CompTIA Partners with Industry Coaches

IT industry trade association CompTIA has announced that it will begin working closely with industry business coaches in an effort to provide members with their counsel, mentoring, and services.
 

During its recent Breakaway 2010 trade event in San Antonio, CompTIA convened a summit of leading business coaches from across the IT channel. Summit participants discussed ways to make coaching more accessible to solution providers. They also addressed training in the channel and shared ideas for future development.

“I think the group found a lot of common ground, identifying ways that coaches helping coaches can lead to even better outcomes for all our customers,” reports summit facilitator Paul Dippell, who is also CEO of Service Leadership Inc.

At the Breakaway event, CompTIA’s president and CEO Todd Thibodeaux announced that CompTIA will launch a series of new educational programs designed to help IT channel companies raise their levels of productivity and professionalism. Business coaches will play a critical role in many of these programs, he said.

“CompTIA would like to help make coaching more accessible to those who need it and help coaches help each other continue to grow and to refine their practices and areas of expertise,” Thibodeaux says. “Business coaching plays a critical role in the success of the channel. We want to help coaches be more successful and to make their skills available to a broad audience across the industry.”

According to Thibodeaux, CompTIA’s catalog of coaching programs will feature “the best content and create foundational standards for knowledge and capability.” He adds that the catalog will be flexible, with a broad range of courses, many of which will be self-paced. Courses will be delivered in different ways, too, including at events and through the coaches themselves.

Educational offerings from CompTIA will cover topics such as healthcare IT, sales and marketing, financial management, solution selling, cloud computing, services management, government markets, and other areas.