The Real Cost of Education
Jonathan E. Sisk

The industry watchdog Gartner Group recently published that the "best-in-class organizations spend 7% to 10% of IT payrolls on continuing education. The average Gartner Group client still allocates only 2% to 3%, and organizations that invest less than 3% see twice the staff turnover than those that invest 6%. Historical staff turnover is 8% to 9%, and that rate will more than double by the year 2000."

They also noted that "one hour of formal instruction equals six hours of ad-hoc learning time. Certified professionals are 25% more productive and 40% more effective in troubleshooting and resolving problems."

On an equally encouraging note, we've seen a 27% increase in hair growth and a 17% reduction in weight for an average JES student.

Now most of us don't tend to think of facts and figures in our everyday work life. I know it was the last thing on my mind last Christmas eve...

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, we were getting ready to close up the office for the holidays when a phone call came in, asking for me personally. I knew this would be interesting the instant that the voice on the other end said "I know I should have taken a class before now, but I've got a slight problem right now".

Me: "What's the problem?"
Him: "Well, we had a spooler entry that was locked up and we couldn't unlock it. What we normally do when this happens is reboot the system. So, we put on the boot tape and rebooted, but it said something about 'mismatches' and we rebooted again. The next time it asked for our restore options, we used "F" to restore the file-system."

At this point, alarm bells are going off in my head and I begin to think 'Uh oh!'

He continues. "Then, when it asked us to mount the file-system tape, we used the boot tape that came with the system."
Me: "Right. So, you've written over your own file-system. That means all data added after the last file-save is lost. Have you tried restoring from your last file-save?"
Him: "Well, ummm, that's the problem. The last good one we can find is from three months ago."
Me: "THREE MONTHS?, I said in all uppercase characters, "you don't run file-saves every day?"

I'm feeling physically ill and breaking out in a cold sweat at this point.

Him: "Well, we thought we did. We had an automatic file-save routine that ran unattended, and each morning someone would take off the previous night's tape and put in today's tape. But we sort of discovered that it stopped running in September."
Me: "Nobody read the reports or checked the tape?"
Him: "Nope. Is there any way to recover even any of the data?", he asked hopefully.

This poor guy and his data were essentially toast. In loading the "factory" file-system, he had overwritten the company data. Even worse, he couldn't even recover any data for the past three months .

This type of situation underscores the vital need for training. If this company had sent someone to an operations course, they would not be in such dire straits now, having to re-enter months worth of data from paper reports, at an enormous expense.

Years ago most dealers and VARs considered system-level training as more or less optional. Many of them told their clients about us, and recommended taking courses if they felt they needed them. As the Data Processing world matured and things got much more complicated, many of them discovered that they were spending an increasing amount of time in tech support, answering questions that would have been addressed in system-level classes.

That's when we were approached and asked to define a path of courses that a new site needed at a very minimum. This turned out to be as little as 2 1/2 weeks, consisting of a database "fundamentals" course (like UniVerse or Unidata), a week of "platform" fundamentals (NT or Unix), and a three-day System Administration course addressed to the client's specific hardware/software platform. From this point forward, these dealers and VARs have strongly encouraged their clients to send at least one or two people through this course path.

Everyone wins with education. The client becomes much more self-sufficient in managing their systems and enhancing their applications to their own personal tastes, like in adding new reports and menu options. The VAR/dealer wins by reducing the load on their own tech support group, which could mean faster access to them the next time you've got a real support question, as opposed to one you could have easily answered yourself with a little training. And we win, too. But it's why we're here.

The real cost of education is in not getting it.

Someone once said, "If you think education's expensive, consider the alternative." I'm pretty sure that my Christmas Eve caller would not see the humor in that. But then, he's probably now enjoying his new career in multi-level marketing.

Jon Sisk (http://www.jes.com)

Reprinted with permission from Evolving Enterprise, Spring 1998 issue