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How Much Do Employers Budget for Education?
FunkyMonkey asks: "I've been able to convince my current employer that we (the programing staff) need to maintain our skills and keep up with rapidly changing technology by implementing an ongoing training/education program. Apparently, my plan entails more time in training than my employer is willing to give us and thinks that there should be 'some extra effort on the programmers part to make this happen.' My question to the Slashdot community is how much time does your employer allocate for ongoing education? Do they expect you to do on your own time?" It's an interesting question, and I'm sure that this varies wildly from employer to employer. Still, this might be some interesting information to share for those of you out there trying to make a case for (or against) budgets for IT training. If you were in control, how much would you spend on training?
Where I work is a subsidiary of NewsCorp. We have to pony up for the classes and do them on our own time to start. If you got the class approved by your manager ahead of time and you make a "B" or higher in the class the company will reimburse you for the full amount.
That is about the same as a couple of other places I have worked.
-dan
Where I work, at a large major telecommunications company (whose name rhymes with "lint"), they're supposedly supposed to give you compensation to the tune of $5,250/yr for tuition reimbursement (for work-related stuff) and two weeks per year of additional training.
Of course, lots of luck actually getting it. You ask your boss and he'll basically tell you that he needs a 20-page justification document that needs VP approval.
Rotsa Ruck!
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
I know there are probably others in my situation, but I feel that mine is probably one of the worst ones out there.
Every year, we get promised that we'll have training courses. And, every year, our budget goes down the toilet (telecommunications support -- not exactly a cash cow) and we don't get any training.
Now, mind you, I'd love to find the perfect job where I can at least get 1-2 weeks of training a year on new technologies, but unless I actually leave this company (and it's one of the largest companies in the US) I don't feel I'll ever see it.
Karnal
From my experiences in the IT departments of non-computer-related companies in NYC, I typically see allocations of a few weeks of training per year, as long as it relates directly to an upcoming project. The companies I've worked for realize that it's cheaper and better for everyone if a few weeks of full-time training are allotted, rather than hiring new people with different skills as needed. It also keeps the employees far more loyal. I know more than just a few developers who chose jobs particularly because they would be sent to continual training as needed. I've only worked for financial institutions, however, so I can't speculate how a software company might react towards training requests.
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Developers: We can use your help.
When I worked for BMC Software, they allotted $3000 per calendar year per IT employee for education. We usually took classes at places like Productivity Point, during normal work hours.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
The policy around here is: 40 hours of classroom learning per year, paid by the company, on company time.
... no conferences (boondoggles for some, but the best way for me to learn); they'll buy books, but I don't get credit for reading them, or for anything I do at home. If there's no babysitter watching over me, maybe I'm goofing off?-(
But
In my previous company (small startup), the official policy was: We'll buy books, but you read them on your own time. (I had a two hour commute each way on the train every day. I read the Blue Camel cover to cover three times.) My policy (I supervised a group of Perl programmers) was: We do code reviews for every line of code that goes in production, and any possible improvement is fair game. We went from (collectively) only knowing Perl 4, to being a really sharp Perl 5 shop with very maintainable code, right after Perl 5.0 (and the Blue Camel) came out and became generally accepted.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I work at a small (20 people) startup software firm. Budget is tight and investing in training is out of the question for now.
It varies so greatly from place to place.
Case in point:
at my current job, my IT director places a huge focus on training, and he's managed to convince the upper management that it's necessary to survive. How he did it I'll never know, but they've allocated $3000 per Development worker for training (of our own choice, with the IT director's approval). However far we can make that stretch is our own business. I've been taking french courses with part of it (we work with a lot of people who speak french better than english). On top of that, there are regular training courses for the whole department that don't come out of your personal training budget.
All in all, it's pretty great.
At my last job, I waited over a year for a single course, and when it did come along, it was because the manager of our department was on vacation and we managed to sneak it past the boss for approval. When he DID come back, he freaked.I saw other people who wanted courses offered an hour and a half outside of town, who were told to find them locally, or they couldn't take them. Any course found was analyzed several times over for price cuts: hotels were severely budgeted (the place i stayed in for my one perl course was infested with centipedes), and any cost-cutting measure that could be taken, were.
God am I ever glad I got out of there. They completely did not understand that training their workers was to their benefit. That and they were (rightfully) scared that anyone who had decent training would look for a job that paid them what they were worth. Which is pretty funny because the place I'm at now (with the huge training budgets) has a much happier, more commited workforce and a much lower employee turnover.
Moral of the story: treat your employees well, and they'll reward you with more than your money's worth.
Personally, I'd rather have a $3000 training budget than a $3000 raise, of which half would go to taxes and the rest would end up being a piddly few extra dollars per cheque.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
There's also a big difference between inhouse training by f.i. the local guru and official on-product-company training where you get a certification. The first tend to be an excuse for the effort
/. poll topic, then at least we could get some statistics on the replies.
For the poll: I get 2 weeks a year
Site remark: this more sounds like a
Personally I think that you are responsible for your own skills, not the company you work for. They pay you to provide a skill or trade, not pay you to better your skills. I could understand that if, say, up front they offer you $68,000 annually -OR- $60,000 annually plus $5000 in on company time training, but I don't think its fair to the employers to have to pay you to learn how to do your job.
If you're really worried about training and can't find enough time on your own to get better at your profession, perhaps its time to look at another line of work.
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." - Tao of Programming
For the kind of job I do (Technical Management), formal education doesn't make sense. I have alot of control over how I spend my time, and I find it more effective for me to educate myself. If I come across a conference or seminar or whatever, then I have to make a business case for the cost of me going to that, and that's fine. This kind of ad hoc self education relies on two factors:
1. The company leaves you enough 'free' time in your general plan that you can schedule in your own days for reading XML books or whatever
2. You do the kind of job where it's possible to teach yourself.
Computing seems to be one of the industries in which it is easiest to teach yourself. I don't blame companies for taking advantage of that. As a manager I can also sympathise with not wanting to book employees on long training courses in advance. That two weeks in October may look free now, but by September we may really need that person on the project.
From both learner and manager perspective, I prefer to see a budget for books and journal subscriptions, and enough slack in people's schedules that they can teach themselves.
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If a book/manual has been written on the subject is is bound to offer a higher ROI then the hours spent in a classroom. Training (in my view) is geared to the lazy and incompetent. They wish to be spoon fed the info. A hungry mind should be able to feed itself from the documentation and the system at hand rather then being read PPT slides. Not to be insulting and I am sure there are many trainers out there who go beyond what is in the written matterial but they are rare and they also need a class that has taken the time to RTFM in order for such a class to be usefull. In other words, listen to your manager, and instead of asking for a couple of thousand dollar training classes ask for two hundred as a book allowance and spend some of your own time advancing yourself proffesionally (don't forget it is YOUR carrer) rather then sucking from the company.
I've had a large number of different experiences in differing places. I currently like the situation I am in right now, but here is what I have experienced.
When working at a community college, I was allowed to take courses there for no fees. This did allow me to get an Associates degree there, but they didn't pay for much (if any) outside training. I went to one course the entire 5 years that I was there.
After moving to a dotcom, I did go to one training (not bad for only being there 6 months). This training directly related to my job and what they needed me to do, so they were able to justify it.
I have now moved on to an extremely small division of a division of one of the larger companies in the world, and our policy here is that we get 2 weeks of training per year, and they reimburse (assuming a passing grade) for all college education that relates to our job. Last year I ended up going to 3 trainings and a conference through them, but that was under extreme circumstances.
I would submit that unless where you work has no money, you would be justified in asking for 1-2 weeks of training per year and/or at least a partial tuition reimbursement program.
The company I used to work for expected us to spen some of our working time doing RTFM activities and cross training, they even attempted to have a 2 hour period every week where employess were given to opertunity to give a training presentation to anyone how was interested.(though this fell through because other work usually interfeared with preparing the presentation) We would also get sent on basic training courses if it was a new field to the company, e.g i was sent on lotus AD1 course(very good) and was expected to do a bit of RTFM to get up to speed. Everyone in the company was sent on a DSDM and MKII function point analysis course which were also quite good. the company stoped sending people on development courses where some staff already had skills in that area becuase 9 time out of 10 they were crap and the people attending the course frequenly knew more than the course instructor. So try to get a good books policy, books work are cheep(ish) and are usually more helpfull than training courses. Cross training is very important not only does it give people a chance to give a presentation and share there skills but it also lets other employees(and the managment) know there skills. If you don't know jack shit about somthing than a short training course is the best way to start. If the company wants there employees to be upto scratch on a given technology/process then make sure they all do the course.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I think programming/sysadmin etc. are jobs where you 'bring your own tools' similar to many professions and trades. In other words, you're hired as a programmer because you have a skill. Maintaining that skill is up to you.
If the company wants you to learn a new skill, then clearly they should either pay to have you trained or hire someone that has the skill.
If you want to get ahead, avoid being obsolete, or just do something different, then you should invest your own time in gaining new skills.
My current employer requires 40 hours spread over two years of work-related education/training/etc. This is normally spent at conferences or trade shows, although some people go for a specific week-long class or whatever. There's also a great tuition reimbursment program, but that requires you to do it 'on your time' (and pick up about 20% of the cost assuming good grades).
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Oftentimes geeks like technomyopia take over and assume that technology is the only field that makes rapid changes. Law, medicine and education make rapid changes not only in technique of practice but of information content. How do those professions and professionals handle training and continuing education?
I know that continuing legal education is actually a requirement of attorneys in Minnesota (45 credit hours every three years). I would imagine that it's seen as the lawyer's professional responsibility to maintain his or her certifications. Some rich firms may reimburse, but small firms may just see it as another professional cost the attorney has to keep up with to be an attorney.
I think it's probably wise for a business to encourage continuing education to the extent of paying for it. Training feels like an investment to an employee and eliminates the potential for "but I didn't know how.." excuses from employees. Some training should be almost manditory and free to the employee. But I do think that employees also have to show some commitment to their field: by either paying something for further training, doing some training during work hours at half salary, or not mitigating work deadlines to accomodate training -- accomodate the training but make the employees demonstrate it has value.
My new CIO says he had a policy at his last company to require managers spend their training budgets or get dinged at review time. He said that training is important, but his experience was employees will often whine for training if it's not an option but if money is budgeted for training they come up with excuses not to do it.
Or IDA's for short is what my employer (in the governement of Canada....) has done to try to keep it's employees smart and happy. Basically, the way it works is that each employee has a an annual budget of $5000 CDN (doen't not carry-over if not spent) that they can use on anything that they think would develop their human capital. That is, anything that would develop the individual's carreer (not just their carreer with this emplployer). I usually use this to go to conferences, buy books and journals, etc.. (I have a research position). There was only one problem.... how do you deal with long term training? Well, management here has decided, that if an employee is gone for more than 5 business days, everyday thereafter should draw $100 from the individual's development account to go towards lost work time. I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not (since they don't pay me $100/day when I go to a conference that takes place on a weekend), but it gets the job done--you can't really go away for too long before your budget runs dry. Allan
I work for the IT wing of a regonal telco. Our training budgets are fairly generous. We get two weeks paid training time per year, plus we have access to a company wide computer based training over our intranet. The CBT is fairly lightweight and not too useful for any hardcore technical information. However, we're required to go through an equivalent CBT course first (if available) before we apply for offsite training.
Not nessicarly on company time, but we are required to have 40 hours of training a year. How we get that it up to us. This year I was about to attend to classes at work, on company time. (Accually it worked out to 48 hours of training).
Basicaly if it is directly related to your current job, and a lot of people (20-30) people need the same class, then they bring the teacher in and you get training in during work hours. Otherwise you have to do it when you have time. Nothing is wrong with studying during downtime, so when I'm waiting for a compile or reboot I can study. (at a couple hours for a compile, and an hour for a reboot this is significant, but your process probably isn't that messed up)
Some people get their 40 hours by presuing anougther major. It must be work related, but that doesn't take out much. (art, and farming) Buisness is encouraged, as are engineering degrees.
