|
An online monthly research publication by the Ivey Business School
Volume 13, Number 7: Summer Supplement
July 2007
The Importance of IT
Skills
Click here to download audio/visual
presentation.
Click here to listen to the Q&A.
Technology is an
essential part of how we conduct business today.
But with increasingly busy schedules, improving
IT skills and technical training often aren’t
high on employees’ priority list. Recent
research shows that companies must partner with
employees to improve their technology skills.
And for both the employee and the organization,
this investment is well worth the time.
Ashleigh Murphy sat down with Deborah Compeau, a
Professor of Management Information Systems at
the Richard Ivey School of Business, to discuss
the ways in which companies can help employees
make the best use of their IT skills. Ashleigh
began by asking why it’s so important that
companies support their employees in making the
most of their IT skills…
A. It’s important for a couple of
reasons. Technology is an essential part of how
we get our work done in organizations today.
There is evidence to suggest that we don’t make
enough use of our technologies and therefore
aren’t getting enough benefit in terms of our
performance. A couple of examples: estimates of
software usage, for example, suggest that users
typically use less than 20 per cent of the
functionality available to them in software.
Often that’s given as a sign that software is
badly developed –it has too many features and
functions. But it’s also true that many of the
features that we don’t use are there to enhance
our productivity, to make life easier, and if we
actually took the time to learn to use them,
we’d be able to do more. There is also some
evidence coming out of a US research firm that
suggests that every hour of needed training that
is conducted saves five hours of organizational
time: four hours of experimentation, a half hour
of training, and a half hour of rework. So the
investment in effective training is actually
worth it in terms of payoff to the organization.
Q. Is there one best way to train
employees – for example, should all companies be
jumping into online training?
A. Definitely not. People have very
different sorts of preferences in terms of how
they learn. So really what organizations need to
do, is they need to offer a menu of ways for
people to learn. Some people learn best from a
class room. They like the structure and pacing
being provided from someone else, they like the
fact that it gives them a strong foundation to
go forward with for additional training, and
they like the social aspect of being in a class
with other people. Other people are very turned
off by that environment. They don’t want to go
at the pace that somebody else sets, they don’t
want to be around other people when they learn,
and so they would prefer to do things privately.
Online training has some advantages because it
can be done at any time, at any place, [and] it
can be done at the pace the individual likes.
But it’s not the only way. It’s certainly part
of a total picture of training.
Q. What is the biggest barrier that
companies face with regards to training?
A. I think I’d say that the biggest
barrier that I’ve seen is really one of time. A
lot of that comes back to the value that is
given to IT skills. We hear so many things in
the media about technology being just a tool,
about how easy to use it is, and all of that
starts to suggest that there’s really nothing to
it. That there’s nothing that needs to be taken
time with, in terms of building skills, and that
creates a real sense that it’s just something
you should know how to do. And if you don’t know
how to do it, well that’s your problem. What
that leads to, is it leads to people who sort of
limp along with inadequate skills; enough to get
by with but not enough to take advantage of what
they’re doing. And the big barrier there is
time. Because if I’m sitting in my office and
I’m faced with choice of, “do I spend time
working on the things that are part of my
quarterly objectives that are going to determine
my performance evaluation or my bonus or do I
work on training for something that is supposed
to be really easy to use, and I might need
someday?” – I’m going to go for the short term
every time. And as a result, what people find is
organizations often have significant financial
budgets for training, but people can’t find the
time to get away to go on the training and get
it when they need it. And that’s what creates a
real problem in terms of that barrier for time.
It’s that competition between performance –
doing the job immediately – and learning to be
able to do the job in the future.
Q. How does the speed of technological
change affect training?
A. The big problem that I think most
people find around the pace of technological
change is that it’s a treadmill. You spend
everyday running to keep up. Most personal
computing software is on about 18 month upgrade
cycles. So just by the time you get comfortable
using it, by the time your support organization
gets all the bugs worked out and figures out how
to support it, you’re on the treadmill and off
on the next piece of software. For corporate
level software, things like enterprise systems,
you’re still looking at three to five year
windows of upgrade cycles. And these are
upgrades that are going to take a couple of
years to complete. So you’re always running, and
you’re always trying to keep up. Every time
technology changes users find that what they’re
able to do in any given day actually drops. In
our research we called it the upgrade dip:
great, a new piece of software comes out and now
all of the capability I have is gone. And so my
actual capability drops and it takes me awhile
to build that back up again. Many of the people
we talked to in our study talked about this
notion of this upgrade dip in one way or another
and the problems that it creates for them.
