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Behavioral and soft skills training for IT sector

IT sector being one of the most imperative and indispensible industry at present and for the coming future, training the IT employees at different levels which are given below:

  • Trainees
  • Program Analyst
  • Associates
  • Network support admin
  • System Admin
  • Sr.Associates
  • Team Leaders
  • Tech leads
  • Project Managers
  • Program Managers
  • Ops manager
  • Process manager
  • Director

is very vital. When we say training the IT employees, it immediately relates only to technical and process oriented training. Very rarely does anyone feel the need for behavioral and soft skills training for IT employees. Mostly it comes at last in the priority list or may be does not even feature in the list. Reason being that an employee of an IT company right from recruitment to working in top level management feels that their sound knowledge and application on technical skills is sufficient for them to grow up the career path climb up the promotion ladder and scale up their progress. Very few feel that the essence for taking the leap is people management which requires immense behavioral skills/attitudinal aspects and soft skills knowledge and implementation to move up the grid.

All the problem starts when one moves from individual contribution to team work to team management. That’s when an IT employee feels the need to enhance his/her behavioral traits and embark the journey of soft skills training. Ideally a behavioral expert/trainer/coach can been seen adding value to an IT employee only if he/she can put their shoes and speak their language. The following description can help one get into the IT space to conduct a soft skill or behavioral training:

An IT company has both internal and external customers:

Who are internal Customers?
An internal customer can be anyone within an organization. It could be another department another branch or even a co-worker. IT is broadly categorized into

      • Development
      • Testing
      • Support
      • Operations
      • Talent enhancement /HRD
      • Admin
      • System and network services

For e.g. the testing department of an IT company tests the software created by the developers of the same company. The developers are the customers to the testing team within the company.

Who are external customers?
An external customer is one who is not part of the organization, rather one who receives a service or product from the organization. They are the ones who pay for a product, and they can make or break the organization. They have a choice; if the product or the service does not please them they can seek other companies.

Some of the Verticals in an IT company are:

      • Banking & Financial Services
      • Communications
      • Consumer Goods
      • Energy & Utilities
      • Health care
      • Insurance
      • Life Sciences
      • Manufacturing
      • Retail
      • Technology
      • Travel & Hospitality
      • Transportation & Logistics

Some of the Horizontals in IT industry are:

      • People soft
      • Oracle
      • Microsoft Delivery
      • Java Delivery
      • SAP
      • Testing

In an IT industry, we call the technical skills as horizontals and the domain knowledge (about the client’s business) as the verticals. Say for e.g., Consider you are a Dotnet professional and you are working on a hotel management project, then your horizontals Microsoft delivery and your vertical is Hospitality; consider you are a JAVA developer and you are working on a ticket reservation system for your client, then your horizontals JAVA delivery and your vertical is Travel; Consider you are a SAP( System Applications & Products) consultant and providing services for an Insurance company, your vertical is SAP and your horizontals Insurance. Thus, the horizontal is the knowledge of software you are trained with and the vertical is the knowledge about the Client’s Business.

IT employees under each category

      • Development
      • Testing
      • Support
      • Operations
      • Talent enhancement /HRD
      • Admin
      • System and network services

require different behavioral/soft skills to interact with

      • Clients
      • Peers
      • Supervisors
      • Subordinates/Freshers/trainees

The talent lies in identifying requirement of skill enhancement/doing insights and creating modules that are customized for each category. Stay tuned for more insights on what behavioral skills are required for each category and how to identify the need to improve skills in our next article.

Until then keep reading our blogs.

 

 

This article is been written by Anusha. Anusha is an experienced voice and accent/ finance trainer with 8 yrs of experience in soft skill/ communication/ behavioral/ leadership and 3 yrs experience in finance (Life insurance) and sales training. She is a focused training professional with immense passion for training and content development. During her extensive career she has taken up various roles as trainer/ counsellor/ Training manager.