Pushing Broader Skills: HPC and Beyond

By Daniel Chow

December 19, 2014

The old adage “knowledge is power” rings true in the technology sector, where both broad and deep knowledge within any given company translates into the power to most effectively support customers, from design through implementation. Not every employee has all of the knowledge necessary to most effectively serve customers, however, technology companies are faced with the challenge of how to ensure their employees are experts in their fields.

By implementing some key strategies, it is possible to broaden employees’ knowledge bases, helping them to draw connections across your business to turn investments, from both the company and employees, into a greater ability to successfully meet customers’ needs. In addition, the costs associated with recruiting and onboarding senior level employees are high. Fostering employee engagement in education and thus promoting internal career development can be a cost-saving endeavor.

Hire the best – then offer educational opportunities

It may seem elementary, but hiring practices are foundational to ensuring that your employees are experts in their fields. Success, particularly in the technology sector, is tied to being able to hire the best employees possible. In turn, central to being able to hire the best is a culture that attracts the best. Employees who are proud of their company and its products, and who enjoy the challenges they meet at work each day, make for companies that know their customers, meet their needs, and remain successful.

Hiring the greatest talent in the industry is only one part of ensuring your employees are experts, though. Given the speed at which the technology industry changes, companies who want to stay on top must offer their employees the opportunity to continually update their knowledge.

Take, for example, Silicon Mechanics. The company has a guiding principle of “Expert Included,” meaning that when customers make a purchase, they don’t just get industry-leading high performance computing and storage technology; they also get access to the expertise that allows them to use these products to the fullest. To meet and exceed customers’ expectations as laid out in this principle, Silicon Mechanics must ensure that employees across the spectrum of customer support, from seasoned engineers to non-technical staff, can draw connections across the company’s wide-ranging offerings.

In an effort to better serve current and future customers, Silicon Mechanics recently implemented Expert Included University (EIU). EIU is an internal training initiative designed to help the company to go beyond its promise to provide experts, in addition to high quality products, every step of the way. The program is the product of a great deal of careful, strategic planning. It gives Silicon Mechanics employees, especially non-technical staff, the ability to access information about different aspects of the company’s business, empowering them to better understand the business and therefore serve their customers even more effectively. The strategic planning involved in the launch of Expert Included University can help to shed light on some best practices to widen employees’ expertise.

Foster employee engagement

With all employee education efforts, a key element to success is fostering employee engagement. Taking a grassroots approach, where employees opt in to an educational program because they know their participation will benefit them, is more effective than top-down approaches, where managers mandate participation in educational programming. Employees who adopt company goals, who wish to better themselves in the interests of customer support, and who find reward in the acquisition of knowledge make better students than those who are obligated to participate in internal trainings. Top-down approaches often lead to employees who may not believe in the efficacy of their training or understand its purpose. Engaged students are more likely to learn more, be more loyal to their company, and use their knowledge to serve the company’s customers most effectively in the future.

How, then, can companies ensure their employees are engaged in learning efforts? Again, forming programs that operate based on voluntary participation is a crucial first step. Another important step, as has been shown effective with Expert Included University, is both listening to employees in regards to requested course offerings, as well as opening course enrollment to all. This means that employees can request that courses be created through EIU to address the topics they most want to learn, and that anyone who has registered and been authenticated as a Silicon Mechanics employee can take any course in the program, including ones like Project Management and General Leadership and Management. Though participation in an EIU management skills course doesn’t guarantee someone a future management position at Silicon Mechanics, leaving enrollment open allows managers to see which of their employees are driven to do what it takes to move upward. Open enrollment gives employees the ability to showcase their desire to work hard and better themselves. In contrast, a targeted approach where employees must be approved to take certain courses may lower morale or discourage some employees from developing their talents.

Silicon Mechanics also made an internal marketing push that helped foster employee engagement in EIU, as it helped to spread the message that the program was starting and that courses were open to all. The marketing department designed the front end of the website and the registration portal to make them appealing to prospective students, as well as to make them appear polished and professional. In addition, this department created a video featuring Silicon Mechanics CEO Eva Cherry to welcome students to the program and explain its goals. Finally, the department provided traditional marketing collateral such as posters to help drive traffic to the new website. Then, as employees began to take courses, they became excited about their new knowledge and the program itself and spread the message about the program to their coworkers. Engaged employees with access to knowledge about an education program will do much of the work organically to promote and grow the program.

