Page 190 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

hiring and preparing great mobile talent � 169

` Role types. Employees of small businesses to Fortune 100
companies, territory salespeople, enterprise managers, ex-
ecutives who work from home and travel regionally and/
or internationally, employees who are extremely specialized
based on training and skill who need to provide services to
various offices or clients
` Mobile technology. Laptops with wireless capability, wireless
modems, PDAs, smartphones with mobile e-mail, SMS,
and some file storage, VPN for secure access
` Tech savviness. Knows whom to connect with when the
time-to-solution is an issue; has an internal champion whom
he or she can call on; likes working with a few trusted soft-
ware programs and hardware devices
` Delivery of Learning. Call conference, Web-based confer-
ence, and occasionally in-office training; use of laptops, ear-
phone plug-ins with microphone or use of mobile device or
laptop for inbound calls, including VoIP

Training managers have to consider how each of these groups is
most likely to access learning opportunities. If the worker is home
based, will online learning systems, accessible from a desktop com-
puter, suffice? If the worker is a road warrior, will podcasts and video
or audio streams, provided to a mobile phone and caught while he or
she is waiting at the airport, be the best way to learn? Is it best, as
John Gentry does with his road warrior team, to bring them in first
for intense, several-day, face-to-face training sessions and then give
them access to virtual knowledge systems? Each group of workers
takes a customized training strategy. Each organization has different
tools available for them.