Some people get their 40 hours by reading various books and doing the example.
Some people get their 40 hours by going to confrences.
Basicaly it is up to the manager to enforce 40 hours a year on each employiee. We are flexable about what you do on your own time, so long as over a year you do it. What you do on work time must be directly job related. (or downtime at work)
The company I work for, Software Architects, Inc. budgets quite a bit towards education. All of the new hires go through a 3 week "boot camp" where they take classes on all of the hot technologies for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Topics include Java, XML, OOD, servlets, C#, etc.
Education opportunities are constantly made available for all employees. Books and other materials are also paid for, as well as the cost of certification exams. All employees are encouraged to earn one new certification per year.
Training is key to maintaining quality employees in IT... Smart companies will provide as much as they can.
1) 20/20. Work part-time, school part-time. Collect full salary and the gov't will pay your tuition. Requires the school be local to your work location.
2) I dont remember the name- spend one year going to the school of your choice full-time. Sponsering agency will pay tuition and housing costs. Again you collect full salary. Problem here is most master's programs require two years of work, yet this program only allows one year.
Both programs require good grades and you remain employed by the sponsering agency a certain number of years after completing your degree. Failure to do so will require to pay back tuition costs in some fashion.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
My old employer was one extreme. They would not send me to training on the specialized tool (BMC Patrol) I was expected to support. Nor would they bother buying the manuals. Since the online user community for this product was pretty small/nonexistent at the time, I had to kludge ways around everything, which included trying to glean information wherever I could, experimenting, and finding ways to get stuff done without the tool. I believe this was unreasonable (the extra time I spent cost them more than training would have).
My current employer is a lot better about this. I have been sent to training on tools I don't even use. While this has benefited me greatly, I don't know if I would have been as generous if I were the boss.
I think it's reasonable to expect some cooperation from your employer on technologies you are currently working on (especially specialized ones for which documentation is scant). But it is unfair/unrealistic to expect them to support your Java certification, send you to linux training, or otherwise increase your value for your next employer at their expense. For most technologies, I imagine your life will not be too difficult. Nobody will stop you from buying a book on Java, XML, Linux, etc. and most employers will/should pay for such things. They should also encourage some playing around with new technologies because this is beneficial to both the employer and the employee (and helps retain geeks :).
I would, however, be careful about trying to demand things from your employer that does not directly benefit them, and might in fact harm them (such as a 2 week training session in Hawaii from which you might not return).
I work for State Government, and the agency I work for REQUIRES that we take 2 weeks of training a year, and they will even pay for certification tests. I have actually spent 3 of the last 5 weeks getting training on IBM's Misc. WebSphere products. Of course, when you factor in the fact that I get paid gov't rates (sux btw), then it isn't quite as sweet as it sounds. But at least I get to keep my skills up to date (relatively so) for free.
Managers, pay attention: One of those people already left the company, and the other is looking for new work. In fact, several people who are considering graduate programs are considering leaving the company, and another long-time employee left so she could pursue an MBA while working and being reimbursed. This may not apply in all cases, but it seems to have a big affect on employee retention here (that's at least 20% annual turnover related to education alone, although probably an extreme case).
At my current employer, IT training is looked at in a good light - we have quite a bit budgeted for training purposes. You can schedule any class that is approved by your manager (network guys take network classes, programmer guys take programmer classes), and the company will pay for it. They also pay for your rental car/flight and your meals and lodging as well. The company also pays for your first attempt at any test you want to take for certification purposes - but if you fail the first one then you have to pay for the rest out of your own pocket. We also get to travel to some select conferences as well (tech ed, SANS, etc). This is probably not the norm for most IT shops, but I thought this would be a good "best case" scenario.
My current employer is NiSource.
- Rick
www.bluealien.org
www.bluealien.org
Prophets of the Blue Alien
My current employer has great benefits, big 401k matches, fully paid and excellent health insurance, subisduzed life insurance, etc. They also allow each department manager about $3,500 per year per employee for various job related training purchases. My department uses the money to maintain a decent library of reference books and CD training courses. We also send people to various one and two day classes on a regular basis.
In addition to job related training they also offer tuition reinbursement, for just about any college level class (as long as you get a C I think). A lot of companies have relaized that good benefits can attract better talent that simply high salaries, and education programs sometimes offer better returns for the company in the form of better employees. Investing in your people is never a bad idea.
Thank you for reading this comment.
Well I work for New York State as a computer Programmer. I just got hired out of college, and I've been here about 2 months. During the course of 2 months I have been to 2 training classes which were a week each. (Oracle, and Forte Development training). In the future they will be sending me on 3 more weeks worth of training. The State is pretty good on giving the employees training when they need it. Most of the people here started out on the Mainframe with COBOL, now that we switched over to a more OO languague the people needed mass training.
What I find is amazing is how much these classes cost. Usually between $2,000 and $3,000 a person per week. That's a lot of cash. Oh well I'm glad the state is paying for me.
Now, mind you, we are a biotech/pharma company, but training is training, be it advanced computer use or molecular polymorphism. We've had a fair number of classes on stats and using JMP (which I don't use enough).
The company also offers tuition reimbursement: 100% if you get an A or B, 50% for a C, and, well, if you somehow manage to get lower, you're SOL.
This is by far the most liberal company education policy I have run across (with the exception of people who work at universities).
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Getting paid for training is great, as is having your company pay for you to take classes that will improve your worth. In the end, though, the company is paying you to produce, not to go to school.
I believe that the responsibility to keep one's skills updated lies in the hands of the techies. Companies will reimburse you for your learning, and most people expect to make more when they know more and are more valuable. Isn't it a bit greedy to expect to do this on their time as well?
We allocate half of a monthly salary for training per year. So far it has worked out pretty well.
First of all -- your company should have plenty of books. Since every programmer have different interests and skills, you may organize your own classes once a week, during work time: someone teaches Java, another one teaches Perl, UML, etc. This is good way to stay up to date with the last technologies.
I have been on both sides...
My former job, we were "allotted" 5k a year for training. Good luck getting it approved though. In the 5 years I was there I was only sent to 2 training classes. One of them was since I knew nothing about relational databases, and was expected to be an expert DBA (since the guy who was leaving did that also). I wore several hats, Unix admin, DBA, security admin and operator. I think the main reason they sent me to database training was 1) I hosed the database 2) I was begging for the class. My old job would also pay for college tuition if you had a c or better, but you had to sign a contract that said you would stay for 5 years after getting your degree. Needless to say I didn't let them pay a dime for my college classes.
My current job: I am required to take 2 classes a year, minimum. I will get whatever training that relates to my job. I'm supposed to be an expert on their systems in the customer's eyes, hence I get the training I need to become an expert. I also can get books for free (they only ask that they relate somehow). And they will pay for college also, without the draconian contract of the old job. Needless to say, I'm much happier at my new job, and heck even if I won the lottery, I'd still work for them.
--
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
Traditionall my employeer haas actually been pretty good about training time and even playing for it. MCSE, MCSE 2000, MCDBA, CYLINK Private Wire, and several other certs all with out a dime from my pocket. Infact even got 50 Bucks for every test I passed doing my MCSE, and a 750 Bonus for achiving the cert. And I did it all on company time! Of course with the stock market taking a digger recently, getting training has become harder, and now about all they will do is pay for college courses on my time.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I work for a contractor which provides IT to county government. i am a webdev, and the web team goes on training 3-4 times a year. the classes either consist of something they need or something we think we can impliment in the future. we also get to take a monthly "field trip" to Barnes & Noble to get any books that we might want/need. our manager also set up some online training for the entire programming department...it has a good range of classes for pretty much anything, and we can take as many as we want up until the contract runs out. we also can take them whenever we want, as long as it doesn't interfere with something pressing.
if you are looking for regular training, government is the only way to go.
-
sean
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Plus we're expected to spend half a day per week on self-education, be it CBT, playing with technologies, wandering around the MS, IBM or Sun websites, reading appropriate books, whatever. Obviously this takes a back seat when projects get hectic, but it's certainly expected that if there's time, we do this stuff. I think it's partly management realism aboutthe true nature of friday afternoons, actually.
TomV
I ain't working in software company, but I have read some literature so here's my speculation.
Small firms provide less training than large firms. Most people cite smaller budget as the reason. Some studies suggested something else. For example, because training is a joint investment (the company give up your working time, provide finacially support, and you lost your leisure hours), if you leave the firms earlier because of higher human capital, they lost. Small firms are less able to accomodate lost of workers. On the other hand, large firms are more willing to offer training to more workers, because of risk spreading.
Another argument is, because small firms are easier to monitor workers' productivity, they do not need training as a method to maintain the productivity. Large firms fail to monitor workers' productivity directly, may induce their workers into training as alternative of maintaining productivity.
I would say the fear for workers' departure after training is the major reason why companies do not provide training, especially those leading to certification (exception is if the certification of workers lead to better confidence from the customers, like accounting firms). Also, firm specific training is more likely to be employer support, and don't expect your employers will provide general skill training (another exception, is to get community support.)
If you want your boss to pay for your training, think about those factors and make them comfortable. That's my 2 cents.
A sig is redundant.
In my current position, I negotiated education re-inbursement as a part of my overall compensation package. I currently get re-imbursed 75% for all my educational expenses - this includes books and software, as well as the cost of the course itself. If it's a class where I recieve a grade, anything over a 'C' is acceptable.
I attribute this to the small size and management philosophy of the particular company I work for. In my previous job, similar to the one I'm doing now, I got laughed at when I asked to be trained.
I later found out that the owner felt that if he paid for training, the people would just leave for a better job, and he didn't want the hassle of making people sign a contract saying they'll work x months after the training to keep their reimbursement.
Needless to say, I wasn't there long...
Press any key to continue, any other key to quit.
First off I think that any training that doesn't directly pertain to the product you are actively working on should be done on your own time. If a project that you are working on requires Visual C++, you shouldn't be trying to get company-time training in Java/Perl/etc.
:)
That said, my company offers $10,000 in tuition reimbursement + $200/year for textbooks. All I have to do is fill out a form, and as long as it's "in my field" I'm approved. I can take any course I want in my field, but on my own time.
My company is also pretty good at allowing for RTFM type training. I've recently been asked to do some Perl scripting(I'm a Python guy), so I asked them to buy me the O'Rielly books and I'd read them, instead of whining "I need training". Sure enough, the next day I walked into my cube and 3 O'Rielly Perl books were on my desk!(Learning Perl, Programming Perl, Perl Cookbook).
It all depends on the company I guess, I might have just been lucky with mine. Doesn't hurt that I took stock options over salary bonus, and subsequently I've made and extra $20,000 in the last 6 months instead of the paltry $5,000 signing bonus they offered
I'm quite lucky, I work in a web-consultancy company. Consultancy companies are wider spread in Europe, projects go quicker and cheaper when you hire the knowledge just for a certain amount of time. (discussable of course ;-) )
Sometimes the salesguys from my company sell ideas or stuff that are pretty new in the fast moving web world, that way it happens that we have to get some sudden speed skill drill courses before the new project takes off.
Good companies realize the value in keeping their employees educated on the things that are important to them. I've worked for a number of companies and they've all had very different opinions on education.
The President of one small software company I used to work for was excited that I wanted to pursue a career in database administration and gave me the time off to take some classes at Oracle, even though he couldn't justify paying for them because they didn't have any plans to use it. He was definitely an exception.
The company those classes got me into had the complete opposite view on training, "Don't take any." They didn't want any of their employees to better themselves and leave, so the employees left anyway. My next employer really liked the idea of training, but didn't want to pay for any of it. To his credit, he at least would come up with some creative ideas to spread the knowledge people had around.
