No IT Training Budget? Think YouTube and MOOCs
In the pre-Internet days, if you wanted to learn about a new technology on your own, you would buy a book. While buying or downloading a book is still a great course of action, it’s no longer the only option. The same is true for CIOs and other IT executives trying to gain new skills or retrain their technical staff.
As a technologist, trainer, and former IT executive, I’m the first person to say that there is nothing better than an instructor physically located in a classroom with the students. That said, however, this isn’t always financially doable or logistically feasible. In the absence of in-person educational options, high-quality e-learning can help fill the gap.
If training budgets simply don’t exist, superior e-learning may also be beyond your reach. Take solace in knowing that even with no training budget, all is not lost. It just means that it’s time to get creative.
There is a wealth of free and informative instructional material available on YouTube and through massive open online courses (MOOCs), free vendor web seminars, white papers, and other related sources. As a CIO or head of IT training, these alternatives can be creatively used to construct a well-orchestrated training curriculum.
Regarding YouTube, as the expression goes, this process may be free, but it’s not easy. While there are many very high-quality YouTube videos available on virtually every technical topic, there is also a sea of marketing-oriented videos, poorly constructed materials, and videos that have great instruction but are too long and boring to present to your IT staff.
If you look carefully, however, and separate the wheat from the chaff, you can construct a multilevel curriculum by technical discipline. These subject areas could be in web development, Java, web design, project management, business analysis, database administration, big data, and virtually all other technical areas. The creation of these types of training programs requires a two-person team: a training designer and a technical subject matter expert, both of whom must have the patience of Job.
Also, because of the ability to load your own videos onto YouTube and other similar platforms, consider these types of internally created videos as a way of maximizing the retention of corporate knowledge as key technical staff leave or retire.
Regarding the use of MOOCs, the materials are virtually guaranteed to be of high quality. They feature many of the best college faculty in the world and are constructed by knowledgeable training professionals. Websites such as Coursera and edX provide a wide variety of free course offerings.
These free instructional alternatives don't need to only be used as a stopgap until the funding for formalized training materializes. They can be used on an ongoing basis to enhance the breadth of well-funded training programs and within internal corporate universities.
