Reaching for the Clouds
Providing techies with a crash course in
business principles is one thing. Offering them hands-on training in areas such
as app development 01* Web design, however, requires plenty of processing power
and valuable IT resources. But cloud computing is changing all that, allowing
trainees to experiment without draining IT resources.
“I can teach a class, Ruby on Rails, for
example, and people can then deploy their application on the Internet using
cloud resources,” says Eric Presley, CareerBuilder’s CTO. “Training for
technology professionals has moved beyond theory. Now they can actually try it,
touch it, feel it and push it out for other people to see.”
“Training
for technology professionals has moved beyond theory. Now they can actually try
it, touch it, feel it and push it out for other people to see.”
CareerBuilder has gone so far as to give IT
professionals a clay off and a financial incentive to experiment with new
technologies. Every quarter, the company holds a “hack day” in which IT
employees are given 24 hours to work on anything they want outside the scope of
their regular responsibilities.
“The entire IT department shuts down for a
day and allows everyone to hack on any ideas that they want,” says Daniel
Cosey, CareerBuilder s director of information management. “This includes any
training they want to get done a data inquisition, a new product idea or a new
algorithm for our search engine.” Here’s the best part: The IT professional who
presents the most impressive idea wins $10,000 and six weeks of paid work time
to implement it.
By embracing self-directed IT training that
involves competition among engineers and IT workers, CareerBuilder has created
a program that’s far more likely to have a lasting impact on participants than
standard workshops, says Lee. “If training is entertaining, employees will pay
better attention to it and what the message is,” she explains.
Obstacles Ahead
Nevertheless, innovations in IT training
can carry risks. For example, companies need to make sure that their network
infrastructure is capable of delivering training videos across the enterprise.
That’s something Broadway Bank had to consider when it decided to distribute
Digital Defense’s SecurED training series across its 40 banking centers
throughout the year. “I think we’ll have to be careful about how we distribute
SecurED,” says Huntsman. “Fortunately, one of the things that Digital Defense
did early on was put their training modules into the Quicktime format so they
won’t utilize a lot of bandwidth.”
That’s
something Broadway Bank had to consider when it decided to distribute Digital
Defense’s SecurED training series across its 40 banking centers throughout the
year
Another pitfall of adopting the latest
training methodologies is the risk of attrition. Even if you invest thousands
of dollars in training IT employees, there’s no guarantee that they’ll stick
around especially since the training makes them more marketable. That’s a risk
companies simply have to accept, says Presley. CareerBuilder does. The company
helps IT workers earn MBAs, offering full tuition reimbursements 01* paid
sponsorships with no strings attached. “If they choose to finish their MBA
graduate degree and then, in a month, leave the company, they still don’t have
to pay that back,” says Presley.
But the risk of losing an employee or two
doesn’t seem to have deterred employers from embracing new approaches to
training. Lynda.com reports that 5% of its members now watch its training
videos on smartphones. While that figure might seem small, it has more than
doubled over the past year and continues to rise.
It remains to be seen whether it will one
day be commonplace for IT professionals to watch training videos starring
Hollywood celebrities on smartphones. What is certain is that offering
high-quality, creative training via a variety of delivery mechanisms is now a
business imperative.
Behind the Lens An IT Training Video
Not many people would disagree with Tom
Graunke that IT “Can you name the last time you did something in e-learning and
said it was amazing?” asks Graunke, CEO of Stormwind, an IT training firm in
Scottsdale, Ariz. “It’s boring, and it’s flat.”
But the process of looking for ways to
breathe new life into IT training tools can itself offer lessons in technology.
Take, for example, Stormwind’s experience developing its HD Live training
system. Used by leading tech vendors such as VMware and Cisco, these live,
interactive high-definition IT training videos feature an instructor standing
in a control room surrounded by computer monitors. Throughout an hour long
online session, the instructor is seen in front of various screen captures and
animated slides while lecturing and fielding questions from audience members in
real time.
But
the process of looking for ways to breathe new life into IT training tools can
itself offer lessons in technology.
To make this online learning technology a
reality, Stormwind had to find a way to deliver live, high-definition video to
a standard Web browser. That’s a considerable challenge given that the majority
of today’s browsers are barely sophisticated enough to handle Flash.
First, Stormwind built a studio with
green-screen technology and created software-generated 3D renderings of various
backgrounds, to make it look as if instructors are literally walking viewers
through screen captures and slides when, in reality, they’re just talking to a
green wall.
But because typical Internet connections
can’t support the transmission of green-screen technology, Stormwind had to
find a way to compress the massive, high-resolution files. It uses a mix of XML
code and Java scripts to deliver the files to Flash media servers, which are
designed to stream video to a browser regardless of an end user’s device and
bandwidth limitations. Essentially, the servers trick the browser into thinking
that it’s dealing with a single image rather than a hodgepodge of Flash, HTML,
green-screen technology and 3D renderings. A Stormwind producer can replace green-screen
images on the fly while Flash media servers prompt the browser to refresh 30
times a second for a constant feed of live images.
Instructors are trained in the use of green
screens, and a producer is on hand to cue new images and request zooms and studio
pans as if producing a live TV show.
Stormwind, which has been in business three
years, says it has found that, on average, students retain 92% of the material
presented in HD Live training sessions but only 30% of the material presented
via traditional online learning channels.
