Devil's Advocate: The failure of IT training

Businesses want a broader range of skills from their IT staff including better communication, but Martin Brampton argues less can often mean more

Inadequate training for IT people has once again come into the firing line, this time in a Forrester Research survey, commissioned by IBM. The focus of the criticism is that training is based on a narrow view of the role of IT staff, while organisations are demanding a broader range of skills.

This might be thought an odd sort of complaint to make when vocational courses have largely eclipsed more theoretical studies in universities, at least in terms of student numbers. And an extraordinarily high number of survey respondents believed that communications skills would be increasingly important.

So we might first ask whether the old distinction between education and training is still valid. It was once supposed that education could provide skills of lasting value, abstracted from the features of life in a particular period. We tend to assume things that seem to us true must be universally true, yet the study of history suggests that people have held all kinds of beliefs that were particular to a time and place.

But it is only recently that the education minister caused offence in some quarters by implying that medieval historians were no use to society and had no justification for public funding. Clearly there are limited employment prospects for people to make a living as historians, but critical skills and an awareness of various forms of society surely have more lasting value than knowledge of a particular programming language.

The need for communication skills needs some examination too. Complaints are often made that schools and universities fail to teach basic language skills, by comparison with the past. Are we, therefore, to assume that just as we need a greater ability to communicate we have somehow thrown away those very skills?

Perhaps the apparent contradiction arises because we actually need to communicate less, in order to have more time to do things. The ability to disseminate material widely has certainly resulted in us being faced with far more than we can possibly digest. Even if we could free up all the internet bandwidth wasted on spam, we still need to question the value of many emails.

Turning directly to IT, another area of severe overload is the documentation that comes with software. A decade ago, each software product seemed to come with a substantial paper back book. Now, there may be the equivalent on a CD, but more likely the information is integrated with the product as online help.

But the average user never finds the bulk of this material, working only with a highly restricted subset of the available features. Even when the product is a software development tool, used only by IT professionals, the same tends to be true. This behaviour is further encouraged by the fact that all too often not all of the features actually work.

Indeed, software tools often develop in a haphazard fashion. In the fast changing world of web development, it is rarely possible to stick with old versions of systems because a critical driver is changed to tackle security problems. Without strong controls on development, new versions often involve rework as a result of changed interfaces.

All this suggests some rather specific aims for training. There is always a need to learn about the details of new systems and environments, and even this is not always adequately met. More important, though, is to encourage a critical approach to every aspect of IT. In many cases, less is more, provided the less is well thought out, durable and flexible. Training that enhances the ability to achieve those values is likely to bring more rewards than mere technical detail.

If we can tackle those problems within IT, we will be better placed to confront the wider issues. Building skills that have wider application in organisations is a fine goal, but is unlikely to be achieved if we cannot even overcome the problems within IT.