Training -- Your Competitive Edge in the '90s
By Eileen Steets Quann, Fastrak Training Inc.
(Editor's Note: This article is based on an address presented by the author to the general session of the Software Technology Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah on April 12, 1994.)
How many of you had a car in the shop in the last year -- yours, your spouse's, or a son's or daughter's? How many of you thought the mechanic who worked on that car was over-trained? Cars have changed a lot in the last 10 years and mechanics are constantly going to classes to certify themselves on new technology. Last week, when I drove my husband to pick up his car from the dealer's service department, I asked the manager how much training their mechanics receive. About two months in the first two years and then about two weeks a year after that to stay current on the new models. That's about 8-10 percent of their time in the first two years in formal training classes, plus OJT and 4 percent annually after that to maintain their skills. Is your auto mechanic getting more training than your software engineer?
If you've been to see a doctor in the last year, did you think that the doctor was overqualified to deal with your problem? Probably not. We expect doctors to stay current on the latest medical findings. We expect them to continually read medical journals and attend medical conferences. We expect them to be knowledgeable about the latest cure for whatever ails us. We expect the people who service our needs to stay current in their field.
The 1980s saw an explosion of technology unprecedented in the history of mankind. Computers became better, faster and cheaper. The growth in raw computing power was exponential. Dr. Fred Brooks, in his well-know book "The Mythical Man-Month" was describing system development in the 1960s, and stated that memory on a Model 165 computer rented for about $12 per kilobyte per month. Last week I received a flyer that advertised a 540 MB hard drive for under $400. To rent that much memory for a single year back then would have been over $77 million. Better, faster, cheaper, no question about it. Hardware has become a disposable commodity. New generations of machines are available every 18 months, and computers become virtually obsolete in less than 5 years. Software has changed equally as much.
Let me make an analogy. I have two teenage boys who always need money. Suppose I make a deal with my 17-year-old son, Sean, to build a doghouse in our back yard. He and I agree on a price for his effort, and we sit down at our kitchen table and design it. He picks up the wood at our local lumber yard and builds it over the weekend, with some oversight and positive words of encouragement from me. Let's assume he builds a beautiful doghouse, the best in the neighborhood.
Now it's time to build your retirement home. How many folks here would be willing to have my son build it? I suspect that I won't find any takers. His ability to build a doghouse does not qualify him to build your home. You have no reason to believe that he knows anything about reading a blueprint, plumbing, wiring, roofing, flooring, insulation, inspection requirements, or any of the other things you need to know to build a house.
Let's assume you have found the builder for your retirement home. A request
for proposal is published to build a skyscraper in downtown
While it's obvious that the skills required to build a doghouse, a single family home and a skyscraper are quite different, I would suggest that the differences for software are just as real, but not as obvious. We would never describe the primary differences between these structures as size -- two square feet, 2,000 square feet, 2 million square feet, but we often describe software in terms of its size -- 200 lines of code, 20,000 or 2 million lines of code. And in software, we often mistakenly assume that anyone who can write 200 lines of code can write 2,000 or 20,000 or 2 million, given enough time.
What makes these structures different? Tools, for one thing. To build a
skyscraper, I need a crane. Suppose I give Sean a crane. Now can he build a
skyscraper? Of course not. Yet that is exactly what we often do in software. We
expect tools alone to solve the problem. Don't misunderstand; we need those
tools. It's just that tools alone are not the answer. Another difference is
that it takes a lot of people to build a skyscraper. Suppose I bring Sean's
entire senior class to
In today's DoD environment, we are finding that our requirements more often that not are for skyscrapers. Yet our staff, experienced in building doghouses, and sometimes single family homes, are not given the training they need to produce those skyscrapers. If I want these people to build skyscrapers, they need to be trained in new processes, new standards and procedures, new methods, and new tools. If I am their employer, I expect it to be my responsibility to see that they get the training that they need. Why is it so hard to accept that in the software industry?
Today's educational system was custom made to fit the industrial age, developed for a society in which it made sense to treat everyone the same. They needed to educate factory workers and the managers of those workers. The mass production-oriented society relied on uniformity to produce results. Students learned almost everything they needed to know in school, and education, for the most part, ended at graduation. Unfortunately, that formula no longer equates to success in business. Many of us have been educated by industrial-age standards and then thrown into the information age to compete. A huge gap exists today between our formal education and what we need to know to stay competitive, and that gap is widening.
