Areas to Focus on While Upskilling Your IT Teams

1. Look for Tangible Results From IT Service Management

IT organizations are increasingly turning to improved IT service operations and management as a way to improve efficiencies and ensure cost savings. IT professionals who are able to create more responsive, stable and repeatable IT service delivery, which includes governance and risk management, will be well positioned to lead their teams. A recent BMC study showed that 42 percent of IT executives reported a cost savings in business processes as a result of their ITSM program and more than one-third of executives reported increases in employee productivity and cost savings in IT systems. ITIL Intermediate Service Operations (SO) and Service Strategy (SS) certifications are a vital first step to achieving these productivity gains. 

2. Leverage Machine Learning to Streamline IT Ops

AI and Machine Learning are making big headlines in consumer industries for sure, but they are also playing a critical role in IT organizations to streamline operations and automate common tasks. A Gartner study reported that by 2022, 40 percent of large enterprises are projected to utilize Big Data and Machine Learning to support IT operations, monitoring, and service desks to automate common responses to IT problems. To illustrate this trend, machine learning and deep learning are two of the top three most in-demand skills on Monster. Accordingly, AI ML Course and deep learning with TensorFlow are two of the most popular online training programs going on.  

3. Align IT with Business Objectives to Ensure Visibility With Management

A key tactic that every IT manager hopes to master is being able to prove ROI of IT operations with executive management, and their ability to strategically align IT processes with the company’s broader vision and objectives. IT organizations must advance beyond being just a hardware fix-it operation to collaborating more effectively with internal customers, creating success metrics and adopting continual service improvement methodologies. According to Gartner, almost 30 percent of IT spending now comes from individual business units, rather than traditional IT, so IT professionals must learn to operate in lock-step with other stakeholders to remain relevant. Moreover, only ¼ of respondents in an ITSM study feel their efforts and value are sufficiently recognized by management. ITIL Intermediate Service Offerings and Agreements (SOA) Certification training can establish credibility with your IT workforce to create and manage service offerings based on business requirements.

4. Identify the Cloud’s Silver Lining

With the cost savings and productivity gains cloud infrastructures can provide, there is increased interest from IT managers in optimizing the value of cloud ops. The cloud computing market is projected to grow to $162 billion by 2020, growing almost 20 percent per year, and 74 percent of CFOs say cloud computing will have a measurable impact on their businesses. From massive data storage to creating and deploying CRM, ERP and other critical business applications, cloud services provide huge scalability and cost savings for IT organizations who want to help improve their business’s bottom line. Certification training for both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are among the most common cloud training programs available to upskill your IT infrastructure teams. 

5. Train for the Entire IT Lifecycle

Having an IT team that has mastered the entire lifecycle of IT services enhances your organizational leverage and helps you do more with less. The ITIL framework was developed as a source of best practices in service management and is used by organizations worldwide to establish and improve IT operations. ITIL Lifecycle Expert training enables IT professionals to master the five critical phases of the IT service management lifecycle, including service strategy, design, transition, operation and continual service improvement. ITIL skills empower IT workers to align IT strategy with business vision, manage the service delivery process across the lifecycle and ensure a smooth transition of new services into operations.

Whether you’re just getting started with IT business transformation or you’ve already implemented steps towards that end, there is a wealth of education and training available to elevate the skillsets of your IT teams. Taking upskilling steps sooner will keep you on track to meet your long-term business goals. 

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