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The following
information was compiled by the Director of
Marketing for Culminis, Vee Tegen. Ms. Tegen
formulated each question with the intent of
securing the most useful information possible to
help the Culminis staff better understand what
it is that IT Pro’s who are members of user
groups would like to see in the future. In order
to gather data to understand their thoughts and
concerns,
many of the
questions collected qualitative data, with
quantitative data where appropriate.
This independent survey was also performed to
determine some of the characteristics and makeup
of the typical IT Professional who is a member
of a user group or association. The group used
for this particular survey, with the permission
of the President of the group, was the
Carolina
IT Professional User’s Group (CITPG). At a
typical monthly meeting attended by a few
hundred members, twenty members were randomly
selected to participate in the survey. They were
each asked to complete the survey to help us
improve IT Pro user groups over time.
The survey
consisted of 10 very specific questions asking
respondents to generate answers themselves and
rank a handful of items. This exercise shows
results of what the User Group members have on
their mind, as they needed to generate original
responses for certain questions rather than
choosing from a pre-generated list.
In response to a
series of questions about Training and
Education, the following results were obtained:
A large majority
of respondents (86%) have been professionally
trained in the past 2 years. Of those, the
largest percent had been trained at a training
center (31%) and the next largest segments were
“company training” and at a “workshop” (23%
each).
A striking
correlation existed between the responses for
the questions about attending IT Workshops and
whether or not their employer paid for that
education as revealed by the following results:
It was revealed that 64%
of the respondents have attended an IT PRO
Workshop within the past two years and 68% of
the employers of these respondents paid for all
or part of this training.
When
asked what they expected the benefits of being a
member of an IT Pro User’s Group to be, the
respondents provided the following input:
This data
points towards the probable conclusions that IT
Professionals value training and seek training
from various sources without much loyalty or
favoritism toward one type of training or the
other. There appears to be a positive
correlation with attendance of paid workshops
and employers willing to pay the expense.
Finally, the graph illustrating IT
Professionals' expected benefits from user
groups suggests that the more technical (and
leading edge) information and speakers that a
leader can secure for meetings, the more
satisfying the meeting will be for the members.
Also, the graph shows that networking
opportunities are very important to members.
Culminis
continues to collect data from a number of
surveys and will report results in future
newsletters. |
Leadership Survey