My present employer (a large backbone/hosting company that rhymes with perpetuity), however has got to be the best I've ever heard of. They encourage us to take 2 training classes a year, offer hundreds of online learning materials, book reimbursement, and pay for all college level classes. If the class isn't job related, then you have to claim it as income on your taxes, otherwise its completely covered including books. This one of the big reasons I went there, I wanted a place where they encouraged people to continue to grow and become more knowledgable. In fact, they're very big on today's low level admins becoming tomorrow's engineers.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
For me, my company has sent me to a lot of education classes over the past year and a half. However, every class I attended had to do with my current job (makes sense). However, if I had to pay for classes myself, I would take courses that interested me.
In the end, an employer paying for my development gets to keep me as a more valuable asset to them - its an investment in THEIR future. If I pay, I better myself to make myself more attractive to other potential employers in the future - its an investment in MY future.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
And don't forget that continuing education should always include soft skills (time management, project planning, customer consulting, etc.) in addition to technical training!
Of course, this was just the usual seminar training stuff. Motorola (as most other large businesses) also has a tuition reimbursement program for off-the-job training. I think that any employer who is interested in quality work will have both types of training programs. Require a minimum of 40 hours on-the-job training per employee per year and offer tuition reimbursement for off-the-job training (college degree, etc.)
Also, just because the minimum was 40 hours did not mean that they wouldn't spring for more. More is always better, because it pumps up the average for people who did not manage the minimum. I usually managed to get them to spring for Usenix in addition to the usual company seminars.
Nowadays, I work for a consulting services company. They will pay for off-the-clock training, but are reluctant to pay for on-the-clock training, since their business is entirely selling consultant services. Occaisionally, you get to work for a client who will pay for on-the-job training, basically you just tag along when the client schedules training for their own employees on a particular subject. Or maybe you get to work for a client that has extensive CBT materials that you can use as part of your job. It is a lot harder to get on-the-job training when you are a consultant. You generally have to budget at least the time on your own, if not both time and money.
This current policy seems to work pretty well for our company.
LFS. Have you built your system today?
I can see the value of this, but in my experience is that most technology people are at best highly competitive and at worst raging egomaniacs when it comes to the work they've done.
Peer review has to be done carefully or can become a pissing contest. Review by senior people keeps the peace, but is only really valuable if senior people are senior because they're smart.
What I would like from an employer is that two weeks a year is set aside, on a slightly floating basis, for courses. The type of courses I would go on are generally a week in one go meaning I would like to go to two courses per year. This is what I would expect from a half-decent employer. Currently I am not getting that from where I work and I have voiced my opinion.
If you and your employer can not come to a agreement, you could vote with your feet and simply go to a company more inclined to better their employees. I would personally be quite happy to perhaps sign some sort of contract with my employer about not leaving within a certain time of having received a course that they paid for. After all, they pay to educate me, I should give some of that knowledge back.
Alternatively, argue for higher pay plus perhaps two weeks earmarked for training per year and set the extra money aside for training.
Just my £0.02 worth
Swedish, but resident in the UK since 1996.
Hmm. Consider the following two strategies, implemented in two equal companies over, say, 5 years time:
Strategy 1:
Primary Goal: Profit
Secondary Goal: Increased knowledge
Strategy 2:
Primary Goal: Increased knowledge
Secondary Goal: Profit.
I strongly believe that the second option will outpace the first in the long run (with regard to profit, happy employees etc). Obviously, this is oversimplified, I hope you get my point anyway.
10% of my time was budgeted specifically for the purpose of staying abreast of change. That meant reading, classes, and just monkeying around with new technology.
I'm now a consultant, so I can't really bill the clients for keeping current. However, the company I consult for does provide for money and some time (not nearly 10% per year) for classes and education. It was supposed to be a dollar amount for college classes, but they've realized that sending someone to a 5 day java or Cisco class often has a faster, more specific pay-off than taking an Ada refresher.
Having said all that, I do bill the clients for the time they expect me to spend learning a new technology, and that's reasonable. I'll bet there are existing programs at your company that involve education (be it finishing an MBA, refreshers, adult education, and business seminars). If only the programmers aren't getting training (which a business seminar is) then you can present a good case to your boss. Just make sure it's not "you get to, so why can't I?" If they feel that more highly trained people will instead flee to higher-paying jobs, point out that it's a problem with all jobs (talent = money), and that you don't think most employee retention issues are a matter of money. (When I've thought seriously of quitting, it was never about money or benefits. It was about abusive treatment by managers and/or people of higher rank.)
Point is, this whole thing is changing. [begin manage speak] Everything you learn and everything you know saves your company money. You need to make sure that the benefits of that knowledge and of those skills provides greater monetary gain for the company than the expense of gaining that knowledge and those skills [end manage speak].
I'm currently manager of my department for a small law firm. It's a small department, just me, my assistant, and a part-time trainer. My annual budget includes a total of six weeks of paid training, nominally divided into three weeks for me, two weeks for my assistant, and one week for the trainer. In actuality, it's treated as one pool and allocated as needed. We often have a surplus. For training paid for by the Firm and considered a job requirement, we train off-site during the day. If an employee wants to attend other training that is job-related but not required, that is covered under educational benefits and reimbursed, I believe at 80% if there is no grade or exam, and at 100% if a passing grade or exam is completed. That has the side effect of paying for certification exams where they wouldn't otherwise be covered, as passing the exam will raise the reimbursement.
My previous employer would pay for required training, and grudgingly allowed us to attend during the day if we refused to take the required classes on our own time. There was supposed to be an educational benefit available, but it required both prior approval and availability of funds. Approval was seldom granted, usually denied as being job-related but outside our job requirements. Funds were seldom available as they were usually snapped up by the managers before any approved requests were processed.
My second prior employer would pay for any job related training if the department head approved it. If it was required training, it was done during working hours. If it was not required, it was expected to be completed after hours. Exams were not covered and not required. This resulted in a lot of people taking a lot of training, but with little actual retention or benefit to the Firm.
My third prior employer would pay for training when it was required for performance of duties under our contract AND the customer approved the costs. It was normally done during the day. Education benefits did not cover job-related training unless college credit was given.
Overall, it's always been my impression that it was an employer's obligation to pay for required training and to allow the employee to attend daytime sessions during working hours - in other words, give you work time to complete the training. I've always considered it unacceptable when companies either denied required training or insisted that it be completed on the employees time. I've often seen educational benefits that would cover the cost of desired training, provided it was done on the employees time, and often certification exams could be covered, if only by claiming that they were necessary to substantiate the required passing grade in classes that otherwise offered only certificates of attendance.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
I work in the wireless industry as a Network administrator. Our Training budget is fairly large for our 20 person department. On average, we can each take anywhere from 3 to 5 classes per year at about $2,500 a piece.
This does not include our company's tuition reimbursement program which allows us to take ANY class required to obtain a degree in our field (That includes the libral arts stuff) and pay for the tuition and the books. The only requirement is we have to stay at the company for one year afterwards and obtain at least a C.
On top of that, every department has online training available. For our department that includs all the CISCO courses to obtain both a CCNA and a CCNP, a Solaris certification, as well as several general Unix and programming courses.
Also, our company believes that books and magazines are an excellent way to learn. So, our company allows me to have subscriptions to several magazines including: SysAdmin, Linux Journal, Unix Journal, and even the Hacker Quarterly.
I guess because I work with a rapidly changing environment, we are constantly required to keep up to date. But at my last employer things were almost comparable. I guess that's why I've been with this company for as long as I have.
most people in universities are underpaid but this is the point at which we have that one great perk. All the free education we want typically at a nominal fee.
I can say that they budget less this year than they do last year, thanks to all the dot-bombs. Training seems to be viewed as a soft expense: one of the first to jettison when times start to look bad.
My practice sets a guideline budget for training. Not every practice in the company is like this, but it's our part of the company that does most of the technical development. So there is your first consideration: 1. If my job is to make sure the printers are always working, then maybe my employer doesn't feel obligated to pay for a J2SE class! The training has to have a clear ROI (return on investment) for the employer. Part of the ROI is that it makes the employee happy, and that should be taken into consideration by the employee. So once you decide you want training, your course should fit into the budget (which it almost alway does) and then you need to get it approved (which usually happens right away unless times are tight or it's near the end of a quarter). But you would be suprised what small percentage of people get around to going to training, and it is encouraged. Our practice even admitted that if everyone decided to go to training and spent the guidline amounts, we would not nearly have enough money. So they count on most people not going to training. There are lots of people that would bitch if the couldn't go, but then they won't go. As if it's just nice to know it's there! 2. Only a small percentage of people will take advantage of the training anyway. Additionally, I feel that if the training is to perform a function of your job and you don't currently possess those skills, your employer should train you or replace you (the training is cheaper). If you are trying to gain skills for your next position (inside or outside of the company) then more of the responsibilty should be on you! 3. You are responsible for your career, your employer is responsible for their company!
I probably have it the best of anyone I know. I work for a large university and besides getting tuition reimbursement up to six hours a semester and time off to attend classes, I am expected to attend any university provided classes that would help me in my job. This includes certified Microsoft training, UNIX admin training and talks from outside venders (Microsoft, Sun, HP, etc.). I can also take time to attend the various user group meeting on campus (Windows, UNIX, Linux, MAC, etc.). This is all outside my $6000/yr budget for myself and my assistant to attend training and tradeshows.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
A larger corporation would no doubt give me a significant reimbursement on a degreed program.
I guess it all comes out in the wash, though...shopping around for a small company afforded me the opportunity to command a higher salary and more responsibiliity for my current skills set than a larger company would have given me.
I just finished university, and I don't want to do anymore schooling...
I learn by example. Being a code monkey that is currently on the task of fixing bugs, I learn alot that way. This teaches me currently used, and accepted technologies (C++, COM, and multiple SQL DB languages)
New technologies are not always applicable to your work. What the heck are you going to do with *TECHNOLOGY Z* when you work with *TECHNOLOGY A*... they don't relate... Is my employer to educated me on something that is not relevant with their business?
My employer does spend money on training... but training is boring... I sat through a week of training, on how to use a source control program. I feel asleep in my chair... (thank God for high back chairs, that are ergonomically correct)... the training is so useful, that we as developers started to pick apart the program they were training us on...
Anyways... training is boring, unless you want to learn it yourself... What alot of places do, is allow you the employee a refund on courses you take. So say, if I wantted to take a Java course, I could go, pay for it, take it, pass it, and then the company would pay me back [if not all, most of the cost]. Therefore they know it's not wasted, and if I wantted to take it, not them forcing me too.
Money cannot buy happiness, but can buy something soo darn close, that you can't really tell the difference
How much training do I think should be provided? I think a reasonable amount is three or four 1-week corporate training seminars per year or two college courses (which financially usually work out about the same).
In my recent experience, however, companies have gotten pretty stingy when it comes to offering training. The preferred solution for the past few years at different places at which I've worked -- especially when a relatively new technology is involved in the project -- is to either hire consultants or outsource a project altogether rather than provide training to then internal employees.
One bit of advice: a major issue to consider when training is available is getting practical experience with the technology in which the course is being taken. Taking a five-day corporate course in any technology isn't going to make anyone an expert. My advice for those who want to learn a new language or tool is to make sure there's a project on which you can apply and experiment with your newfound skills. Otherwise, the new skills will likely fade away very quickly, and also certainly won't help your resume at all.
I can't say much for programmers, but from a System Engineer's point of view it's been like this. Every company I've ever worked at has taken the "extra effort on your own time" view. I've begged to go to Red Hat training, but for some reason employers just aren't willing to shell out the $5000 it's going to cost. Only the manager's "good ol' boy network" gets to go to training, and that's the ONLY for MS stuff. Like I care what Exchange 2000 has to offer. I can tell you right now without having heard the marketing spooge they call training....bloat.
