| Tech Companies Are Upgrading Employees |
Dot-com perks such as all the M&Ms you can eat and endless foosball games may be all the rage, but many technology companies have decided that free or reduced-price training programs make better inducements to keep employees around.
"It's a recruiting and retention tool," asserts Paul Stefunek, a recruiter who places high-level tech workers for the Stratford Group. Candidates "ask about employee development and training. It's one of the questions I get asked frequently."
In some industries, corporate training has been around for half a century. More recently, technology giants such as Sun Microsystems Inc., Dell Computer Corp. and Motorola Inc. have developed their own in-house universities. What's different now is that small and mid-size companies are getting a piece of the action by partnering with local colleges and offering all-hours Web courses for the techie on the go.
Take Imtas Inc., a D.C. consulting firm that pays an outside vendor to offer online computer training for its 12 employees. Or consider USinternetworking Inc., an Annapolis firm that has contracted with Anne Arundel Community College. It also provides training in certain software packages not only to its workers, but also members of the public.
Those businesses are helping to make adult education one of the fastest-growing presences on the Web, according to Jupiter Communications Co. analyst Anya Sacharow. The American Society for Training and Development, headquartered in Alexandria, reports that market leaders it surveyed spent an average of $1,616 on training each employee they managed last year. More companies are hiring full-time trainers rather than paying consultants to do the job, according to the society's 2000 study.
That's the route taken by Digital Focus Inc., a Herndon company that creates Web sites and digital businesses for its clients. Earlier this year, Digital Focus hired Dianne Houghton to become its vice president of strategic services. Her main task: Figure out how to build a "Digital University" where the company's 115 employees could go to receive information about Java programming certifications and leadership skills.
Houghton, who previously worked with the Executive Development Center at the Harvard Business School, is tailoring her course offerings based on requests from employees. Later this month she will host a beer-tasting in observance of Oktoberfest. Sessions on financial planning and how to become a product manager also are in the works, Houghton said.
Susan Boyd, a training consultant at Boyd & Associates in Jenkintown, Pa., said companies are merely responding to the need for up-to-date information technology skills.
"Systems' rate of change is six months or less," Boyd said. "The half-life of a programmer's knowledge was three years. Now it's maybe one."
Boyd said that techies once got by "knowing a system inside and out." But since today's software is changing so rapidly, a technical worker now must be able to spot patterns and trouble-shoot on the fly.
Even small firms are responding to workers' pleas for more opportunities to build their technical education. Ajay Bhatia, chief executive of Imtas, said he offers free Web-based training to his dozen employees--a perk that might cost them as much as $300 to $400 per class if they had to pay for it on their own. He also reimburses workers as much as $2,000 per year in tuition for technical classes they take that are directly related to their work.
"It's always cheaper to retrain the employee rather than going out and recruiting new ones," Bhatia said. "It's much less difficult to fill a lower-level position than a higher-level position. By offering training, you're raising your own employees to a higher level."
That holds for companies operating outside the traditional confines of the technology sector. By 2002, the Labor Department estimates, half of American workers will require some information technology training--no matter whether they are employed by a retailer or a computer chip manufacturer.
It's a trend borne in part out of the less permanent nature of the modern employment contract, said recruiter Stefunek.
"Employees are saying, 'I've got to do this for my personal benefit,' " he said. "They realize they have to build their skills. You never really know what's going to happen with a corporation."
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By Carrie
Johnson Washington Post Staff Writer/Sunday, October 8, 2000 |
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