Educate or die - a view from Fairfax Water
- Summary:
- The encouragement of continuing education seems to be as hard as ever. In this video, we explore some simple ways to overcome the problem.
Last week I had the pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Tammy Powlas, an SAP Mentor and business intelligence specialist at Fairfax Water. Prior to our going on camera, Tammy was telling me how disappointed she was that so many of the session questions are what you might term 'SAP 101.'
Elsewhere, I was shown a phone conversation SMS stream where one party was saying that they'd need to get educated on the job. That party was no less than an IBM outpost.
It gets worse. Nothing much has changed. Almost exactly a year ago, Graham Robinson, another SAP Mentor and organizer of the SAP Australia Demojam posted an impassioned plea to others:
I am deeply concerned for the future of those of our colleagues who have not kept in touch with contemporary development trends including ABAP skills. I fear that they will find themselves so far behind the rest of the industry that they will struggle to be relevant.
Holy crap! There is another view - if people don't keep their skills up to date then it is all the better for those who do. That may be the view of some but it's actually a self defeating way of viewing the world because scarcity creates a dreadful imbalance in skills distribution.
So in this video, Ms Powlas makes the case for continuing education. She implies there really is no excuse for not keeping yourself well informed, even if you already have a day job. Like others in the Mentor program, Ms Powlas is dedicated to the notion of community but it is not altruistic in the sense most might think. She makes it very plain that maintaining skills is one of the keys to ensuring project success and ensuring that her projects help the business maintain a low cost profile.
In the end, it's all about working just a little bit harder, something I fear that a whole generation has forgotten.
Bonus video: Harald Reiter and friends on SCN
Disclosure: SAP is a premier partner