Training as Agile as Technology: A Business Requirement

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-learning 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.

Technology training must address three key areas:

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 earners 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 is 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 anytime, 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.