It is very frustrating. It is painful. It is expensive, but it is a fact of life in today’s fast-moving technological era.

As soon as you have bought new gizmos and gadgets that are supposed to solve all your problems, they come out with even newer, easier and cheaper devices. As if that weren’t bad enough, you then have to train all your people and go through a painful upgrade process.

On one hand you want to just forget it and not have any more upgrades. Yet, on the other hand, you don’t want to fall behind and be at a disadvantage with the competition.

Then, to make matters worse, many companies are running into acute labor shortages today. According to published reports by the National Software Alliance, only 37% of programming jobs are filled by computer science grads as compared to 67% in 1987. This is due to a severe shortage of programmers in today’s market. Where is the gap being filled? By other fields. 52% of programmers hired are now from this "other fields" area while only 27% were from there in 1987. This includes people that are good at programming but haven’t necessarily studied it in school. Math majors, science majors and even music students are eagerly stepping in to fill the gaps. It seems that students who study music are more open to the creative types of programming that is needed today. They tap into a portion of their mind that is often left unused by others.

Many companies are moving people over from functional areas into computer-related areas (programming, support, maintenance and other areas) but the problem remains getting them up to speed with the technology.

How can a company get their employees up to speed on new technology? How can they train them fast enough on new technology without a lot of extra work and money? Then once they are trained on the new products, how long will it be before even the latest training is obsolete?

You don’t have a large lead time to educate your people on these concepts either. They have to be up and running quickly and be able to move rapidly into even newer areas. As soon as you can impart one set of technological skills there is a new set that is needed.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that most computers are not fully economically depreciated before they are fully technologically debilitated. This only compounds the problem and aggravation for managers and decision makers.

Let me share with you how I have handled it personally and how I see many clients dealing with it successfully:

1. Don’t be overwhelmed. Realize that it is part of our era that things are going to change rapidly. Accept it. Enjoy it. Don’t try to fight it but instead build the process into your decision-making model.
2. Build on the knowledge of the past. The picture you see is my own Royal typewriter. It was given to me as a gift from Mom & Dad when I was in Jr. High School. That little typewriter helped me with countless papers, letters, reports from Jr. High through High School, undergraduate school and through my MBA. It still does what Royal said it would do. Sure it is long-ago obsolete. Yet the skills that I gained from using that typewriter are used today as I type this column for you on my new laptop computer with a slick word processor. Moral of the story: Get tools that can be used for a number of purposes, be used for a long time and on which you can build for newer and better tools in the future. A bonus moral: Learn how to use the tools. Without the proper knowledge no tool is going to be useful Right now the best example of what to learn is a strong knowledge of the Internet. Learn how to research on it, how to communicate through it to customers, vendors and peers and how to do commerce on it. It is a truly "royal" standard!
3. Hire a kid. Sometimes the basic knowledge of computer use resides in our children. They don’t have the layers of doubt that many adults have allowed to accumulate and corrode the learning system in an adult head. Hiring a high school intern to show you specific tasks and how to make them relevant in your business can help you immensely. You’ll also help someone earn a little side money for college and learn about what free enterprise is all about.
4. Network on the Net. Discussion groups (called Newsgroups in Net parlance) provide topics of a wide range of interest. Find the area where you need assistance and send out lots of questions. If you find an expert, don’t be afraid to bring that expert to your place of business to help. The extra cost of travel is nothing compared to the advantages you’ll receive from having that powerful brainpower available to solve your real-world business problems.
5. Specialize, then master quickly. Let different people on your staff specialize in given areas. Let them learn about that area and master it quickly. Then allow them to share what they have learned with others. This allows the whole staff to learn and work as a team, rather than just one expert in a particular area.
6. Once mastered, record and disseminate. Once you have someone in the office who has mastered a given area (Word macros, for instance), record it. Use tape recorders or, better yet, home video cameras to record the specific steps required to accomplish the task. Once recorded, you can then make copies of that tape and make it available to people throughout the company or the department. It doesn’t have to be fancy. We don’t have time for fancy. However, this process is far better than having each person painfully learn a new task on their own. You can collect a whole library of quick, single-focused videos on how to do important select tasks that relate to your business. Then if these people leave and new people come on board (even temps), you can have them quickly watch a few videos to learn how you do things at your business. The opportunities here are tremendous.
7. Use the Web for storage. One of the problems with data gathered is how to retain it and make it available for the future. Documents that I had on my old Osborne computer from the early 80’s are unreadable by machines on today’s market. Unless I had printed those documents and can now scan them, they are practically worthless. The same is true for CP/M documents (an earlier operating system for computers) and many other formats. If you use the Web today, you’ll retain the documents longer and they will be in a format that will be accessible by more people. This will be part of your company’s internal Knowledge Base, an increasingly important part of your competitive advantage in today and tomorrow’s environment.
8. Devote yourself to constant learning. Often we regard gaining knowledge as a one-time experience. I’ve heard people describe having studied a subject much like having received an inoculation as in, "Oh, I had Economics once," or, "Yeah, I took a course a while back on the Internet." In a fast-changing world, only those who understand change and how it can be relevant to their needs will profit and survive.

We can’t fight technological obsolescence. We shouldn’t. We can understand it and work with it to gain a competitive advantage as we round the corner into the new exciting decade, century and millenium. Seize the opportunity now!