This same employer would, however, pay for books. Then you had to keep them in the "company library" and check them out when you wanted to take them home and study. Since most of my books I keep around for reference I found it easier to just buy them on my own. Basically, you can't count on your employer for anything. I think this is the reason that IT has such a high turnaround - management generally doesn't have a clue as to how to treat us. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I haven't found any.
And as a plus, instead of training we can just 'borrow' code from Perlmonks anyway.. :)
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I dont think any of my past employers spent ANY money on education. They were happier just being clueless :)
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I work for EDS and I am part of a development program(just started a month ago fulltime)and there is tons of technical and bussiness training I MOST complete. As for normal employees any training they want is completely paid for IF they use the EDS Online University. They also are good at paying for parts of College education if needed. So EDS understands the need for education since everything is always changing. I guess that is why it is Second for IT companies. :)
CS majors, we are the geeks that run it all. Without us things die.
What annoys me about the companies I have worked for is that they make assumptions about the type of training that is good for you. I find reading aroung a subject myself the most effective training. Most employers want to pay someone to talk to you.
I worked for Verizon up until last year. In our business unit, management received a budget for training, but since their compensation included an incentive percentage designed to limit spending, no one was encouraged to pursue company-paid education.
My manager drove a BMW Z3. Guess how much training we received.
I'm THE network admin for a small (2 rural towns, approx 5,000 homes) cable TV company, but my manager really believes in keeping up with technology. I get conferences and semenars paid for, and get to go on company time as long as they are related to my work. College courses I do on my own time I have to get a passing grade (not that hard) and they will re-imburse me for it. ...mind you I'm a bit under paid for what I do, but that's life.
I've never been turned down for anything that I asked to do. (and we run on a very tight budget, with a minimal staff)
For the engineering side of the house, Earthlink has a $2400 per year budget for training to spend pretty much how you want (with in reason of course). Management gets angry when you do not spend your allotted training dollars. It is pretty cool.
When I worked for a federal agency they had a lot of programs, but the ones that included education during working hours were very competitive. Most education was on personal time, and reimbursement was tied to grades (100% for A, 75% for B, 50% for C). Degree programs required an employment commitment, but individual courses could be justified as job-related and not require a commitment. I got two masters degrees by getting each course approved on an individual basis.
At Zeta Associates where I work now, we can pay for training out of our individual benefits account (IBA) pre-tax (the ultimate cafeteria-type plan) and unspent funds roll over year to year. For training that benefits a project, we generally build it into the contract and it doesn't come out of the IBA. Sometimes the company will ask someone to take something in particular and pay. Blanket policy of paying for books and journals (our judgement on relevance). Also our responsibility to decide what we can do during the day as support to a project and what to do on our own time. Billable hours are a priority here--we work hard to keep overhead low, and staff charging to overhead hurts twice (increases indirect labor and decreases direct).
Bill Gates is a communist -- he's just more equal than the rest of us.
And what field of industry you're in.
As I work for a university, I automatically get tuition credits (work related or not), but I don't get allocated any extra time for those classes.
I automatically get 75% off any certificate class offered by the university, 100% if it's work related, but for those, I'm pushed out if a full paying student comes along.
Depending on what we need, as we're in Washington, DC, which has various classes going on all the time, I've gotten approval with two week's notice to go to off-site training, on the company's money, on the company's time. They don't pay me for the travel or lodging [it's all fairly local, even if I have to go up to Baltimore], but they'll cover the classes.
As we do have a fairly high turnover rate, they do wait 'till you've been there a while before they'll fork over the cash for the off-site training, however.
As for the book stuff, it all depends on what you're wanting. If we can directly relate it to a project that we're working on, then they'll pay for it, and we can read it during work hours. [However, with the amount of work that we do after hours, it doesn't even come close to making up for it]. Book reading is one of the main uses for public transportation.... If I were more sure about when I'd be going home at night, I'd take the metro every day, so I could get a little research done.
Unfortunately, for us, as we're short staffed to handle all of the emergencies that come up, there's no definate line between work time and home time, so that we can make deadlines and move machines around when we inconvenience the fewest people. We've got people who sit at home all night checking machines to make sure they're staying up, but still put in 6-8 hrs in the office on weekdays.
So well, it's a big tradeoff. You might want the education benefits, but what are you willing to give in return?
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Give me no less then 40 hours a year for a continued education.
----
Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
I am a contractor for a Fortune 500 company in the DC Metro area. I contract for a company called Sapphire, who offers .. well .. shitty web-based training. After fighting for better training for about a month, I realized the company doesn't give a fuck about the people it employs, it is just conserned about how much profit it makes.
FUCK YOU SAPPHIRE!
So as to how much money do they put into training, my guess is not very much.
--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
Previous employer: training but not certifications paid for. Only the "chosen few" (favorites of the boss) ever got to take any training or get to work on the high-profile projects, while the rest of us did the drek work to keep the place alive for never even as much as a "thanks, guys." Current employer: training and certifications paid for. Training is availabe on almost any (reasonable) subject, and may be taken during normal work hours when the workload permits. Now working as part of a team that views itself as a team and takes both credit (when available) and blame (when necessary) as a unit.
The problem with books is that they have a very steep learning curve, and piss-poor skill retention - this holds especially true for programming manuals. You read the book, do the examples, try things out as you go, but unless you're already at least familiar with the concept of what you're learning, you're going to be spending a lot of time flipping back and forth through the index.
Training, GOOD training, gives direction - it strings concepts together in a way that flows logically so that your brain can swallow it easier. And keep it down. Then, from that point, you can use your newly-found rudimentary understanding of the concept being learned and go hit a manual.
As a (non-self-employed) consultant, everything lives or dies based on billable hours. So for an employer to send me on a course entails:
(i) cost of the course -- usually into the thousands;
(ii) lost revenue for the length of the course when I could be on site being billed out at an exorbitant rate.
Given this, it's often difficult for an employer to justify sending me on a course. But ask them for books, and they're usually more than happy, especially if those books are leading up to certification exams. The more bits of paper I have, the more I can be charged out at. (Note: this is not intended to start a debate on the value of certifications, paper-CNE/MCSE, etc., etc. So if you're going to take it as an excuse for that, well, umm...I didn't do it!)
One of the more interesting policies I've come across was at the end of last year when I was interviewing for a new job with a number of different companies. I found one company which would have included a $5000 "education" stipend in my contract -- and that education could be anything, even if it wasn't job-related, and was over and above anything the company might spend to send me on what they perceived as necessary training. If I had taken the job, I could literally have spent that $5000 on flower-arranging courses and they wouldn't have grumbled.
It seems reasonable to me that any employer should be willing to buy self-training materials such as study guides and books; it can't help but increase knowledge and productivity. But there are far more ways of increasing knowledge than just the books. Example: the coffee lounge where the programmers gather to relax for half an hour and inevitably start talking about the project they're working on and how such-and-such a segment of code isn't working, and then someone else says why don't you try this, and presto it's fixed! Difficult to justify to an employer maybe, but invaluable as a learning resource.
I allocated 2 weeks worth of training per person. That is usually 2 - 1 week classes. Which ends up being about $6000 per person plus travel. The only deal I made with my guys is to try and take it some place close so the travel expenses don't kill me. But, if it's only held once a year or is something special (aka Upper Management is hot on it) I usually let them go. I also tell them to take it in either the spring or fall. There are too many vacation days that get taken over the summer and Christmas/New Years time.
Travel usually runs about $1200 for round trip and about $150 per night for lodging plus $40 per day food. Some times the numbers are lower, this is to pad for the times when they are a little higher.
When I was the CTO for the website of a large paper that's how much I spent on my staff. I wanted 8k, we settled at six. Obviously class costs vary, but I was estimating 2k/class and so wanted 4 a year and got approximately 3.
Then there were the books...
Ironically, my current employer doesn't even have a formal policy. I'd guess they spend on average about 3 or 4/k per person with a wide distribution.
My cat can eat a whole watermelon
I work for a tech support department in a small school district--mostly doing lotus notes and web work (perl, php). We get full college tuition reimbursement (must get at least a C), 1 week/year of other formal tech training, and the cost of as many certification tests as we want. For every certification test we take, we get a week off for study. Pretty good, as it's getting me through college with several certifications.
To answer your question my employer says a minimum
:-(
of two weeks a year of training.
I maintain the best way to spend the money is in
a good library. For the cost of a couple of courses
you can get a load of good books. If you employer
gives you the time to read them then your set.
If your employer is bothered by you spending half
a day, one day, reading a book, you need to find a
new employer.
Of course my current employer bought lots of great
book and then promptly locked them away, so they
would not be stolen.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
My company periodically decides to do a Dilbert-esque "training initiative" and sends people to week long courses aimed for audiences with no technical skills at all. It appears that the big IT education business has geared itself to the wannabe dot-com newcomers rather than to true professionals, and the quality of training has dropped below the point where anything useful ever comes out of it.
As this crowd well knows, any computer-related class worth taking is very expensive. I'm of the opinion that proper training pays for itself, but I'm also of the opinion that tech workers are some of the most disloyal employees on the planet.
They readily jump ship to the employer down the block for stock options. So, as the employer, what are you to do? Spend $20K-$50K per year training your employees, who simply plans to get as much experience and as many certifications out of you as they can so they can go job shopping with a resumé you paid for?
Contracts are a fair way of ensuring you at least get your money back from training classes. Say for every $1000 spent on training, the employee agrees to work for a month. If the employee chooses to break the contract, he will be financially liable to repay the company the remaining cost on his contract. This would also allow an ouside company to buy out an employee's contract if they *really* wanted him/her, without financially damaging the first employer.
Personally, I hate classes. You're always stuck at the absorption speed of the middle, and often low end, of the class learning curve. I'll take a well-written book anyday.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
The place where I currently work keeps allocating dollars for training, but refuses to actually spend any. They are always so proud because we are always in the CIO top 100 IT depts, but if you look really closely, we are the last in spending money on training. I think the average is $50 per person per year.
A lot of the comments here are shocking to me. It seems that most of the people here feel your lazy if you want to go to training and it's unfair for you as an employee to want to take paid time to train. I guess I'm pretty lucky. I work as a consultant for my company. At a consultancy, the only real asset the company has is the people. If all the people pick up and leave, the company has nothing. If all the people aren't well educated, then once again, the company has nothing. There are two sides to this. From a company's standpoint, it really is in their best interest to budget money and time for employees to take training. It costs a lot more money for a company to train an existing employee than it does to hire a new one when the existing disatisfied one leaves or when the existing (once again disatisfied) one can't do the job. It isn't complicated math. The education fights attrition by allowing employees to do more challenging work, thus keeping them happier and making them more valuable to the company. How long do you let hardware run without maintenace and upgrades? Not very long if you want it to be dependable when you need it. From the employees side, it is everyones best interest to be up on the latest. You want to be too valuable to fire and valuable enough to get a better gig if you want out. If the company won't pay for it, best you find a way to get it in. I personally do littly projects of my own just as an excuse to get a crack at stuff that interests me. Regardless of who's paying, it is in my best interest to know what's going on. However, if the company gives me time and money to pay for it, it gives me a lot less excuses. Sure, it's never a good time to take off time to go take a class. But it has to be done. If you have your eye on the long term viability of the company, it has to be done. Maybe these things are a little clearer at a company where the assets of the company do solely rely in the people (such as a consultancy). Maybe not.
I'm a director with an internet media company. We/I give a week or so of external training a year. This is paid for and can be real expensive stuff. (Oracle, Sybase, Sun, classes aren't cheap.) Books are always expensible, be it in a class or not. Internal training is usually less technical, but in-addition to external training. Travel is also included (hotel, airfare, meals, etc). Sometimes we trade-off some training for good conventions with or without conference sessions.
:-/
The tough part is getting staff to find these things and go to them. I usually have budget left over for beer.
