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Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Information Technology (IT)

They are talking about this topic: Current Continuing Education

 

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The quotes below are about this issue:
While some employers send incumbent employees off-site for training, many have professional development units that develop in-house training. Vendor training is frequently used for new software/technologies that businesses purchase.

Employer Quote Region
"What we've been doing in the last few years is we've been working directly with the vendor because there's no training other than specifically sending them to the vendor. In our industry, we're the folks who make sure that the connections work so you can have remote workers doing your programming and fixing things remotely. We're the ones that take care of the network that makes that happen. And the folks that we're able to hire typically don't know how to run the testing equipment; they don't know how to use the equipment to test and figure out where the issue is at if there is an issue. So, we're sending them directly to the vendor or—in case the State the Minnesota—predominately to a company called Calix, which is now the vendor for most of the telecommunications products in the state of Minnesota for those connections." Central
"Vendors are able to stay a little bit ahead of the curve, and I think that's very difficult for academia right now. Maybe there was a time when academia was ahead of industry, but I don't think that's the case anymore, at least not in this sector." Central
"One of the things that we do is Red Hat. We do training. So, one of the vendors we support is Red Hat. And they benefited a great deal from Oracle buying Sun and customers just running away from the Sun infrastructure and running to Red Hat. So, we've seen a tremendous growth in training and in Red Hat and the whole virtualized infrastructure." Metro
"Vendors are a big source in our industry for training, whether it be VMI or Symantec or ENC or whoever. I really do think there are opportunities there because what we see is that our customers go through training—typically quite large businesses—and there seems to be a gap between...as those companies get smaller and smaller, they can afford less and less of this kind of training. And that's why I would look for closer partnerships between colleges and vendors." Metro
"Well, certainly, PMI training is a big," Metro
"Employer: We actually now have a specific learning development organization that resides within the technology area. They provide a lot of different trainings, predominately technical. They have hundreds of various trainings that they can take, in addition to having opportunities to take additional courses outside of the organization. So, they do have specific dollars that we've allocated towards their training and personal career development.

Question: So, you've internalized that function then?

Employer: Most definitely."		 Metro
"In my area, it's not necessarily a formal program to sit down in some classroom training or anything like that, but it's certainly a grooming process that is facilitated by supervisors and leaders." Northeast
"We have a couple of things in place that help drive that. We have an internal program that we call High-Tech [lost in translation], which teaches soft skills and tries to instill some sort of understanding of what the stuff is supposed to do. And not just make it work, but why businesses have things like this. The business acumen piece, we actually require people that are in senior positions of leadership to sit on non-profits boards or to go through the leadership [lost in translation]—things like that to help unplug for a second from the industry and hone those business skills." Northeast
"We do send our folks to trainings." Northwest
"Often, yeah, we train them. We do a lot of training, but we also will send people to training. From time-to-time, we do utilize services from local institutions or we do custom trainings. And we'll get a little room and do the training for our state board electricity licensure stuff." Northwest
"Employer: I know from the early days of working with [another respondent] on router stuff—the two of us sat in a room and didn't even know half about cracking into one. We know a lot about that stuff now, so it's working with the new employees that come in and have a willingness and a desire to learn. It's not required of all of my techs to know all this stuff, but I make the options available and say, 'We're going to go through restoring the database to our finance server on a backup server, so if you want to know how it's done, here's your opportunity.' We have one that asked about more active directory training, so we looked for opportunities for him to do that, and so on. But if we buy a certain product for content filtering or whatever else, we'll bring everybody on to work with that particular vendor.

Question: And you bring that vendor in midst of the training?

Employer: Very wireless stuff, and whatever else. But everything that's in-house—the knowledge base we already have—we'll certainly share with them.

Question: And for most of you, is it a combination of online and in-person training? Or do you lean more...?

Employer: We send them off, too."		 Northwest
"Going back to communication skills, they actually host training sessions for our staff on all of those basic Microsoft Suite programs—Word, Excel, Publisher, etc.—but from a communication standpoint, not only do they help people troubleshoot, but they actually teach our staff." Northwest
"Our tuition reimbursement program has scaled back over the last couple of years. When we had a fairly lucrative tuition reimbursement program, I would say we had three or four students involved in that program, and the company was basically reimbursing their degrees. That was about it. So, I would say it's pretty small. I think sometimes employees are looking for employers to kind of push them in the direction they need to be going in. I mean, there will always be employees that will take the initiative themselves." Southwest
"In some cases, we have provided training to our employees. We were looking to get some state grant dollars when we worked with [MnSCU college]. Over the last couple of years, we did quite a bit of training with our employees. But, in some cases, we look for our employees to take the initiative to say, 'This is what's happening with my field and this is the training or education I need to get.' We certainly will help our employees with tuition reimbursement programs." Southwest
"Generally, experts within our company would do the training. We have many technical experts in certain applications. So, once or twice a year, certain groups of people get together and then training programs are offered through a two- or three-day seminar session. There are also all different types of industry training courses offered out there, either online or by attending somewhere." Southwest