Where can you go beyond training? Site visits can be helpful, as can mentoring. Want to expose your engineers to white-glove customer service? Have one of them spend the day with your best helpdesk analyst. Want your helpdesk to get a sense of how a network upgrade is performed? Again, mentoring helps.
Professional development is ultimately an HR issue. While you'll need to bring IT-specific staff development strategy to the table, a friendly HR professional can be very helpful in identifying how to develop skills on the job, especially soft skills.
Bottom line, anyone can train staff--all you need is tuition, travel and per diem dollars. But truly developing your staffers to help them reach their potential requires an involved manager who's willing to take the time to create a plan that goes beyond acquiring technology skills--a plan that answers the age-old question, "So you've got an MSCE ... now what?"
Jonathan Feldman is director of information services for the city of Asheville, N.C., and a contributing editor to Network Computing. Previously, he was director of professional services for Entre Solutions, an infrastructure consulting company based in Savannah, Ga. Write to him at [email protected].
Sadly, professional development is an oft-neglected piece of IT management. Letting individuals chart their own training courses is at best a piecemeal, inefficient approach, at worst a serious tactical error that will come back to bite you in lower customer-satisfaction scores.
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