How much time do you set aside each quarter, or each year, to take training? One week? One day? One hour?
When you think of for-the-job training, you may think it takes away from your daily responsibilities, or worse, wastes your time.
But results from a new IDC white paper, sponsored by Microsoft, may reset your thinking.
To quote the recent IDC white paper, Partner Success with the 3rd Platform: Why Training Matters (July 2014), "Partner organizations that fail to maintain and enhance their employees' technical and sales skills will be unable to successfully apply the best technologies to match evolving business requirements."
Knowledge leakage is real
IDC identifies the term “knowledge leakage” as “the slow degradation of skills over time” and call it “a silent threat to organizational success.”
Furthermore, if you don’t take the time to train and learn new skills, you could fall behind exponentially. To quote IDC:
•"Organizations that fail to acquire new skills as technologies evolve can see their effective capability decline by as much as 75% in just six years."
•"Over time, a partner’s failure to upgrade the technical skills of its workforce results in an effective loss of collective capability."
•"Partners who don't effectively train their consultants are doomed to offer last year's answers to next year's problems, sell technology solutions that are outdated, and be lapped by competitors who can more rapidly identify and apply innovative solutions."
What to do?
Read the Partner Success with the 3rd Platform: Why Training Matters white paper to see IDC’s recommendations.
At MPN Training, we are here to help you keep your skills fresh and relevant. Be sure to follow this blog as well as our @MPNTraining Twitter feed to see the latest news and offerings. You can also visit the Get2Expert site to find out what courses we are putting on here in the UK.
The bottom line: "If a partner's employees are not actively advancing their skills, the organization is falling behind its competitors."
Don’t let this happen to you.