Last week my wife made good on her vow to go to the local Apple store and get training on how to better use her myriad Apple products. She kept putting the training off because day-to-day commitments got in the way. She knew she both wanted and needed training, but it never got on the calendar.
Once she got to the training, however, she learned a lot in a small amount of time. The class gave her a lot of new knowledge that she could use to get more out of her devices – albeit some of it useable to control the family better – and a desire to take more classes.
This is a lesson for everyone who works in and sells technology. Daily commitments seemingly demand all of our time. Better education is viewed as a “one day” nice thing to have. We look at what’s right in front of us as if it constitutes the entire known universe.
Let’s be clear: If you want to remain successful in the IT field, training isn’t “nice”; it’s essential. Solutions change in days or weeks. If you haven’t gotten training for months, focusing on the daily grind has already made your knowledge obsolete.
The Apple skills learned by my spouse made her not only more valuable to the family team, but to her community and work teams as well. What she learned can be put to use on many different levels. This may drive the children crazy but has also resulted in her becoming a more significant part of her other teams.
Training, therefore, benefits you via the acquisition of new skills that make you a larger asset to your company. The skills also benefit the larger team you work on, making the company better. You are also now a more valuable partner for your customer, improving your ability to attract and retain business.
This is still a great time of year to get trained on the latest developments in technology. The federal season starts slowly and you – and your customer – can take the time to get educated on the latest developments and how they can help with federal missions. While feds may buy a lot of existing technology, there is an increasing call from their leadership to look at emerging technologies as well.
It’s not just the technology itself that is important to a federal IT contractor. You must also know what the emerging federal IT priorities are and how your customer plans to acquire them.
Priorities change with new leaders. There have been many new CIO’s and CTO’s put in place in just the past few months. Do you know what they’re thinking? Would they rather buy predictive analytics or cloud storage? Guess wrong and you could be marketing a great solution that few people want.
Similarly, the “how” part of federal IT acquisition is also changing. Drives to centralize acquisition are rippling through the federal market and will likely have an impact on whether your customer uses its own small contract to buy from you, or uses a larger vehicle like a GSA Schedule. If you’re not on “the big three” vehicles of Schedules, SEWP and CIO CS, you may have to develop new relationships or come up with a convincing alternative acquisition method for your customer to buy from you.
Every professional takes the time to get trained and re-trained to ensure they have the skills necessary to succeed in the coming season. Baseball has Spring Training. Football has pre-season. This is your time to get up to speed so that you’re ready when your customer calls you up to big leagues.
