10 Common IT Training Challenges and How to Overcome Them

IT training is useful for technologists as well as non-technical employees. It keeps their skills up to date, helps you leverage the latest technologies, improves employee retention, improves your capabilities as an organization, and ultimately helps the company grow. While all that can be achieved by using IT skills training services, every company is different and has different IT training needs. If you want your organization to succeed, it is important that you assess the areas that require training in your company. This will help you in identifying the problem areas and will prompt you to work on them at the same time.

1. Anticipating The Training Needs

The biggest challenge is to know the kind of IT training you will be needing six months down the road. It is a manager’s job to do training needs analysis and find out the areas that need work. However, when it comes to IT, you never know what kind of disruptive technology will be introduced in a the next few days that will render your plans obsolete. The solution is to find an IT training subscription that allows you to change your training plans at a day’s notice.

2. Finding Reliable Trainers

Most managers like to go for internal trainers, i.e. they ask someone from their technology team to train their coworkers. On the surface, it looks like a good choice. You are getting a trainer at no additional cost and are promoting peer to peer learning in your organization. However, you are asking one of your most valuable resources to take time away from more important tasks and do something that they are not trained for. They may be great at creating and maintaining virtual machines, but that doesn’t mean they can teach others to do the same. You can even consider live online training delivered by virtual instructors in a virtual classroom to solve this problem.

3. Who Will Work on the Training Materials and Environment

A lot of managers give importance to the budget; hence they get things done in-house. This is great if you have a dedicated training and development team. However, if you don’t have one, you need to find IT skills training services that will take the job of worrying about the curriculum off your hands.

4. Standardization of Training

To make sure you are getting the right kind of training in terms of training standards, you have to hire someone with experience and the right credentials. If you are planning to train your employees in Microsoft-related technologies, you should choose one of the many Microsoft learning partners. If you want to train someone in ITIL, you should go for an ITIL accredited training partner and so on. A good way to ensure standardization of training is to go for IT training providers with the right accreditations.   

5. Dealing with Cultural Diversity

Diversity can bring a lot of new ideas, but it can be quite a challenge to deal with it. One problem with diversity in IT firms is that everyone has different learning styles, so you need to make sure that your training is done in a way that accommodates bilingual as well multilingual people. One recommendation is to have group based training as well as individual approach as well. If you are hiring an IT training provider, make sure they can deal with diversity.

6. Training Different Generations

Training becomes a challenge when you have different generations at the work place. What may work for millennial may not work for Gen Y. It is recommended that you adopt different delivery methods, or have a training program that supports multi-modality, so that the employees can be effectively trained.

7. Keeping the Employees Engaged

Your goal is to make sure that all your employees are fully engaged during the training so that they can retain what they learn. One mistake that organizations make is that they don’t educate their employees about the objectives of the training. When they won’t know the whys, they will not take interest. This issue can be easily dealt with by creating a dynamic training portfolio that uses different methods to explain the objectives. In addition to this, microlearning can be used with visual as well as audio aids.

If you truly want your employees to learn, you need to make them a stakeholder in their own learning.

8. Making Sure The Training Sticks

You need to conduct training that will stay with the attendees. After you have conducted the training ask them the following questions:

• Did you learn something?
• Do you think that the training was relevant?
• How can we improve?

9. Not Keeping Up With the Latest Trends

A number of IT training providers will gladly teach courses that are more than two years old. However, as technology changes, the courses need to be updated. So you need to ask your IT training provider if they are offering the latest courses.

10. Not Identifying Leaders Amongst Employees

Training give organizations the chance to identify leaders amongst their employees. If organizations are not doing so, they are wasting a great opportunity to do effective succession planning for their company. You employees may have great potential to overcome project management challenges and lead great initiatives, and you can identify these people by keeping track of their performance in different IT training programs.

Challenges Faced By IT Companies

Here are some of the challenges that IT companies face:

• IT companies tend to have poor customer services.
• IT companies don’t have competent human resources that would work to bridge the gap between employee goals as well as organization goals.
• Lack of activities that distribute workload and decrease stress.
• They tend to have ineffective budget planning. Most of the companies want to achieve same goals every year without upgrading their budget.
• Lack of training to upskill the employees.

Overcoming IT Skills Training Challenges

There is no challenge that can’t be dealt with. In order to overcome training related challenges, organizations can use IT skills training services. It is recommended to do training needs analysis before the training is done to highlight the problem areas. In order to see if the training made a change or not, organizations can do a pre-training test and a post training test, while evaluating the ROI.