On-site training courses are gaining popularity at System i sites as firms seek to sharpen skills during the recession.

Budget cuts have had a huge effect on IT training but Simon Lewis, IBM enablement manager for Power i, storage and networks training in the UK, says: "It’s starting to pick up now and most of the enquiries at the moment are companies wanting us to come to their location and run private classes. I think the reason for that is probably down to travel restrictions. If they’re going to send maybe two or three people on a course in London, it means that they’re out of the office for that amount of time, they’ve got to have other people covering for them and they’ve got travel and hotels as well as the price of the course."

Jimmy Cooper of ATS Automated Training Systems confirms the increased interest in workplace education .

"I would say up to three people probably is your break-even point," he advises. "If you’ve got up to three people that you need to train on the same topic, it is then seriously worth considering doing an on-site course."

Market forces have caused IBM and the other training providers to drop their prices so now is a good time to book such packages, he says. And the current economic climate has had other effects on whether firms choose to upgrade their staff's skills.

"There are some very skilled people out there with the takeovers and mergers and redundancies that have gone on," says Cooper. "They are advertising their skills and customers are finding that they can actually pick people up with some of these skills a lot easier than they could the past."

Even so, there is a requirement for operational skills such as logical partitioning and the use of the HMC and BRMS plus a fair amount of cross-platform demand. Traditional i people are moving into .NET and C# and IBM will be running a Windows/i interoperability course in the new year. Lewis also foresees demand for external storage skills.

"Years ago, when I was teaching these courses, I used to see people that were purely System i and that’s all they did," he says. "But there’s a huge amount of convergence and I think that’s everywhere in IT and other industries as well. I don’t think nowadays it’s enough for an employee to just work on the System i so most of the people that come on the courses will be running and managing System i but they’ll also be in charge of maybe Windows systems and Unix systems as well, so now I think people do need to know a lot more than just one platform."

This works the other way round as well, says Cooper: "We recently organised some training for a software company in the UK that was looking to make several redundancies within the organisation and one of the platforms they supported was the iSeries and they were going to find themselves not having skills in-house any more to be able to support their customers. So one of the things that we organised was to cross-train some of their Unix/Linux people to be able to support their iSeries customer base."