Management

The Importance of Providing New Technology Training

When done right, educational updates can be beneficial for federal agencies in multiple ways.

Cory Stonehocker is director of Department of Defense sales for CDW-G.

The world was turning to digitization well before the pandemic. The pandemic simply accelerated things. Now, there are more applications, more ways of interacting with these applications, more digital processes and more end users who depend on the efficient use of these technologies.

It’s become imperative for federal employees to receive the training needed to best evolve their skill sets alongside new technologies. Depending on how this necessary training is done, it can be beneficial for agencies in several ways.

Be it for upskilling purposes or to learn a new companywide application, training is an essential component of learning and using new technology in an efficient manner. However, many people won’t seek this out proactively, and by the time they seek it out reactively, they’re already behind the eight ball.

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The Need for Mandatory Technology Training

The only way a federal agency can ensure workers have undergone the proper training necessary in the needed time frame is to make new technology training mandatory. This way, agencies can address another need: maximizing the time of their IT workers.

IT workers have the unique skill sets necessary to address agency technological needs in a way that ensures the agency evolves along with the broader technological and workplace landscape. From DevOps to zero-trust network architecture and more, the IT staff can enhance an agency’s technological capabilities in myriad ways, but only when they have the time.

Every minute an IT worker spends assisting an employee who isn’t competent in a new technology is a minute that worker is unable to put toward the broader technological advancement of the agency. Those minutes add up quickly.

Giving IT workers the time to do what only they can do is one of the biggest advantages of hiring a third party to provide new technology training. Even if an agency mandates technology training, IT will spend hours assisting the agency’s employees without a third party providing that training. Otherwise, it would fall on the agency to design and teach a training course for every new technology being implemented.

LEARN MORE: Virtual classrooms expand learning opportunities for federal workers.

The Advantages of Third-Party Tech Training

It’s also worth noting the quality of the training these third-party training companies can provide. Unlike an agency’s IT staff, training is the third party’s full-time job. As a direct result, trainers have developed and continue to update in-depth curricula taught by expert instructors, providing a robust learning and developmental experience that not every agency will be able to provide in-house.

The result is that agency employees will understand and adopt new technologies with greater efficiency, first acquiring a basic understanding and then advancing to deeper levels of competency.

CDW’s Focal Point Academy is a third-party company that can help, particularly as it pertains to the cyber workforce. Focal Point Academy offers a wide range of courses federal agencies can use, including specific cyber training for auditors and executives, classes on the Google Cloud Platform, behavioral malware analysis training, and more. We’re able to offer this training in both physical and virtual classrooms, using the right media for the right content.

However, we don’t simply sell training. Focal Point Academy helps agencies build fully loaded workforce development programs customized to their teams in accordance with the skills those teams already have and the skills they need.

Regardless of how or where it’s acquired, technology training is needed. When done right, this training will help align skill progression with career and agency progression.

This article is part of FedTech’s CapITal blog series. Please join the discussion on Twitter by using the #FedIT hashtag.