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.”

This view is echoed by Scott Morris, director of partner sales, Australia and New Zealand, Network Appliance. “The business has chosen to fund our partner training so we take that as a cost of our business because it’s our obligation to see that our partners are as fully equipped as possible and not use it as a revenue raiser to penalise those guys who want to sell our kit.”

Tim Dickinson, Australian and New Zealand country manager, Kaseya, puts it even more bluntly. “We don’t believe in making money through training, we think it’s a critical thing we’ve got to provide our partners with for them to be successful.”

Another major trend when it comes to training is the move away from buying competency and instead investing in existing staff. “The last two or three years in particular there’s been a real push for people to buy competency, not necessarily from overseas but usually off other resellers who have the skills already,” James says. “Resellers are expected to be across a much broader variety of technologies, their customers expect them to do a lot more rather than have to shop around to different resellers and the level of experience is pretty thin. A lot of people have been trying to buy those two or three gurus that can then cross-skill their own workforce but chasing those people just leads to a cost spiral. People are now going back to more traditional three year training plans and looking for vendors to be more creative.”

This view is echoed by Quinn. “It’s a tough one with a moving workforce. It’s a combination of train up and hands on involvement in particular projects. But there is some element of buy in, if a project comes up and you require some software expertise or whatever you have no choice but to buy in.”

So how are resellers deciding what training is needed for them to keep ahead of the pack? Dean Vaughan, channel sales manager, Citrix says, “resellers are investing in training based on the demand for the technology so it is linked back directly to what technology is hot or in high demand. It really links back to what the customers are asking for through to what the resellers are asking for.”

At all times, resellers tend to be very selective about what training they send their people on, explains Quinn. “Usually various vendors are trying to get a foot in the door to provide product training which is invariably sales training and trying to get access to our sales force to push their message. We’re quite restrictive in what we allow in that respect because we found that we were getting many vendors come through that weren’t relevant to our sales force and in some cases it wasn’t even the preferred solution. So now for our sales training we choose the topics that we think need covering and then we’ll organise the training.”

Another trend is the move towards vendors providing training in business skills as well. Dickinson says “the average reseller is a computer person who has had an entrepreneurial seizure and kind of ended up in business by accident, so quite often they are fantastic technically but can be relatively light on with actual business skills. So many vendors are doing a lot to help resellers with expanding the business and understanding how the business operates as opposed to the technology. You can give people as much product training as you like but if you don’t help them grow the business they’ll just be spinning their wheels.”

Vendors and distributors are still the main source of training for resellers, however, Morris says. “We build the material ourselves and the only tangent I really see are some of the niche professional service providers who are building their own education programs. They are then pushing out over the Web or via email, seminars and Webinars as a technical augmentation to other partners who don’t necessarily have the skills or people themselves.

“Nonetheless, in most circumstances the vendor themselves don’t provide the physical training or facilities. A lot of it is outsourced to core training organisations such as Frame and FastWay who are skilled in the delivery of training. We undertake to ensure that the course material and the train the trainer abilities are there but rely on third party organisations to push that out across the country.”