Tech leaders give tips on cloud training and skill development

Using cloud technology isn’t the same as driving value with it. To drive value, organizations need people with cloud skills. But how do you build a cloud training strategy? And how does it fit into larger cloud goals? 

Teresa Dietrich, former Stack Overflow Chief Product & Technology Officer; Lena Reinhard, Leadership Coach & Organizational Advisor; and Erik Gross, Pluralsight Principal Consultant, answered these questions and explained what organizations need to do to boost cloud skill development and foster a culture of learning. 

Get more cloud tips from the experts with the Pluralsight cloud transformation strategy guide.

As you execute your strategy, remember that things will change. This doesn’t mean it’s not worth investing time and energy into creating a learning and development plan—leaders just need to measure success and get comfortable with changing their strategy throughout the process.

Establishing metrics early on will help your teams know if they’re heading in the right direction. Employee satisfaction surveys, course completion rates, and impact on ROI are some metrics you can use to evaluate your upskilling strategy.

“I’ve led product and engineering teams, and I always ask, ‘What does the rest of the business care most about from the combined product and engineering [teams]?’ It really cares about predictability: I’m going to deliver X at about the time I said, with the features I said were going to be in it, with a certain degree of quality,” said Teresa.

Developing a company-wide learning culture and giving teams the resources they need to upskill creates more predictability. And that allows organizations to be faster to market and more reliable in delivering new products. Mistakes might happen, but learning from them is part of refining your skill development strategy and achieving full-scale cloud transformation.

Even the most well thought-out cloud skill development strategy won’t take hold without an organization-wide culture of learning. Creating a culture of learning starts by giving employees the ability to solve problems for themselves.

“Having skills from both a technical and cultural perspective—including things like communication skills, translating between engineering functions and your finance team, and breaking down those barriers—enables people to problem solve themselves,” said Lena.

“The whole idea [of cloud transformation and DevOps culture] is to have a learning organization where people have the tools to problem solve, to figure out what we’re doing right now and how we can improve from where we are,” she added. 

Empowering people with tools puts you in a position where you can harness team members’ knowledge, power, skills, and experience. This, in turn, helps teams feel more invested in their work. 

Plus, our research shows that 94% of employees are more likely to stay with organizations that invest in skill development. And in the face of current talent shortages, retaining highly skilled employees is key.

To a certain degree, Lena believes it doesn’t matter if organizations do cloud skill development “right.” As long as teams believe in their decisions and move forward with the intention to learn, the only way to go wrong is to do nothing at all.

“Organizations that approach [cloud skill development] as a cultural shift and can approach it with an agile DevOps mindset, while keeping up with the latest cloud trends, will have a tremendous competitive advantage and successful outcomes,” she said.

Ready to get started? Explore our cloud transformation strategy guide or cloud computing courses.