Training a key in IT Departments - Learning Management System helps

Dice.com, a career webiste for It professional, reports that according to a recent survey of 281 IT leaders with hiring authority, companies in 2007 are especially looking for IT professionals with project management, security and architecture skills, as well as strong interpersonal abilities. The study of small, medium and large organizations, conducted by Forrester Research, also found that many organizations plan to train existing personnel to rectify current skills shortages, and increasingly, outsource their more commoditized IT tasks.

Beyond hiring, CIOs expect to acquire needed skills by devoting substantial resources to training existing staff. Top training priorities — for more than half of all organizations — include project management, change management, service management, business process skills, and vendor or sourcing management. Almost half of all organizations will also offer risk management, enterprise architecture, account management, financial management and security training.

Also hot: More than one-third of organizations will train existing employees on application maintenance management, infrastructure architecture and network management. Finally, about one-quarter of organizations will train developers to improve their legacy programming skills, a key component will be a learning management system offered by companies like Simplydigi to make course assignments and track progress.

To manage training costs, some organizations are utilizing innovative tactics to negotiate better discounts with training providers. "One of the interesting things I saw was a smaller IT shop banding together with several other small IT shops to artificially create scale, then running a course for all those IT employees," says Bright.