Welcome to our online resource for Learning and Development

Here you find all the latest training industry news within the UK.

Issue 003

This month’s special feature is from Megan Pendlebury, Head of Service Management at itSMF UK, looks at the importance of acquiring the full range of skills necessary to become a proficient Service Manager.

Managing across boundaries – the skills of a Service Manager

The skills which a Service Manager needs are varied and wide, ranging from managing people and all that entails through to the technical understanding of IT and toolsets such as ITIL.  Access full story.

Allan Pettman, UK managing director at Global Knowledge talks with Gary Flood about social networking in training and encouraging informal learning through it

Access full article.

New channel programme to support the development of Cisco partner Business Architects

We report on news of a co-funded programme that is designed to train and develop Cisco partners into Business Architects. Cisco’s channel partners are critical to the company’s success. With over 60,000 worldwide, they represent Cisco’s primary route to market and account for over 80% of its revenues. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Cisco is constantly seeking to ensure these partners have the right capabilities and skills to meet changing customer needs. With this in mind, recent plans were announced by Keith Goodwin, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels at Cisco, to evolve its channel partner specialisations from technologies to architectures in order to help partners develop integrated practices around emerging areas such as borderless networks, collaboration, and data centre virtualisation. Access full story.

Project management skills are in demand

All the indications point to a growing demand for project management skills, with recent research and industry comments reinforcing this view. The latest issue of the e-skills Bulletin, which provides a quarterly summary of all the latest IT and Telecoms data collected from Government and private sources, shows that project managers were amongst the most in-demand groups along with software communication engineers and senior systems analysts during the most recent period, with each of these groups seeing a rise in job openings of over 20%. Access full story.

New Office and SharePoint software heads for the clouds

Microsoft has launched the new 2010 versions of its Office and SharePoint software with much fanfare and with a twist…hosted online versions of the Office software will be available later this year. The first plank of Microsoft’s new vision has been unveiled – using SharePoint 2010 as the lynchpin in conjunction with Microsoft Office 2010 to enable users to pull information together quickly from data sources anywhere, co-author documents and share ideas with other people simultaneously, support customers and automate workflow and document routing through various departments and contributors. Access full story.

Information management training is key to public sector cost cutting

A new report has highlighted the urgent need for effective training in information management skills for both management and staff in public sector organisations. Recent announcements have clearly indicated that the public sector faces a hard time over the coming months and years, and the demand to make cost savings will be ever more challenging. However a new report from Socitm, the Society of IT Management, entitled Managing information: managing the lifeblood of the organisation claims that many cost cutting initiatives will not deliver the expected results due to a poor understanding of information management. Access full story.