Tradition holds that when new
construction takes place the first stone laid is the ceremonial “cornerstone”.
It acts as much as a symbolic attribute of the structure as it does in actually
supporting it. This cornerstone serves as a guide for how laborers should
continue construction. We see cornerstone guiding lots of industries. For
example, the 4 cornerstones or marketing are “Price, Product, Place and
Position” or the two cornerstone of Java programming are “coupling and cohesion”.
There is even a “Cornerstone of Internet Freedom” which outlines the legal
structure of user-generated internet content.
So where is our cornerstone? Where
is the outline of what makes our IT Learning industry work? Who has defined our
responsibilities to the industry and what we need to rally around to keep our
industry the exciting, dynamic and strategic element it is today? There is a
good understanding of the size of the IT Learning industry and it’s no small
number. We are in big business, so let’s get some stakes in the ground and
cornerstones laid to build upon.
There are three main themes that come to my
mind when looking at defining our industry. These are: Content, Community and
Certifications.
IT Learning has its foundation in content. We are responsible for
creating, promoting, managing and insuring that our students are offered
compelling, high quality materials that offer value to the overall IT industry.
We produce, acquire, structure and present these materials using the latest
delivery techniques all in the name of insuring that our students stay current
and useful contributors to the IT industry.
The next tenet of our industry is community. IT is perhaps the most
rapidly changing industry history has ever seen. Products, players,
technologies, hardware and software literally change overnight. How are we to
keep up? IT Learning needs to develop a strong sense of community. We need to
create collaborative means to build trust among our peers and build a forum so
we can adapt to the rapid change. A place where we can debate and let best
practices win with the purpose to make us more valuable as strategic as well as
operational partners with the IT industry.
The final piece is certification. While it may seem odd
that certification plays such a defining role in IT Learning, I would argue
that no other industry so relies on certification to measure the quality of the
individual. While Doctors, Lawyers and Accounts are deeply rooted in Licensure,
IT is deeply rooted in certification. It is IT Learning that is responsible to
deliver these certified individuals. The IT learning industry has built a means
to certify on vendors products, IT technologies and the strategic processes to
keep everything working. According to Madewrite.com the entire IT certification
size in 1991 was less than $100K, think how far we have come since then.
"So on the week that Microsoft released their Windows 7
operating system, which will perhaps reach the largest audience any IT product
has ever reached, all of us in the IT Training industry can also begin to build
our learning products keeping in mind the cornerstones described
above. I believe all of us in our industry will benefit.
If you
have any comments about the Cornerstones of IT Training, please
feel free to comment below. And your feedback is welcome at bob.austin@itlearnblog.com."