Our management structure is also a product of the industrial age. Uniformity, control and centralization in the factory were the ideals of industrial society. Responsibility rested with the bosses who made the decisions that were implemented by the workers who followed orders. Training was limited to teaching new employees the specific job skills for their positions. That paradigm worked well in the industrial age, but it falls apart when we are competing in a global marketplace for which the only constant is constant change and survival demands continually improving our products, our services and our ability to respond quickly. The notion that workers are supposed to be already trained may have made sense 50 years ago -- it doesn't today.
Technology concepts are ushered in faster than our ability to master, or even understand them, unless we are perpetually in a learning mode. We are perceived as the leaders of technology. Yet all too often we are woefully ignorant of technological progress. I attended a one-day technical exhibit two weeks ago. The themes were multimedia, client-server networks, and information engineering. Two thousand people attended. Ten years ago, that conference could have been held in an elevator. We cannot allow our software engineers to become technologically obsolete.
Where will the software of the future come from? In this month's IEEE
Spectrum magazine, there is an article about the growth of the software
export industry in
Recognizing the export potential for this industry,
What about the quality of their software? Many of these Indian companies are working toward certification under ISO 9001, which corresponds roughly to the Level 3 on the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model. And they're looking beyond that standard to the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality requirements. Other developing nations are also moving into software as a viable, profitable export. These will be our competitors in the global marketplace, and unless our attitude towards continuous training and learning changes, we may not be much competition for them.
Every person in this room will be technologically obsolete by the year 2000 if we don't do something about it. So what can we do? Peter Drucker, the management guru, in an article in INC magazine stated simply, "Assume that it is the responsibility of the organization to train." With the continuous changes in technology, our software engineering work force cannot stay competent and current without support from the organization.
I would like to add, "Assume that it is the responsibility of the individual to learn." We no longer live in an age where education can stop when we graduate from college. The explosion in technology is both exciting and frightening. We can envision a future with wonderful new ideas, yet we may be afraid that we will become obsolete, and perhaps some of us will. But that is our choice, not our mandate.
The most successful people in the next 10 to 20 years may not necessarily be the smartest today, or know the most right now. The technology they know now will be obsolete by then. Success in the information age will be defined by your ability to learn. Knowledge will become obsolete so quickly that the only survivors will be the lifelong learners.
In the world in which change is the constant, the critical skills we need are the ability to think, to analyze, and to learn. These are not necessarily skills we were born with, and unfortunately, in many cases, they are not skills that we have been taught. They are, however, skills that we must acquire because the best learners are becoming the most valuable people in our organizations. And the responsibility for learning begins with the individual. Look to the people to the right and left of you who you have just met. One of you three is in a learning mode right now and may already be a lifelong learner, one of you could become one, and one of you will be technologically obsolete by the year 2000. Which one are you?
What is a lifelong learner and how do you become one? First of all, a lifelong learner reads. I went to the newsstand near my office three weeks ago and counted 47 computer-related magazines. How many do you subscribe to? How many do you read? How many business newspapers and magazines do you read? This is a software conference. How many books have you read on software engineering this year? Ever? What were the last five books that you read that related in any way to your professional growth? When was the last time you were in a library?
Lifelong learners don't stop their formal education when they graduate from college. When was the last time you were in a classroom to improve your professional skills? Interestingly, very few people take advantage of educational opportunities offered to them by their employers. The March 1994 issue of Benefits and Compensation Solutions reported that less than 7 percent of employees take advantage of educational assistance programs at their place of work.
Lifelong learners never think that they are too smart to learn. How many of you have small children? A child is born wanting to learn. Among their first words is certainly "Why?". They must ask that question and others a hundred times a day. Perhaps we all need to ask "Why?" more often. Every time we are afraid to ask questions, because we think it will make us look stupid, we lose an opportunity to learn. The lifelong learner has not lost the ability to ask why, or what, or how. They have confidence in their ability to learn because they have done it over and over again. They know that the learning stretch -- when we are pushed to perform beyond what we already know -- can be painful, frightening for fear of failure, humbling for we have to admit that we don't know, but also exciting, exhilarating and rewarding when we succeed. By the way, if you've been in a job for two or three years and feel like you're not learning, you're probably due for a stretch assignment.
Even while we recognize that it is the responsibility of the individual to learn, individual learning alone cannot save an organization. To be competitive as an organization, we must institutionalize the learning process. Organizations must provide the climate and opportunity for learning. We must foster the learning organization.