As a self-taught professional programmer, I feel it is MY responsibility to keep up-to-date on the latest technologies. My labor is a commodity, and I try to provide the best product (me) for my customer (my employer) that I can. If the cost of using my labor goes up (because of training costs, etc.), my job security goes down. It's a competitive world, and I'm willing to do what I have to retain my position as a highly-valued (and valuable) asset. As such, I probably spend at least $100 a month on books and magazines, and I take the time (at home) to read and learn about new technologies.
My company aweseome with training (motive communications, www.motive.com).
We have a great internal training department with constant ongoing classes for our own software (new releases/detailed technical classes/overviews/etc) that we can schedule any time out to take.
We've also just sent some of our dude's to solaris training for a week.
We're not the gung ho "send EVERYONE to training for a month" type, but if you need to know something and don't, we just ask teh manager and he hooks us up.
There are two sides to this. From a company's standpoint, it really is in their best interest to budget money and time for employees to take training. It costs a lot more money for a company to train an existing employee than it does to hire a new one when the existing disatisfied one leaves or when the existing (once again disatisfied) one can't do the job. It isn't complicated math. The education fights attrition by allowing employees to do more challenging work, thus keeping them happier and making them more valuable to the company.
How long do you let hardware run without maintenace and upgrades? Not very long if you want it to be dependable when you need it. From the employees side, it is everyones best interest to be up on the latest. You want to be too valuable to fire and valuable enough to get a better gig if you want out. If the company won't pay for it, best you find a way to get it in. I personally do littly projects of my own just as an excuse to get a crack at stuff that interests me. Regardless of who's paying, it is in my best interest to know what's going on. However, if the company gives me time and money to pay for it, it gives me a lot less excuses.
Sure, it's never a good time to take off time to go take a class. But it has to be done. If you have your eye on the long term viability of the company, it has to be done. Maybe these things are a little clearer at a company where the assets of the company do solely rely in the people (such as a consultancy). Maybe not.
I have also attended classes where the instructor was really sharp, and went well beyond the printed material. This is what you hope for in training, but it only happens about a third of the time.
In defense of traditional training, I think some topics require a "hands-on" workshop approach, in which case the "give-me-a-book-and-leave-me-alone" approach won't work. Remember too, that some people learn best in a classroom/lecture environment, while others prefer to read manuals, and some need to be "hands on".
None of the training options work at all unless the knowledge is used and reinforced immediately after the training is finished.
I'd stick with what my company does: Any training theu pay for but you do in YOUR time - you get rewarded for passing. Any required training i.e. in specific technologies is done in work time, but stuff like Java certification, in my opinion, is for yourself and you should invest your time in it.
I just take my admin password and log into one of the many universities we host and silently observe/interact in an online course. Calculus one week, C# the other, Germanic History the next. So far I've increased my IQ by 30 points!!
But seriously, I lead the internal training department here at eCollege. We have an education budget - about $5000 per developer. We go to classes every 6 months or so on whatever technology fits our fancy - as long as it applies to our current system. But the best solution we've come up with is a two hour lecture every Friday lunch. We all meet to discuss and train on new technologies. Lunch is paid for by eCollege. Group interaction goes a long way. And we get to hear and become familiar with the many projects that are going on.
We also have agreements with some of the universities we host. If an employee sees an online course they would like to take, we normally get a huge discount from that university. Education is cheap if you're hosting the education - it's a pretty sweet deal.
Remember children - there are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
We are a $9 Billion dollar company which gets $5k per year. It used to be at my old company before we got bought out, that we'd get $500/year. However, this $500 dollars can't buy anything (not allowed for books). For instance, it is typically $1200 per credit hour for a college course and $1200+ dollars per day or week for a seminar. My boss and company views training as follows: 1) If we call in a company to give a product demo that we might purchase, it is considered training since we are seeing new technology. Just that the other company is paying to come to your site and the total cost to my boss is nothing, 2) That all training be via the company training department using CBT (a bunch of Powerpoint slides). The reason being that the training departments responsibility is putting together CBT training courses for customers on a contract basis. And when times are slow, they rely on the in-house employees for business. Most companies I've worked for do this since it keeps the corporate money in-house to pay another dept/division vs. an outside trainer; and it helps the training department get through the slow times waiting for a "paying" contract. Moreover, my boss' training budget -- and the part that is mine -- is docked X amount of dollars to pay our in-house training dept everytime I take a company CBT course. I've heard stories that the bosses review is based on how much money they have saved -- including training -- vs. other people on this site posting the opposite saying the boss gets a good review for training people.
Helping ones career? No! Companies I've worked with will tell you up front that if you get a MBA or a masters in a technical field that there will be NO automatic raise or promotion after completing the course. In fact, a condition of employment is that if you don't get your Technical masters degree within about 2-3 years of being hired, you'll be laid-off. The reason being is that when they compete for contracts, it makes them look more qualified since they can say we have X amount of BS', Y amount of Masters, and Z amount of PHd's. Hence if the number of the companies Masters degrees exceeds the number from another company competing on a contract, the company would be viewed [perception] as more qualified and thus more likely to win the contract. This means you stay employed!
Of course training must be after hours on your own time and expense (i.e. travel expense). You must get A, B, or C with a graduated scale of payback on these grades: any other grade they don't pay for. Tuition and books are paid for.
It does not vary from one employer to another. It's always "do it on your own read about the things you need to know in your own time. We might pay for the books you need though if it's not too much.". That's as far as the idea of staff development stretches in 99.99% of software shops.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Openwave (merger between phone.com and software.com) reimburses $7500/yr for relevant training in which you get a "B" or better. It's up to you to find the class you want to take and to get it approved, but my understanding is that most anything reasonable is given the go-ahead.
"there once was a big guy named lou
whose limericks would end at line two"
Where I work the programmers get four hours a week "personal development time". I'm using it to play about with Java and experiment a bit with stuff the company doesn't yet do, but could if the staff knew how to. It's usually the first thing to go out of the window when there's a deadline panic, but apart from that, it works well.
The answer is that "it's your career, not your bosses'".
I don't have a formal degree from any institution of higher education, but I've been fortunate enough over the past 23 years to learn and advance according to the amount of time and energy I've put into staying current.
When I first entered this industry in '78, there were no peecees, Unix was just beginning to emerge, and there was barely an ARPANET at that time. I cut my teeth on mainframes, and I really had to push to demonstrate that there is never anything like a "one size fits all" solution to the range of business and systems problems that I've been asked to solve over the last couple of decades.
In the time since, very few of my employers have been willing to send me to school (formal or otherwise) -- it would have taken me off of coding or other tasks, and the one constant in the IT business is that you're always behind schedule. That 'real-world' aspect never changes.
I have always found a way -- most of the time on my own time -- to investigate, experiment, and learn about new and emerging technologies. Sometimes I've been able to suggest and even apply this "new stuff" in production projects, and -- of course -- I usually come out looking like a genius, when all I really did was borrow from the experiences of others.
Yeah, staying current takes a lot of my personal time and effort; but it's worth it over the long haul. I consider it a personal investment to my own career (which hasn't worked out all that badly!). Had I waited for one of my employers to send me to school, I'd probably still be coding "file-in, file-out" programs in COBOL. (Ugh.)
As far as being individually motivated, that's the best advice I can give people. When it comes down to "hey boss, I need 8 more coders just like me to get this done", it's a little bit harder to find those people. Sometimes the answer is for Mr. Bossman to cough up those bucks, and sometimes it's in hanging around the water cooler long enough to find those people like yourself -- internally motivated.
It's tough ... hang in there!
------ Give a man a flame, keep him warm for a night. Set a man on fire, heat him up for life.
Although a good idea, the amount is waay too small. IMHO, for =ANY= profession, employers would actually profit if their workers had their time per week split 3:1 working to training.
(That would mean 10+ hours per week, learning new stuff. I honestly don't believe that any less than that is of any real value. Learning for show might look good on the budget sheet, but it dies sod all for improving productivity, understanding, quality, or ability.)
I also believe that learning in a narrow field is unhelpful. Many useful refinements in fields come from borrowing ideas from elsewhere. Thus, I also believe that of those 10 hours, a maximum of 5 should be spent on "directly relevent" topics.
(A totally off-the-wall example: Let's say a brick-builder spent a couple of hours a week learning ballet. It's not directly "job related", until you realise how much of construction work is about precision, timing and balance - the three things that define ballet.)
Let's say that a typical entry-level job is 52K (nice easy number!), then you're looking at 13K for training a year. To be economical, the company would have to be sure that they were gaining more than 13K per employee per year in additional profit.
Let's see if this would be true. Well, it's difficult to compute the exact numbers, even if there was a useful case to use. But can we make some kind of educated guess as to what would be affected?
Yes. The first thing that would be affected is morale. Giving someone free education in any field they like, plus (effectively) one and a bit day's holiday per week, paid, is going to improve morale. And good morale means more initiative, greater "energy", and greater desire to get the work done.
The second thing that would be affected is injury and sickness. Most injuries and sickness are, in part, stress-related. Stressed people are less careful, and have weakened immunity. This leads to accidents and/or illness. By reducing stress, you reduce lost time. Reducing lost time saves money, improves turnaround, and (indirectly) therefore improves customer relations, which (even more indirectly) may improve future work orders.
Third, a knowledgable workforce reduces the need for management. Managers are great for coordination, but once the workforce is largely self-coordinating, managers become overhead. Since managers cost more than workers, reducing their numbers is definitely profitable, provided the workforce -is- able to do the work effectively without them.
Lastly, a knowledgable workforce is an innovative workforce. That means that if company A fails to deliver widget B on time, company C can still do work, without being held up. Some worker might even discover widget B can be replaced just as well by a chocolate chip cookie, thus allowing the work to be finished on time, regardless of A, AND for less money, AND with the possibility of sponsorship from a chocolate chip cookie company.
A sufficiently trained workforce in California, for example, would not be impaired by the rolling black-outs. By now, they'd have built their own geothermal power system, plus solar power system, plus wave power system, got the company working at 120% efficiency from the surplus power, slashed the electric bill to zero, and made a fortune selling extra power to the powr companies.
The fact is, an uninformed workforce is a dead workforce. Sooner or later, their conventional, stagnant knowledge pool will fail them, and the company will suffer devastating consequences. California is a good example, precicely because there IS still a problem. The workers there just don't have enough skills, enough initiative and enough clout, to resolve it. If they did, they would have. Since they haven't, they don't.
$13K-$20K per year, per employee, on a varied educational diet, I believe is certainly recoupable, in one way or another, by the various mainstream, unusual and extreme savings that the company would make. Further, it would lead to a workforce with an incentive to stay, which leads to its own savings (training, loss of information to competitors, etc)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, our policy is: -Training is done on your own time, with your own money -The store will reimburse you for the cost of the EXAMS at the end of the course. Naturally, this is the case for ONLY those courses that benefit the company.
If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
I work at a 400-strong hardware and software company. We are required to undergo 40 hrs of training on company time.
Sounds good, untill you learn that about 12-15 hrs of it will get sucked up by "training" that amounts to nothing more than company propaganda & brainwashing, touchy-feely & get in-touch-with-your-personality type sessions.
What a waste of time. I made a big stink last year because when they made it "official" that everyone had to have 40 hrs of training, that meant they had a big system in place for tracking what training you have done. So what if you read a book, the time-honored way or learning new material? I made a stink and I can now get an 8 hr credit for reading (by my own word) a technical book.
What's the point? Our company does do training, but we have too many HR-types managing the system for it to be truely effecient worthwhile.
---------------------------
That's not what I meant.
Where I work (in the corporate H.Q. of a commercial metal heat-treater with 7 locations), our I.T. department consists of 5 people (including our boss). Our company has around 400 employees, total - to put things in perspective. We go back and forth on the training issue constantly. We don't have "budgets" for anything. The annual raises are pretty much determined by the owner of the company, who dictates to the heads of depts. what maximum percentage they can dole out to their people. Training and other departmental expenses are approved by dept. managers, who can use their own best judgement.
