Closing the Knowledge Gap: Leveraging Vendor Expertise for IT Success

Episode Summary

Join Automox's David van Heerden as he discusses the skill gap in IT and how it can be challenging to address. He highlights the broad and varied domains within IT and the difficulty of keeping up with new technology. David suggests that vendors can be an underrated resource for closing the skill gap, as they have specialized knowledge and are motivated to help their customers succeed. He encourages listeners to reach out to vendors for advice and support beyond their predefined courses and materials. David also shares a personal experience of learning SQL from a vendor and emphasizes the importance of leveraging vendor resources to level up skills.

Transcript

David van Heerden (00:00)

All right, welcome to, I guess, episode two of this Lego building podcast series that I'm doing, brought to you by Automox. Again, the name of this podcast is really the Automate IT podcast. My name is David van Heerden, and thank you for joining in and listening.

A little progress update from last time. There was no missing piece from the first episode. I think I just used the wrong piece there. And we have the other one hiding in the box somewhere in here. yeah, I'm just gonna dump this and see how that goes. But topic for today. So we're gonna be discussing the issue of the skill gap in IT, which I think

easy to say, hard to understand, and even harder to address. I think we all feel the perpetual lag in that there's new technology coming out all the time and we don't understand it and we're supposed to be the experts in it. And that's where that imposter syndrome sets in for us quite a lot, right? And particularly with those of us in IT,

the domains that we have to learn are so broad and varied. We can get specialized into realms of IT within realms of industry. So you can be a network specialist in manufacturing, which is, this is our missing piece, I think, which is an entirely different role than being a network specialist in say software development, in tech, a software specialist

Let's say your large scale fleet management and the kind of networking that you have to understand and communications that you have to manage. So it's near impossible for us to have our skills leveled up on top of all things all the time, which is where the main point of my ramblings today.

are gonna be centering on that of covering that skill gap within your area of specialty, within your industry, and how can we accomplish that? How do we do this sort of thing? We may have seen the Udemy courses and classes like that, which are fantastic resources in helping us figure things out. So I'm create some space here. But even then, Udemy as great as they are, or Skilljar, or even just YouTube videos and tutorials.

for as amazing as they are, can't get us all the way there. There's so many fine-tuned nuances and details into our day-to-day jobs that these coursework and classes that are designed to apply to the broader sense, otherwise they won't make so much money with these courses, right, don't really get the job done. And so we're sort of left to figure it out on our own, fake it till we make it, or have...

happen to find some sort of other expert that can teach us and mentor us through all of it, where tribal knowledge just becomes the only way that we can learn and grow our skills and our career. But there is another option that I've talked about a few times on some different webinars, and it seemed to resonate well. And no one has corrected me yet on this thought, but if you have a different opinion, definitely let me know.

I think one of the most underrated resources for closing the skill gap in IT is vendors. Your software vendors, your service providers, people love helping is the hot take I'm going to make here is that I think more folks might generally agree that people love to talk. People love to talk about themselves. People love to brag,

So in whatever different ways it feeds the ego, you can use that to your advantage and that somebody who knows a lot of something about something would love to talk about how much they know about it. Here I am talking about all the things that I know, right? But from there, within these tools that you use within your industry, These tools

most likely going to be somewhat specialized to that of IT and then to that of within your industry. I can give just the example in food and beverage, right? We point of sale systems where there's no shortage of the different kinds of point of sale systems that exist out there, but there are some point of sale systems that are just really good at smaller restaurant types. Think of like your boutique burger shops or your boutique

taco restaurants, Mexican food. And you can go broader to then your point of sale systems in entertainment, point of sale systems for larger chain restaurants where they're specialized, even within those different segments within that industry. And so if you, as an IT person, have just gotten that job or you're trying to level up your skills,

You might have a hard time in those broader courses finding anybody to help you there, but where you'll find plenty of people that can give you advice are those specialists, engineers, sales folks, support people for those vendors. You pick up the phone or you send an email and say, Hey, I'm struggling to get this to work. What have you seen other customers do? What have you seen other people in the same industry as me?

do to solve this problem. And it doesn't necessarily even have to be related to that vendor. Think of Automox, for example, right? We're an endpoint management, patching automation tool tailored towards that of IT people. But we have a lot of cybersecurity professionals, a lot of security minded and background people where if you have a cybersecurity oriented type, we're at a sticker phase right now. So I might get a little focused here. This is a very important step.

