This morning at the Gateway to Innovation Conference in St. Louis, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems fame gave the keynote presentation. One of the points he hammered home was a fact where he stated that an IT person loses 20% of their skills per year. This theme was repeated by other conference speakers as well.
If this statistic is true, I'm not worried about it. At Clearent, two of our cultural tenets have us prepared: make others great and continuous learning.
Making others great keeps us focused on lifting people up and sharing what we know. This ensures that as the tide rises (people learn new skills), all boats get lifted (everyone has an opportunity to learn new things).
The other tenet of continuous learning is a bit obvious. What is not obvious is that Clearent has a training budget, and the IT management is measured based on everyone in IT going to training! The organizational focus ensures that training and new ideas are infused into the organization.
If Scott's claim about skill atrophy is correct, Clearent is in a great position to lead the technological pack!
