10 Reasons Why You Should Train and Certify Your IT Staff

Is your staff begging you for training?  Are they at the point in their career they need to become certified?  Are you asking yourself, "Why should I train my staff"?  There are many benefits your business can see through training your staff members.  Whether your are a university, small business, large enterprise, solution provider, or technology reseller, you have an IT team behind you in one way or another.  They allow you to send your emails, surf the web, secure you, back you up, get from point A to point B, or they are implementing a product or service you are selling.  The truth is, your IT team needs to have the knowledge to meet your needs, and the only way to get it, is for them to learn it.  My hope is, is that you will train your staff on a regular basis and certify them.  Here are ten reasons why you should train and certify your staff.

10. Increase Your Business' Confidence

Nothing hurts an IT department more than your end users/customers thinking that the IT team just hides in a room with the lights off, praying for things to not break.  Since everything is done electronically, your business, employees and customers need to have the confidence that their data is being handled by true technology experts.   As your employees begin to earn their certifications, post them on your department webpage, a wall in a well trafficked area in your office, buy the shirts, and let people know your team are "Certified Experts".  Spread the word!  It is a great accomplishment!  A well trained team will more likely have their solutions optimized to best practice, configured correctly, and will have less downtime.  Having a secure, optimized and highly available environment will keep your employees, end users and customers confident that their data is protected and being handled properly.
When it comes to selling a product or a service you want your team to be held to the highest confidence by your customer.  Whether it is implementing a SAN solution or simply installing an application.

9. Prove That You Value Your Team

This turns into a touchy subject for many supervisors.  Do we pay for our team to go to training?  Do we pay for them to get certified?  Do we encourage them to get certified?  What if they leave after we spent ALL of that money training and certifying them. My answer is: Invest in your employees and they will return the favor!  Don't be scared that if they get certified they will go find another job somewhere else.
Think about it this way.  If they take the time to self study and to certify on their OWN time and dime, why do you think they are doing it on their own? Probably to improve their resume.
Invest in your team and they will return the favor, either by making the changes or moving on.  If they move on, is it that big of a deal?  If it is, require them to sign a contract to reimburse for the training at a prorated amount.  If they do leave, do you need to increase the pay of your employees. If they can simply go somewhere else to do the same thing, but for more money, something is wrong.  Start with checking how you invest in your employees.  Again, actively INVEST in your employees or they WILL find someone that can.  Take a note from this Dilbert comic: Please, don't marinate in your own stench...

8. Optimize Your Company's Infrastructure

A company's infrastructure is only as good as the person's/team's knowledge that put it in.  If you have a staff member, just throwing stuff into production, because everyone else uses it or they heard it was cool and wanted to try it, STOP THEM!  Don't let them put anything into production without learning about it first, and then ensure it is labbed up in an isolated environment to work out the bugs and to document it.  It sucks when you get into a position, that has all these little "free and cool" applications, barely functioning, on 20 different servers, and now you are responsible for managing it all.  Without any documentation.
By putting things into production without the knowledge to back it, it will not be optimized.  It will be shoddy, limping along, and likely on the verge of failing.  Send your people to training, so they can learn about what they are doing before they even think of implementing a solution into production.  Don't get your company stuck with an environment that is running on banana peels, when training will allow for optimization of the software or hardware.

7. Stay Current With Technology

Is your business still running Windows Server 2000 or Server 2003 across the board, maybe Exchange 5.5, 2000 or 2003?  Why is that? Windows Server 2008 and Exchange 2010 have been out for years!  Do you know that you are behind the times and Server 2012 is now out, with Exchange 2013 peaking over the horizon?!  Are your Cisco products still running CatOS? Train your staff to help get your company up-to-speed on the latest technology.  Take advantage of the latest features now available in the new releases. Staying behind on technology does nothing for your company but allow for more security vulnerabilities and a "going nowhere" staff. Those complex and confusing solutions that were put in ages ago could be running very smoothly, but think about it, really.  With the latest advances in technology, things have become increasingly simple, more secure, and definitely faster.  Your company and staff suffer by keeping old technology running.  Make the move, train your employees, implement new technologies, and certify your staff.  Give them a testing environment to play with the new technologies, to make sure it will work, and to make sure it can integrate into your production environment.

