Message Pad

Message Pad's ITQ goals

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To reduce the support burden on centralised ITS in the areas of

A. Application support:

• Fewer “I think I’ve broken…” calls
• Fewer “How do I…” calls
• Fewer “Could you do this for me…” calls

B. Equipment troubleshooting and maintenance

• Fewer “My PC doesn’t work…” calls
• Fewer site visits

C. Increase security awareness

• Data security; Viruses; Trojans; SpyWare; etc 

Key lessons learnt

The internal sale and delivery of ITQ needs effort: not just ‘executive sponsorship’ but also time & energy.

• Ensure the training provider ‘is copied in on’ the company’s internal sales pitch.
• You can’t outsource all of the training & accreditation delivery – this needs to become ‘second nature’ to the internal managers

Match the training material, provider & delivery method to the staff needs

• In particular recognise that staff are already doing the job and therefore probably [believe they] already know most of what they need
• Recognise company processes/policies in the collateral

Most importantly, don’t assume one size fits all

• Organisations differ
• Departments within those organisations differ
• Individuals within those departments differ

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1. Identifying a need

Actually recognising that a skills deficiency is responsible for poor individual and collective performance can be a challenge in itself. This is because poor IT skills often manifest themselves, in the first instance, as IT problems or issues, not a need for learning. Kit admits that though Message Pad was in the process of centralising its IT department and knew its IT staff were losing time to ‘first line’ IT support, it was an outside agency (e-Skills UK) who helped them identify the fundamental need for IT training amongst their staff. Learning Providers could promote the benefits of ITQ by helping organisations make the leap from identifying IT problems in the first place to recognising an IT skills gap as a more intrinsic reason for poor performance. ‘Providers have the expertise to ask the right questions and encourage employers to look beyond their immediate problems to think about skills and training,’ commented Kit.

2. Ensuring Ownership: finding an ITQ advocate

Identifying an in-house ITQ advocate who will own and drive ITQ internally is crucial. At Message Pad, Kit stresses that the whole board was behind the ITQ programme. In their case, the responsibility for driving the ITQ initiative lay with Kit himself, who is in charge of ‘Information Technology and Information Assets’. In this role, he was seeing first hand how poor IT skills were impacting on general productivity and performance. His IT Support staff were getting tied up by user-orientated IT queries - ‘how do I do this?’, ‘is my computer broken’- type questions (‘first line’ response) – which they weren’t strictly speaking there to resolve. An ITQ advocate doesn’t have to be an IT-orientated person such as Kit. An HR Manager, a Line Manager, a Project Worker – anyone with capacity and enthusiasm - can fulfill this role. It is true to say that although an advocate does not need to be an IT expert, he/ she should be an IT enthusiast and someone who recognises and values the role of IT. All ITQ advocates need energy, encouragement and organisation – and a vision for long-term change in the way their organisations and the individuals in it perform with IT.

3. Assessing the ITQ course

What excited Kit about ITQ was that it offered generalist IT skills that would give staff competencies they could use everyday in the workplace. When comparing it to other courses, he considered:

• A) How complex and advanced is the content covered - ITQs are for IT end users and complexity is not what they need.
• B) What are the outcomes of such a training course and how might it benefit my business? ITQ offered a clear way to establish good IT working practice for Message Pad as a business by focusing on the workaday IT skills needs of its employees.
• C) Relevance: Kit also considered the course from a purely practical point of view. Does ITQ entail swotting up on tricks with Excel spreadsheets or is it actually going to grow my staff’s understanding of their everyday tools?

4. Engaging the right Learning Provider

When Message Pad undertook ITQ, they were in the unenviable position of managing three different Learning Providers: a local training college, and two private consultancies. It was therefore a challenge to ensure learners were receiving a consistent approach to the training.

What makes a good Learning Provider? ‘The capacity to be flexible in approach and delivery and the ability to be focused on the needs of the individual learner,’ says Kit.

5. Customising the course material: making ITQ fit for us

Kit customised all the course materials to suit the needs of his organisation himself. It took him about two to three weeks, working two to three days a week to transform the ITQ materials he was given – standard ‘brochureware’ and other ITQ-related ‘bumf’ - into language his staff could understand. (The acronyms and jargon that proliferated much of what he was given he was sure would have put his learners off.) Ideally the Learning Providers would have done all this as part of the service, targeting the ITQ resources to the individual client. Given this was the ITQ Pilot, Kit accepted that the expertise to accomplish that was not yet in place.

6. Planning and promoting ITQ internally

Preparation and mobilisation: At Message Pad, Kit took four weeks to prepare the course materials, prepare the business and get organised with the Learning Providers.

Selling ITQ to staff: He then ran a series of introductory workshops for learners in groups of 10 to 15. Issues that arose out of these workshops were: a) managing staff who thought they didn’t need ITQ; b) managing expectations about time commitments and how much work ITQ would involve.

Customising the ITQ: with the help of the Learning Providers Kit outlined sample tasks learners did in their day jobs and mapped these to ITQ course competencies. This was an iterative process that continued to be refined well into the roll out.

7. Keeping staff motivated and managing the learning

Kit found that all his learners had a different style of learning. Learners with little experience of formal qualifications and who anticipated being closely supervised found it difficult to source their own learning from the palette of course materials, and required very clear learning objectives. But course materials with step by step routines that assumed all learners were novices alienated those who already had competencies: they got quickly bored and would drop out.

Keeping the balance between those with and without previous learning
experience was a challenge. Kit found that having ITQ floor walkers was the best solution: if any learner had a question there was someone there to provide oneto-one guidance on the spot.

8. Measuring – and sharing - success

For Message Pad, the evidence of the success of ITQ is as clear as day: all the first line support queries have stopped. And ITQ has also left its mark amongst staff in a subtler way. As well as improving business performance, employees now share IT tips or learning amongst themselves, ‘they have generated their own momentum,’ observes Kit. Efficiencies and improvements – such as a more appropriate choice of IT application to perform a specific task, or a more polished
Power Point presentation, for example – that Kit had not anticipated are in abundance. It is crucial that these benefits and improvements are communicated back to the organisation and that learners can be made to feel proud of what they have achieved individually and contributed to collectively through their learning.

Our thanks for this case study go to City and Guilds who published this text in their ITQ Update, Issue 5, January 2006.

Last modified: 16 Jun 2007