Plugging the skills gaps

by Tom Duffy

January 10, 2001 —

Two years ago, Bank One's Investment Management Group was at a crossroads. The $2 billion organization was moving quickly from client/ server systems to bandwidth-heavy Internet and intranet applications. But the newly consolidated 180-person IT department lacked many of the specific skills needed to lead the way.

"We had no skill in analyzing the bandwidth of applications," says Jim Hendrickson, senior managing director of customer delivery for IMG, the investment arm of Bank One in Columbus, Ohio. "We were going to be building Internet applications for customer access without understanding from a network and availability perspective what would happen when people logged on."

Hendrickson also worried about employee retention. The IT department's turnover rate was about 8% in 1999. But he expected that local job market pressure might easily double that rate during 2000. A greater emphasis on training might encourage people to stay.

The IT group had plenty of money for training -- about $750,000 per year. But the question was how to apply it effectively. The first challenge, as Hendrickson saw it, was not to put bodies in training seats, either off-site or online. It was to create a culture in which people wanted to expand their skills.

IMG started by holding brown bag lunches featuring a systems engineer who had just returned from an off-site training session. The engineer would share what he learned on, say, network address translation, as it related to the firm, while everyone munched on sandwiches.

"The idea was to create an environment where, because their peers were learning, other people would start saying to themselves, 'Well, I better learn some of this stuff too,'" Hendrickson says.

The firm planned to use online courseware wherever possible to reduce training costs. But the challenge was to identify skills individuals lacked and plug employees into relevant training sessions in a timely way. To do this, IMG turned to Intraware of Orinda, Calif., an electronic marketplace for Web-based software and services, including training.

Skills assessment can be a tricky business, Hendrickson says. Employees can often become defensive when managers suggest that they need to update their skills. But he says working with Intraware, which bundles an assessment package designed by SkillScape Management Services of British Columbia into its offerings, took some of the difficulty out of the equation.

Instead of dealing with a manager, systems engineers logged on to Intraware and compared their abilities in a host of predefined skills with an objective list for their specific position. For each skill, SkillScape told users whether they needed to be a guru, an expert or simply proficient, and then listed particular techniques the users needed to execute for each ranking.

If a person needed to be an expert in routing but only had some knowledge of it, SkillScape would identify a course to fill the gap. Later, the employees would chart a course of action with a coach brought in from outside the company or a peer from within.

However, identifying the skills gaps has proven to be a bit easier than getting people the online training. Hendrickson says in some cases employees had trouble accessing the material becausse of firewall and security issues that the company declined to enumerate. IMG temporarily got around the problem by putting the course material on its own server. In other cases, employees took the courses at home.

"That cost us between 30 and 60 days as we worked through the problems," Hendrickson says.

David Zorich, an IT project manager at IMG who oversaw the implementation of Intraware, says some of that delay has been compensated for by the convenience of providing online training, as opposed to sending people off-site to seminars and courses.

"Often if I'm working on a hot project, I can't go away for three days of training," Zorich says. "This way, if I have an hour or a couple of hours I can do it."

Zorich tried his own skills assessment, at least partially, in August. He was so busy getting co-workers connected to Intraware that he only had time to assess about half of his skills.

The product indicated that he had a weakness in e-commerce fundamentals, and recommended that he take three courses to close the gap. He took one course online, downloaded another to take home and has yet to take the third one.

Zorich was happy with his experience but says that Intraware's interface is a bit complicated and that it can sometimes be difficult to navigate around the site. "They have the concept down in terms of how it can be used as a career development tool," he says. "But the user interface needs to be improved. It needs to be less mouse-clicky and more intuitive."

Though only half of the technology group has been assessed, the combination of Intraware and online courseware already has provided significant savings. The turnover rate for targeted employees held at 10%, Hendrickson says, which translates into a savings of about $350,000 in recruitment costs. Online courseware, meanwhile, has saved another $300,000 or so, compared with taking the courses at a school, while the cost of the Intraware applications was just $90,000.

Down the road, Hendrickson wants to use Intraware as a career development tool for people in other Bank One divisions who might be interested in moving to IT.

"That way if people in customer services want to become systems engineers, we could give them the skills profile so they would know what they need to do to get there," Hendrickson says.

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