Getting skilled up

There are so many different vendors and technologies out there that a diversified tier one reseller could have its sales and technical people in training courses almost continuously. While the opportunities vary from vendor to vendor, there is overall no shortage of training available. And using training to grow the company’s skills base is more important than ever given our tight labour market. Just as important is picking the right areas to invest in training and it can be difficult to pick how much training is appropriate for an emerging technology. There are also major shifts happening in the way reseller training is delivered, its cost and the type of training that is delivered. Training is increasingly being done online and it’s no longer just technical, vendors are educating their resellers on how to build their businesses and identify opportunities.

When it comes to the available opportunities, a lot depends on the size of the vendor. There are exceptions but one of the advantages of working with the larger vendors is that they are able to provide more opportunity for training. According to Craig Quinn, product manager, ASI Solutions, “we get virtually nil training from AMD and that’s probably due to the lack of size of their presence here, while with Intel there is a lot.”

One of the most intractable problems around training is how to handle the workload while key people are out of the office. Because of the skills shortage few resellers have a full complement of engineers and technicians and sometimes there’s no one to cover the gap.

This pressure has led to an increase in the number of courses available online, although Neville James, channels and marketing manager, Australia and New Zealand, Nortel, says “Time is the biggest cost. You can spend $2000 a week on a vendor led training course but it’s time spent out of the field, especially with the skills shortage, that is the single biggest issue. There has been a shift towards online training but we’re finding that more in the sales arena, rather than technical. Technicians still want to touch the stuff to be able to install, program etc.”

Although the cost of having someone out of the office is the greater cost, paying for the training itself can also be a costly exercise and this is one area the market is seeing a big shift. For many years vendors have seen the training they offer to resellers as yet another revenue source. Many vendors, particularly some mainstream ones, continue to cleave to this attitude, others are offering training at cost or even in some cases at no charge.

“We don’t charge,” says Peter Spiteri, director marketing communications and PR Australia and New Zealand at Emerson Network Power. “That’s been Emerson’s policy from day one. For the larger resellers we’ll take our equipment into their facility and spend a day with them taking them all the way from anyone who doesn’t know anything about power, all the way to the heavy stuff.”

getting skilled training & development up