Stan Gibson brings up a good point about the training of IT professionals — one that is corroborated in a survey we did earlier this year.
In his eWeek column, “Keeping IT Skills Sharp Pays Off,” Mr. Gibson writes, “To be competitive and derive value from IT…companies will have to invest in their IT people.” Hear, hear! But what happens when the employer is a service provider? He quotes Robert Rosen, who heads up Share, an IBM enterprise user group. Mr. Rosen has cause to speak to many service providers, and what he hears alarms him:
I had always believed that service providers would do all they could to keep their employees’ skills sharp and cutting edge. But when we surveyed 13 IT professionals and managers who work for service providers, we were amazed to learn that it isn’t the case. As I write here:
“Among the people we interviewed, training benefits and access to tools became worse by far when they moved to the service provider. We find this odd, considering that most service providers frequently tout the quality of their IT staff, which presumably comes through a greater emphasis on training and certification and access to the newest or best high tech tools.”
Mr. Rosen told Mr. Gibson that in his experience, “Indian and Chinese companies do seem to be investing in ongoing learning…”
The gap between what US technologists can deliver and what the technology providers in these other countries can deliver will only widen as long as these practices continue.
The next time you’re evaluating a service provider and they say something like, “IT is our business, so it behooves us to make sure our employees are world-class and topnotch in their skillsets,” press them for details: What do their training programs consist of? How many weeks of training does an individual get each year? How many billable hours is an individual techie expected to generate (which gives a clue into how much time they get offline for skills development and educational activities)? What’s the churn rate for technical staff? (How many people did they lose in the last quarter and how many did they gain?) How do they prepare staff for new technologies?
Plus, look for opportunities to talk with tech pros who are on the inside of that service provider. Find them in discussion forums and groups online.
You may be asking, “Why should I bother? The contract will guarantee I get the services I’ve signed up for. Anything else really isn’t my business. It’s the business of the service provider.”
On one level that’s true. Keeping the servers up can be considered a commodity service.
Yet, look at it a different way. Study after study shows that training is a great way to motivate and retain staff. Don’t you want your provider to have people who are sharp, motivated and planning to stick around?
How does this play out? Once an IT person understands your business through a measure of longevity and the prism of training, he or she is in a better position to help transform your operations in meaningful ways. Keeping servers up can turn into consolidating servers, which can turn into revamping the IT organization, which can turn into ways for you, the client, to generate new business.
