TRAINING - School for cats

Until recently, dealers have been caught in a training trap - locked into a single vendor's product and paying for the pleasure - but things are changing.

The past few years have seen a massive rise in product training andd into a single vendor's product and paying for the pleasure - but things are changing. accreditation from dozens of vendors. Every large vendor now offers myriad options, through an often complex network of authorised training and accreditation centres. The result has been a boom in third-party training and a growing range of more sophisticated and varied courses.

But does the dealer - often the intended target for vendor product training - benefit from these training courses, all of which are run commercially and are designed to make a profit for the trainers? 'Most product training courses are back to front,' says one trainer. 'They should start from what the dealer has to know and then work backwards.'

In reality, much product training and certification is less about giving dealers the skills they need to do their job better and more about dealers being seen to have made a commitment to a particular vendor. To get high-end product certification, dealers are often required to have put a certain number of technical staff through the vendor's training courses. Quite simply, if they do not make the commitment, then they do not get to sell and support the product.

So, does it all amount to anything more than paying for the pleasure of hanging a framed certificate on the office wall? Clearly, the more skills there are in the channel the better, but the problem is that dealers have to fork out for the training and there is some evidence that dealers - particularly the smaller ones - do not always benefit.

Training staff is a long-term commitment and hard-pressed dealers are not always able to look so far ahead. The looming threat of the millennium time bomb and the shortfall of trained programmers to deal with it has highlighted the whole problem of skills shortage in IT - but there are other training pitfalls for dealers.

The major ones are the high cost of training and the risk of trained staff being poached. Industry observers estimate that fees for sending staff on training courses account for only about 20 per cent of the overall cost to the dealer. By far the biggest cost is the working time lost while the employee is in the classroom.

Some manufacturers are beginning to address this issue. Microsoft, for example, has introduced its Net Results scheme (now part of its Direct Access dealer programme) to enable smaller dealers to train up at a level below Certified Professional in a range of evening and weekend classes.

Another problem for the small dealer or reseller is the absence of multi-vendor training courses, where the trainee can learn how product sets from different vendors fit together. Recently, this has started to change and many of the big vendors, such as Novell and Microsoft, run training courses about other products. But what dealers are really calling for is a programme which will enable them to become 'generically certifiable', or expert in the whole range of networking products, for example, rather than in those of just one vendor.

This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the IT industry is one of the few in which there are no standard professional qualifications.

But it is making some tentative steps towards change as vendors and colleges start working together to try and make computer studies degrees more applicable to industry needs, and less about theory (see box, page 41).

Debbie Walsh, IT skills development manager at Microsoft, not surprisingly disagrees with some of dealers' views on the problems of training. She argues that training technical staff up is the best way for dealers to hold on to them.

'We have found that many technical staff leave dealers that will not train them up,' she says. Joint research by Microsoft and the Computer Software and Services Association (CSSA), she adds, shows that technical staff are more likely to leave a dealer that pays them a high salary but does not give them training.

But dealers are still worried about the risk that trained staff might leave the company or be poached by rivals, or demand higher salaries.

Another Microsoft-commissioned survey has shown that Certified Professional status can sometimes mean a pay increase of 25 per cent.

One way to prevent this is to get potential trainees to sign a contract stipulating that if they leave within two years of completing the course, they must pay back part of its cost, perhaps spread over 24 months.

The other concern for dealers is that the sheer volume of training course options has made the market confused. Walsh says she is sympathetic to complaints from dealers about the scale of Microsoft qualifications.

'We recognise, from the feedback we have had, that our qualifications can be confusing,' she says. 'But it is easier for a vendor like Novell to offer training because it only operates in the networking market.'

Microsoft, on the other hand, offers products that range from word processing and spreadsheets, through operating systems, right up to complex development tools and qualifications to match. The company says it is working on plans to streamline the training and accreditations process on its solution developer programme.

Vendors such as Microsoft have a responsibility to the industry and to dealers to bring in multi-vendor training, Walsh believes. 'We all have a joint responsibility to provide multi-vendor training. The average customer does not have just Microsoft products,' she says.

