IT Staff DELA Welcomes State-of-the-Art Technologies Thanks to Customized Training Courses

In late 2015, the Eindhoven-based funeral insurer and provider DELA began preparing for a course in digital mastery. Ruud van Huijkelom, IT manager at DELA, explains what this entails: “For digital mastery, our IT people need four qualities: solution-oriented, being a team player, discipline and craftsmanship. We conducted an assessment of our IT department: what tasks does it perform and what does our cooperative expect from its IT staff in the long term?”

For example, DELA saw that the IT department was doing a lot in direction and management, while the developments the cooperative is going through just require IT to become more robust in development. DELA then examined what skills the IT people needed for those developments. “We did that in two areas: for soft skills and for professional skills,” says Ruud van Huijkelom. “For the latter, we called on Info Support.”

In the past, the IT workers at DELA all had a specific function. “For example, whoever was a tester had the sole task of testing software,” explains Ruud van Huijkelom. “But we noticed that we needed to be able to use our IT people more broadly.” So DELA defined several broader profiles, such as solution engineers, solution managers, project leaders, scrum masters and functional administrators.

All of these profiles are broadly deployable. This evolution towards broader employability has been going on at DELA for some time, notes Ruud van Huijkelom: “We switched completely to an agile development model several years ago. We then noticed that our development teams work more efficiently as the developers have multiple skills. After all, everyone can then perform all the tasks and not everything depends on one person.”

For all IT professionals to be broadly employable, however, they must have basic knowledge in a number of key areas and be up to date with the latest developments. “This is why we sat down with Info Support and discussed what those general basic training courses should look like. It covers topics such as security and integration,” explains Ruud van Huijkelom.

In close consultation with Ruud van Huijkelom, Info Support drew up a course of general training courses: some standard, some customized for DELA. The first classroom training sessions by Info Support teachers have already taken place: Security Awareness, Service Oriented and WebScale Architecture, Overview ASL, BiSL and ITIL and Advanced SQL training. “These training sessions take place at our premises in Eindhoven, which is convenient for our employees: that way they don’t have to travel,” notes Ruud van Huijkelom.

Info Support has partnered with DELA on a second phase: individual training plans. Depending on their position, IT employees receive more specific training. Info Support conducts a technical assessment interview with the employee and determines the person’s skills and ambitions. It then determines which training courses that person needs to take to achieve the desired level of knowledge with the existing knowledge. This is how Info Support builds an individual training plan. Currently, the first employees have received an individual training plan and their training courses are about to start.

Info Support instructors also provide these training courses in the individual training plans. Because the topics are diverse, the teaching methods are equally diverse: they range from classic teaching methods and cases to demonstrations, group discussions, presentations by trainees and role plays. “In this way, we prepare our people to become best-in-class IT professionals who can keep up with the latest technologies,” Ruud van Huijkelom knows.

“What struck me most in all my contacts with Info Support was their passion,” Ruud van Huijkelom looks back on the cooperation, “and also their thorough knowledge with which they shaped this training program.” The trainees also experienced the training courses as positive: “Our trainees were particularly pleased with the content knowledge of the teachers.”

It was also a real partnership, emphasizes Ruud van Huijkelom: “Even in the preparatory phase, we always had a good consultation. Info Support listened carefully to our wishes and thought constructively with us about what they could do for us. Their training program also came out well in our cost benchmark. In short, Info Support really is our partner in digital mastery on all fronts.”