6. Improved Project Management

When a member of your staff knows their systems and solutions from the inside out, any future projects led by that team member will be significantly improved and timelines will be reduced.  Take into consideration the time they spent studying for their certifications, or even the time they spent at training.  They learned new advances in technology, they may have even heard or have been informed on other pieces of technology through conversations with classmates, or by a topic covered in class.  With that knowledge in the back of their minds, when it comes time to implement a new project, present the solution to administration, or to research a new technology, they will have a head start and be able to get the ball rolling with confidence.  When it comes to implement the project, would you rather have a knowledgeable staff ready to go, or a staff that is scrambling day-to-day, trying to figure out what they are going to do.

5. Better Customer Support

Your customers need the best support they can get. Provide it to them.  With a trained and certified staff, who has optimized their environment, implemented high-availability solutions, and implemented best practices.  Your customer calls will drop significantly.  A well trained team will also help cut down the time it takes to troubleshoot and remediate any issues that do happen to crop up.  Once your staff is trained and fixing issues with ease, they will have plenty of downtime to research and make improvements where needed.  With the improved customer support, the complaint department should now be able to find other things to complain about. :)  Give the customers an advantage, prove to the customer why they chose you over the competition.

4. Less Downtime

There is no doubt that when a system is installed according to best practices, it will run optimally and as intended by the solution provider.  Whether it is redundant core switches, firewalls, file shares, Client Access Array's, or DAG's, a well trained staff member will implement these solutions to make life easier for them and the helpdesk.
Imagine your own environment, if a single server fails, what will happen?  Will there be people knocking at your door demanding the service be restored instantly?  Probably.  All of this can be avoided to the utmost extent by training your personnel and valuing their input and recommendations to make your environment run smoothly. Many solutions out there offer some type of high-availability option, some take additional configuration steps for it to run optimally.  By not learning about and implementing these HA solutions, you can get in some deep goop at the point of failure.  When a staff member knows the capability of their systems and solutions, it will be installed and configured to meet the business goals.

3. Influence a Dynamic Learning Environment

You want your staff members to be the best they can be at their job.  By pushing them to attend training, learn new technologies, and get certified, your company will stay on the leading edge of technology and continue to grow and provide the best solutions for your customers. Make continuous learning the top priority when it comes to your employees.  Show your employees you want them to keep learning, don't view learning as a burden, view it as an opportunity.  Keep your staff passionate about their jobs, keep their brains moving, keep the juices flowing, keep your business moving forward. Encourage ideas, inspire growth, and implement the best solutions.

2. Eliminate Mistakes

When you think about it, how much downtime, customer issues, nights and weekends worked, have been the product of a mistake made by the IT team.  It happens all of the time.  One of the biggest influences of system downtime is human error.  Whether it was mistakenly deleting a connector, wiping a switch config, deleting a user account, unchecking a box, or formatting a critical disk, these mistakes cost the business time and money, and it will cost people their jobs.  Mistakes will not necessarily be eliminated, but there will be that knowledge in the staff to make the right choice, to take extra the time and think a thought through, rather than just clicking around or unplugging something inadvertently.
Let your business be the poster child of WHAT to do. Don't make the mistake of denying training to your team. Take advantage of the time you have now and train them before it's too late.

1. Improve Your Business' Reputation

By combining all of these together your business will provide better solutions, be more productive, allow faster turn around time, and provide your end users and customers with a high quality product.  Don't let your business be affected by downtime, unhappy customers, unhappy staff, old technology, or an overall lack of functionality.  Improve and enhance your business' reputation, give your staff the knowledge and skill set they need to meet the company mission. A smooth operating business, keeps the staff and customers looking at the future of the company.
Think of your IT department as a human backbone, it really is.  Keep it strong, keep it moving, and keep it adjusted.  If you don't, you can expect to see headaches, soreness, inflammation, cramps, and stiffness.  Everything will start falling apart from there.  Exercise it!

Overall

It all really comes down to investing in your IT team and valuing the work they do for you.  The results will reflect directly within the environment, and align with your business goals.  Thank your employees for their hard work and investment they have given the business. Invest in them in return. It's for the best.

A well maintained machine runs smoothly.  A poorly maintained machine, grinds, scrapes, seizes, overheats, and fails.  Please, oil your machines routinely to avoid break down.

Putting a Value on IT Certifications - Part 3 "Certified Rockstar"

Finding and Creating Your Value

The true value of your IT certification comes from what YOU do to create the value. You can put your certifications to good use and be a complete rockstar, or you can get certified and do nothing but flaunt around your signature block, resume and office's wall of pride.  Please, use it for good and be the rockstar. Do it to prove to yourself and others, that YOU ARE THE EXPERT, and not just a name with a list of acronyms at the end.  In short, be intelligent, don't be arrogant.