In I.T., what usually happens is the "yo-yo" effect. We complain for a while that we want more training, and management eventually agrees that it's a reasonable request. Then we get to go to a 3-day or a 1-week class on something. After that, they mumble something about considering a policy of attending 2 training courses per year, per I.T. person. Then it falls to the wayside as soon as big projects come up that require our time. Wait 1+ years and repeat cycle.
I work for a company that produces movie trailers and we have a program (we are based in Los Angeles) callet ETP which is funded by the State Governement that provides money for education in companys that are helping out the economy. Sort of you help us we are going to help you situation. They need new blood so they pay for most of the cost of training. As far as my company personally they don't have a budget, if its needed we can afford it.
My little Universe is cool for the people who can fit inside it (being 250 6'4" there aren't that many who can)
And for some probably unrelated reason our training budget is inversely proportional to our turnover, which was 100% for the same period. Well, not quite 100% yet, but it will be as soon as I get done cleaning up the Word document I've got open right now.
Of course our company has a strict promote from within policy so if we don't train our people, we would quickly become irrelevant. Personally I think it is a very reasonable amount for the company to budget for. Any company that doesn't pay for relevant training for it's people is deeply foolish. No one is hired into a job knowing everything they need to know. And what you need to know changes over time. If the company doesn't provide you the opportunity to update your skillset, they are simply going to slowly suffocate because their employees will slowly become second rate. Doesn't matter what industry you are in, and it doesn't matter what job you do. Everyone needs training after they are hired. It's a simple fact.
I know several people who work at companies and receive a LOT of support for education (including off-site training, internal labs, books, exams, etc). This is obviously a large investment for these companies so the enforce some restrictions: if an employee quits (not sure how it works if they're fired), they may be asked (not forced) to pay for any training they've received in the last 24 months. My feeling is this system makes sense. We can't assume our employers will throw money at us for training without some argument for payback (it's an investment, not charity). If you feel training should be a perk, argue for it at contract time, otherwise understand it's an investment a company makes.
kill_9_1
Yeah, exactly... My boss is a big proponent of just buying a book and self-teaching on a subject, as opposed to blowing $'s on a class. But that's a bad deal for the employee, because you end up having to cut into your own personal free-time to learn. Sure, he might pop for the $40 for the book, but try reading it and doing the exercises in it during work hours and see how quickly you get reprimanded. The cost of the book is nothing compared to your personal time you have to invest to get something out of it.
Going to a training class forces your company to make the time committment to your learning.
Code reviews are a terrible practice. They either turn into a week of web surfing and at the end everybody says all of the code is perfect or what's worse they are taken seriously and turn into a morale killer. People don't like having their competence questioned. Even if they are fairly junior they like to think their work is up to scratch. Senior people don't like being questioned about their particular programming style: they know they have a number of successful projects already behind them and don't want to be questioned on how they perform the work. If it does the job and is maintainable it should be good enough. Code reviews almost always end up turning into personal attacks. It's a sneaky management ploy to turn developers against one another. They cause harm, quarrel amongst seniors and intimidation for juniors. THEY SUCK!!!!!!
How to avoid the problems of lack of code reviews? Number one is have good comprehensive unit tests. They tell you a lot more about code's correctness than any amount of code reviews you can think of. Pair programming eliminates the issue of "lonely wolves" where individual programmers hoard a piece of application and don't let anyone else near it. These two suggestions are the fundamental blocks of extreme programming.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I've worked for small companies, and have been able to get about $500 for a class, but only if it is directly related to an assignment Ive been given...on the other hand, I now work for one of the largest telecom companies in the US (rhymes with horizon)...basically, ongoing education is unlimited to all employees, as long as it is work related. Anything not work related, I think it's 5,000 a year. "Work Related" means anything in telecom, pcs, etc. I'm getting my degree, all on this company. Very cool. They also pay for certifications (classes & tests), and general knowledge classes (how to build a pc)
Winter is Coming.
- The training is paid for
- Other expenses (travel, food, lodging) are paid for
- We get normal pay for the time.
A pretty sweet deal, me thinks. It's nice also that it's done by # days, rather than cost, etc.Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
I earn my living with Perl, Apache, Linux, and security. Total formal training in those areas: nil. What I spend my evenings and weekends doing: at present, I'm reading:
Three guesses which type of education has been the most valuable to me.
My current employer has been maknig vague hand-waving promises of "training" ever since I started, nine months ago; I've given up trying to get anything from them. But now I'm wondering whether that's such a big deal. Can you really learn more in (say) a week's formal classroom training, than in the same length of time spread over several months , albeit in `real life'? And isn't the value of stuff you're motivated enough to learn yourself greater than some tedious classroom, which (as I recall from those days I actually got sent on real courses) are invariably on non-free, proprietary garbage, which will be redundant within a couple of years anyway? (Perhaps it's just the courses I've been sent on...)
Seriously though, isn't this what *everyone* has to do? Even if you have a stunning academic record, new stuff will always come along and need to be absorbed (even if you're in an area where the basic principles change only very slowly - say, database design.)
Ob self-promotion... if anyone's hiring in London, UK, mail me at the address above... I wouldn't say no to getting a bit of my life back, one day.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I was/am the first full time IT person at my office. One of our offices in another city hired a full time person at about the same time. Together we made a good case for training and were quickly sent off to Cisco and NT (yeah, I know, but it pays the bills) school. As soon as we had certs in hand, the guy in the other office left for another job that paid 20K more a year (I stayed and got a fat raise as management was afraid I'd leave to). He just took the training and ran. The firm was new to this and had no recourse. Soon after this debacle, our HR director asked me to sign an agreement that stated I would pay back the cost of my training if I left within 3 years. I refused to sign because the total training was about 15K and if a sweet offer came by I didn't want to be held hostage here. That was three years ago and I have had zero training since. I'm beginning to see training as an important part of my compensation and benefits package. Now that the economy has cooled and people aren't job hopping for the quick buck, I'm working on getting my employer to at least do tuition reimbursement. I learn the most/best on my own, but there are times when having a guru to answer questions cannot be replaced. If it's important to you, keep training in mind when negotiating/renegotiating your contract. I would actually take a little less of a raise in exchange for some good training, as I know it will pay off in the long run.
Here is how my company works: The manager of each department gets a training budget for that whole department. It's a non-rolling over amount each year, based upon the number of people in that department. The manager of that department is free to use that money however he/she wants during the year. I believe it averages out to somewhere around 6k per person. Some managers (especially in operations, where people have very structured work hours) schedule classes to come to the office, or send large groups of employees out to a class together. My manager basically lets us take whatever we want, whenever we want. About 8 months ago he dropped $8k for me to take a 4 pack of weeklong classes. But he made me promise that I was done with training for a while after that. :)
My company also has a very formal tuition reimbursement program. If you are taking college classes they'll pay 80% of tuition/books/etc. for every class you get a 'C' or better in. I don't believe there's any kind of annual limit on that or anything either. And it doesn't have to be at all related to your job. I'm a network design engineer, and I'm currently about halfway done with my Bachelor's in English, all on the company dime.
I work for Purdue University and they happily provide opportunities to advance learning. This includes opportunities for seminars, classes, and a special IST program. Class time is during working hours up to two a day if the class is work related. Othewise the time must be made up. The IST program is incredible. As an employee, I take a concentrated (~two week) course presented by a professor and have no future obligations as a result of advanced classes (initial, 15-credit semester requires 2 year commitment). Further, credit hours are included, and there is not cost to me. In roughly two years I've completed 27 credit hours over 3 semesters, all while receiving full salary.
In Quebec, which is fairly social-democrat compared to the rest of North America, by law an employer must spend an amount corresponding to at least 5% of the salaries budget on employee training and education. This applies to any company with at least a certain number of employees (I believe the threshold is something like 10 or 20). This helps companies realize that there are benefits to letting your employees learn more. Many companies in the high tech business end up spending much more than that. For instance, it's funny to see how many people speak Canadian French at SIGGRAPH.
2. Large Canadian Telecom/network equipment manufacturer. 2 classes per annum. Manager apporval required. The fuck heads laid me (and 30,000 other people) off, and arent' making a lot of money right now, so this program may have been frozen.
3. Small Bio-Tech firm. We have a small IT staff (15 people). Two classes per annum. Manager appoval.
In every case, the money is budgeted to the manager for his/her people. VP apporval is for cash-strapped companies, or pussy managers that can't say "no". Books were also something you just needed to ask for. Most of the time, you don't even need to ask. $50 a month on books is no big deal.
Definately look at this when evaluating a potential employer. Training for us IT people is important both for learning, and for resume building. And hey, if you can get that CCNE or MCSE on the company's nickle, all the better.
- Dan I.
I have done a reasonable amount of training which has been supported by my employers. I have taken project management classes from the University of Toronto, paid by my then employer, which were "for credit". And when I was an employee of Sun Microsystems, I took courses from their SunU - no external credit recognized. Of course I have also had books paid for, etc.
There are advantages and disadvantages to all the different modes of training and learning. Getting books is good from the perspective of time and cost, and sometimes learning effectiveness. Going to a seminar or formal classroom environment is good because of the interactivity and the (human) networking that can be done. Different methods are appropriate to different people with different learning styles.
However, in all cases, the training is in one "direction" only: the employee gains knowledge and noone else does. In other words, the money an employer spends on training an employee is tied up in that employee's head. Unless _extraordinary_ efforts are made to have that employee "share", which is usually done with some form of company show-and-tell session (read: expensive).
Because of this experience, and my generally strong interest in education, I have been working on a knowledge-sharing educational system called Oomind. The basic idea is that a company can set this up so that employees can learn, are motivated to share their knowledge, and can use their critical thinking skills to determine the worth of knowledge.
This system will (doesn't yet) allow a company to train people, track that training, share knowledge in a repository (so that other employees can access it), and have a permanent record of "credit" so that when/if an employee leaves, they have something to show for their training.
And of course, Oomind is meant to be the best place to learn on the Internet. It's still very new so there isn't much content - feel free to register and contribute. Its kinda like nupedia, except tied into a truly open editorial process and more importantly tied in to an educational system!
http://www.oomind.com/
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Also, if we spend the money on CBTs or certifications, we have to have the certification by the end of the financial year that the money was alloted for. But this is a reasonable request.
We try to use all our education money because if we don't, they may think we don't need all of it and cut back. Our company is very focused on continuing education.
The question is not on whose time you get trained (company's or your own). The question is: Can you afford to not be trained at all? If your employer is not willing to give you the time necessary for staying current, then hell do it on your own time. Otherwise you'll be without a job in two to three years!
Subsequently, I wouldn't feel bad about taking my toolbox somewhere else to use it. Maybe I would feel differently if they would help me out, but, hey...at least I am skilled in Managing From The Heart (yes, that's really one of the classes required).
We lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
On the average we find $2000 and about a week usually does the job. This allows them to attend one major conference a year or attend a week long training class for the newer members. Proper budgeting allows newer members two weeks of training for $2000. We find that we get a very good return on the investment.
The senior members that attend the conferences share their experiences with the team and usually focus on those seminars that are valuable to the team. When they return we all benefit from the experience as they share the knowledge.
No Zen is good zen
My company bought me an unlimitied SUNKEY, and a 16 day M$ xchange bootcamp. You are so very right, without training on new tech a staff grows stale and often the best leave to pursue newer more challenging (read better paying) jobs.
Although I think a GOOD network tech is worth his/her weight in GOLD.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
So I'm in a situation where the company is willing to pay thousands for training, but not the couple of hundred bucks it would cost to get me there :-(
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Frankly I wish I had a mandatory training requirement (I work for an ISP) to keep my technical skills up. But I am getting some training ad hoc.
sulli
RTFJ.
