This year as businesses around the world shifted to remote working, IT teams have felt the pressure of how to manage and, in some cases, rebuild their networks. They have also needed to accelerate their digital transformation and cloud strategies to meet changing needs. This has caused challenges. Organizations are facing surges in user support requirements, as well as new or increased security threat management needs, and all with less on-site interaction. And on top of these obstacles, some teams are also facing capacity and skillset deficits.

The need for IT teams to keep up with the accelerated pace of new technology development is by no means new. But traditional tools and approaches are becoming even less effective with the move to remote-first working. This shift has brought the importance of software training to build new IT skills further into the spotlight. So how can IT leaders bridge the skills gap and make sure their teams can meet the continuously evolving technology needs? In a word, training.

A recent IDC whitepaper sponsored by Red Hat, “The Business Value of Red Hat Training,” revealed significant benefits for organizations that use Red Hat training courses including an average three-year return on investment of 365%. In addition, the study found that companies can see an increase in DevOps team productivity, faster deployment of new IT resources and more efficient IT infrastructure teams through the Red Hat Training and Certification program.   

For this study, IDC explored the value and benefits for organizations of having various IT teams complete Red Hat training courses through the Red Hat Training and Certification program. Participants in the study included IT leaders at different large-scale organizations, spanning multiple industries and countries. On average, respondents have 302 associates who take Red Hat training courses annually for a total average of 363 Red Hat training courses.

As organizations are looking at where they invest budget, this study found that increasing the share of a typical digital transformation budget allocated to training from 5% to 6.5% can increase the chance of a project meeting its business objectives from 50% to more than 80%. While it may feel like an individual investment in the moment, there is tangible business value that follows. It shows up as an average annual value of $43,800 per employee trained, which equals $5.71 million per organization. Trained IT staff see greater productivity, risk mitigation and a reduction in IT infrastructure costs. When it comes to team onboarding, job readiness increased by 76% when new team members had already completed Red Hat training prior to joining and more than half (55%) in cases where they were trained as part of the onboarding process.

IDC projects that organizations will create more than 500 million new applications globally by 2023. To keep pace, IT organizations need to train development teams to deliver more timely, robust, and differentiated applications and features. This study found that teams with Red Hat training can deploy IT resources – including physical servers, VMs, containers and storage – 59% faster. Diving further, the study found that trained DevOps teams are 44% more productive and IT infrastructure teams are 34% more efficient than those without training.

Turning our attention to IT infrastructure and IT security teams, this study found that Red Hat training courses helped respondents use technologies such as Ansible and OpenShift to reach much higher levels of automation and virtualization in their IT environments, which in turn helps drive efficiencies for IT infrastructure and security teams. For example, they found that through training teams saw the percentage of associates with competency in OpenShift increase more than tenfold and four times higher competency with containers.

Red Hat Training and Certification builds the skills and culture needed to optimize and modernize IT infrastructure. Red Hat combines outcome-driven courses, hands-on labs, and performance-based exams to assess, train and validate skills with Red Hat technologies. With a curriculum that covers topics from platform to application development to automation, Red Hat has flexible training options to help professionals achieve their goals for accelerated development, delivery and return on investment.