Professional Development Strategies

All this requires planning and a manager's personal attention. But the upside is that in these times of lean pay raises, this attention sends a clear, morale-boosting signal that the organization is interested in the person beyond his or her ability to deliver a quick tech hit.

Build It, and They Will Train

Here's how to get a comprehensive professional development program off the ground.First, make the case. Tooling into the CIO's office and announcing that a full-bore professional development plan is a good idea will go over like a lead balloon. Professional development is neither cheap nor easy. You need to spend some time enumerating what such a plan can do for the business.

The most obvious benefit is staff retention. Our small reader poll for this article showed that job growth is just as important as monetary compensation to 70 percent of respondents--and even in a tough job market, two-thirds would likely look for another job if their present positions didn't offer professional growth. With more than 90 percent saying a professional growth plan would make them more likely to stay with their company, managers can feel good about implementing one as a retention strategy.

Besides, turnover costs the bottom line. "It does cost money to lose people, significantly more than it takes to train them and retain them," says Deb Turner, senior HR executive at an international market research firm and a former IT recruiter for a Fortune 500 financial services company. The conventional wisdom is that it costs about twice the salary amount to replace somebody, she says. A good development plan shows IT employees that significant time and effort are being devoted to their success--that is, the company cares.

A good plan also can provide better customer service. The IT aphorism, "You can be incompetent or you can be unpleasant, but not both," while amusing, isn't really true: Customers want someone who can treat them right and solve their problems. Indeed, this point is tied to morale.

"IT employees are usually overwhelmed with work and often have difficult, demanding customers who want it fixed now," says Peggy Morrow, a customer-service consultant and author. "If they're working in a demotivating atmosphere, they will tend to be short with customers and treat them rudely."Working on both competence and customer-handling skills improves your customer-service score, which is often the metric that makes or breaks your department's performance evaluation. With customer-service numbers so tightly bound to business objectives, tying this back to your professional development efforts will help enlist support and funding.

In general, a good plan will provide better staff capability, and therefore better IT project capability. "You need someone in the job who can find the efficiencies in that job," Turner says. "You can't buy that."

Finally, think of professional development as a way to tie into upper management's organizational initiatives, such as HPO (High Performance Organization), Balanced Scorecard and Six Sigma. All these plans have staff expectations that go beyond technical skills, and your professional development plan will help deliver on those expectations.

Once you've established the need for a plan, chart a course for each role. It's important to tie plans to jobs, not individuals, as the expectation should never be based on personality, but rather on function.

Most folks like to know where they stand regarding promotion, and a professional development road map conveys that information instantly. From a manager's view, the road map formalizes expectations and prevents misunderstandings. It defines what must be done to achieve the next level. One organization's professional development track for network engineers and consultants is shown on page 64.A good road map comprises a measurable or definable sequence of events. In the "training-only" mentality, such events are limited to occurrences like conferences and training classes. These should be balanced by other important events, such as ongoing professional reading and classes on nontechnical business skills like project management, teaching others and preparing documentation.

How is this different from a conventional work plan? A typical work plan has specific goals that vary among individuals, whereas a development road map lists nonspecific, ongoing events that help round out the individual. Also, with a conventional work plan, most of the goals that are set are mandatory. A good development road map provides some choices.

But defining road maps for roles rather than employees doesn't mean you shouldn't track activity types through the career of the employee. Tracking activities such as lab time, professional writing and teaching is appropriate for most IT employees. Looking to other disciplines such as medicine and law enforcement, employers keep track of formal training hours, which is a good idea for IT as well. As you can see in our sample development plan, some IT professionals may also want to keep track of lab hours as a metric of professional development.

A road map doesn't do anyone any good if nobody's navigating. If you're a manager, it's up to you to consistently and regularly follow up on your staff's progress. If you're a staffer, you must follow the map, identify roadblocks you're experiencing and speak up if you think the road map needs revising.A good professional development plan has three essential components: technical skills, time- and project-management skills, and business and customer skills. If one of these is missing, you'll never achieve an exceptional level of customer service, Morrow says.

Acquiring technical skills involves more than classroom training, of course. How many hours have you spent this month reading technical books and professional journals? How many hours have you spent training others or writing documentation? All these undertakings exercise your technology brain, but the pressure of having to teach someone else how to do something forces you to raise your level of knowledge on the subject.

