Tapping into training

Employers that want to recruit top IT talent need to sweeten the deal by offering to pay for network courses and college tuition.

By Evanthia V. Brickates

When Tom Roy was looking for a new job, one of his goals was to find an employer that was willing to foot the bill for Windows NT certification. Roy had just earned a network administration certificate and wanted to build up his NT skills.

The technical support specialist landed at Boston Consulting Group, a management consulting firm that was more than willing to comply with his wishes by allowing him to take an array of courses.

Like Roy, network professionals can afford to be choosy about prospective employers. Companies that want to lure coveted IT personnel increasingly need to sweeten the deal with generous offers of employee training and tuition reimbursement.

Planning for the future

IT job hunters are looking for training that will ensure long-term job security in a constantly changing marketplace, according to technical recruiters. Although NetWare certification was hot a few years ago, Windows NT is the meal ticket of the moment.

Training incentives are especially popular in the Northeast, a region where many IT workers still have nightmares about the depression that gripped the area's high-tech industry in the late '80s, says Eileen Foley, a partner at Winter, Wyman and Company, Inc., a technical recruiter in Waltham, Mass.

Companies unwilling to provide such training will find themselves behind the eight ball in terms of recruitment, she adds.

Astute older programmers who specialize in COBOL are increasingly looking for companies to retrain them, despite the current demand for Year 2000 project contractors.

"Come 2001, the demand for these folks is going to fall off a cliff," says Steve McMann, manager of the Westborough, Mass., office of national technical recruiter Source Services.

"There's a trend to retrain them, but that window of opportunity could close soon."

Educational perks are on the rise on the West Coast too. Some companies still suspiciously view employee training as just another way for workers to puff up their resumes for their next job. However, more and more companies view this perk as a way to recruit workers, develop talent and retain their staffs.

"If that is what it takes to get a candidate in the door, they'll do it," says Source Services' Eric Percy, a recruiter at the firm's Waltham, Mass., office. "For network people, being Microsoft-certified is a big deal. If a company is willing to pick up the tab for it, [employees] will be more inclined to stay."

Because of their sophisticated IT needs, financial firms and consultancies appear to be the most eager to cut education deals with prospective employees, according to recruiters.

These companies also see such perks as a way to beat out trendier companies for qualified candidates.

"Most people don't want to hang around and be wire pullers," says Gavan Taylor, chief information officer for Boston-based Putnam Investments, which employs about 500 IT professionals. "Because of that, we have established career paths for people to go from technicians to developers."

In addition to tuition reimbursement, Taylor says Putnam readily provides training seminars on ATM and router technologies through major vendors such as Cisco Systems, Inc. and Bay Networks, Inc. Windows NT, Oracle databases, Internet tools and languages are other popular subjects.

"We're in a competitive workplace," says Peter Tedeschi, Putnam's new vice president of network operations. "You need to make sure that your people have all the newest equipment, technology and training." Tedeschi plans to take graduate management courses and says the firm's education perks were a significant factor in his decision to take the job.

High-tech vendor companies don't intend to be left out of the hiring game either. Eager to edge out competitors in the chaotic Internet marketplace, GTE Corp.'s Internetworking division (formerly BBN, Inc.), in Cambridge, Mass., also has become a believer in offering training incentives to recruit and retain IT professionals.

Prospective employees are always asking about training, says Joe Leonard, director of network operations for GTE Internetworking, where a crew of 43 technicians maintains 4,500 routers.

GTE has found training incentives to be so effective that it now offers in-house instruction on such topics as LAN/WAN interfaces, T-1 and T-3 line troubleshooting, the Open Shortest Path First protocol, Border Gateway Protocol and advanced Cisco routers. The company also provides a $7,500 annual tuition reimbursement.

Most of GTE's system runs on Unix, so Unix administration certification is a popular academic track, along with instruction in frame relay, ATM, Synchronous Optical Networks (SONET) and Cisco routing technology.

Offering top-rate training programs aids employee retention by keeping people interested in their jobs. "Without challenging people on a regular basis, especially your better people, they'd probably leave," Leonard advises.

He proudly points out that only one employee of GTE's networking group has left the company since the fall of 1996, when GTE bought BBN. The man who resigned was moving out of the country.

That kind of low turnover also helps reduce recruitment costs. "The cost of trying to find someone is high," Percy notes. "It may be cheaper for [employers] to train someone from the inside, and it shows goodwill towards employees."