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About IT portal to upskill professionals during lockdown

Sibahle Malinga
By Sibahle Malinga, ITWeb senior news journalist.
Johannesburg, 17 Apr 2020
Gerrit Olivier, founder and CEO of About IT
Gerrit Olivier, founder and CEO of About IT

IT solutions provider About IT is offering e-learning programmes for IT professionals through its new online portal, the About IT Academy.

According to the company, the About IT Academy is a resource for customers to upskill or learn new skills, creating an opportunity for businesses to improve resiliency and cross-skill employees during the lockdown and beyond, as more staff work remotely amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The academy offers employees from cross-sector organisations with courses that include Acumatica (cloud ERP), Power BI (dashboard reporting and data analytics) and Sage (on-premises ERP).

Gerrit Olivier, founder and CEO of About IT, says cloud ERP, data analytics and business accounting technologies are at the heart of the academy, as these services will enable SMEs to intelligently digitalise their operations and create mobile businesses that can operate remotely, an important element during the current lockdown period.

“Many businesses were not prepared for the ripple effects of the novel coronavirus. The academy offers organisations the opportunity to let their employees learn at their own pace, direct from the experts, anywhere, any time.

“Many IT employees feel that on-the-job training is enough. They don’t always feel the need to regularly upskill through training courses, either classroom or online, which often leads to companies lagging in the right IT skills.”

Programmes are delivered through Webinars, how-to videos, case studies, fact sheets and online coaching and consulting that is focused on the student’s own business environment.

Olivier believes some local companies lag behind global counterparts in cloud services adoption, mainly due to an “on-premises attitude”, driven by in-house IT departments that make the cloud appear to be a very unsafe place to do business.

“I have seen many companies limited by their IT departments’ failure to understand or adapt to new technologies that could render huge business benefits. A lot of that is motivated by fear and sometimes organisations don’t know enough about the new technologies,” according to Olivier.

About IT joins a list of IT service providers offering professionals online courses focused on emerging technologies.

Last month, SAP launched its openSAP digital learning initiative, an interactive educational platform to support professionals and tertiary students interested in learning about the latest technologies, during lockdown.

“The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are impacting everyone around the world,” said Christian Klein, co-CEO and member of the executive board of SAP SE, at the time of launch.

“SAP is expanding its commitment to support the next generation of professionals and users by broadening access to some of our best digital learning offerings to facilitate the continuity of innovation and enablement.”

This month, enterprise robotic process automation (RPA) firm UiPath introduced an expansion to its free online RPA training and certification curriculum, offering professionals the opportunity to upskill or reskill their capabilities for the “automation first” era.

The various courses prepare RPA developers, solution architects, infrastructure engineers and more, for the roles required to build an RPA centre of excellence, says the company.

“AI and automation will create more than 100 million new jobs in the near future and anybody should be able to acquire these skills and step into these jobs,” says Tom Clancy, SVP of UiPath Learning.

“These enhancements to our training and certification programmes further our commitment to empowering people with the in-demand automation skills to succeed in newly emerging careers and remain competitive in their current roles.”

Software giant Oracle says it is stepping up its efforts to help build critical technical cloud skills during the global lockdown,for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database customers through its online Oracle University.

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