From skills to performance: How hands-on learning is preparing IT teams for digital transformations

Business-critical activities like optimizing a database, building a machine learning model, or combatting a DDoS attack cannot be learned solely in a classroom or knowledge-based setting — and, as this article will make clear, not all training is equal in effectiveness. Offering practical experiences to reinforce learning content is the only way to ensure your team is ready for AI, CDKs, the IoT, and every acronym in between. 

Training content is well embedded in the corporate L&D (learning and development) world, along with certain enablement, partner, customer success, and sales functions. Traditionally if someone needed to learn something or train a partner or customer, they probably came across or were recommended a learning pathway consisting of courses, blogs, videos, audio recordings, and multiple-choice quizzes. 

This is a common approach to solving a mass-market need when you need many people to gain a basic understanding of a skill. But learning about a skill is much different than being able to apply it in your organization’s ecosystem. And some skills require meaningful, deep capability development (usually in a short timeframe) that can be demonstrated or applied with confidence at work. 

IT workers understand this. Over half (52%) of IT employees feel that their current learning opportunities are only ‘somewhat effective’ and 37% struggle to find training tied to their specific level or expertise.

The science of knowledge retention

If you break down the ways we learn most effectively, you begin to understand why such a gap exists between learning and application when you are just using a theoretical approach. The human brain learns best through practice and constant challenge. Consider how a toddler learns to walk and, eventually, progresses to running — to the ire of their parents! Or how a pilot is trained first in flight simulators before logging a certain number of hours before getting their commercial license. Nearly every ‘critical’ skill we’ve learned has come with opportunities to practice, fail, learn from it, and eventually master the skill. Why should technical skills be any different?

Safe application in real environments

It shouldn’t, but IT training has been limited to spinning up sandboxes a la carte when there is a training need that justifies the time and expense to maintain a sandbox environment. When insurtech company Majesco needed to upskill a large part of its workforce in new technology, it realized that self-paced video training and instructor-led training weren’t going to be enough. After completion, employees were still unable to complete fundamental tasks and this was impacting workloads, threatening business continuity, and introducing unacceptable risk. 

“We had to ramp up and deploy a large chunk of our organization to work, but our existing learning modalities simply couldn’t keep pace and we were finding our people were not actually ready for certain parts of their roles,” explains Jennifer Messersmith, Chief Learning Officer at Majesco. 

They introduced experience-based learning elements through sandboxes, but the costs quickly spiraled, amounting to over $300,000 in maintenance costs. The team was further hampered by decreased productivity as IT was tasked with provisioning environments for employees ready to take courses and then troubleshooting when the sandboxes were down.  

The team turned to virtual IT labs as an alternative. Specifically, Majesco chose to work with leading virtual labs company Skillable due to the scalability and flexibility of the lab environments, seamless integration with its new Learning Management System, and the ability to validate skills for greater individual and manager confidence. 

How Majesco used hands-on learning to drive business-growing impact

Bringing labs to Majesco has had notable top and bottom-line benefits including that aforementioned $300,000 now being saved since sandboxes no longer need to be set up, maintained, and torn down. As Jennifer Messersmith adds, “The savings were significant. As we expand Skillable’s platform to other products in our portfolio, there are even greater savings. Plus, managing sandboxes is not exactly the fun stuff our tech team likes to do, so it was a big win on multiple levels – both cost and employee engagement.”

Scored labs automatically give learners feedback on their performance in a lab, so they can immediately improve and learn from mistakes. Skill data is also helping to validate when a learner is ready to be deployed on projects and new career opportunities within the business. 

Skilling tech workers quickly and at scale

Technology is at an inflection point and IT leaders are feeling this. But as Majesco discovered, building learning programs around scenarios and real-world practice gives people the safe space they need to master skills quickly and with confidence. We need upskilling and reskilling that prepares IT teams for the technologies and processes they will use in their daily roles. Learning opportunities that can be refreshed, torn down, and implemented quickly as soon as a new model, software, or process comes to the market. To that end, Majesco was up and running its labs on Skillable’s platform within four months after implementation. 

Quest Software also found that hands-on learning is what’s helping give its partners an edge in a fast-moving, competitive software market. It needed to reskill and certify over 1,000 new partners following an acquisition — a lack of technical knowledge of Quest’s products could hinder its growth, lead to mistakes and misconfigurations, as well as declining customer satisfaction scores. With virtual labs providing hands-on practice and performance testing, Quest Software has increased partner-led sales by 183% and reduced its certification costs by 85%. 

Speed is of the essence