I hear a lot from the employees and tech workers themselves about what training they are pursuing or about whether or not their companies support and/or pay for their training. I am curious though about the training issue from the other side of the fence.

In other words, if you are a manager of tech people, server admins, helpdesk personnel or field service technicians, etc., how do you handle training and ensuring that the staff remains knowledgeable with changing technology?

What do you need to be doing to make sure your staff is properly trained and keeps up with the changes in technology and the industry? Should regular training updates be mandatory? Should a company pay for this training? If training is voluntary, what do you do with employees who refuse to obtain training they should have?

I know that I used to have all of my training paid for. Now my company has gone almost entirely to web-based, self-paced training followed by begging and pleading to get someone to pay for the any associated certification test. At least there is an abundance of web-based training at our disposal though.