Are you thinking about an IT Bootcamp for your business? Training your IT employees may seem like a noble idea for your business. In a different world, employees would spend almost half of their time learning new techniques and sharpening their skills. However, for most businesses, IT employee training is a low-priority objective, especially due to the long to-do list, budgets, and fear of losing employees after investing in them. This is a wrong way to look at it because investing in IT staff training is now more important than ever.

Benefits of Sending your IT Team to a Bootcamp to Learn New Skills

To improve your employee’s skills: Sending your IT team to a bootcamp can turn them into better employees. The IT bootcamps have detailed courses that cover a range of IT skills that can ensure all your IT employees understand and are able to use tech programs and software.

To increase the value of your IT department and improve its ability to respond to the ever-changing business needs: As big data and analytics change the way we conduct business today, IT has become a value and profit center. This means that your IT department needs to know how to enable new technologies that can help to directly serve your customers. Additionally, an IT bootcamp will train your employees in new technologies that can help generate revenue while cutting on costs.

Increase employee efficiency: When your employees work on a challenging project, they tend to handle the new problem at a slower pace. At other times, they may be forced to consult their superiors to assist them on how to respond to unique challenges. This can cause wastage of time and other resources that will cost your business money.

Challenges of sending your IT team to a Bootcamp

Although sending your IT team to a bootcamp has numerous benefits, you may still find it to be ineffective due to some common challenges such as:

Hectic employee schedules

When your employees have to juggle between work, family life and a slew of other responsibilities, they may be physically drained, and a bootcamp may only add to their stress. To avoid such an occurrence, you can choose a bootcamp program that can provide on-site training. Such a program may be able to tailor the lessons according to your company’s own policies. What’s more, the training can be scheduled to suit that of your employees.

Inconsistent employee training materials

One of the common challenges that most companies experience is inconsistency on what is taught. To avoid such an occurrence, carefully choose a bootcamp program that is consistent and that has accountability tracking.

Lack of engagement

There are three important levels of engagement: cognitive, behavioral, and emotional. When these three are absent, your employees will have poor knowledge retention. Additionally, the lack of engagement hinders behavioral change. Such a challenge can be evaded by selecting a bootcamp program that can establish an active learning culture through continuous coaching to make all your employees feel like they’re part of the culture. This can greatly enhance emotional engagement and lead to increased learning.

Different learning habits

Regardless of the number of your IT employees, it’s important that you consider their learning preferences and habits before you send them for training to an IT bootcamp. The current workforce has different generations, and they all have different relationships with technology.

Therefore, employee training can be less effective if it assumes that all employees have the same level of knowledge. The solution to such a problem is to choose an employee training program that uses different content types such as videos, graphics, written notes that caters for different employee learning preferences.

How to know Whether Sending your IT Employees to a Bootcamp is the Right Move

Signs that your IT employees need training are often subtle, especially when your organization is used to working with knowledge and skill sets gaps. This can cause problems for your business including lack of compliance in computer and network security systems, lower quality of work, and high turnover rates. Well-trained IT employees will produce high and consistent results. Some of the signs that it’s time to send your IT employees to a Bootcamp include:

Lack of basic skills: There are situations when IT employees don’t know how to carry out some tasks which lead to time wastage.

To meet compliance regulations: When there are new policies, then your employees need training to know about the new regulations and to comply.

Teaching new skills: Whether it’s a new system or equipment, it’s important to train your IT employees so that they can know about it.

If you’re contemplating to send your IT team to a bootcamp, or you’ve noticed red flags within your business, visit Infotec today for employee training. It’s easier to nip these early signs before any serious damage happens.