Learning as a Service: How to drive digital skills in an ever changing world

Skills has slowly overtaken security as the number one blocker for why organisations don’t move to the cloud.

In my daily conversations with companies of all sizes and types, be they small start-ups, large global corporates through to central government bodies as soon as I talk about lack of technical skills around cloud the door is opened wide as they agree this is the key area holding back their digital plans.

So how has this happened, and what’s different now? Well technology and how it comes to market has fundamentally changed and the skills you need to run and manage technology within a business have too. Software use to released on 3 to 5 year cycles. If you were responsible for that technology every 5 years or so you would head off to a training provider, sit down for five days, get certified and head home with the knowledge to start using that piece of tech for the next decade, in some cases.

With cloud technology we move to a dynamic release cycle. Azure has a new feature added and released every 36 hours. The demo training course we run on Azure has to be completely re-written every couple of months because so much new functionality lands we are constantly running to keep up with it. With the emergence of DevOps even internal development moves to a continual update, release, improve cycle over an update, test, update, test, update – finally release.

So not only are we faced with a change in the technology we need to have skills in but how we keep on top of those skills has become dynamic. The impact of cloud goes further than just tech skills. We all need to understand cloud because it fundamentally changes how we do business. Every industry is at different points of it’s digital transformation but what is clear is every industry will go through a digital transformation. And some of that transformation is radical, you never can tell where your next competition is going to come from, but you can be sure it will be technology driven.

So how do you learn a skill which needs to be constantly kept up to date? Well the first thing everyone needs to do it take responsibility for their own learning. Whether that is reading articles, attending meet-ups, doing online courses, listening to Radio 4 – whatever is your preferred way – but put time aside every week to do it. For tech skills we need to move away from classroom training to smaller, self-paced, on-demand training and learn as you need to learn, otherwise you are learning about something which will change by the time you want to use that knowledge. That’s where Learning as a Service comes in. Learning at the point of need, as and when you need it.

If it’s cloud technology you are learning about, guess what you can use the cloud to do it! Training delivery is undergoing it’s own digital transformation and the biggest place to learn? YouTube. I know from my own experience in photography (I did my City & Guilds back in the day when you spent half the course in the dark room), I have no idea how to use the vastly complicated photo editing tool I subscribe to but I just search on YouTube and in five minutes I’ve merged photos together, removed errant people in the background and made everyone look 10 years younger and 5kgs lighter.

Any training provider looking to be around in the next few years will be looking at how they use online technology to deliver training and how to support the peer learning experience you get in the classroom online or in smaller, less frequent face to face sessions. So, when you look next to invest in training think about how you best to use that investment to ensure you keep those skills up to date and relevant in an ever-changing dynamic world.

NB. This is my first article on LinkedIn so I have no idea if it’s useful or valuable to anyone! If it is let me know and I will look at contributing more around this and related topics.