Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Technology Training from a Manager's Perspective

Every manager who plays a role in researching, selecting or implementing enterprise technology needs to have a firm grasp on emerging technologies. In addition, managers serve the larger business purpose to ensure that technology is being used to the company's best strategic advantage. A program of continual information technology training is crucial to the success of any IT team.

Technology is constantly evolving, and it seems that there is a new product and service released almost daily that is meant to simplify doing business. This can be overwhelming if you do not stay current on the high-level trends of technology and their corresponding impact on business. As a manager, you must take it upon yourself to become proactive by keeping abreast of emerging trends. You need to understand them not only from a technical standpoint, but evaluating them from a higher-level, strategic standpoint. This type of knowledge will help you make conscious and informed decisions on what aspects of new technologies will affect your organization over the next few years.

IT employees have to continually engage in professional development to keep pace with new technologies and applications. They often become technology innovators within the organization, and can serve as internal advocates and trainers. Hence, the trained IT employees can bring the other employees up to speed as end-users of technology.

Employers who invest in employee professional development also tend to reap rewards when it comes to employee retention and job satisfaction. Organizations that encourage their employees to attend training are viewed as being caring and supportive. In such an environment, employees are more likely to stay for the long haul and to have positive attitudes toward their jobs and their companies.

David Schuchman

6 comments:

  1. David, excellent topic. In a consulting or Professional Services Organization, sometimes you get "trained" by experimenting. This is not optimal and should be the last option, however, in today's world of tight budgets, it may be a reality.

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  2. Many managers are so busy that they don't have time or better yet they do not make time to develop their own staff. In such a situation everybody is losing. Nice article David.

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    1. Thank you for your observation and comment, Alex.

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  3. Dave - great article - I am an email junkie but I am trying harder to spend less time on that and more on the tasks at hand. As I was reading this, I was thinking that similar rules should apply to social media. The unfortunate thing with spending an allotted amount of time there would be that you possibly might miss something important. I know that there are tools out there to consolidate the information coming in from different site (good segway for another blog!) but I don't have experience with those yet. So much to learn and so little time! Thanks again.

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  4. As a manager one ought to have a skill matrix and a training plan. Keeping those up to date is paramount to their relevance but that task can easily be delegated as part of professional development of one of the team member. The trick is then to keep the item on the agenda of teams meeting.

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