I've had several people ask me if I am going to be looking for a new job now that I have all these Microsoft Certifications.  The answer?  No. I still have A LOT of work to do!  Sure, I can go anywhere and get a significant salary increase, but why leave this place hanging when I can do so much more to help with my newly acquired knowledge!  First on my list, start identifying what needs to be fixed.

Identifying the Problems

We constantly have our binoculars out scanning the horizon for new technologies and thinking of ways to implement them to help our students, faculty and staff. On the other hand, we also need to make sure we put the binoculars down once and a while and see what is happening in our own environment.

Here are a few items that have come up that need to be tackled ASAP. Fixing these issues will definitely increase our value as a University.

Lack of Datacenter Redundancy

As an Enterprise Administrator, my professional life is contained within my datacenters, its applications and hardware and how it meets customer demands.  That being said, it had better run and run well or I won't have a personal life.

One thing our datacenter was lacking was application and hardware redundancy, we had SAN replication going on between sites and Domain Controller replication going, but other high demand applications were lacking in redundancy.  Our website, SQL databases, and Exchange Servers were stand alone systems.  Each of them are in very high demand, so rebooting them anytime before 2:00 AM is out of the question unless it is an absolute emergency.

Lack of Technical Knowledge Held by Students, Faculty and Staff

When I started as a student at the University, we had two Information Technology related Associate Degree programs, one in Network Administration and the other in Web Design.  About seven years ago, they were removed entirely.

Since the removal of pretty much our only technology directed fields, our office, in particular, has had to hire technicians with very little computer experience.  We are getting student technicians that are on track to graduate with Biology, English, and Wellness degrees.  Training them, pretty much from the ground up, is an ongoing occurrence.

Many of our technicians are all freshly out of High School, with little experience, that causes a problem when we have a more complex issue arise with a customer computer.  Who do we send, who's been here the longest? Do we escalate it up the chain to our most experienced server admin, who hasn't done technician duties for ages?  Our Faculty and Staff need to be serviced by quality work.  We also need to provide all of our students, faculty and staff with a proper technical learning environment.

Something needs to be done to ensure everyone knows what they are doing when it comes to technology and how to do it the right way.

Applying the Certifications to Resolve the Problems

Improving Datacenter Operations

Being certified has given me the confidence to really dig in and try to make our Datacenter optimized.  It used to be a mess, but has now been totally revamped and virtualized.  Having the advanced and expert knowledge of our infrastructure and the software we support has allowed me to add redundancy across the board.  This includes implementing Exchange 2010 DAGs, DFS replication,  Load Balanced Web Farm and SQL Clusters across two sites.

By implementing failover clusters, load balanced services, SQL Clusters, Client Access Arrays, and Database Availability Groups we have significantly improved and optimized our Datacenter availability at our two sites.

Training the Students, Faculty and Staff

Microsoft IT Academy - I'm currently working on a proposal to enroll our University in the Microsoft IT Academy program. This will help our Faculty and Staff with their professional development, and also provide the opportunity to start having more technology related classes at the university.

Let me tell you a secret, being a teacher has always been a dream of mine. Although I am not yet a Microsoft Certified Trainer, it is one of my goals to attain within the next 12 months.  Transferring knowledge to students and seeing them succeed in the end will help me both fulfill and continue my career goals and fulfill one of my personal dreams.

The plan: Enroll --> train our Faculty and Staff --> train our students.  It could be that simple, logistically. In reality, not so simple.
The obstacles: Staffing and $$$. I'm the only certified person able to teach Microsoft classes. Since we no longer have any technology classes, we have only one faculty member, not certified, that teaches MS Office. Will there be any demand for the classes or will it be a waste of time? Who is going to pay for it all?

One day my hope is to get over 90% of our Students, Faculty and Staff, Microsoft certified. The end result is intended to be a more technology converged personnel.

It is time to get the ball rolling.

In the End

Value your work, your employees and your image as a professional. Train and Certify your team, as often as you can.  Keep your professionals up-to-date on all technology aspects and you will keep your customers happy.

Imagine the possibilities attainable with your business, university or other environment that has a certified staff.  If you present yourself, your business, and your work, as being completed by experts and professionals, your end product will be held with the utmost value.

In the end, you will be the certified rockstar.

See Also:

Putting a Value on IT Certifications - Part 1

Putting a Value on IT Certifications - Part 2