Business Technology

If you read forums or mailing lists you have no doubt noticed some interesting tag lines at the ends of the posts.  One that I noticed the other day said "What is worse than training your staff and losing them?  Not training them and keeping them!"  Think about that for a minute.  Some professions require continuing education to keep up to date with the latest techniques and safety measures.  Consider a surgeon or even a paramedic that is still using 10 - 15 year old methods, but can't update because their employer thinks it is too costly.  How about a tax accountant who can't be bothered to keep up with current tax laws?  Education is critical to keeping your staff operating efficiently, and keeping them up to speed with current methodologies.  This allows your business to operate at peak efficiency, and helps prevent obsolescence.

Unfortunately, in the world of technology, where change sometimes happens at what appears to be the speed of light, many employers opt to minimize, or even prohibit training due to the cost.  In the midrange world, IBM has unwittingly made this strategy easier on businesses.  Even though IBM's midrange technology has kept pace with, and in many ways maintained a healthy lead over its competitors, the architecture of these systems, the AS/400 and it's successors in particular, has allowed the old techniques to perform equally with newer techniques.  In fact this protects the investments of the companies that have come to rely on these systems better than any other line of computing equipment.  But, in the absence of continuing education, many of these IT shops have found it hard to find new developers versed in the old ways.  They may even, mistakenly, believe that these systems can not effectively support newer object oriented programming models, web based applications, and open standards.

Cost isn't the only inhibitor to continuing education.  Existing developers and managers frequently feel overwhelmed by the backlog of work they face, and frequently even acknowledge that newer techniques would make their lives easier, and relieve some of the maintenance burden.  But instead of learning some new time saving technique, they say "I'll learn it when I have time".  In fact I have been given that ironic excuse by someone who said they wanted to learn newer skills but wouldn't take the time to learn them.

And what about the fear that a newly trained employee will leave in search of greener pastures?  I am unconvinced that this would happen just because you trained them.  An employee, who goes elsewhere, typically will not do it because they are trained, but because they are unhappy with their current employment.  Additionally one of the top ten reasons for this discontent is Lack of Training.  So in my opinion it is more costly to fail to adequately train your IT staff than it is to keep them up to date.  At Star Base Consulting, Inc. we encourage all of our staff to take a week of training every year, just to keep up with the trends.  In addition you can contact Star Base for your IT Training needs in Cincinnati.