Cloud Skills & Enablement

Cloud Skills and Capability Uplift: 70% of organisations don’t believe they have the right skills, leaders, or operating structure to adapt and 75% said their training programs are not effective. Harvard Business Review. 

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has declared a skills crisis in Australia and warned that a “staggering” 95% of the Australian workforce needs re skilling.“By 2030, we will need 1.3 million additional skills to effectively utilise the technologies reshaping the Australian workforce. The pace of technology investment in Australia is projected to skyrocket from $171B in 2023 to $259B by 2030, this rate of growth is three times faster than overall business investment.

Traditional enterprise IT models often build around central teams of experts servicing demands from 'the business'. This approach worked when the pace of innovation was low, and the ability to deliver technology required skills that could be easily centralised - think of applications built on a mainframe - only one mainframe team (skills) would be necessary.

Today we need to push skills to the edge. To realise the full value of Cloud we need to enable our business teams to be as self-sufficient as possible and directly enact the changes to their systems, data, and applications. Increasingly the job of central IT is to enable this to happen as safely and efficiently as possible. Developing cloud skills in the business units facilitates greater technology to business alignment, speed & agility, and cloud spend accountability.

Consistently we observe organisations looking to their training programs to help build new “capabilities” that support scaled usage of modern technologies, and facilitate a move to modern ways of working.But these objectives are complex and multi-dimensional, requiring a skills uplift but also involving people, process, and culture change. These programs are hard to design, measure and deliver. Resulting in most cloud training programs reverting their focus to skills & certifications; much easier to design & deliver, but not driving the desired capability uplift or organisational change.

Three consistent mistakes with we observe regarding cloud training programs:

1. taking a “one size fits all” approach and delivering a single cloud training offering with no consideration for the different internal roles or user personas.

2. focusing on cloud vendor certifications without considering their organisation’s wider cloud ecosystem, processes and tools associated with cloud consumption and operations, and

3. not providing trained people with a pathway to apply newly acquired cloud skills, or overarching programs that support new cloud centric ways of working.

These issues not only fail to deliver the required skills and capability uplift to the organisation but can also lead to employee’s becoming frustrated and departing the organisation.

You do not want to be training your people for their next role, outside of your organisation.

At DigiRen we have deep expertise in cloud operating models, training & skills enablement, and change management; with all three be required to succeed in building cloud capabilities and a shift to cloud centric ways of working. 

As cloud operating model experts our approach takes into consideration the multi-dimensional elements required to deliver a scalable and sustainable step-change in organisation capability& ways of working. DigiRen works closely with organisations to define the learning strategy, define the role-based learning &curriculum, and develop pathways for application of knowledge.

DigiRen works closely with organisations to assess the current skills and capabilities across the consumers or users of cloud, the central data teams and dependent group IT functions. We then create learning pathways for each group and identify the target ratio of expertise (informed, hands-on, certified) required in each group.

Underpinning the role-based learning program is organisational specific learning collateral. DigiRen works closely with organisations to co-create the learning collateral, identify suitable vendor certifications, but importantly creating organisations specific curriculum that educates on the standards, processes and systems which is critical in making the vendor training relevant and actionable.

To support the learning program and internal culture, DigiRen advocates identifying a small selection of employees on the “certification” learning path to receive deeper and accelerated training to facilitate them achieving an “expert” level of competency in both the new technology and the principles associated with adopting modern ways of working.  

These “experts” become scaling enablers for both supporting teams and the organisation adopt cloud centric ways of working. Employee’s undertaking “hands-on” or “certified” learning pathways will be assigned to an internal “expert” that will guide and support them in the exploration and application of their newly attained knowledge. As part of this process, we often work with human resources to identify any role changes that support the employees expanding or changing their roles. This approach has proven to not only to accelerate and scale internal employee development but has proven to be a catalyst for increased internal collaboration and uplift in culture.

DigiRen does not compete with traditional training providers but instead work closely with an organisation's training teams, partners, and hyper scale cloud vendors, to design tailored learning experiences that align directly with the organisational needs and objectives. Customised content ensures relevance and increased ability to use newly learnt skills. The DigiRen approach to cloud enablement provides the individual with learning and role development pathways and helps organisations uplift internal capabilities and move to modern cloud-centric ways of working.