IT education: How to keep your IT talent up-to-date in the current climate

The dynamics are simply enormous. In the IT sector, technological development is accelerating at a blistering pace. The triumphant progress of digital transformation is giving rise to new approaches that unlock additional efficiency potential and attractive growth opportunities for companies.

However, this also means that new skills are constantly needed in the IT organisations that are supposed to implement these innovations. Existing knowledge possessed by IT specialists is becoming obsolete at an ever-faster rate. Companies must ensure that they keep their IT professionals continuously up-to-speed by offering further training, as this is the only way to continue reaping the benefits of future digital innovations.

In the current job market, this problem is further exacerbated by the skills shortage, which is particularly acute in the IT sector – with 80% of IT organisations in the UK reporting difficulties filling roles. The IT skills shortage presents many IT leaders with major challenges when it comes to recruiting new professionals with the necessary know-how. In this case, it’s all the more important to promote the development and upgrading of skills in existing IT teams through upskilling.

Nevertheless, further training for your IT team also has many other positive effects. Since employees benefit greatly from it, their job satisfaction increases as a result. Their loyalty to the company is strengthened and at the same time the attractiveness of the company as a potential employer is enhanced.

There’s no shortage of relevant topics when it comes to further IT training. Typical areas that are currently in high demand include:

• Cyber security: Attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated – IT absolutely has to keep pace here.
• Automation: New approaches promise massive productivity gains and innovative personalised customer management – but only if the team has the expertise to implement them.
• Programming languages: Digital transformation requires state-of-the-art coding skills, e.g. in languages such as JavaScript.

It goes without saying that upskilling measures cost both time and money. To ensure that the investment pays off, upskilling should be embedded in a comprehensive skills strategy from the very outset. This way, IT leaders ensure that the measures don’t get bogged down, but rather make a decisive contribution to implementing the corporate strategy.

Strategic planning is best achieved within the framework of systematic skills management. The first step is to determine which skills are currently available, which are still lacking, and how this is likely to evolve in the future. This is ideally done using digital tools that create a solid database. If this prerequisite is met, IT managers can:

• Set up tailored upskilling programmes
• Define relevant learning objectives, develop necessary content and derive targeted learning methods
• Introduce an approach for monitoring and evaluating the learning programmes to measure their success.

Upskilling, which refers to the further training of IT professionals in their own specialist area, can also be supplemented by reskilling, depending on the personnel situation. Reskilling involves retraining suitable employees from other areas with the aim of making them IT specialists. Such undiscovered IT talent often turn out to be extremely motivated employees. In times of a shortage of skilled workers, reskilling should be considered as a valuable extra option.

Providing training and learning programmes for IT professionals should go hand in hand with developing a corresponding corporate culture. After all, skills thrive best in an environment that fundamentally values learning and knowledge and thus encourages individual commitment. To this end, IT managers could organise learning-focused events such as lectures, conferences, innovation workshops or hackathons.

Companies can also support this learning culture with a dedicated learning environment that is integrated into existing systems. Online courses and knowledge libraries that are easy to access are made available to professionals on a digital platform.

How do you create the best possible training for your IT professionals? It’s crucial to strike the right balance between online and face-to-face formats in all training programmes. While many employees prefer the flexibility of online events, the trend toward blended learning offers a balanced solution that covers both aspects.

Further IT training is worthwhile for everyone involved and is clearly in the employees’ own interests. Nevertheless, those responsible should also create or reinforce specific incentives and financial rewards for this.

• Bonuses: An obvious approach is to link the achievement of learning objectives (such as obtaining certification) to bonus rewards.
• Further training budget: Employees can also be granted individual budgets. Ideally, this should also include opportunities for voluntary, self-led personal development. This includes training that is not directly related to their specific job.
• Diverse formats: Courses and training are the obvious options here. In addition, there are formats in which learning takes place “on the job” in another department or is provided by other experienced employees (job rotation, job shadowing, peer coaching, mentoring).

Specialised coaches and trainers are needed to carry out further training. What’s more, companies can benefit from partnerships with external institutions when upskilling, e.g. educational institutions, universities and professional associations.

Alternatively, working with specialised IT professionals like Experis is an effective option. Experis provides support with proven, in-depth further training expertise in the IT sector through our Experis Academy offering. The relevant content and methods, certifications and appropriately qualified instructors are absolutely ensured. Among other things, Experis offers:

• Upskilling and reskilling programmes – from graduates to experienced professionals, to align to current market demand
• Relevant IT content such as Java Fullstack, .NET/C# Fullstack, cyber security, embedded development, data analytics, backend, Python, JavaScript, cloud solutions and DevOps, AI and data
• Partnerships with industry leaders including Microsoft, ServiceNow and AWS.

Experis will help you identify suitable candidates, design and organise the training, and provide a wide range of specialisation and certification options. Existing modules are used when designing individual programmes, which can then be combined and modified. New courses are also created as required.

Experis’ extensive IT know-how and long-standing experience with training measures is complemented by its global ecosystem. We work with external training partners from around the globe to orchestrate the exact training programme that an IT team needs. For IT organisations, our approach offers three key benefits:

1. Faster and more efficient: Training by Experis is usually cheaper and more time-efficient than developing further training skills yourself
2. Time to productivity: The time it takes for newly qualified personnel to be fully operational is reduced by up to one third
3. Global scaling: Programmes and initiatives can be easily rolled out and scaled worldwide.

Would you like to learn more about further IT training with Experis? Get in touch with one of our experts!