How do you get the skills you need while keeping training costs to
a minimum? Philip Hunter reports on Web-based training and asks:
does the virtual classroom work?
The IT skills shortage has been caused only partly by
proliferating demand for staff in key sectors. The reluctance of
companies, particularly smaller ones, to train people - rather than
recruiting - has also contributed to the lack of skills. But now
there are signs of a trend towards more home-growing of skills
rather than relying on the permanent recruitment and contract
markets to get the right people.
This change of attitude by some organisations is not so much
motivated by any desire to contribute to the common good by
increasing the overall pool of skills, but because it is now
possible to justify the cost of training. It can be justified not
only because of the high cost of relying on contractors for scarce
skills, but also by improved morale, staff retention and
productivity.
Avoiding the high cost of contracting motivated First Tele-com,
an emerging telecoms provider, to start training its own staff in
Microsoft and related skills, with courses provided by Peregrine.
"We were buying in contract staff to provide short-term fixes for
the lack of skills on-site in Microsoft, SQL, Visual FoxPro and
also in the Unix side," says First Telecom's group IT director
Neminder Matharu.
"Costs were high and it leaves you exposed in the long term."
Matharu reckons that staff costs have been cut by a third in the
areas where training is given.
There is fast growing interest in tools and methodologies that
attempt to measure the return on investment (ROI) from training,
both through direct staff savings and indirect business benefits.
Although these may be crude and inaccurate, they do at least
provide a tool for justifying the cost of training, and for
tailoring courses to the needs of staff. This is giving a boost to
training and increasing its profile at board level. Historically,
training, alongside advertising, has been first in line for a
budget cut during lean times.
E-learning
The other factor contributing to a growth in in-house training
is the rapid development of Web-based courses under the banner of
e-learning, which can cut costs and also bring a number of
advantages over the traditional classroom-based approach. But
e-learning should not be regarded as a panacea, as Hewlett
Packard's European general manager for education, Phil Lawman,
points out.
"Too many companies are driving learning programmes by cost
rather than ROI," says Lawman. "Our point is that if you want to
save money, go online, but you will not necessarily get the best
ROI". One danger of online training is it can be too passive and
without sufficient interaction, meaning that staff fail to
concentrate as well as in a classroom.
Xerox has made a major switch to online training and has already
derived significant benefits, even though the classroom approach is
still preferred for some technical and managerial training
involving interaction or role playing.
Online training scores in several ways. Classroom-based training
brings a high ongoing cost, whether a company maintains an in-house
facility or uses external courses. This can be reduced
substantially by a switch to e-learning. Money is also saved by
avoiding giving staff time off to travel to courses and give up
several days at a time that would otherwise be spent on productive
tasks. E-learning is also more flexible, allowing people to take
courses at their own convenience. Training can administered as a
drip-feed on demand, almost like an extension to online help. With
skills needing to be updated at a frenetic pace, it is easier to
provide new mini courses online as and when required rather than
continually dragging staff into a classroom.
E-learning also makes it easier for a large organisation to make
its courses consistent and avoid contradictory messages being
given. An online course can equally well be disseminated to 10,000
people as to a classroom group. Furthermore, by virtue of being
online, the progress of people taking a course can be assessed more
readily, helping to measure the value of training.
"Being online, you can provide software to record who's using
our courses, how long they're spending in them, who's completing
the course versus who's dropping out, and what kind of test results
they're getting afterwards," says Paul Henry, international vice
president at SmartForce, a provider of Web-based training
packages.
Web-based training, though, has downsides, not least of which is
that many of the packages are not much good, and while some purport
to emulate the "real world" through virtual reality, the
simulations are often poor. Some make no attempt even to simulate
the real world, according to Paul Butler, managing director of IT
training company KnowledgePool. "There are lots of start-ups who
say they're in the e-learning business, but all they provide is an
HTML-based book reading service," says Butler scathingly.
On the other hand, the best e-learning services are getting to
grips with the more fundamental weakness of online-based training,
which is the lack of interaction of students with each other and
with their tutor.
The concept of the virtual classroom has been coined to describe
Web-based systems that allow online interaction with tutors, either
live, or via e-mail communication with some delay. There is also
the possibility of combining the Web with interactive TV, but this
is too expensive an option for many enterprises, although it has
been adopted by Xerox.
It is also possible to incorporate some of the advantages of TV
in Web-based packages, which some suppliers are beginning to do. "I
think the Internet provides a better more cost effective way of
offering the benefits of video-based training," says Steve Deneen,
managing partner of the consultancy and training company Fuel.
"Companies like us are taking video-based training and converting
it into Web-based training with animation and streaming audio,"
says Deneen.