Q. What is the difference in the value
placed on novice vs. higher level training in
companies?
A. Most companies tend to associate
training with something that they need to do
when they introduce new technology. And that’s a
really good thing. There was a day when
introducing new technology, people…the first
time they ran into trouble in their project
their idea was to cut the training budget –
because we don’t need to spend the money there.
Now I think organizations have recognized that
they really do need to spend that training
upfront. But what we’ve seen in our research is
that companies have a tendency to think training
is something you do when new software comes in.
But that ignores the fact that people come into
new roles, or come into the organization anew,
beyond when that’s been done and so that’s often
not there. So there’s a timing issue. There’s
also a focus on that introductory level
training: “oh, that’s new to you.” And not
enough focus on saying, “alright, what skills do
you really need to do your job” and providing
the training at that level – which might be
intermediate or advanced level training for some
people.
Q. How well does self-learning work? And
how popular is self-learning with firms?
A. Self-learning is an interesting thing.
There are really two ways to look at that. Most
firms assume that users self-manage their
learning around technology. In other words,
we’re not going to think about it, it’s your
responsibility, you do it. Formal self-managed
learning programs are less common, but they’re
certainly out there. They’re kind of effective
in that they put some value on this kind of
training, they say there is something you need
to learn, they put some formal process in place
to help people know when to identify their
needs, how to fulfill them, and it puts some
structure around it. It’s something that can be
on the performance evaluation. The difficulty
is, in the organizations that what we’ve seen do
this, it can easily become a bureaucratic
process. A process that really just leads people
to formulate goals around learning that really
are not goals about learning, but are goals
about an activity. So my goal is: I’m going to
take a training course. And I probably won’t
offer to do that, maybe until I’ve done it
already, or certainly if I’m planning to do it
next week. And so what we saw with the
organization that we dealt with in our most
recent study was that users would never promise
on a goal that they didn’t know they could
accomplish. They would formulate their goals
around something very mundane, like taking a
training course. And that they weren’t really
pushing themselves to really think about what
they needed to do in order to do their jobs well
and how they would carry that out, and what
would be required to develop that. And so self
learning can be very effective but it’s actually
much more difficult to manage than I think we
anticipated when we went into our research.
Q. Is there one most important thing that
a company can do to help develop IT skills?
A. I think for me, the most important is
valuing IT skills. And this goes back to what I
said earlier about organizations assuming that
it’s just a tool, that it’s just something
people pick up. Because that translates into the
time available for learning; the resources
available to support learning as people are
going forward; the recognition that this is
something that people should be doing, training
is not a vacation, it is actually part of doing
your job; and recognizes the performance
benefits that come from the learning.
Q. So are there any other things that
companies can do help develop IT skills?
A. I think the second thing, beyond just
valuing the skills, is recognizing that one of
the places where this really starts to fall
apart for users is in assessing what they need.
And I think companies have a role to play on a
coupe of dimensions. The first one is in
identifying what skills really are required for
different jobs. But the second one is actually
on helping users to asses their own
capabilities. In a number of research projects
that I’ve been involved in over the last couple
of years, we’ve found that in fact people are
very bad at assessing what they are capable of
doing with respect to technology. Most people
significantly overestimate their capabilities,
relative to what they can actually do when given
a task. There are also a small number of people
who underestimate, systematically underestimate,
their capabilities. So what we’ve found is that
getting people to decide for themselves what
their skills are and whether that fits what they
need, is actually a pretty dangerous practice.
And so I think that would be another area where
I think organization could invest to reap some
real benefits.
That was Deborah Compeau, professor of
Management Information Systems at the Richard
Ivey School of Business.
Professor
Compeau's Homepage
Impact Vol. 13 No.
7: Mitch Rothstein warns firms using
personality tests
Previous Issues of Impact
Register for
Impact
|