In a learning organization, emphasis is on creative thinking. People are encouraged to ask the right questions rather than learn the right answers to predictable questions. Mistakes are recognized as an essential part of learning. I enjoyed the analogy of Robert Rosen in his book, The Healthy Company in which he says, "Mistakes are as natural a part of learning as sore muscles are of athletic training." With spring finally arriving, many of us will start up new exercise programs and rediscover muscles we forgot we had. If we quit with the first sore muscle, we'll never get in shape. Likewise, if we quit after our first mistake, we'll never learn.
A learning organization provides training that is consistent with the goals and business plans of the organization and follows up to make sure that the goals are being met. All employees have their her own personal training plan, evaluated regularly, that is consistent with the goals of the organization. The SEI Capability Maturity Model talks about software process improvement. An organization's ability to improve is in direct proportion to its ability to learn. An organization that cannot learn cannot improve.
I believe that for most software organizations, moving from Level 1 to Level 2 is the most difficult step because it demands a culture change. Individuals must commit to learning and organizations must commit to training, or there won't be any change. If you can get over those two hurdles, movement up to the higher levels is much easier. You cannot institutionalize process improvement without institutionalizing individual learning and organizational training.
We do training in Level 2 Key Process Areas. I have discovered that I can now tell within a couple of days of working with an organization whether it will ever become a Level 2. You just have to listen to the people to find out. Let me give you two examples. In one organization, where we give classes in project management, requirements management, QA, CM and a variety of other courses, the classes are always filled by the technical staff. On the evaluation forms they frequently say, "My boss needs to hear this." Yet, when we have scheduled classes for the managers, short overviews to tell them what their employees were learning, not one manager attended. Rarely do students get to apply what they have learned in class to their job. The employees are discouraged.
In another organization, at the start of every new class, the director comes in, tells everyone why they are there, outlines for them the goals of the organization, and ties the class objectives to the organization's goals. He then encourages them to learn everything they can and to come back ready to apply what they have learned on the job. The students are enthusiastic, many of them clearly in a learning stretch. The contrast between the two groups is striking. One of them will succeed. An organization's ability to improve is directly proportional to its leaders' commitment to create a corporate culture that not only invites but actually demands continuous learning.
The learning organization must be led by learning leaders -- those who are actively committed to their own learning. Learning leaders attend training with or before their people. They define the goals for their organization and then commit the resources to make it happen. They don't set arbitrary dates for "becoming a Level 2" without understanding what that means, without putting in place the mechanisms and committing the resources that can make it possible.
In the leading edge companies, continual learning is recognized as an essential ingredient to competitiveness and survival. They understand that the only competitive advantage an organization in the information age will have is its ability to learn faster than its competitors. They make the commitment to spend the money required for training, but only after they make sure that the training is linked to their business strategy. They don't waste training dollars.
Unfortunately, I think the DoD-supported software industry has fallen very far behind in the learning process. We put off training with every budget cut and think somehow that we have saved money. We expect contractors to always provide trained workers and don't acknowledge the continuous nature of learning. Much of the money we do spend on training is wasted because it is not directed at the goals of the organization. Our model for training must be dramatically overhauled. First, we must link training dollars to business strategy. Training dollars must be budgeted first, not last. Our greatest resource is our people, and the maintenance of that resource requires continuous investment in training just to stay current. For every dollar spent on hardware or software, another dollar must now be budgeted for training. And because of downsizing and reduced budgets, it may be necessary to get that dollar from the hardware and software budgets.
As an individual, you must make the conscious decision to become a lifelong learner. The bad news is that even if you know everything there is to know technically in your field today, you will be obsolete in five years if you don't learn anything new. The good news is that if you commit to lifelong learning today, you can be the technological leader in five years.
If you are a manager, your success depends upon your ability to inspire the best in your employees, to expand their competence and capacity, and to create the right conditions so that they can learn. It is your responsibility to ensure that training is adequate, appropriate, directed at the goals of the organization and not wasted.
If you are the leader of an organization, you must recognize that the competitive edge in the 90's will go to the organizations that train their people. You must define the goals for your organization, communicate those goals to your people, and allocate the resources to support those goals. Your organization can lead or it can follow, but in the fee-for-service environment, being competitive may mean the difference between surviving and thriving or going out of business.
As you drive onto the information highway of the future, check your rearview mirror. The competition from around the world is gaining on you.
Our success, indeed our survival in this rapidly changing world, will depend upon our ability to respond to change. To do that, we must be able to think, to analyze, and most important to learn. Training is your best competitive strategy in the 90s. Don't pass up that opportunity.
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