Last week I did something exciting and slightly profound. I sat down with someone from our internal training department to discuss and develop curriculum for an internal training class for our employees, centered around… you guessed it… virtualization! As it turns out there is a hunger within our walls to learn about virtualization. I’m not talking about certifications or technical level training here. I’m talking about internally sponsored user training. After all, it’s now powering our internal systems, test lab, SAAS department, demos, labs, and training classes. It’s everywhere in the organization… and we never really took the time to educate people on how to use it properly… at least the people outside of the datacenter. Once we started talking about this, all kinds of self-evident ideas came to light. We not only crafted the outline for a “101″ level class, but began discussion of what an advanced class would look like and the types of things we will be presenting at our next technical conference addressing virtualization.
This brings to light that virtualization is more than a mere adoption of technology. There is a cultural adoption as well. How do your people know that they shouldn’t run 4 VM’s on their laptop? How do you explain that virtualization is not *magic* to people that don’t have a fundamental understanding of how it works? In my mind this might be that mystical missing piece in your ROI puzzle. Once your drive adoption at the lowest level with a workforce of people who are educated and excited about what the technology is doing in your organization, the enthusiasm will bubble up to the top levels of the company.
I’d love to hear from you… have you begun any internal user training initiatives around virtualization in your organization?
How soon will this 101 class be offered? Pretty much right away?
I had done this to our employee in IT department as a start more than 1.5 years back. This will provide more understanding and amazing demo to build the confident to both users and management to adapt to the technology
I’d love to hear how this goes. I’m just starting on my VDI project and need to show our helpdesk department the *magic* of virtualisation.
Please drop me a line or a post on your findings.
We are looking to begin running this “entry-level” training in about 3-4 weeks. The plan is to have the advanced class ready for sometime in the spring.
I would be interested in viewing your 101 training. I have found it difficult to craft an understanding presentation in this area.
Thanks,