Posts From: Bob Austin

As a fan of the TV show The Office, I challenged my daughter to learn the theme song on the piano. She neither takes piano lessons nor has any genetic talent from her mother or myself. But what she does have is determination (she is the third child of four). She learned it. Relate this to a recent class I took. Four days long, in the classroom 8 hours a day and the instructor read the slides. I didn’t take away much from the class. In short, determined people learn but they also learn to use the tools given. My daughter leaned the theme song from You Tube. I didn’t learn from a real live person. Could the future of IT Learning be You Tube?

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Used to be that if you worked in information technology or provided training for the IT field you; 1) listed Star Wars, Star Trek and any Monty Python movie as the best movies ever!; 2) Thought that calculus was somewhat easier then talking with the opposite sex; and 3) communicated only in cryptic Unix shell commands to friends and family. For most of us, it’s good that things are different now.

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It doesn’t matter if you are fresh out of university or a 25 year veteran of the industry, we all seek a career roadmap for staying engaged, interested, respected and employed. Business leaders traditionally choose to add three letters to their resume (MBA) and $40k+ dollars later; these people have new ways to approach business problems. For us in the IT Training business, we must not only learn these MBA-type skills, but also understand the need to go even higher and reach the top of our field: Becoming a Learning Architect.

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There are two things in life that are guaranteed: death and taxes. I will add a third – storage space. Using a computer or tablet will continue to require more storage. The longer we stay employed as an IT professional we are going to need more storage. Yesterday’s storage requirements would fit on today’s portable thumb drives and tomorrow’s storage needs are likely to be factors larger than today’s. So how are we going to acquire the knowledge we personally need to insure our requirements are met? And how are we, as IT Trainers, making sure that we have training skilled people to look after this important asset?

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An old coworker of mine recently appeared as a keynote speaker at a local tech workshop. This previous coworker has done well for himself moving out of the ranks of corporate America (we were both at the time in a large corporate training organization) and moved into Academia landing himself at Duke University. Not a bad gig if it comes with free basketball tickets.

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How is your job? Are you skilled in the right industry? Or more important for the IT trainers, are you busy? I ask this since just this past week there have been several local newspapers that have run encouraging articles about the IT job market.

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I took a little time off this summer and the mind is refreshed. Once I got back and through the pile of emails, the blog-able item that was on my mind was how, why and will we continue to train our hardware engineers differently than our software engineers.

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I have already blogged on the fact that the recession is over. Obama said it. So with it officially over you and I can start spending money again. One of those areas which all of us will spend is on a smartphone. If you don’t have one, or even if you do, get ready for an explosion of new devices coming out this year.

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WOW…100 million licenses of Windows 7. Now that’s amazing. What is more amazing is the report further goes on to state that sales are on track to add ANOTHER 200 million more by the end of 2010! So how do the competitors stack up?

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It’s official. Jobs are coming back. In a speech given last Friday in Charlotte North Carolina, President Obama made a statement about jobs that "We are beginning to turn the corner!” He cited the latest data from the Labor Department adding that the economy added 162,000 jobs in March, the biggest increase in three years. A quick couple of Goggles’ (or a “Topeka” if you caught the April Fool’s joke Google played) looking for local proof actually supported this claim and among the largest gainers…IT workers. In fact, companies are hiring IT workers at the highest level in quite some time. No surprise as those unemployed have taken advantage of retraining opportunities and IT leads the way there too.

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