Certification Magazine - February 2008 - (Page 33) “We bring them into some of these strategic engagements with our larger customers in which we’re doing more policy or process work. They may be ancillary, or on the side of the project, but they’re involved with it to understand what’s happening.” Additionally, management and communication exercises have been woven into much of Savid Technologies’ general job training. For example, IT pros alternate leading an informal weekly technology seminar. “My goal is to get the engineers to do it not only to enable their technology skills — they’re learning new stuff — but also to learn the soft skills, which is leading the meeting, communicating with other engineers,” Davis said. In addition to the seminars, Savid Technologies also has a lab — which Davis called “a big virtual farm” — set up in-house so employees can learn and play with technology at their leisure. It comes in particularly handy when new technology has been introduced but not yet released to the public, Davis said. “We’ll spend a Saturday playing with it, and we’ll learn more in that one Saturday than going off and actually reading the manual or something like that, because we actually play with it in a real environment,” he said. The lab is also useful for gaining client business that the company otherwise might have lost. Of course, on-the-job training isn’t the only kind of education Savid Technologies encourages. Employees are given incentives to take classes or earn certifications to further their development. “We subsidize any certification that they really want to go after as long it’s applicable to our business,” Davis said. “Also, if you get it within a certain time frame and hit a certain score on it, we’ll give you an extra incentive. So instead of just, ‘Did you get the certification?’ it’s, ‘How well did you get the certification?’” At Savid Technologies Inc., a software development and IT consulting agency, employees are expected to chat with a client’s CIO just as easily as they repair a broken network. MBA degrees also can be covered, although not to the same extent. If an IT engineer decides to pursue business school and wants to be reimbursed, Davis said, he must qualify as a high-potential employee and also must agree to continue working at Savid Technologies for at least six months after the completion date. The company also budgets a generous amount for books, filling multiple bookcases in its Chicago INTERFACE continued on page 39 “We’ve done a couple of engagements for clients in which we’ve said, ‘We don’t know this technology as well as somebody you could go get, but we’ll be willing to give it a shot at a discounted rate for you, if you give us the time to learn a little bit,’” Davis said. “If it’s a customer where we have a good relationship with them, they have no problem with it. And in that situation, you not only get to learn the technology by playing with it, but [you experience it in a] real customer environment with real problems and real people using it.” February 2008 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE 33
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