By Lawrence Cummer

The IT industry is constantly shifting, bringing with it a continual need to understand new technologies and solutions as clients’ ever-changing needs mirror the rapidly altering business landscape. Since it’s not feasible to simply hire new talent with every new challenge, many organizations seek to foster an environment promoting career-long learning and training.

Larry Poirier, chief executive officer of Ottawa-headquartered Nitro Microsystems, stressed the importance of learning to a successful reseller company like his own as clients show higher need for highly specialized expertise and outsourcing capabilities.

“Training is very important,” he said. “In our business model, we’re seeing more specialist VARs who are focused on only a few solutions. We’re highly focused on IT outsourcing, so we need a broad range of training to keep up with technology and to be able to manage our client’s environments as efficiently as possible.”

An ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path

Poirier noted that his company has spent 20 years building a culture in which each employee understands how valuable learning is to themselves and the organization. To this day, the value of learning must be persistently presented, he said.

Any organization that wants to build a culture of learning has to go through a lengthy development process, said Ingo Holzinger, assistant professor of organizational behaviour at the Schulich School of Business. An expert in the management of change, Holzinger said that embedding learning into an organization’s culture is no mean feat.

“With professional cultures what’s most important is to realize that it’s a long term process to develop that culture,” he said. “Just like any ethnic culture has developed over hundreds of years, the same is true for organizations. It may not take hundreds of years, but it will take time to change and develop. “If an organization wants to build a learning culture or a training culture, it’s not enough to provide learning opportunities or training opportunities but to change norms, to change values, to change beliefs that learning is necessary and that learning is valued. Learning needs to become the norm; it’s just what you do.”

Reinforce learning culture with buttresses of consistent policy

Even as learning becomes the norm in an organization, Holzinger said, there still needs to be recognition of the efforts. This is especially true in the development phase of building a culture of learning. “To build a culture where an organization values learning, to get to that point it’s important to reinforce,” he said.

“It’s also important that I see my managers and my superiors make the same [training] efforts. So there’s a consistency of policy and action, or of the walk and the talk.”

While it seems like common sense, Holzinger stressed that consistency in what managers say and what they do is crucial to building any organization’s culture. The breakdown between the two compromises the trust an employee has in the value being attributed to the training they are engaging in.

Training reinforcement is an area where most organizations fall down, noted Suzanne Stevens, president and founder of Ignite Excellence, a company specialized in influential face-to-face communications, including sales, negotiation, leadership and presentation training.

She said that Ignite Excellence works to reinforce its training through after-session correspondence that reminds both the organization and the trainee of the triadic responsibility of successful professional learning: the trainer who puts the program together, the organization that must reinforce the learning and the trainee for adopting what has been learned.

“Most organizations talk the talk that they are going to reinforce it,” she said. “We offer up tools and encourage coaching, but not enough organizations take us up on the offer. It’s almost like (they are saying) we want our teams to be better but we don’t want ourselves to be better.”

Nitro’s Poirier pointed out the importance of this reinforcement by making training a part of all technical staffs’ reviews. After two decades of building their culture, Nitro technicians understand that in order to reach the next level of professional achievement they need to grow their skill base to increase their value to Nitro clients, he said. A training budget is set up for each technical staff member at each 12-month review to help them reach their goals of familiarity with new technologies or to achieve specific manufacturer certifications. The employee is ultimately responsible for determining which method is most appropriate for their learning, and engaging in it.

“For example, we’ll say, you have $3000 for training this year,” he said. “They can use that money to buy online training, or classroom training. Of course, you can buy a lot more online training than classroom training. Or, you can engage in text-book style training. But, in order to go from a particular salary, to achieve a, let’s say, five per cent increase, they need to achieve that training over the next year.”

Can you teach old sales dogs new tricks?

Sales training happens more sporadically at Nitro, and has its own reward systems built in based on success. One challenge Poirier admitted with training sales teams is that they are often experienced professionals, and they tend to fall back into their comfort zones.

It’s a generality, but the sales arm of a reseller, or any organization, can be filled with the most grizzled, tried and tested professionals. Getting them on board with new techniques and professional education can be a bit daunting, but some suggest even greater rewards are to be reaped for the organization and the sales professional.