Beware of training for training's sake--if you don't use it, you lose it. "The worst thing people do is go to training, get all pumped for it and then do absolutely nothing with it," Turner says. "That happens all the time."

A good way to kill two birds with one stone is to have the recipient of training teach new skills to others. If you're launching a peer-based training program at your organization, however, here's one tip: Don't bite off too much at once. If you start out asking people to teach half-day classes, this may be a bit daunting. Have practitioners give a half-hour class, perhaps as a way to mix up a staff meeting, on tips and tricks regarding their specialty; this can be enough in the beginning.

Get Thee to the LabOne thing we IT pros, consultants and magazine editors have observed over the years is the significant number of outages attributable to a lack of hands-on experience. There's the adage, "We only truly learn by destroying." But isn't it better to destroy in simulation than in production? Again, when you think about other disciplines, it makes sense to track the number of hours with given types of technology. You must log in excess of 35 training hours in an airplane to obtain a private pilot's license; why should complex technology be different, particularly at enterprises?

Consider redos of upgrades. Upgrades are typically done in overtime. Unexpected snags arising from inexperience can be costly, particularly when the project involves an outside vendor's billable time.

Don't be fooled into thinking your staffers get what they need to avoid these errors at the weeklong training class. We've participated in and written these classes and labs--they're usually optimized for quick-hit achievement of a single goal to emphasize the lecture. They aren't a substitute for doing a dry run of a complex deployment. A lab that mocks up the salient parts of your environment is essential.

Projects frequently get stalled because of a lack of staff time-management skills: the ability to schedule blocks of time to devote to a task; the ability to use your calendar as a planning and reminder tool; and the ability to use some kind of follow-up mechanism, whether with vendors or fellow staffers.

Pursuing professional development is itself contingent on having the discipline to "steal" small amounts of time on a regular basis for this purpose. Think about it: Half an hour of professional development reading per day means about 130 hours of professional development annually in a typical job. Over 10 years, that's 1,300 hours--not too shabby.In addition, project-management education is often overlooked for line IT employees. The attitude in IT seems to be, "If I wanted a project manager, I'd hire one." But when you think about the many projects a network engineer embarks on, it makes good sense that he or she be familiar with at least the basics of project management.

Do You Want Fries With That?

Business and customer-service skills can be the most difficult to develop. In general, you'll want to focus first on communications: Can your network admin write a coherent memo or express herself succinctly at a meeting? Is your helpdesk analyst giving users choices, or is he laying down the law and slamming down the phone?

You certainly can "train" these skills, and courses are available that, like time-management classes, will give your staff the basics. Indeed, many organizations have "corporate universities" to develop just these skill sets.

You'll also want to look at the way your organization measures IT success, because you're communicating what's important by the way you judge your managers and staffers. If it's all about uptime, you're sending a message to your data-center manager that other things aren't important. Each role is different, but to build your data-center manager's people-management skills, for example, you might want to have, as a goal, coaching employees a certain number of times per quarter, either to praise correct behavior or to encourage better performance.Where can you go beyond training? Site visits can be helpful, as can mentoring. Want to expose your engineers to white-glove customer service? Have one of them spend the day with your best helpdesk analyst. Want your helpdesk to get a sense of how a network upgrade is performed? Again, mentoring helps.

Professional development is ultimately an HR issue. While you'll need to bring IT-specific staff development strategy to the table, a friendly HR professional can be very helpful in identifying how to develop skills on the job, especially soft skills.

Bottom line, anyone can train staff--all you need is tuition, travel and per diem dollars. But truly developing your staffers to help them reach their potential requires an involved manager who's willing to take the time to create a plan that goes beyond acquiring technology skills--a plan that answers the age-old question, "So you've got an MSCE ... now what?"

Jonathan Feldman is director of information services for the city of Asheville, N.C., and a contributing editor to Network Computing. Previously, he was director of professional services for Entre Solutions, an infrastructure consulting company based in Savannah, Ga. Write to him at [email protected].

Sadly, professional development is an oft-neglected piece of IT management. Letting individuals chart their own training courses is at best a piecemeal, inefficient approach, at worst a serious tactical error that will come back to bite you in lower customer-satisfaction scores.We explain how to build a comprehensive professional development program that will challenge your IT staffers while letting them know you care about their future with the company. Of course, before you can build it, you have to sell it, so we also offer tips for getting management buy-in.