Author: Chaitanya M Bhatt
Email: chaitanya.bhatt@gmail.com

Let us try looking at this issue from another perspective. If it were that training was a solitary solution to fixing this issue, then the industry would have never faced a problem called “deficit of skill/incompetency” which unarguably persists across not just a specific country but every geographical area in the world. I have seen
situations where in spite of giving massive training programs to professionals before being deployed to projects, resources still have shown severe lack aptitude and skills when put to work.

According to me, any technical field is very capricious per se and new technologies crop up every day; in such a juncture, I feel, it is every professionals responsibility to align his/her skills to the evolving technologies on their own by the method of self-learning. Today, loadrunner statistically has a market share of just over 63% with other emerging small players like Compuware, Boarland, Radview etc. sharing the rest of the market and it wouldn’t be a surprise to me if in another 5 years we see loadrunner market share to have dwindled to less than 50%, so does this mean that all the professionals need to be trained officially by their employers on every competing tool which enters the industry? I work in a company where different clients prefer different tools, ranging from completely open sources tools like Grinder, Jmeter to enterprise level tool sets from HP, IBM etc., now if every resource were to be trained on all these tools before being deployed to projects then the employer would never ever get his ROI; not to forget that these days ‘Training Programs’ are priced exorbitantly high.

The solution is in the hands of every professional; if a professional has the right kind of approach in problem solving and a good interest level in the subject then he/she would learn any tool/technology without any hassle.

I recently registered to Google and Yahoo LoadRunner groups and saw a disturbing habit of several members in the group of posting basic questions of LoadRunner like “What is LoadRunner?”. This is ridiculous! If people are capable to register in Google/Yahoo groups with an intention to learn loadrunner from the members of it then I think they are definitely also capable to register in http://itrc.hp.com portal which is a gateway to acquire tons of Loadrunner resources, and these resources are undoubtedly the best anyone can ever get.

If recruiters pay a little more attention to a candidate’s interest level towards the job profile, his/her true problem solving capability, smartness and general attitude rather than just looking at the “University” he/she graduated from and his/her GPA — then I would say they have hired a candidate who is already 90% qualified to do the job and the rest 10% would automatically come up as he becomes more experienced. “Training Programs” I feel, contributes more in refining the capabilities of a resource than in shaping one.