×

Incorporating new learning and training environments into IT organizations can help CIOs address myriad talent challenges while boosting IT performance and improving KPIs.

Udacity, edX, Khan Academy, Codecademy, Hack Reactor, and Dev Bootcamp. Those organizations are part of an emerging education paradigm that’s simultaneously challenging and complementing traditional education providers and corporate training programs. The missions and models of these new organizations promote flexible, social, practical learning and, judging by participation rates, they are quickly gaining acceptance in the marketplace.

Consider Udacity and edX, two major providers of massive open online courses (MOOCs). As of January, they boasted more than 1.5 million and 1.8 million students, respectively, according to MOOCS.com. Research from Course Report, which helps consumers pick coding boot camp programs, expected those programs to generate $59 million in tuition in 2014 while “graduating” nearly 6,000 students the same year, a 175 percent increase over 2013.

Consumers’ rising investment and participation in nontraditional learning programs like edX and coding boot camps signals their appetite for hands-on education and training experiences that meet their specific needs, according to John Hagel, co-founder and chairman of Deloitte LLP’s Center for the Edge. These programs can be a boon to corporate IT organizations, he says, as they serve to close the gap between employees’ existing skills and organizations’ desired capabilities.

“These third parties can accelerate learning inside IT organizations while helping them cope with the exponential rate of technology change,” says Hagel. “For those reasons, taking advantage of emerging learning platforms should be an imperative for IT organizations.”

John Seely Brown, independent co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, says one of the challenges with IT training these days is that it requires more than teaching new skills: In many cases, IT professionals have to “unlearn” old skills in order to absorb new ones. “I was trained in client/server architecture,” says Brown. “To move to cloud computing, I had to unlearn what I knew about client/server and begin thinking about IT architecture in a new way because client/server is so different from cloud computing.”

Brown adds that nontraditional learning environments, like boot camps and the Hacker Dojo, a community and maker space in Mountain View, Calif., lend themselves to unlearning and re-learning because they emphasize experimentation and collaboration. “Many major shifts in technology, like client/server to cloud, central processing units to graphical processing units, and SQL to NoSQL, require unlearning followed by rapid new learning—a pattern that traditional, theory-based, instructor-led training methods don’t lend themselves to, but that learning-in-action and social learning facilitate quite effectively,” he says.

How to Bring External Learning Trends into Corporate IT

Hagel and Brown offer the following suggestions for incorporating MOOCs and more into IT departments’ training curricula and efforts to promote on-the-job learning:

Find staff participating in new learning paradigms. Ask your direct reports to ask their direct reports (and so on) if staff are using MOOCs, boot camps, or local hacker meet-up spaces to enhance their skills and learn new technologies. Hagel and Brown are confident CIOs will find individuals in their IT organizations who are participating in these new learning ecosystems.

“Often the most passionate employees inside IT organizations are already engaged in these platforms,” says Hagel. Brown adds that the “edge-dwellers” inside IT organizations—the individuals who gravitate to the cutting edge and who are sometimes viewed as renegades—are also likely to participate in new learning environments. They advise IT leaders to encourage these individuals, who typically aren’t shy, to share their experiences using new learning platforms with the rest of the IT organization.

Promote “reverse mentoring.” Many organizations support formal mentoring programs as a way to transfer knowledge from more experienced employees to less experienced ones. But Brown points out that managers and more senior-level leaders in IT have as much to learn from younger, less experienced workers about new technologies, the pace of change, and new learning environments.

Brown, who enjoys hanging out at Hacker Dojo, says he’s routinely amazed at the number of 20- to 40-year-old IT professionals who go there at night to attend events, build robots, develop business plans, or refine code. He notes that many of the “kids” he sees at Hacker Dojo work for elite Silicon Valley firms during the day, yet they feel they need this other, nontraditional learning space to help them keep up with the blistering pace of technological change.

“Many managers haven’t lived through this exponential rate of change at a gut level. They read about it, but they don’t live it, as these kids at Hacker Dojo do,” says Brown. “For that reason, coupling mentoring with reverse mentoring can be a powerful learning tool.”

Create safe spaces for experimentation. To incorporate new approaches to learning effectively into IT organizations, some CIOs may find they need to redesign the work environment in IT. If the work environment isn’t conducive to experimentation and on-the-job learning, then IT professionals trying to apply what they’re doing in external environments to the enterprise are likely to experience so much resistance and frustration that they give up, warns Hagel.

“These emerging, external learning resources become largely irrelevant in IT organizations where employees can’t make mistakes or deviate from established processes,” he observes. “Much of employees’ learning occurs when they try to apply ideas or practices derived elsewhere to their own environments, but if they work in IT organizations where ‘failure is not an option,’ they’ll rarely have the opportunity to test and refine those ideas.”

Brown encourages IT organizations to use cloud computing environments as “safe spaces” for experimentation and learning. “Suppose you want to see how massive processing units complement normal processing units,” he suggests. “You don’t want to buy and build that infrastructure yourself. Instead, provision part of your cloud with those capabilities and try it out.”

Brown adds that experimentation is critical because people learn as much, if not more, from failure as they do from success. “When you’re experimenting, you expect to encounter failure, but those instances where things don’t work provide significant ‘eureka’ moments, and the cloud lends itself to learning through rapid sequences of failure,” he says.

The ROI for Nontraditional Training

Hagel and Brown cite numerous benefits IT organizations can realize when CIOs focus on learning and make training and development the centerpiece of their talent agendas. Among them, they may reduce their investment in traditional training programs—the ROI of which is often questionable and hard to measure—while simultaneously improving key performance metrics.

“The economics of traditional training programs are generally unattractive: Companies have to spend a lot of money up front, either to develop or register employees for the programs, coupled with the cost of lost productivity when employees leave their jobs for training,” says Hagel. “In contrast, organizations that help employees address day-to-day challenges by providing them with access to internal and external learning resources often see a significant, sustained improvement in relevant performance metrics like productivity and quality.”

Another compelling benefit: A focus on training may solve CIOs' other challenges around attracting, recruiting, and retaining talent. “Creating a work environment where employees can learn faster, on the job, and where they can connect with external learning ecosystems ought to help CIOs attract and retain the talent they need,” adds Hagel. “If people are developing faster in your organization than they could anywhere else, they have much less impetus to leave, and word of mouth is likely to spread, thereby attracting other individuals passionate about learning.”