IT training allows council's communications to bloom

16:45 6th May 2009

Cambridgeshire county council has completely revamped its communications infrastructure in recent months, but the council's staff needed plenty of IT training to ensure they could cope.

The Guardian reports on the development of Cambridgeshire's unified communications infrastructure, which includes transferring their systems to Voice-over Internet Protocol technology, enabling calls to be made via the internet.

While the technology has been designed to save the council money, many employees faced a major headache when dealing with the new technology unless they received some IT training.

"We simply did not have the required skills and needed to obtain them in a very short period of time," Alan Shields, the council's technology architect, explained to the newspaper.

He continued: "This was achieved through some excellent training and awareness sessions from [technology partner] Avaya and through recruitment of specialist staff."

The development of Cambridgeshire's system highlights the importance of carrying out IT training for staff faced with new IT and communications systems, to ensure they are capable of coping with it.

A recent study by the Computer Technology Industry Association found that companies are increasingly willing to send their staff on IT training courses to reduce the threat of employees accidentally opening up IT systems to security attacks.

The organisation found the number of people being sent to IT training events is up 50 per cent on last year, with most employers citing fear of security breaches a main reason for sending staff on the courses.