If you had the resources to build a brand new L&D program for your IT staff, what areas of skills development would you prioritize?

I echo the focus on non-technology skills.  Specific areas of focus of IT team members are communication, budgeting and forecasting, understanding of key functions of all of the business areas they support, engineering principles, problem solving, and mastering the art of saying "no".

IT staff have traditionally been learning the routine tasks required to manage traditional systems, but their knowledge is outdated if you consider the current changes sweeping in. So the biggest priority for the IT staff would be to learn the following to the level of mastery:-

~ Prompt Engineering/ Context Engineering - Basic & Advanced
~ Agentic AI - Architecture, Setup, and Implementation
~ Data Security with a focus on AI, Privacy
~ Data Engineering for AI-ready data
~ LLM Model Management (Evaluation, Usage, Upgradation)
~ AI Infrastructure
~ Vibe Coding
~ Autonomous Operations - Design, Maintain, Upgrade

While I think that building technical competence is obvious, I have had these topics covered in ours and they were very effective:

- Leading yourself

- Influencing others
- Negotiation

- Business acumen (understanding the business your business is in, what various units do and why)
- Planning and running effective meetings with stakeholders
- The fine art of saying no with diplomacy and tact
- Writing a great briefing note to sell your ideas, surface issues, and expedite decisions
- Systems thinking (beyond technology systems - looking at the organization as a system, its environment, etc.)