Today's rapidly changing business makes it very important for employees to be adequately trained. Nowhere is this more critical than in the area of internetworking where new technology is appearing at a very fast pace. To gain competitive advantage, companies need to acquire and install this new technology faster than their competitors. This can only happen when the empolyees understand the technology, learn how it can be best applied to business needs, and quickly field it.
In tight times, the training budget often is one item that quickly falls to the budget axe. However, research done by Dataquest and other organizations find that untrained personnel are more costly to the organization in terms of lower productivity and system misuse. The research found that a trained user spends approximately 50 hours after formal training to feel comfortable enough with the new skills to apply them to the job. An untrained user requires as much as 300 hours of exploration, experimentation, and research to achieve the same results. This is a six-fold loss of productivity.
Greater numbers of errors and technical failures are also attributable to inadequate training. How many networks have been affected by a novice network administrator who lacked sufficient training to properly configure the network or fix a network problem? Whenever this occurs, the more advanced administrators have to spend precious time troubleshooting and repairing the problem. And this does not count the down-time of the network, which has been estimated at $30,000 per hour in an article entitled "LAN Downtime", from Data Communications, March, 1990.
The moral to the training story is a simple one: an organization either pays for training now, or pays later with lost and lowered productivity as the users learn "on the job."
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