Does chopping IT training pay off? (Repost)

In this afternoon’s NZCS Newsline, NZCS CEO Paul Matthews (who I greatly respect) had written a particularly poignant article entitled “Does chopping IT training pay off?”.  I couldn’t possibly say it better, so I’ve reposted the article in its’ entirety below.  You can find the original post at http://www.nzcs.org.nz/newsletter/article/157.  And if you’re not already a member of the New Zealand Computer society, now’s a good time…

Times are tough. We all know it. The economy’s starting to come right but many are still watching the pennies. But what does that mean to IT? And IT skills advancement and training especially?

For a start, it usually means tightening budgets. For the truly less forward-thinking organisations, it means tightening IT budgets. Even worse, it ends up as tightening IT training budgets.

Why do I say “less forward-thinking” organisations? It’s not rocket science: the key to saving costs permanently and sustainably is increasing efficiency and productivity. My point here is, IT isefficiency and productivity.

IT and the use of technology is clearly the answer to increasing productivity in organisations.

Whether it’s in the time savings of core staff knowing how to use their tools properly, reducing support costs from the same, improvements from developers who understand query optimisation and interface design concepts, or just the feel-good factor of staff that aren’t frustrated by their tools continually, knowing how to use IT to its best advantage makes things easier, faster and more accurate. I  hope you didn’t need me to tell you that!

My apologies for lapsing into HR-speak but the difficulty in times such as these is that we’re not concentrating on optimising the efficiency of “people assets” to achieve performance (and hence cost) savings. I addition, we should with prepare for when times get better so as to get the jump on the competition when the going’s tough.

Instead, the knee-jerk reaction is to cut, cut, cut. Whilst some cuts will always prove necessary, any good investor will tell you that the best time to invest is when the chips are down. Investing in training in IT is no exception.

Obviously investment costs. That said, the fact is, investing in training brings results. The current remnants of a tight economic climate are temporary. Whether temporary means a few more months or a little longer is irrelevant; the world keeps on spinning, the sky won’t fall on our heads and things will come right. When they do, those that positioned themselves and their organisations to accelerate out of the curve will be the winners.

One of the core jobs for C-level managers is to position their organisations to take advantage of future market conditions. Hence, given that we know upskilling in IT (for general and IT staff) has a big benefit and we know that this has major flow-on effects, couldn’t one argue that those who don’t position their organisations during tougher times by investing in lifting the IT skills of their staff, or even worse, cut back in these areas, are not doing their job?

I’m constantly amazed when I hear stories about organisations making their staff take annual leave to attend work-related conferences, training and events at their own cost and the sad thing is, I hear that a lot. Sure, there’s not a lot of spare funds floating around but surely keeping your staff current has to be one of the highest priorities in our profession?

This may be a simplistic view and we all have budgets to think about, but this is one area where cuts and tightening of belts can end up costing a whole heap more tomorrow than a relatively modest investment today.

As Gandhi wisely said: “The future depends on what we do in the present.” Perhaps he should have been in IT.