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IT Survival Skills (continued)

Similarly, Tom Carpenter, a longtime IT trainer and consultant for LearnKey in St. George, Utah, has found that his course, "Communication Skills for IT Professionals," struck a chord. The genesis of the course, Carpenter recalls, was the perception that information technology people are poor communicators. "I found out this was really true, and that the large majority of people working in IT had put close to 100 percent of their effort into developing their technical skills and almost no effort into developing their interpersonal skills."

The course focuses on "learning to speak the business language and communicating the business value of IT," says Carpenter, who still teaches on technical topics. Since the course was first offered in 2002, enrollment has more than doubled.

Training for Real Life
More and more organizations stress both written and verbal communication skills among their IT staff. University of North Carolina's Oberlin, for example, requires his 450 IT employees to be able to write short summary memorandums.

Training in project management, running business meetings and dispute resolution is also vital. Anthony Orr, the global best practices director for BMC Software in Houston, Texas, prepares employees for an even tougher test: communicating in the midst of chaos. Orr oversees a unique airport simulation workshop designed to give students a better understanding of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), a best practices framework for IT. In the simulation, students set up a service desk, add technical specialists and suppliers and manage the dynamics of the environment, all while increasing the complexity of the IT infrastructure.

"They experience what chaotic behavior is like within an organization where the processes aren't aligned correctly, the technology doesn't underpin the processes and there's no communication," says Orr. (article continues)

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