Investments are made only when returns are expected. I would not plant an apple sapling if I am not going to consume any apple or trade apples in market. Even if I do want to consume or trade, before investing I would like to make sure that I break-even on my investments and start making profit as soon as possible; in case it's not possible then it's pragmatic to look for other means to satisfy my want. I believe, similar thought goes true in case of training resources in any firm, especially for firms whose market is having cut-throat competition, like IT firms.
Apparently, top management of my employer, which happens to be one of the largest IT service provider in India, doesn't thinks so. Recently, there was an initiative driven by our industry lead; the so called "initiative" christened as Know Your Industry, aka 'KYI', desired to imbibe all of the resources with sound knowledge of its domain. These KYI sessions and trainings spanned from basic information, evolution and future of industry, various technologies, frameworks, processes et al related to our industry. The initiative mandated all resources (my estimate is that the total number of resources is not less than four thousand odd people) to go through the trainings and sessions. No doubt all these pieces of information passed on through this initiative were pretty good but at the same time they were redundant and also obsolete in some cases, at least from my perspective. The whole package demanded at least one full day for one average resource to read/attend sessions, understand and assimilate the information. Which means that the investment in terms of man-hour was around 4000X8 units (leave aside the cost of planning and execution from management side); that's a huge figure going down the drains when not more that 5 percent of the total effort is going to bear fruits (I might be having a lot of free time to write a blog or surf around but there are scores of people who do, apart from the regular work, stretch assignments and support their applications). Kindly note that i am not against fruitful trainings; trainings are good and a crucial tool to keep yourself updated with the industry and to learn new stuffs, and trainings should be guided by ones project and personal development needs.
Most of us understand the significance of trainings. We try to relate trainings with the outcome which can be derived from it, so when a resource finds that the management mandated training is nowhere related to his daily work and responsibility and even doesn't falls in line with his/her personal learning's keenness then the resource loses all affinity to that training. This results in failure of the whole purpose- the purpose behind training people. Moreover, knowledge without implementation is of no use; if I know the intricacies of my industry, say Telecoms, but I am unable to leverage that knowledge due to lack of scope, then the knowledge is as good as nothing. Hence the whole KYI seems to be redundant.
Not only did the KYI seems redundant, it was also obsolete in some cases. During one of the session, the instructor was talking about convergence and 3G and its future in Telecoms domain but, I guess, he was least aware that he could have easily skipped those topics. As he went through his slide show one guy was busy with his GPRS enabled phone and another one revving his BMW-Mini in a mobile game.
It's very difficult to believe that I am yet to find a reason pragmatic enough behind this KYI initiative. There must be one, at least!. One reason which must have prompted my top management for such a decision; one justification to take such a step. If you find any possible reason, please leave a comment and let me know. Thanks in advance.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment