Selling the Importance of IT Training to Employers

The IT training industry needs to stress the importance of hiring skilled workers and providing additional IT training to the employer audience, speakers at CompTIA Colloquium said on Tuesday.  It’s an audience that is sometimes overlooked, Terry Erdle, CompTIA executive vice president of certification; and Cushing Anderson, program vice president for research firm IDC, told attendees.

“We haven’t necessarily sold this to the employing world, that if they get a skilled person, it’s much better for them long-term,” Erdle said. “And certification is a good metric of that.”

While some employers worry that additional training and certification will lead employees to pursue a new job, the data shows the opposite – that employees who get professional development stay at their jobs, Erdle said.

Even a small increase in the skill and dedication metric of a project team can dramatically increase the chances of success, Anderson said, citing IDC research. “You don’t need to move (the skill level) a lot to get a lot of impact,” he said.

It’s the type of message the IT training industry should be delivering to employers, he said. “Well-trained teams perform better,” Anderson said. “I don’t think we market to this enough.”

Both Erdle and Anderson also commented on more demand for more online, self-directed training options as opposed to traditional classroom and text-based delivery models. “There’s a younger audience that communicates in different ways,” Erdle said. “We have figure out how to engage that. I think it’s a big mistake to just take yesterday’s training and slap it on an iPad.”