By Matteo Pallever, HR Director, OverIT,
Field Service solutions help in dispatching, optimising, and mobilising technicians to remote locations, to provide installation, repair or maintenance services on assets and customers. Innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) are increasingly playing a major role in Field Service Management.
OverIT has more than 20 years of international and cross-industry experience in providing customers with process knowledge, innovative functionalities, and cutting-edge technologies with the aim of transforming their operations and businesses. Our latest solution, the Next-Gen FSM platform provides users with the full lifecycle of field service from scheduling optimization to digital work instructions and virtual collaboration.
While OverIT has traditionally been a System Integrator, we are now transitioning to becoming a Software as a Service company (SaaS). In order to be the best-in-class FSM vendor for enterprise, we need to ensure that our internal team members are continually upskilling with new technologies.
The importance of skill development
To ensure this new technology is being used effectively with maximum impact, it’s critical to give employees the skills they need to work efficiently.
At OverIT, training and development has involved implementing a collective skill assessment campaign aligned with the product roadmap and defining ad hoc training plans accordingly. This has led to a comprehensive upskilling and reskilling program to bring our employees up to the standard required for a high-performing SaaS company. Additionally, these programs may focus on teaching teams how to use a range of tech skills that are vital to serving customers – including cloud computing, AI, data science, and cybersecurity. Without this internal knowledge, field service management companies may struggle to help customers to transform their operations.
To get these skills in place, we use online, on-demand learning from Pluralsight. It was crucial for our teams to be up to date on software skills, including Java. As a result, we use online courses to master the programming language, enabling them to carry out development projects much more effectively. Another example is our mobile applications. It’s critical for these kinds of tools to work efficiently and effectively, so the team is constantly keeping up to date with the technology the app is based on, meaning they can resolve any issues promptly and keep it running successfully.
Skill development is also important in ensuring employees and teams across a company can support one another, and skills aren’t siloed. A perfect example of this arose when the organization needed one team to continue the development of a project started by a different team. However, not all employees were familiar with the language of this particular project. They used Pluralsight to upskill, giving them the confidence and capability to fully understand the project and see it through to completion.
Customising learning
As well as offering skill development opportunities, tailoring upskilling programming to the needs of all individual team members is critical to allow everyone to grow their skillset in a way that best suits their needs and their role.
With Pluralsight’s Skills capability, we have been able to develop customised upskilling programs for each of our employees. Now, our teams can benchmark and track individual upskilling progress on any new technology, identify he gaps needing to be filled easily, and deliver on critical objectives.
For instance, the DevOps team manages the preparation of the infrastructure on which new projects start. Those employees have been upskilled on the use of Terraform technology, which has cut down the time needed to deliver frameworks to the development teams. Meanwhile, others have taken courses on Angular, to complete a specific project, or have strengthened their skills in writing and maintaining code.
For our team leaders, being able to define which skills each team or employee needs, while guiding them towards the right learning pathways is key – as well as aligning employees’ own skill requirements with those of the company. As we move to a SaaS model, carrying out a skill assessment across teams in line with the skills required to carry out the project will help ensure everyone is equipped with the knowledge to work productively.
Reaping the benefits of upskilling
By upskilling employees to work with in-demand tools and programs, it is possible to effectively embrace innovative technology, and improve field service management. In our case, developers are now able to write code in a more structured, quality way; they have become more skilled since being incentivized to learn. We have also improved developers’ clean-code techniques and started working with new versions of Java. As a result, there has been an improvement in the quality of source code, fewer bugs, and ultimately fewer issues reported by customers.
As the field service management industry continues to advance, investing in new and innovative technologies, and upskilling employees to work with them will be critical to support customers, provide quality services, and remain competitive.
