Employee training is essential for an organisation’s success

Talent shortage is a top emerging risk facing organisations

  According to a 2017 report by Global Knowledge, a massive 68% of IT decision makers faced a present skills shortage in their teams.  Gartner research 2018 indicated that companies need to shift from external hiring strategies towards training their current workforces. Statistics clearly show the importance and benefits of employee development: a more competitive workforce, increased employee retention, and higher employee engagement.

“Organizations face huge challenges from the pace of business change, accelerating privacy regulations and the digitalization of their industries,” said Matt Shinkman, managing vice president and risk practice leader at Gartner. 

The use of cloud has been growing rapidly in the last 4-8 years. Compliance, automation, improved security, infrastructure as code, better DevOps practices, and developing cloud-native applications, are just some common reasons corporations want to move to the cloud.  Adopting a new cloud environment involves extensive change, from skills to processes to technology. With the growing technology changes, it is hard for companies to keep up, and even harder for the average employees.    

Skills development: hard and soft skills

Skills development is a process where we turn from a beginner to a junior, and ultimately a senior. Skills development comes down to two key factors: identifying the skills gaps and developing those skills. When developing skills, it is commonly broken down into hard and soft skills:

• Hard skills are specific to a task and tend to be knowledge-based. Having skills in programming, software, or even another language is classified as a hard skill.
• Soft skills are what we as humans have been learning from our first breath. Personality, leadership, time and stress management, decision making, ability to deal with adversity, and most of all networking.

Hard skills are commonly looked at. It is great to have a smart co-worker, but it doesn’t help the corporation if the employee is not willing to share information or can’t handle stress. Therefore it is best to help employees build both skills.

 

Bridge the skills gap with cloud training

According to a recent study, 2017 U.S. training expenditures increased 32.5 percent to $90.6 billion. We at Nordcloud have also seen a drastic increase in our cloud training business. During the last year we saw a 66% increase in participation numbers. As an example, last year we arranged 101 AWS courses with an excellent (4,50/5 average in) participant satisfaction.

"Excellent course, materials and instructor! Gave good overview of AWS. There were also some interesting questions asked, the answer were good and the instructor seems very educated surrounding the topic. All in all, a good training!"

Check our Cloud Training here - and sign up!