There are formal justification processes, and you are most likely to get approval if it's relevant to a current or future project. But if you're persuasive enough, it can be done. This is in stark contrast to my former employer (ironically, a contract IT provider) who basically gave us CBTs and refused any requests for books, training, etc.
DEC (in the "good ol' days") used to offer a couple of similar programs: GEEP (Graduate Engineering Education Program) and GEM (Graduate Education in Manufacturing). That benefit was really good: full tuition and full salary, while you attend grad school full-time. The only hitch was it was only offered to select employees, and the application process was fairly grueling, IIRC.
The problem with these programs was that a number of employees left almost right after getting the degrees that they earned entirely on company time, and for which the company got little -- if any -- payback. I remember one colleague who told me that she was planning to leave once she got her Master's (which was funded through this program), because she felt she could get more money once she left, and didn't feel she owed anything to the company.
Now, that was one of the more blatant examples of abuse that I saw, but I heard of more cases where graduates of these programs simply got their old jobs back once they had finished, rather than be given something more advanced and more in line with what they supposedly learned while in school. And that was just stupid on the part of their managers. In those cases, the employees simply got bored with their work after a short time and left. And in those cases, I don't fault those employees, since they were theoretically qualified for better work, which they weren't going to get.
What people don't realize is that company-sponsered education carries some "obligations" (for lack of a better word) for both sides. The employee has to at least try to make use of that training to help the employer in some way, and the manager should (by virtue of spending company money for the training) see that their employees are in a position to use what they've learned. Otherwise, it's just a waste of money and time for everyone involved, and over time won't be offered at all.
I work for a startup - if you don't know your stuff you are on the sidewalk. If you need to learn new stuff, you just do it. We have no budget for anything of the sort, besides that, I think self-motivators are what we look for. There's never a problem getting hardware or software to work with - that is a good thing.
Curiousity is what got me into IT. Curiousity is what keeps me in IT. As long as there are new and better ways to do things, I will want learn how to make these processes tick. I will do it whether I'm working for someone or not because I'm curiousity-driven. If something comes up that I just can't for the life of me wrap my brain around, I look for someone who has. About 99% of the time that information is buried somewhere on our lovely little Internet.
I'm not saying training is for wimps (really, I'm not) - hell, if your company is willing to shell out the big bucks for ya, go for it - but I do believe that self teaching in a hands on environment is where hardcore memory retention occurs. And if I can't remember it, I haven't learned it :)
-= jester =-
I work at Boeing, and one of the wonderful advantages here is that they will pay 100% of your tuition while you are employed. Yes, all of it. Every single penny. If it is in the least amount "job related" (which your manager decides) then the reinbursement is tax free. If not, its taxed at 42% I believe.
off to get two bytes of 0xF00D
Why the heck even bother with legislation?
If training is a Good, then businesses that employ it will prosper, and businesses that don't will die. That's free market economy in action. It doesn't need to be legislated. If some boss wants to be stupid, let him.
I have zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies.
Constitutionally Correct
As you know, there is a wide range of Ask Slashdots about every kind of technical question, from graphics to routing to site design to continuing education, with hundreds of well-informed users commenting on virtually every subject.
Best of all, it's free! Just make sure to buy some VALinux servers to keep Slashdot well-funded.
I feel really saturated with what I know regarding my job. It's just a simple sysadmin/netadmin combo that a lot of us have: Admin some linux servers, set up frame relay PVCs, and... well, that's about it. I remember my first assignment: set up an SSL web server. That took me about 4 months. Two years later, I find it taking about 90 seconds. Problem is, I'm still doing the same old things. I think that perhaps many companies have zero incentive to force their employees to learn, because the more marketable they become, the more likely they are to leave.
The point that I was going to make, though, is that it seems when I REALLY learn something, it's due to my breaking something that was working. Nothing gets you in a learning mood more than having your job at risk. (Well, at least thinking your job is at risk... I'd bet a company overlooks a certain number mistakes if you agree to work for a low enough income). Hey wait, did I just call myself mediocre? Heh.. maybe. I AM posting during work. But who isnt?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
They expect that you will have approx. 8 hours of training per month on company time. They also supply $2500 USD for training that isn't related to the work you do per year. This money can be spent however you like, as long as it is towards a degree or can loosely be described as being useful in your job. You do have to get a B or better however.
If the training is work related, you can usually take work time and have the company pay for the class and materials as well as reasonable travel costs. This is for ALL professional employees, not just IT.
In my opinion, this works out quite well. Training options are only limited by your own motivation. I don't know if the training time is 'required' since I never have had trouble spending time in training.
All that said, I do my best learning self-paced and self-taught. However, frequently I am able to get a good jump on the learning by taking a day or two of class or by buying a book. Also, it doen't look as official on a resume to say that you taught yourself. Universities may not be the best place to learn, but they do have official-looking pieces of paper to give you when you're done. :-)
Officially, we get tuition reimbursement for any job-related classes we take outside of work, if we earn a grade of B or better. I have heard of some companies, particularly large ones with deep pockets, which have much more aggressive educational programs, including reduced hours with reduced pay but with full tuition reimbursement and full benefits. I have also heard of some companies, particularly small ones with tight pockets, which have no educational programs, although small companies have more room for negotiations.
Unofficially, no one at our office takes advantage of any educational program. The most useful educational program we have is purchasing tech reference manuals, tutorials, etc. When we get a new technical challenge, we are thrown in sink-or-swim, using these books as life-vests to stay afloat. This really is not a problem with a solid background in Computer Science / Software Engineering / Information Technology. The same concepts and theory keep coming around in different systems. That is, provided you have a solid background, which is worth the investment to obtain from a formal education.
I'm in the web development field, and the company I work for covers most of my training needs. Most of the stuff I do is either from books or web sites, but anything I need purchased they buy for me, and they pay me for the hours I spend learning it. They even pay me for the hours I spend at home learning._ ________________
______________________________________
All circuits busy.
At my company, we have a group of people that are elected to a Technical Ladder. This ladder theoretically means that these people are competent in their field and have shown that they are leaders. Now a side-effect of this ladder is that the members are expected to give "Brown Bag" sessions during their lunch hours. At my company the brown bags are held in an auditorium we have here on campus, and this auditorium doesn't allow food or drink. So the "Brown Bag" is essentially a mini-training class that you have to skip lunch to go to...Preparation for the "Brown Bags" are not placed in the schedule, so the engineer that is giving the class has to prepare for it outside of work.
As you can imagine, there aren't alot of these sessions...
Now the good news on this end is that management is beginning to see the need for REAL training and is also understanding that Brown Bags should be given a bit more leeway in the schedule...but this has been a painful process and we are still taking baby steps...
Anyway...thats my experience...
United Technologies pays 100% for all courses at accredited institutions. Including books, etc.
If the courses are job related, you get some time off from work to take them.
For any degree (associated, Bachelors, masters, PhD) they give you 100 shares of stock. Free.
AND, no commitment or requirement to stay for 5 years. No lock-in.
Cool. I did it, and so should you.
On the same note, I get tired of people pressuring me to impart my knowledge onto them. It just doesn't work that way. I learned the hard way. They need to as well. Any good tech/programmer I know spends a good portion of his or her free time messing with computers or writting software on the side. Training? Whats that?
To respond to the post, I would like to say that an employer should at least consider reimbursing an employee for their own initiative. But I don't think every little certification should be reimbursed. Employees should be encouraged to get real education. Like a university class in data structures. Far too many people will leech off of a company to get a zillion certifications just to put it on his/her resume for the next job.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
After reading this article, I realized that I had no idea what my budget was for training. It was just ask and ye shall recieve. So I asked. Turns out, there isn't one. My entire IT budget is a bit of a slush fund. I work for the parent company with 6 subsidiaries. Each child company sets aside about 50,000 a year and my training, expenses, activities, purchases, whatever just gets pulled from whoever's budget it benifits the most. This makes for a 300,000 dollar a year budget! On top of that, my paycheck comes out of the operations budget for the parent company and is seperated from the above mentioned amount. So this now presents the question, am I working for the mafia?
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Launch all sig
I'm now a consultant, so I can't really bill the clients for keeping current. However, the company I consult for does provide for money and some time (not nearly 10% per year) for classes and education.
Having said all that, I do bill the clients for the time they expect me to spend learning a new technology, and that's reasonable.
I assume you're not an independent contractor, but rather an employee for a company that contracts you as a consultant. If you were trying to pose as an independent contractor, and the IRS found out that you had received education from your customer (much less billed them for it!!!), then they would declare the customer to be your employer and you to be their employee. I'm sorry that I don't have time to find you the relevant IRS document, but it's somewhere at their web site:
An independent contractor must not include education hours as billable hours. If you take on a large project that you know will require you to undergo additional training, then you must write a contract that anticipates that expense and accounts for it, not as an itemized expense on your bill, but rather as a sort of hidden cost that lurks in the big cloud that includes your profit.My experiences:
:)
When I worked for a consulting house, they needed people to be certified so they could carry the products. As such they worked with the vendor they were trying to resell for to get the techs discounted/free training.
This worked out really well for some stuff, like the sun training.
Certifications were put as career goals, and incentives were offered to the employees. Things such as raises, nice dinner for getting certs were common.
They had a policy for testing for the certs, that they would pay for the test too.
Also, on certs where the vendor would not offer discount courses, or where you knew the material, it was encouraged to study for the test, and take the test without the courses. This worked out pretty well too
The next place I went to, another consulting shop, claimed to be really strong on training, but you could never go while on assignment as then you would not be billable. They would only pay for tests if you passed them.
The last few places have been pretty much the same:
Study on your own time.
Take the test,
If you pass, they will re-imburse you.
Some places will offer to buy the training materials, but usually I buy them and keep them around for reference.
-- C
When I get a years pay in escro against the possiblility of layoffs, I'll start thinking about company loyalty.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I work in local government and in the two different departments of county government I've been in the difference has been like night and day. The first department was the local county hospital district and their policy was to avoid the discussion, thought, or inference of providing any training to anyone like the the plague. The CIO there felt that if he provided training to his IT people they would jump ship in a minute for better paying positions elsewhere. In reality the turnover rate was very high as most of my coworkers (an myself) left for departments or private sector jobs that would provide training. I went then to the engineering department of the same county and here we have a fairly generous budget for training (averaging around $5,000 per emplyoyee per year)by local government standards and in the last three years I've been over here not one employee has left the IT group for greener pastures. I've turned down two jobs paying almost 10k more per year because it's a good place to work and I get to stay current on the software/hardware. What's not to like?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Which is worse: to lose a trained employee, or keep an untrained worker?
--Any sufficiently reliable magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I work for Gap Inc. in the Old Navy Marketing department as the Network Manager. I'm using primarily Apple equipment. Gap's stand on education varies from department to department so I can only give you info about mine. I have $3000/quarter to use for seminars, training classes and certification courses. If the classes cost more, I have to come up with the remainder. But as far as books are concerned, I can pretty much buy anything I see justifiable. As far as taking the classes or learning new things, Gap would rather me do it on their time than on my own. ie in the next month I'll be taking Apple iServices Certification courses. While I'm at these courses, Gap hires a contractor to do my work while I'm away. Not a bad setup. I think it's more than fair.
I had this very discussion yesterday with my supervisor. We have $2000 budgeted per year per person, but it doesn't carry over from year to year. You can use company time, and travel is paid for, but it has to come out of the same $2000. Our fiscal year ends on 7/31, so anything not spent as of then turns into a pumpkin at midnight. I've got a brand-new co-worker here who's just got his bearings in the company, and would like to take a A+ prep course this coming month. Since the guy's short on knowledge, it seems like a good starting point for him. At $1500, it sounds like the best thing we're going to find before the deadline. My supervisor doesn't want to approve it because "it's $1500 and it's so late in the year". What, does the amount of money available to us decrease in proportion to the amount of time left??? Where is *this* written in the policy??? The kid just started in March, he didn't have 12 months to spend this money! Of course, he's perfectly willing to send him to $120 worthless Holiday Inn seminar. Those things aren't worth the time out of the office. Our folks need technical training, not Effective Business Meetings or whatever they're offering this month. So the time and money allocated, whatever it may be, is in some ways less important than the policy and most of all, the people who excute it.