But we are filled with people that are passionate about cybersecurity and we are invested in seeing everyone else in our industry do better in cybersecurity, which is why you've seen, you know, I'm shamelessly plugging our company here, but why you see us putting so much investment in things like Patch Safe in that we are the only ones that are scanning packages before we send them out into your environment.

I don't know if that image here aligns right. I'm really struggling here, folks. But we put that out there because we understand how risky automation can be. I mean, we all know what happened in the last two weeks here, right? automated updates and automated rollouts can be a scary thing. So we want to make sure that as you all use automation tools, use our products.

You are doing it safely and properly and with thought and intention behind it. So with that said, we are a resource for you in closing that skill gap. My last shameless plug, I promise, will be that of our Automox University course, where within Automox University, we teach you, of course, how to use the Automox product. But if there's a use case that you are just really trying to solve, there's people all across

this Audemars organization that are on your side and want to help you be successful in your work, even if it's kind of outside the bounds of our product. So join in on our community forums, right? Post your problem in there. We have, again, passionate people that love to solve problems and it might even be a nice mental break for us to solve something outside of our company and solve something outside of what we do and just help a fellow IT person out. So again, to that broader point.

Pay attention to your vendors, see how they can help you beyond just their predefined courses and prepackaged material that are designed to help you use their product better, but realize that you have access to a network, a motivated network where everyone at your vendors' companies want to see you succeed, especially using their tool, but in general have a positive experience with

Those customer experience teams are designed and built to keep you happy. so lean in on that and use that as a way to level up your skills and cover your skill gaps in your specialized industry, especially if you're new into that industry. I'll give you one personal experience of mine is we had set up a whole new property out here in Orlando and it's this large resort, hundreds of hotel rooms built brand new.

And while I was in there, I'd worked with point of sale systems before, but never a true large scale on -premise one. It had a whole different tech stack. was rather than one server with a little piece of software that just needed to talk to the cloud so that it can communicate with the iPad app. Now we needed to have totally segmented networks that were gated off and secured for compliance reasons.

And going through all of that, I then had to learn how to manage SQL databases, or sorry, use SQL against databases and learn how to query all of this so I can generate reports for our operations team, which before reports like that were just readily available within the app. I didn't have to worry about it. But here I am not knowing anything about building these kinds of queries.

So what did do? I got on the phone with the vendor and I got a, you know, I was really nice to the support guy and there's, Hey, I don't know how to do this. Please help. And I, I got a free, finely tuned step-by-step course on the phone. You know, I should have, I should have remembered his name. I definitely wrote a very kind email, to, his leadership team, thanking him. but I was given a fantastic education through that vendor

And that was a skill that I then obtained and used throughout the rest of my career. And so, yeah, just think of your education. If you're budget strapped, your department doesn't have a way to fund the work that you're doing or fund your education or reimburse you for anything that you do, consider your vendors as allies in your growth journey and to close those skill gaps for you. So yeah, we made decent progress this time.

I don't know if I skipped a step while I was just rambling, but yeah, I'm supposed to tack this on on the front here somewhere. Nice. The chest plate. There you go. That's that's our progress step on episode two here. Thank you all for listening in. I'll catch you next time.

Takeaways

• The skill gap in IT is a common challenge due to the broad and varied domains within the field.

• Vendors can be valuable resources for closing the skill gap, as they have specialized knowledge and are motivated to help their customers succeed.

• Reach out to vendors technical support for advice and support beyond their predefined courses and materials.

• Leverage vendor resources to level up skills and address skill gaps in specialized industries.