By Paul Talbut, SNIA Global Education and Regional Affiliate Program Director
It is widely accepted that those who are considered knowledge workers (those who use a screen or the internet as a part of their daily work routine) face constant disruption and distractions. The constant flow of emails, online news feeds, social media, and personal interests tend to draw people away from the need to concentrate on the job at hand.
Recent studies suggest that workers are interrupted on average every five minutes, ironically often by work applications or collaboration tools. If this is happening to the work function, then it is not surprising that the opportunity to undergo training or personal development, where focus and concentration without distraction is key to learning, is severely restricted. The same studies suggest that around 1% of the working week is all that workers have to devote to focus on training and development.
This has led to a dramatic shift in the way people consume their training content. It is no longer practical or cost effective to lock people away in a training room for five days. Any such educational value is now much more likely to be absorbed on the train or the bus on the way to work, and so the nature of the content delivery has to change.
Educational content needs to be delivered in modules and in a variety of formats to match the plethora of personal devices and platforms available today. Even without the formality of instructional design and a comprehensive curriculum, content such as podcasts, webcasts, and training materials need to be accessible on the move and in such bite-size chunks that we can give people the information they need and make it available at the times that suit them best.
SNIA is changing the way study guides and materials are made available to our constituents by collaborating with our members and training partners to focus on a wide variety of educational channels. Materials and study guides are now available via e-book, PDF, YouTube, BrightTALK webcasts, podcasts, and online instructor led courses.
The challenge now is to make the content compelling and attractive enough to compete with all the other digital content available for consumption, and provide the opportunity to learn something new about storage rather than watching ice-buckets, mannequins or the latest cute cat.
To date, SNIA has certified over 12,000 storage professionals worldwide, and our vendor-neutral certification program continues to be the industry leader in the independent assessment of storage technology skills.
If you’re a storage professional you are likely familiar with the many certifications available to prove competency in a given technical area. Many of the certification options are offered by major IT vendors as a natural extension of their product and service offerings. In fact, if you work with any of the major players it is likely that at some point you will be required to prove your technical skills by acquiring specific credentials through certification.