Accelerating Skills Development

The trade-off for a business hiring a new, enthusiastic, and relatively cheap college grad is that recruit's lack of practical working experience. In a nutshell, new hires don't have an extensive background in field to draw from for problem solving that can be so crucial. Companies are still willing to give newcomers a chance but businesses are looking for ways to bring their new hires up to speed as rapidly as possible. Businesses looking to accelerate their new hires' skills acquisition would be wise to take a page from the skills training book of a couple of vendors.Unisys and IBM both offer training designed to help advance new hires practical skills so they can make a quicker leap to being able to come up with innovative solutions to corporate technology issues. Basically, being book smart alone won't cut it in an environment where rapid-fire changes to the infrastructure are the norm. IBM puts interns in a very focused, intensive program where they see a project from start to finish in a relatively brief time period. This kind of training allows a newbie to apply theory in practice and gain actual real-world experience

If done correctly, in a manner which the trainee gets the right balance of guidance and freedom, the training can benefit everyone. The newcome gets a chance to build their skill set quickly; co-workers get a full-functioning peer much faster than they would without the training; and the business gets an IT professional with up-to-the-minute theoretical knowledge.