“One of the biggest challenges in a sales training environment is that most of those people have tonnes of experience,” Stevens said. “People will not listen to you (as a trainer), unless you have a lot of experience. And in with a sales department, specifically, you had better be an experienced sales person or they will not listen to you.

“Also, they come to the table with preconceived ideas, which is a real challenge for learning. Someone young is so much easier to train, but the reality is they never learn as much. They are easier to train because they are open to change; however, the people who have all the experiences aren’t as easy to train but many of them realize the mistakes that they have made. That is if it is a good, solid program.” Stevens said a solid training program actually takes advantage of the experienced professional through role-playing exercises and interactive engagement.

Even if the rewards are greater, the famous proverbial challenge of teaching the old dog new tricks does appear grounded in some truth. Holzinger pointed to studies that show that after an individual reaches their early- to mid-30s they often have a reduced appetite for new experience, and that translates into a harder time training.

Still, he stressed that managers and trainers cannot take that attitude. He said if trainers and managers approach veteran professionals with the assumption they will be harder to teach, they will likely harm the training by pushing the older professional harder and more aggressively than necessary.

Like Stevens, Holzinger suggested it’s important to engage the experienced professional in bringing in their own skills to the training environment.

“Why not draw upon the richness of the experience of these experts to use their knowledge and build upon it?” he asked.

A certifiable communications problem

Building a culture of learning is one thing, but knowing what to train on can be a wholly different problem. Reseller organizations have a number of obvious and not-so-obvious considerations, including a variety of technology certifications and solutions to potential client-communications challenges.

While Poirier does present the importance of certification, he stressed that most technicians are strongest based on hands-on experience. Certification, he suggested, really just establishes for the manufacturer a standard level of familiarity and capability with the product. It establishes a comfort level for the manufacturer, but isn’t always as important to the customer.

“The customer pays you to go in and do a job—to implement a solution for them,” Poirier noted. “They are not as interested in the resume.”

Certification is important in helping establish with the manufacturer a stronger partnership, which brings benefits to the reseller organization, he said. “They spend more money on marketing. You’ll see more mindshare. There’ll be more opportunities brought to you. They are all looking for strong partners, especially in the SMB area.”

While customers might not worry whether resellers are falling short on certification and technical expertise, an inability to engage in strong communication might be holding resellers back from growth. Stevens said training must take place to strengthen a technical person’s communications skills, especially, but not exclusively, when they are client facing.

“One of the key issues in technology—or wherever people have a degree (like) lawyers, engineers, architects, technical people—is that a lot of these people are smart in their field, but what they were never taught is how to communicate their message in a compelling way to other people. And it’s not just with the customer that there are problems. Often there are miscommunications between the account manager and people working on projects.”

Stevens noted that because of challenges around communications, one of the most important things that must be trained for is not how to win business, but how to keep and grow it through overcoming voids in communications.

Training Success 101

A few techniques for successful training resonate with trainees and trainers alike. Suzanne Stevens of Ignite Excellence and Schulich’s Ingo Holzinger share a few of the methods they use to build and foster a healthy learning environment.

Take a philosophy of “learn-do-review.” Stevens notes that training must be interactive and followed up with adoption that puts it into practice and later returned to, or it is easily lost.

Build training around both personal and professional objectives. Stevens says that before training personal goals should be factored in. Only after both a trainee’s objectives have been met does Stevens feel her job is done.

Measure capabilities before and after development. “That’s the only way to get smart people to listen to you,” says Stevens. “They need to see it for themselves. They need to see that they are not perfect.”

Be patient. Holzinger reminds organizations not to expect results immediately, or in the first several months. Training takes time.

Select for success. Even though training can help avoid some recruitment needs, recruitment can play a big part in training. Holzinger says during the hiring process, seek individuals with an openness and interest in learning.

Be consistent. Holzinger notes that if trying to send a message that training is crucial to an organization, don’t reward 20 individuals who’ve followed the culture you are trying to build and then break trust by on the 21st time rewarding someone that hasn’t. “As you know, trust takes a long time to develop but it’s destroyed very easily.”