But vendors tend to see multi-vendor training as being mainly about their own product sets, with other vendors' products added on as an afterthought.

Real multi-vendor training should not focus on any single vendor.

Novell was largely responsible for the creation of the accreditation market, setting up the Certified Network Engineer (CNE) scheme in 1989.

By this year it had issued 140,000 accreditations worldwide. Lutz Ziob, education worldwide sales programme manager, says Novell also co-operates with other vendors.

'We fully subscribe to the need for multi-vendor training, he says. 'One reason why the Novell CNE qualification has been so successful is that we have resisted the temptation to base our training on just one product set.'

The key, according to Ziob, is to constantly add training in other products and platforms as options to be added to the core course. CNE trainees can take tracks in Windows, AS400 and Unix, and Novell has also introduced an internet professional qualification.

'Obviously, the vendor has an interest in promoting its own products, because it is not a public training institute,' Ziob says. But he claims that Novell has always accepted that customers need to work with their existing products, and that this is reflected in the company's approach to training.

Novell unveiled plans last year to introduced dealer-based multi-vendor training options under its InfiLearning scheme, which offers dealers a 'storefront' of products, books and computer-based training (CBT), and includes options in training in Microsoft products. After some delay, it is expected to kick off at the end of June.

'The biggest oversight with training is that people train as an afterthought,' Ziob says. 'Training is so important that it should actually come before the product.'

One of the problems of multi-vendor training was highlighted recently by Azlan. The distributor, which is the subject of a Serious Fraud Office investigation into suspected false accounting, is also the largest certified independent network training organisation in the UK. In April, it signed a deal to become the sole provider of the Intel certification programme in the UK.

At the beginning of May, Azlan Training started offering the Intel certified integration specialist course to dealers and customers in the UK. Intel is the latest of many vendors to decide that it needs accreditation training in its products. Scott Schafer, Intel small business and networking group's certification programme manager, says Intel decided to offer certification because of its 'increasingly multi-faceted position in the market'. He adds: 'Our product line has evolved from just chips to platforms and network solutions.'

Azlan head of training Adrian Botterill comments: 'Intel has one of the best considered certification programmes we have come across. We expect to see a variety of people attending these courses, including resellers and systems engineers.'

The first two courses will last between nine and 13 days and will cover the design and implementation of Intel systems. But the problem for Azlan is that, just weeks before it signed Intel, it lost Compaq.

This highlights the difficulty for trainers of keeping several vendors under one roof and offering training in their products at any one time.

What might prove to be the insurmountable problem of multi-vendor training is that it requires the agreement of a number of rival vendors, which do not have the same aims and may not want to share product information.

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE

At present, the onus for training staff in products is on the dealer.

But the Microsoft authorised academic training programme is designed to introduce Microsoft product, certification and accreditation into computer studies courses at universities and colleges.

Historically, what students on computer studies courses learn has not matched the skills that industry needs. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why applications for entry to computing degrees in the UK fell between 1992 and 1996.

The Microsoft programme involves signing up the colleges as accreditation centres for Microsoft qualifications, for example as a product specialist.

As well as getting their degree, students can also get Microsoft certification.

'We have signed up about 40 colleges and universities for this so far,' says Microsoft IT skills development manager Debbie Walsh.

The keenest seem to be the new universities, which are less inclined to be snobbish about the courses they offer. The advantage of the academic training programme is that it could, in theory, lift the burden of training staff away from the reseller. New recruits will come out of college with qualifications that are better suited to the type of work they might do.

'Dealers should be pleased that the IT industry is working so closely with education,' says Walsh.

Despite this, vendors see the education training market supplementing industry training rather than replacing it. What vendors are pushing for is a national minimum IT qualification. Based on the NVQ in computing, this would be a multi-vendor certification in IT. The idea is that it would spread IT literacy, skills and employability throughout the workforce and finally remove the onus of training from individual vendors.