The success of an organisation increasingly relies on information technology (IT) supporting business-critical or mission-critical requirements and often requires implementing new technologies or getting greater value out of existing systems.
At the heart of every organisation, strategy, initiative, customer interaction, and product or service innovation is the workforce – who must conceive, develop, and execute everything to make the organisation successful. The workforce, especially the IT workforce, must be trained and often retrained to properly lead, execute, and support the strategic objectives of the enterprise.
Digital transformation (DX) is ushering in a new era of digitally enabled customer-facing products, services, and experiences in an environment of rapid change and uncertainty. According to IDC’s Worldwide DX Executive Sentiment Survey*, through the end of 2019, up to 70% of companies engaged in digital transformation efforts struggled to translate business needs into effective IT investments and operational plans, more companies struggled in 2020, as organisations accelerated digital transformation initiatives while adjusting to changing work requirements and business constraints.
Organisations most often struggle because they don’t have the skills they need to build and execute an effective transformation strategy. In fact, “having the right skills in-house” is most often selected as the biggest challenge for organisations who want to digitally transform their datacenters. Other challenges exist too, such as developing new applications, migrating workloads to the public cloud, and data integration issues, but each of these challenges is also significantly constrained by the skills of the IT professionals in the organisations.It is estimated that trained and certified teams responsible for core IT activities are generally 20% more productive than uncertified staff, while our research demonstrates that Microsoft trained and certified IT professionals perform 26% better than colleagues with the same responsibilities who are not certified.
Benefits from having a well-trained IT organisation
The IDC’s Cloud-Based Enterprise Application Performance Survey of more than 1,000 IT leaders worldwide illustrated three significant benefits to having well-trained employees:
- Timeliness: Well-trained cloud migration teams meet nearly 90% of their business and project milestones compared with less than 50% of milestones met by cloud migration teams who only have “average” skill levels.
- Insight: Nearly all (90%) of the organisations with well-trained teams are satisfied or very satisfied with their ability to monitor, forecast, and optimize server, storage, and network resources. In contrast, less than 10% of the organisations with undertrained teams are satisfied with their ability to optimize resources.
- Business impact: 80% of the organisations with teams that are well trained in automation and orchestration tools report being satisfied or very satisfied with the business impact of the move to cloud, while only 20% of the organisations without sufficient skills were satisfied with the impact of cloud.
High-performing teams also have greater engagement with their organisations’ mission and objectives. In the IDC’s research on the benefits of role-based certifications that focused on the Microsoft portfolio of technologies, more than 650 IT leaders across a variety of roles helped uncover how training improves the performance of IT professionals.
The findings include:
- Certified cloud engineers were more effective. Microsoft certified Azure cloud engineers spend 20% less time setting up the infrastructure and complete significant projects nearly two days sooner than uncertified engineers.
- Certified cloud administrators had more capability. Microsoft certified Azure cloud administrators are 55% more likely to be able to determine the scope of impact of a security issue with a virtual machine than uncertified engineers.
- Certified enterprise administrators were more efficient. Microsoft certified enterprise administrators spend 40% less time designing and implementing Microsoft 365 services than uncertified engineers.
- Certified security engineers were more proficient. Microsoft certified security engineers have 37% fewer network-related security incidents that impact multiple devices than uncertified engineers.
Beyond specific performance improvement, achieving technical certification can put IT professionals on a path to even greater contribution to their organisations. Once a professional has successfully mastered a challenging topic, they are more likely to believe they can do so again – feeding future professional achievement. Increasing skill levels to help the IT organisation better support business strategies must be intentional and is enhanced by both high-quality training providers such as Mecer Inter-Ed, and industry-respected training content.
Mecer Inter-Ed, as a training provider with the capabilities to execute and measure learning programs, is essential to developing the right skills your IT organisation needs.
What does Mecer Inter-Ed offer?
Tech intensity is known to create skill intensity and as a Microsoft Learning partner, Mecer Inter-Ed (MIE) offers businesses all the support and assistance that they may need. There are three types of certifications offered by MIE which meet the needs of both individuals and organisations. These are:
- Fundamental Certifications: These validate a foundational understanding associated with Microsoft technologies.
- Role-based Certifications: These focus specifically on solutions and not just products, and validate the technical skills which are required to perform industry specific job-roles using platforms and technologies from Microsoft.
- Specialty Certifications: These validate deep technical skills as well as ability-managing industry solutions. This includes third-party solutions either on or with Microsoft platforms.
*The Majority of Enterprise Digital Transformation Strategies Lack Implementation Road Maps and Regular KPI Monitoring, IDC #US45939818, January 2020.