Apart from the role of e-learning, the other big issue is how to
measure ROI and justify the cost of training. Some, such as
Microsoft's UK education manager Clare Curtis, still believe the
need for IT training is self evident in many cases, such as when
implementing a new project. "I would say training for every IT
project should be mandatory and you shouldn't have to justify it,"
says Curtis.
Budgets
But as at Xerox, for example, training managers are now having
to justify their budgets. Indeed Microsoft itself has published the
results of research it conducted with IDC into the benefits of
training.
"We were looking at the difference between individuals who were
certified in Microsoft qualifications (such as MCSE) and those who
weren't," said Curtis. "The research did show some significant
savings in computer failure, which was cut by more than 50% when
someone who was qualified was in charge."
Such research results should be treated with caution, as other
factors could have contributed to the reduced failure rate, such as
the fact that qualified staff have more experience. This may be
more significant than that they happen to have taken the Microsoft
courses.
There are, however, serious attempts being made to assess
whether training has a direct business payback. The Kirkpatrick
model, used by both Xerox and Stream, has evolved as a standard way
of obtaining feedback about the business value of training.
This model is divided into four components, firstly to assess
how candidates got on with the course, secondly to test the
knowledge gained, thirdly to determine how the courses altered
staff behaviour within their job roles, and fourthly to establish
some measure of whether they are doing their job better. Each
successive level is harder than the last to assess. As already
noted, e-learning can help with the first two, but the hard nut to
crack is the last one of real business benefit. That is where the
focus in training research now lies.
Case study: Xerox
Xerox is making a big shift to e-learning and virtual
classroom-based courses for all its in-house training including IT,
although the company's director of education and learning for
Europe, Graeme Cree, admits this is has proving to be a culture
shock for some people. "The response by staff varies both by age
and what area of the company they work in," says Cree. Conventional
classroom-based training is being retained for courses involving
role playing or significant amounts of hands-on with expensive
equipment, although often allied with Web-based content. "We aim to
have a 50/50 split between classroom-based training and e-learning
by next year," says Cree.
Xerox is also using interactive TV, sometimes backed up by the
Internet, to deliver courses across multiple sites, avoiding the
need for staff to travel. "This allows us to get at a large
audience with a very consistent set of messages and no variation in
deployment in a short space of time," says Cree. This is quicker
than traditional classroom-based training where instructors can
only teach a small number of people at a time. "Instead of taking
six weeks to train people on a new product, we can do it in six
days and get five weeks more productivity," says Cree.
Xerox uses the Kirkpatrick model (see main article) in an
attempt to measure the benefit of training, which is essential
given the ongoing battle with other departments for budgets. The
tough one to measure, as Cree admits, is business benefit, measured
in terms of factors such as increased productivity, and reduced
turnover of staff leading to lower recruitment costs.
Stream International
Stream International is a global provider of high end technical
support, working for a number of major suppliers of PCs and small
business systems on an outsourcing basis.
Its 7,000 staff have to cover a broad spread of skills, given
the wide range of PC kit such as scanners, digital cameras and so
on that might be included in a given installation, as well as
software.
The company embarked on a drastic move to improve its level of
service and at the same time reduce staff turnover by setting up
its own internal training centre called Stream University. The
company's training manager Paul Duddy says this has already scored
a direct hit for the business by helping to retain existing clients
and gain new ones.
The Kirkpatrick model has been used to assess the benefits, and
attrition rates of staff fell in the first year, from 37% in 1998
to 28.5% in 1999. The ultimate goal is to retain staff for an
average of three years, which is good by the standards of IT
technical support and field service.
The company is less enthusiastic than some about e-learning,
with Duddy concerned that staff treat it casually and fail to
acquire skills as quickly that way. "You're competing for someone's
leisure time, and that's a difficult challenge when doing
computer-based training," says Duddy.
The nature of the training may have something to do with the
lack of enthusiasm for e-learning, given the need to train
engineers rigorously and quickly to provide support for new pieces
of kit or software.
How much do companies spend on IT training?
The answer to this question is that nobody knows, and there are,
in any case, huge variations both between industry sectors and
individual enterprises.
There are signs of an increase in IT training budgets as it
becomes harder and more expensive to recruit people with the
required skills or obtain them on the contract market. It generally
costs between £20,000 to £30,000 to recruit a relatively junior
member of IT staff, and companies are realising they can buy a lot
of training for that, assuming the staff are of sufficient calibre.
Indeed by training in-house, it becomes possible to re-focus the
recruitment effort on hiring people with potential, rather than
just those with the skills needed at that time.