Training for certification or training for organisational needs?

It has been a while since my last post. I thought it would be good to get January out of the way before I got back into the "blog" thing again and wow did it fly by. January was another busy month at Practice-IT Training Services, as a distraction from normal activities we decided to exhibit at the Learning and Skills show at Olympia. This gave us a chance to meet some new people and get some feedback on our services.

On day 2 I met an interesting gentleman who came and spoke to me on the stand; after I gave him the "pitch" about what we do he said something quite interesting to me. He said that in his opinion and I quote “All It professionals want out of their training is a vendor certification " (incidentally I didn’t agree with his statement).

This got me thinking about the about training for IT certifications vs. training for the organisation needs. I am not talking about certifications for people who are new to IT or those people that are cross skilling from other professions, it goes without saying that certifications have benefits to this group. I am talking about certifications for the seasoned IT professionals up and down the country who are running our IT departments.

Here are my thoughts on the subject:

Benefits of certification based training

There are many companies that pride themselves on the number of certified engineers they have and go to a lot of effort to ensure that is maintained. It can provide a good baseline to measure your workforces’ technical competency. So from a marketing perspective it is great to tell clients (internal & external) that you have a number of industry certified professionals working in the IT department and you have a recognised level of competency. This also has some major financial benefits for the solutions providers that sell equipment in to other organisations, the more certs you have on your books the more of a discount you get.

Drawback of certification training

There are ways and means and means of achieving certifications without having any technical or practical ability. I think that is why certifications have devalued somewhat in the past with the large number of “paper” engineers produced. It looks like the vendors are trying to change that, but I think it will always exist. This makes it difficult to judge a person’s technical ability by their certifications alone. The other down side to certification training is that not all the content covered in a course actually relates to an organisation’s needs. For example, an engineer may go on a 5 day course and only a proportion of the subject matter is relevant to the organisation, this not only wastes time but is costing the company money to have you out the office learning “stuff” that is never likely to be used.

Benefits of organisational Needs Training

By identifying the skills gaps in an individual or team and then training specifically to cover these areas has much more of a business value. Training this way has real benefits to the business as “risks” are reduced due to lack of skills in key areas where they are required. This also allows you to maximise your training budget by allocating it to areas that have been identified as needing attention. Generally this type of training would include a number of individuals from the same team so it can be cost effective and provide consistent level of knowledge amongst the individuals.

Drawback of organisational needs training

One of the biggest drawbacks of this type of training is making staff available to attend the training. To be cost effective, normally the team would have to be trained together as a group so some creative scheduling would be required to make this happen. Also it can be difficult to identify what areas actually need targeting without some assistance.

So where is the balance?

This is not meant to identify which solution is better than the other. It comes down to a number of different factors in determining which type of training best fits the organisation and individuals. However the key point is to try and reduce the drawbacks from either solution and maximise the benefits. As IT departments are asked to get the best value from their operational budgets the same efforts should extend to the training budget. Don’t just send the someone on a course for the sake of it, make sure there is a real requirement first.

 

Ricky Doyle
http://www.practice-it.co.uk/
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