In general, New York’s IT employees express high training needs. On average, employees reported a need for training in 42 skills, comprising a mixture of general professional and management skills, broad IT concepts, and specific techniques or tools.

General patterns show that employees seek training at the next higher level of skill beyond their current proficiency. In responses to the open-ended question, many employees commented on the need for continuous training in their specialties as well as conceptual training in a variety of topics. They often pointed out that the rapid pace of technological change requires ongoing training to keep their core skills up to date. Many also cited the importance of having general familiarity with a variety of areas outside their own specialties in order to do a good job of contributing their particular expertise to larger efforts that combine skills and technologies from several specialty areas.

Every skill in the survey was selected for training by at least some employees. The highest training needs were expressed for management skills with project management (48 percent), leadership (48 percent), and supervisory skills (48 percent) as the top three. Negotiation and conflict resolution (48 percent) and planning and evaluation (47 percent) were also in the top ten. Of the top 25 skills by number of employees who say they need training, eleven are management skills. Among the technical skills, system security applications (47 percent), website design and development (47 percent) and disaster recovery and planning (46 percent) ranked as the top three. Intrusion detection and website management were also among the top ten.