EDS

How QA reskilled EDS’s developers with legacy COBOL skills to develop solutions using the Microsoft .NET framework.

The Challenge

When EDS wanted to reskill a group of its developers from COBOL to .NET – and establish a .NET centre of excellence – Microsoft introduced the company to QA.

The Solution

Although both are programming languages, COBOL and .NET are vastly different. Today’s object-oriented programming languages, such as .NET, work in a fundamentally different way to forty-year old COBOL. Teaching a COBOL developer to use .NET is not like ‘teaching an English speaker the French language’ – it is more complex.

QA identified that one of the biggest challenges would be assessing the training which each person would need – since each already had different skills.

To simplify this process, QA produced an EDS-specific skills ‘roadmap’ – which aligned the EDS’s already defined developer competencies to a mixture of classroom and e-learning materials from both Microsoft and from the EDS’s internal training facility, the EDS University (EDSU). Not only did this make planning much easier, it also saved money: EDS tested the roadmap against an already live training project and found that using it would have reduced the number of days training required, by being more focused on the required outcomes.

Working closely with the EDS University, QA also undertook a detailed training needs analysis, to assess the skills of the team and define the training required for each person. People were streamed into two paths – where a person had the required skills, they were given additional training to help them become team mentors, to enable EDS to manage more of the learning in-house. The mentors would help their colleagues with both subject-matter issues and in guiding them through the e-learning materials. This also enabled the faster learners to ‘cascade’ their knowledge down when other learners were ready.

Prior to the programme, QA delivered a series of five one-hour orientation presentations, to outline the scope of the training programme and provide an initial technology overview. The learning itself combined classroom training and e-learning into one seamless training programme. In addition, on-site mentoring was provided as one-day sessions, to enable EDS employees to receive training on specific topics, as the need arose – with QA instructors and EDS mentors working side by side. In total, the training was delivered to around two hundred of EDS’s staff. Microsoft and professional certification was used to validate the success of the training.

Ian Smith, capability development programme manager, EDS UK Northwest Solution Centre: “Through a combination of TNA, blended delivery, and mentoring, QA exceeded our expectations. They not only provided excellent training, but their consummately professional trainers motivated the staff to such a level that they eagerly attended all the required courses, supplementing the classroom-based training with a considerable amount of work in their own time, keen to use the technology in a live environment.”