Pull from within

Pulling from within the company for course instructors has been another central part of fostering employee engagement for Silicon Mechanics’ EIU efforts. When it comes to instructors, a company’s greatest assets are its own senior-level employees, for a number of reasons. For one, those employees have the greatest sense of what information is truly important to the business. This is exceptionally important in the technology sector, where there far more useful information available than any single employee could learn in his or her spare time. As a result, tech companies’ educational efforts must be precisely targeted to the companies’ goals in order to be an efficient use of time and other resources. In addition, these instructors are guaranteed to have hands-on experience with the material that they are teaching. Nothing is a substitute for experience when it comes to developing expertise; high level employees are therefore able to impart wisdom to their students that they have gained from hard work in a hands-on setting.

Given that a company’s employees are its best resource for targeted instruction, the most efficient design for educational programming is often one that is designed and implemented in-house, rather than one that relies on outside organizations for training and education. While offering employees stipends to take external courses for certification or for general knowledge is common practice in the industry and can be effective, these external courses are not specifically targeted in the same way as an in-house education program. Again, given the depth and breadth of technology information that is readily available, spending time to tailor educational offerings specifically to customer needs is the most efficient use of both instructors’ and students’ time, as well as a company’s resources.

Moderate content

If this targeting of educational offerings to each company’s niche is so important to implementing productive educational efforts, then deciding what exactly is important to your business is a crucial beginning step to implementing an education program. Sending employees to a week-long Linux boot camp is nowhere near as efficient, say, as creating a targeted one-day course that gives an introduction to becoming a Linux user only as is relevant to your company. Targeted messaging has the benefit of aiding instructors in creating course material, as well as in ensuring that educational messaging is in line with the company’s long-term goals.

Another benefit is a kind of internal brand that develops among employees who take part in these educational opportunities. Concise messaging about who your company is, what is important to it, and the role employees play in the company’s success becomes widely available to employees through education. As a result, employees are more likely to feel like an integral part of the company, to stay at the company longer, and to be more effective in their jobs. “Moderate your courses’ content” is therefore another key tip for making your employees relevant experts.

Moderating educational content is also important because even though each company’s most effective instructors are its own high-level employees, these employees don’t necessarily have what it takes to be a great teacher. Scaffolding the efforts of these hard-working employees to create relevant content and effectively convey their messages helps everyone to get the greatest return on their investment.

At Silicon Mechanics, this scaffolding came in the form of employees with education backgrounds who have come together to form a sort of “virtual school board.” These talented people are not only subject matter experts, but also know what it takes to be great teachers. As a result, they read and edit presentations, assessments and other course content for instructors. This gives instructors the necessary tools to make sure that “students” are getting what they need out of courses.

Another way to scaffold the efforts of instructors is to provide them with sample course materials and assessments. Even better, companies can offer a class on effective course creation. Silicon Mechanics has implemented a web-based training on how to launch a course, create course content, assessments and quizzes, and how to post the course content on the EIU website. The internal education effort is flexible, efficient, and targeted enough to allow this kind of course to be created and therefore help other courses to be successful.

Design for success

The final tip on how to make your employees experts in your field is to make it easy for them to succeed in your educational programs. Everyone learns a little differently and will approach courses from different levels of expertise. Courses with the flexibility to suit different kinds of students will allow everyone to succeed.

One way Silicon Mechanics has gone about making EIU accessible to all is to offer a mixture of instructor-led, in-person trainings and web-based courses. This gives people with different styles of learning the opportunity to choose the courses they believe they will gain the most from. The different styles of course give a measure of time flexibility as well. Instructor-led trainings are held for a set amount of time during the work day, and therefore are best for people who prefer structured learning time. Web-based courses, on the other hand, are self-paced and therefore best for people who benefit from learning in a less structured setting. Employees are encouraged to take time to complete the courses whenever they feel they will learn most effectively: during work hours, on their own time, or a mixture of the two, provided that they complete all of their regular work as well.

The trust that is put in employees to choose what time they will use to complete the courses fosters an even greater sense of engagement in the program and loyalty to the company. It also means that employees are likely to use their time efficiently and therefore get the greatest return on their investment in the courses.

Setting employees up for success of course translates to the greatest return on investment for employers as well. When you give your employees the tools they need to become experts within your company, your company benefits, as do all of your customers.

 

 

Daniel Chow is COO at Silicon Mechanics.

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