Why good training pays dividends

Good leaders enact change before it's needed. Train saved a state I was running over $20 million dollars, with the effects seen in less than 90 days!

Big IT departments have multiple challenges. In this case, the department had a contactor-to-employee ratio of near 3:1. Legacy hardware and applications were supported by the employees while the contractors built the new applications. As many of the employees were tenured, they weren't motivated to be the most productive.

We decided we wanted to migrate from mainframe and client server to a distributed hybrid cloud environment. This meant moving application development to low code/no code platforms and Azure/AWS. By bringing in Microsoft to train the employees, we were able to show the tenured we still cared, and guess what? They loved getting to learn something new. Not only did morale and productivity surge, we had some exciting side effects. First, we were able to reduce the contractor projects by over 75%. Our employees who had deep tribal knowledge of our applications, discovered shortcuts to build out new low code alternatives in weeks. Not years or decades, but weeks. This enabled us to let over 85% of the contractor grow. The governor allowed us to give raised to the employees as we saved so much money and time.

Investing in training was investing in our employees. They responded by self actualizing thre improvements we struggled enforcing with normal tired tenured staff. They were revitalized and the entire department felt it. Even the Helpdesk got a 92% "excellent" rating from the users. First time the IT department had won both financially as well as improved their public perception.