Companies will need to continue to adapt their training programs at a much more rapid pace than ever before if they want their IT departments to continue to stay ahead of the game.

Can you imagine living during a time when you did not have access to find out what was happening anywhere and everywhere at the touch of a button? Indeed, people have access to nearly every piece of information they could ever need - and some that they don't. The world of information generation and consummation has changed forever.

Now you may be saying to yourself, "Yes, this is true," but what does it have to do with the world of IT training? Well, it has everything to do with where learning is headed.

In the Old Days (say five years ago), companies and individual IT professionals had time - and support - to participate in traditional classes that would train them on the new advances on their respective fields. When employees would return from training, they had time to digest and implement what their companies paid hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for them to learn. In a nutshell: We weren't working in the rushed, cost-cutting environment that we are today.

Today we live in a world of extreme speed and tremendously tight budgets. When you combine that with the fact that many people are doing the jobs of two or even three people, due to recession-based cutbacks, there just isn't much time left for learning.

This doesn't change the fact that learning is critical for professional growth, and companies staying on the cutting edge and leading the way. Here are some best practices that any company can implement to stay ahead with IT training.

Take advantage of better technology

It wasn't so long ago that online training was perceived as very low-quality. Today's it's the method of choice. Due to technology advances, including improved e-learning authoring tools, web and video conferencing, podcasts, and so forth, the barrier has shrunk.

In addition to controlling costs, online training has enabled many companies to supply significantly more training to their IT departments than they could have afforded with in-person training programs. According to Thomas Hoyle of Solar Winds, who takes advantage of online training programs for his team, "Technology advances make the training more engaging and effective. More and more vendors are recognizing the globalization trend and need for virtualized training, which ultimately reduces the cost required to leverage online training."

Looking forward, consumers can expect the increased competition in the online training market to make it more cost effective to receive a higher quality product than ever before. Of course, there is always room for upgrades.

Get in the lab

One of the biggest requirements by training departments is for workers to "learn by doing." Enter the IT training lab. Technical professionals need access to remote labs to experiment and practice what they learned during instruction in a safe environment.

These labs typically come in the form of downloadable software or a program that lives in a virtual environment. More important, they enable more accurate "testing" of skill development. As a result, instructors, learners, training executives, and managers can record results and better plan future performance development initiatives.

Training in chunks

Workers not only prefer their learning to be online, but also - and more important - for it to be on-demand. According to Hoyle, "As Gen Y moves into the work force like a stampede, they're accustomed to having small bits of information available to them anywhere, when they need it. And we have to be able to train them accordingly."

Hoyle goes on to say that in his experience, this generation is not so concerned with "learning the knowledge," but more concerned with having "access to the knowledge" right when they need it. On-demand learning content promises to meet this need.

On-demand learning (sometimes referred to as self-paced learning) often can be a better solution for today's technical professional all around. The obvious benefit is that the information is generally broken up into convenient bite-sized pieces, and that learners can access content according to their individual work schedule. An added benefit is that in most applications workers can revisit the information on the job should a situation arise in which they need a bit of a "refresher."

Flexible learning

Without a doubt what IT professionals need to learn and how quickly they need to use that knowledge on the job is too enormous to call for a one-size-fits-all approach. Here are some methods to make training flexible at your organization:

  • Lunch-and-learn courses. Scheduling online lunch-and-learn courses that can be pulled up and repeated several times over the course of a week. Learners can sign up for one of several lunchtime slots and an instructor is available online during that week to answer questions as needed.

  • Podcasts. IT professionals are notoriously strong multitaskers and regularly have the need to flip between screens on their computers or be away from their machines all together. For these individuals, creating on-demand audio training that can be pulled up at the learner's convenience permits the staff member to keep working while still learning.

  • Combo training. Conducting mentored sessions with a live instructor in conjunction with online learning and labs combines the best of all worlds. Companies do this to save money, and they get the first-hand touch of the instructor to answer questions.

Companies will need to continue to adapt their training programs at a much more rapid pace than ever before if they want their IT departments to continue to stay ahead of the game. Never before have there been so many options for learning methods and different ways to gain knowledge. But even with the decreasing budgets and fewer resources, organizations of every size can implement sophisticated training to all of their IT professionals.