The most valuable resource any company has is its employees. No matter how good a product is offered, or how prime a market is, if the right teams are not in place with the correct skills to perform, then all efforts will be in vain.
For a business to succeed, it must invest in its employees to keep their skills up to date.
When those investments are in the form of technology training, both employees and employers benefit. Workers gain skills that improve their career prospects, and the business gains employees who are knowledgeable in specific areas with the most, and often hardest-to-fill, needs.
Not All Technology Training is Created Equal
Unfortunately, internal training efforts can sometimes miss the mark.
In a Capgemini and LinkedIn survey, 52% of tech employees said their company’s training programs didn’t help them gain new skills, and 42% went so far as to call them “useless and boring.”
For technical training to be successful, training must be targeted, specific, and engaging. Developing internal training programs that often miss the mark wastes the time of both the instructors and student employees, leading to frustration on both sides and potentially negatively impacting retention.
A better alternative is outsourcing employee training to a training institute that specializes in and is an expert at teaching technical skills. For companies unsure of utilizing an outside training provider, here are 7 reasons to consider:
1. Internal experts don’t have the skills or time for training
When you want employees to learn the valuable skills other employees already have, a seemingly obvious solution is to have your expert employees teach their peers. But that’s an option that presents a couple of significant issues.
First, those employees with valuable skills would have to take time away from their primary work to spend time teaching. The days (or more likely, weeks) they spend in developing a training program and implementing it means the time the company is losing that person’s output—the precise work you’ve deemed important enough to teach others. That comes at a high cost.
The second issue is at least as serious — the employee that’s awesome at a particular tech skill is not necessarily awesome at teaching it. Teaching requires an entirely different skill set than data science, cybersecurity, or software engineering. If you take some of your most valuable employees away from their main work to do training and they’re terrible at it, you’ll spend their time, the trainees’ time, and the company’s money, all to end up with nothing to show for it.
2. You can find trainers with the specific expertise you need
Chances are, there are multiple tech skills you want to teach your employees. If you were to try to hire one person full-time to handle your company’s technology training, you’d have a hard time finding someone who has all the different competencies needed to cover all those topics.
By contrast, when you outsource your training to a technical education provider, you can choose the specific types of experts you need to handle each training course or session. And if teaching technology is what they do as their primary job, instructors will have both the teaching skills needed and the specific tech knowledge to upskill employees.
3. Professional tech trainers will have up-to-date knowledge
Part of why providing tech skills training is so important is how fast tech skills go out of date. If a cybersecurity expert you hired five years ago did nothing to learn about new threats, it wouldn’t bode well for your company’s security.
An organization that teaches tech skills professionally will treat it as part of the job to stay on top of the trends and changes in the industry. If you find a good training provider, you won’t have to worry about them teaching your employees information that’s already outdated.
4. A good provider can customize their training to your needs
One of your alternative options for employee technology training is to license pre-created materials to provide your employees. That will cost you less than hiring a skilled instructor to provide the training, but the materials you get will be generic. They may not cover the precise skills you want your employees to gain, and definitely won’t address how putting those skills to use at your company will look. Static materials also can’t respond to the particular learning styles of your employees.
An experienced instructor can work with you to create a training course or session based on your specific needs and make sure the material is tailored to your company. And part of being a good teacher is being able to respond to individual students and provide the personalized attention and instruction they need. You’ll only get that from a trainer that brings teaching skills to the table.
That company has already done the work of hiring and vetting skilled trainers. Your job is simply to find the company you want to hire, interview them to make sure they’re qualified to provide the kind of training you need, then work out the details of your contract. A company that’s well-versed in providing this kind of service will have an onboarding process in place to make getting started easy.
5. The hiring process is simpler
Organizations that focus on tech training have developed teaching materials that they know work because they’ve had time to test them out with students. And if the training you hire them for is similar to courses they’ve taught before, they won’t have to start from scratch in creating training materials. They can pull from what they’ve already created, which can mean getting started faster.
Hiring trainers that teach tech skills professionally as their main job means that you get all the benefits of their experience. Anyone who’s spent years teaching students becomes an expert in figuring out the teaching tactics that work best for different types of learning styles.
6. Tech training experts will have proven tactics and materials
In comparison, hiring a company that offers technology training as a service means you only pay for what you need, whether that’s one session a year or regular courses. Since the teacher in charge of the training is employed by a third-party company, things like taxes and benefits aren’t your responsibility, and you can leverage the programs and trainers only when you need them.
Hiring a full-time employee to handle your technology training means paying for their salary year-round, covering health insurance costs, employee taxes, and benefits like paid time off. It’s not cheap—especially if you want someone good at what they do.
7. Outsourcing can cost (a lot) less than hiring full-time employees
Last but certainly not least, hiring new employees to fill existing skill gaps on your technical teams is expensive. Posting job descriptions, conducting interviews, onboarding costs, and yearly salaries and benefits add up quickly.
By investing in your current employees, you minimize these additional costs associated with new hires and retain loyal top performers with priceless experience.
Get Started Training Your Employees
If you’re committed to investing in your employees with outsourced technical training, be sure to choose a provider that is experienced in your needed skillsets, and has the results to prove it.
To make sure your employees gain valuable tech skills, hire a company that:
- Can provide trainers with specialized tech knowledge and teaching skills
- Utilizes an industry-leading curriculum that teaches relevant and up-to-date skills
- Can customize training or courses based on organization-specific needs
- Have proof and results available of successful training and previous partnerships
If you’re wondering where to find a provider that meets all the above criteria, look no further than Flatiron School.
With tech training solutions that cover just about any need – whether that’s upskilling and reskilling existing talent or sourcing and screening brand new candidates – and programs targeted to skills across a variety of technical expertise, Flatiron School has what you need to fill the skill gaps on your teams.
And, when you partner with Flatiron School, you’ll be in good company with industry leaders such as Amazon.
Let Flatiron School help modernize your business with our training and talent services. Let us educate, so you can innovate.
