Cloud driving employee skill sets to become more specialised, says City & Guilds IT director

Ian Turfrey tells employees that they have to expand their skill sets

IT employees can't stagnate with the skills they already have as a shift to the cloud requires them to specialise, according to Ian Turfrey, group board IT director at vocational education organisation City & Guilds.

Turfrey described his organisation as a Microsoft house, adding that it has recently implemented Office 365, SharePoint online and Windows Azure.

He told delegates at Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit 2014 in London yesterday that he had to sit his team down and explain that they couldn't continue working at City & Guilds with the same skill set that they had at the time.

"I said: ‘What got you here is not going to get you there in the future'.

"So previously they would have had to know about Exchange issues on-premise, but we don't need to worry about that as it's in the past, but you have to have an honest grown-up conversation with the staff to tell them that their skill set will become more niche," he said.

When Computing asked how City & Guilds' employees are meant to be trained in order to get up to speed, Turfrey explained that the firm relies partly on third parties to provide a knowledge base for its employees.

"We use partners for knowledge, we use online training tools as well," he said.

He believes that by up-skilling staff internally there will be better collaboration among staff as a result of a breakdown of siloes.

And Turfrey concluded that the company's employees are now behind the idea of gaining new skills.

For more on cloud and other top IT trends, visit the Intel IT Center.