Training IT Pros to Become Cloud Native Champs: Decade-long training relationship continues to thrive [Case Study]

The Situation

One of the top 5 North American banks with more than 70,000 employees and 17 million clients worldwide needed an IT training company that would also serve as a partner to ensure its IT employees would receive training to help the company adapt to changing technologies and stay competitive in the market. The company had hundreds of IT employees and was looking for training courses for specific roles and a training company with an excellent track record to deliver the various courses.

Quick Facts

Industry information

  •  One of the North America’s Top 5 banks based on revenue

Wanted

  • Long-term IT training and consulting
  • Partner to help continually upskill IT employees to keep up with the newest technologies

Services provided

  • Flex Account to simplify budget tracking and administrative tasks
  • Custom training, courses and programs aligned with job roles, employees’ tech background and technology strategy
  • Private virtual courses for various teams
  • Skills assessments for each IT team to identify specific requirements

The Challenge

The bank was looking to solve an immediate requirement — training — but didn’t recognize that it needed to develop a strategy to continually upskill its workforce to keep pace with changing job roles and new technologies. The bank’s management team didn’t have a clear picture of the company’s current technologies and didn’t know whether they were being used to their fullest potential or whether there were new technologies that could help the bank innovate and deploy apps faster.

The Solution

Starting in 2010, ExitCertified subject matter experts (SMEs) teamed up with the bank’s Learning & Development team for the first time to discuss a long-term plan to continually meet the company’s IT training needs as employees, job roles and technologies change. As well as meeting with IT managers and surveying employees to assess current skill gaps, SMEs met with IT leaders to understand their goals and skill sets. The SMEs later presented a training plan for various job roles, consisting of public courses and custom-made courses to close the gaps in needed skills. For more than 10 years, ExitCertified has been working with the bank to ensure it stays on track with its needs for IT training and certifications.

Below are some noteworthy programs ExitCertified has delivered for the bank:

  • A one-day class for approximately 50 company managers and executives on microservices and their impacts on the organization and its customers
  • A five-day Mirantis-based Cloud Native Operations Boot Camp course, presented five times, for 100 administrators
  • A five-day Mirantis-based Cloud Native Developers Boot Camp course, presented four times for a total of 85 developers
  • A custom-designed program that upskilled the team on containerization and Hadoop Administration

In the more than 10 years of working with the bank, ExitCertified has delivered numerous training courses in various technologies, including those listed below:

  • SQL
  • AWS
  • Cloud Native Applications
  • Administrator Training
  • Red Hat
  • Cloudera
  • Google Cloud
  • IBM

"Extremely knowledgeable instructor who communicated effectively to a non-technical person, helping me grasp all the technical concepts."

-Bank’s business manager 


Outcome

Management has a clear understanding of how the bank can continually keep its workforce skills current to adopt the latest technologies and stay competitive in the market. Executives gave the one-day management course an average score of 4.9 out of 5. The IT director was so happy with the custom-designed bootcamps that he also scheduled them for the bank’s Asia-Pacific IT team. Additionally, he had ExitCertified create a customized Microsoft Azure Data Pipeline course for administrators and developers, which incorporated some of the skills learned in both cloud-native bootcamps. The continuous cycle of training and services has enabled this customer to continually upskill its workforce to adapt to new technologies to remain competitive.