Do you value your staff as much as you fear the cost of downtime!

Gone are the days where training budgets matched the share option returns and massive bonuses. Justification of IT training spend has become a must for every company pulling back on costs and needing to do more with effectively less people.

Where ten years ago businesses were not so reliant on their IT systems now the same business cannot function at all without it. Consequently, the cost of downtime means that any system outage can have disastrous effects on business.

Why is it that training is seen as an expense rather than an investment? Is it because of the intangible nature of the service, or the fact that training is naturally an investment in personal professional continuance? How do you assess the effectiveness of human capital investment? What effect does training have on your business as a whole and is it all worth it?

But how can IT managers demonstrate return on investment for training? ROI reports based on inaccurate predictions of possible savings often get approved at enterprise level mainly because the savings are so impressive or the calculation is so difficult to follow that no one can take the time out to challenge them. Most ROI tools are just the numbers stacked up for the CFO, but training is much more than simply adding up numbers.

Most training companies ask for assessment forms to be completed at the end of any training session: these sorts of forms are an ideal way for you to start to justify the expense of training staff. Following the course get your staff to complete a survey or informal interview. The interview identifies whether the experience met the IT professional's and company's needs.

Three and six months later interview staff again to check whether the training helped the employees improve their skills and was applied to their work. Managers can then make informed decisions about which training companies are effective and increase partnerships with training companies that receive a higher rating.

Set the trainee working on the learned information immediately. They say that experience is the only way to cement learning. Leaving the task learnt for a three-month period is a guarantee to reducing the effectiveness of your training program.

Managers should work with employees to create a plan for trainees to use their know-how soon after a class. For instance, if staff attend training on installing VERITAS Volume Manager, they might use what they learned when they return to work by performing mirroring or disk virtualisation.

Using the employee surveys and post training interviews you can then start to structure the most effective methods for training your staff.On site, customised classes and purchase arrangements provide convenient training locations and significant cost savings and allows you to train your staff on your own systems giving you the opportunity to deal with your own issues and learn best practices needed to run your systems effectively.

But the ROI on training is not as simple as being able to measure the effectiveness of the training taken. How do you justify the training expense in the first place? It has always been accepted that training delivers value to a company because it helps IT employees perform their jobs better. It is just as important to keep employees' skills current and keep them enthusiastic about what they do.

By training your staff you are helping to ensure that your High availability, Disaster Recovery, or Data Protection strategies and solutions achieve maximum return on investment, help to reduce capital and expenditure by decreasing operating costs and increasing productivity, reduce technical infrastructure costs, increase the effectiveness and retention of IT staff and increase your technological competitiveness by improving effective access to business critical information.

How you go about proving your training investment will vary depending on the objectives you have for your staff and business. Ultimately, in the system dependent businesses we now run the requirement for data protection, high availability of systems and system recovery following a disaster the question is negated through the need to keep those systems running efficiently - if you don't train your staff you are jeopardising your business in the same way as if you didn't have a data protection strategy in the first place.

Training your staff to help prevent system outage costs but a fraction in comparison, so what is the cost of downtime against the cost of Continuing Professional Education?