of all CEOs said they

expect their industries to be unrecognizably transformed by digitization. At the same

time, only 16 percent of businesses believe they have the right talent in place to

succeed in digital, according to another report by Forrester Research. So, how can

organizations grapple with this dilemma? The key is to continuously up-skill the

workforce.

The challenge of keeping skills current. Three quarters of business leaders told

Price water house Coopers in 2015, that the availability of key skills was one of the top

three threats to their organizations’ growth. That’s a jump over 63 percent in

2014. Leaders must ensure that training development strategies keep up with the

rapid changes in the business environment.

When a workforce goes untrained, employers are exposed to two risks. First is the risk

of infrastructure outages that can cost enterprises billions of dollars in lost business

and productivity. A recent Dimensional Research study showed that a vast majority of

outages arise from human error. The second risk is the associated reputational

consequences arising from service disruption to customers or breaches in security that

expose confidential customer data.

The tradeoffs of successful training. Organizations want to use cutting-edge

technology to give them competitive advantage in delivering better value to their

customers. It also reduces operating expenses and improves the bottom line. Many

technology vendors today realize that strategies for developing training content have

to keep pace with the changes in the business environment. It takes longer to produce

high-quality training content, but the shelf life of training content is shrinking. This

mirrors the shelf life of the associated product.

Meanwhile, customers are looking for training that is accurate and current. Training

departments of technology companies have to find a way to meet customer

requirements and internal stakeholder expectations. The tradeoff between cost,

quality and time is starting to resolve towards meeting time-to-market expectations

with good enough quality on a reduced budget.

Employees prefer the effectiveness of live, instructor-led training. However, employers

themselves prefer eLearning and on-demand training to support the continuous

learning needs with minimum disruption to work while keeping training costs under

control.

Setting a course. The needs of employees and employers must be balanced. Today’s

training strategies need to include skill development as well as provide access to the

latest updates from the technology vendors whose products and services the

organization is using.

There are three key areas that technology training must address:

1. Employee development: Employees demonstrate greater engagement and a

strong workplace culture when learning opportunities are available.

2. Taking on new technology: Organizations need education to support business

value realization in addition to enabling successful go-live strategies.

3. Long-term learning management: Today’s rapid pace of change has led to the

need to quickly access the exact content learners need, when they need it.

Understanding the different types of available training and determining which make

most sense for an organization’s teams can be challenging. Lines of business leaders

need to find the most comprehensive solution to meet their training needs, across all

vendors.

Generally, instructor-led training is best suited for new technology adoption. That’s

because typically a project team needs to acquire skills in a time-bound manner

before starting a new technology rollout. For career development training, manager

budgets will drive the decision in favor of either instructor-led or on-demand. On-

demand training through a training subscription provides a way to scale agile training

across enterprises to meet the ongoing technology management needs. It has the

added benefit of producing a higher return on investment over time.

Measuring success. Benefits must be measurable to see the correlation between

training and the associated outcome. For example, time-to-market and defect rate

metrics are relevant for new technology adoption. Time to respond/resolve could be

useful metrics for ongoing technology management. Employee engagement and

attrition could be potential measures of career development training. From a

management perspective, a key measure is operational efficiency. What’s the yearly

cost of training an employee? What’s the cost of not training employees?

Agile learning ahead. It’s no secret that technology is rapidly changing. Training must

change just as quickly. Technology vendors need to be able to provide the

appropriate training for their users right out of the gate. Learners need current content

that they can access at any time, anywhere. To stay competitive, business success

demands technology training and certification that equip the learner and the whole

organization for the future. Agile training isn’t optional, it’s required.