Extrapolating from my salary, guessing that others are paid similarly, and knowing what we had budgeted last year for edu and for books, my employer budgets 1.5% of salary for education.
my employer is a large department in a medical school in a well-off private university.
HTH
Yes, I do work for a company that contracts me out.
But thanks for giving the rest of us a heads-up. Geez, the tax code is complex.
My company does industrial control system both hardware and software. Our policy concerning continuing education is that we will pay for classes related to the employees job description and if the employee receives an A or B then it will be 100% covered, a C grade will earn the employee 50% coverage. A D, F or if the employee leaves before the class is finnished and the cost will be deducted from their pay.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
The biggest problem where I work is that they are trying to completely eradicate overhead charges. Each expense (billed time) must be tied directly to a contractural requirement. What this means in practice is that there is no allowance for training or configuration managment implementation. At the same time we developers are expected to remain proficient and implement company (corporate) mandated configuration standards(CMM) qualifications.
One recent example of this stupidity at work:
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
There's a catch, though. Whenever you submit the request form for a class (which are generally automatically approved), you sign a contract saying that you'll pay back your education costs if you leave the company within a year of the date on the check. It's not cumulative, so if you take a bunch of classes over 6 months you only need to work a year after the last one is payed for, but it's incentive to not go out and get a CCNA or something just so you can get a better job elsewhere :)
-Jade E.
Since I run my own company, I guess I should answer this. The training budget is actually small and is allocated on a department level with a common fund the the department manager can authorize. However I am a little more flexible on time. Typically we allocate 8 weeks/yearly for training time. Most of this training is spent in review, self-taught, or in-house training.
I've come up as a hat-wearing tech. DBA, Sys Admin, networking, etc, etc, etc. And one of the things that always frustrated me was the constant 80 hours a week with little downtime to learn technology. I learned as I went, but am unhappy with that as you never know what holes are missing in your education.
So I offer a lot of education, or at least try to. Of course some out there are thinking, WTF you'll train your people and then lose them. Actually, this happens a lot less than you might expect. I try to hire hackers that are primarily interested in playing with their toys. If I can make sure that they are fed, have time to work on their own projects, and have money to pay their bills most are happy enough to stick around. What I don't pay in cash, I try to make up for in benefits. I look at the education as a retention tool rather than as a loss. If everyone else offered the same training that I do, I wouldn't be able to retain the staff I have.
For the past 6 months the company has had a rough spot, I've had to lay off a lot of the people working for me and they went on to get higher paying jobs then they did while working for me. The interesting thing is, that most of them call or email at least once a month asking if the company can afford to hire them back at their old salaries. Since my primary goal is creating company loyalty, I take this to mean that my efforts in this area are succeeding.
To wrap up,
Training is used at my company as a retention method.
A limited training budget is available, but most training is done by peer support and book learning.
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
I think companies - especially ones that do development - should allow for training, but be flexible enough to provide the right kind of training based on the individuals learning style. Whether it be reading books, conferences, classrooms, web-based or simply writing code.
My company spends about $4000/employee/year. We're a rather small consulting company. They seem to think that this is nessecary to keep our skills up to date so that we can be "sold" to those who need them.
These $4k are we free to spend as we see fit (as long as it has some relevance to what we do for a living) and should we need specific knowledge for a task we get extra funding for this.
I think that this is one of the best ways to keep your employees happy.
<management mode> It's a win-win situation. </management mode>
You increse the value of your employees and keep them happy at the same time.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
- 1.) Let the employees buy books and study them
- 2.) Send the employees for training
- 3.) Have trainers come in
- 4.) Ignore training
Option 1 is very effective and inexpensive. The employee learns at his/her own rate, on his/her own time. They also get a nifty book to keep after training.Option 2 is very expensive. Airline tickets, time away from work...
Option 3 is less expensive, but still, sitting in a class learning at the rate of the slowest person is not very effective. There is the benefit of access to the interactive experience of the trainer. (if the trainer actualy has any real experience)
Option 4 is very bad and is employee abuse.
Thus at our company we have a very liberal book policy and it is very effective! Out policy is... You want a book, ask me and I'll say OK, and then go buy it (with company discount card number) and expense it. Books are freely traded around the company and there is no library or check-out of books. If you can't get ahold of me just buy the book anyways." (Actualy there is a library, its in a big box in my office.)
rkeene@icentris.com
We started a new policy - every year, we purchase about 15 days worth of training vouchers from a good, local training firm for each person on the team. Every person on the team is guaranteed 15 days training per year, as long at it's somewhat, sorta relevant to what we do in general, not necessarily specific to a project. Oh, and we also get a $2000 tuition reimbursement, above and beyond the vouchers, for any class taken anywhere with a B or better grade.
meh.
You can often times get entire degrees during work hours, or at least mostly paid for by work. There is nothing wrong with gaining a masters degree or retaking the newest cutting edge technology course for $200 bucks, leaving work when ever necessary for class. I work for a lab at a major technical institute and this is awesome. It greatly adds to the work environment, giving us tons of people who are continually up to date with the current techniques. I try to buy my own books sometimes and they yell at me...and buy copies for the lab.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
Nearly every company ive worked at (especially bigger ones) promises training in the interview but its always a lie. I don't really think it's overstating it to call it a lie either, the only employees who are generally eligible for training are those whom are most valuable, which generally means youre going to be one of the most busy. Taking one of the most critical employees, who paradoxically are generally the only ones worth sending to training out of work for a week on a completely optional basis is rarely acceptable to either your manager or the rest of your co-workers. Whenever there is a moderate work lull those are the times youre expected to work on all the loose-ends youre normally "too busy" to work on like documentation. Aside from that, training, especially training geared towards certification, generally builds your skillset, resume, and leverages your independence from your employer, making you a more attractive candidate for other, higher paying companies, and aids justification in a pay raise from your current company if you were to want one. Most companies will reimburse whatever you do on your personal time however, including certification tests, college classes, etc.
I have a job in the computer industry, and starting in the Fall, I'll be working on a master's of computer science. This means that I'll be spending on average about 60 to eighty hours a week working on a computer. I know people who spend that amount of time on a computer, JUST FOR WORK. I also havea wife, and ,hopefully in a year or two, a kid. Maybe I'm just a bit tired of staring at a computer screen after 60 to 80 hours a week? maybe I'd like to have a little time for myself, my wife, a hobby? Maybe I don't have time to learn whatever wizbang technology my boss has latched onto this week on my own time? Ohh, but I forgot, this isn't a profession, it a way of life to which I must sacrifice all else...
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Sounds to me like someone ripped apart your work lately. Well, code reviews are important because a good codebase and product are more important than the developers feeling good about themselves.
-- topher71
On average, though, we try to have everyone spend between 10 and 20 percent of their time in training. That includes technical, soft skills, and other stuff like export compliance and "diversity" training.
Surprisingly (to me, at least) the time-based metric seems to work well overall. As far as budget goes, when we have money, we do more technical training. When we don't, we work "soft" skills. Also, when budgets are tight, we squeeze the vendors to give us more training. Even if it's having a Cisco SE come in and talk about a new switch technology or having a RedHat SE talk about their cluster solutions, we can always provide something that valuable to someone.
I also spent just over a year in the dotcom world at a little security consultancy where I was responsible for all of the training. I can't begin to describe what a different world that was.
First of all, the budget for training included my salary and nothing else. No one had time to spend in training and we didn't even have space where more than a couple of people at a time could get together to talk about what we were supposed to be learning. I ended up running a few seminars for customers and teaching a few classes for them. To my knowledge, no one at the company ever got any training (either before, during or after my time there).
So, having been exposed to both extremes, I have a few personal reflections to share:
- If you want training, don't be a pain, but don't let up about it. If you let management forget that it's a priority for you, they will.
- Give management some alternatives: does the local community college offer classes? If so, can the company get tax credit for reimbursing you? You pay up front and the company pays you up front, but eventually you're both reimbursed and you both benefit.
- You're probably going to have to do it yourself. There's no better way to learn something than to take the time to put together a class on your own. Pick someone who understands it less than you do and try to teach it to them. You'll be amazed at how much you learn.
If you're not really committed to making it happen for yourself, it's not going to happen. Good luck.I worked in an NT shop for a couple years, and they had a great training strategy. You wrote up a topic, got approval, took two weeks off regular tasking to do it, then did a presentation. You got an extra $500 for the demo.
The Unix shop I work in now is far more conservative. You have to get approval to travel to a course or seminar, which is usually kind of weak, it costs many thousands of dollars, and you have to pay the company back (pro-rated) if you leave within a year.
As much as I like Linux and Unix, the NT shop had a better way of doing things, IMHO.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Both of the companies I've worked for, IBM and Unisys, are quite liberal with allowing and encouraging employees to train.
IBM regularly contracted companies (especially Solutions Technology) to come in and give training classes on pertinent topics-- primarily standards. The cost of these classes was always picked up by the department... and each department's budget seemed to be more than large enough.
Unisys, on the other hand, takes it's training very seriously. Unisys University has determined what skills a person needs for every single position you can hold in the company, and if you don't have those skills, they require you to get them. Senior management makes sure the proper classes are available, and every dime is picked up by the company. Even for a hardware engineer, like me, these classes range from programming to project management to teamwork.
Kit
I work at the Univeristy of Wisconsin - Madison in our somewhat central IT department called DoIT. Unofficially we can charge 5-10% of our time to a project called Professional Developement, which can be used to better yourself or work on projects that aren't technically related to your job. For example if you don't work with Linux in your job you can spend a couple hours a week learning about it at work. It's really nice and I think it encourages employees to learn more than just what they do in their job. I was also able to charge a day-trip to Comdex-Chicago to it as well. (Sadly it wasn't worth the trip but at least I got paid for it.)
NO training, no materials, it's pick it up as you go.
I had to push real hard for them to let me train the department on Macs, on my own time, with my own materials. Then they tried to take the materials, to use themselves. I got no credit. I need to leave.
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[Training is] one of the first [expenses] to jettison when times start to look bad. And you are surprised? When times are bad, you can hire experienced people cheap. When times are good, either you train people in what you need, or you pay through the nose to lure them away from other good jobs.
I've had two major employers in IT, both consulting companies.
One fluctuated on training, encouraging us to do it ourselves and providing some money for books, but very little organization. We were free, but we had to make our own time.
My current employer emphasizes training when consultants are off assignment. You can train in your spare time, take time off for classes (if approved), etc., but the major focus is "when you don't work 8 hours a day, you will study 8 hours a day." Your manager also advises you on training paths.
My current employer thus has very little retention problems, and skillsets are always increasing. Because the support is there and organized, people take advantage of it. Even when there's lots of downtime, by the odds, eventually you WILL get an assignment if for nothing else what you learn during downtime.
The lesson? Make sure there's time and access to training. How much can vary depending on situations, but there needs to be some, and there needs to be a way to do it. Downtime is for study, and study is part of the job.
I have no plans to leave this company, needless to say.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Reading this makes me realize how lucky I am. My company has flown me out of the country(my country is the US) for training, as well as to several major US cities.
In 18 months, I have spent 7.4 weeks in training. I've been trained on a major voicemail system, as well as had general Telecom training. I've been trained on a DACS, and spent some time learning about some of my company's other products. We have more training planned for the future.
I work with a small group(a division of a much larger company) maintaining, installing, and upgrading platforms used for outsourced services in a variety of different applications.
In addition to this training, the company provides > $4000 for (approved) college course reimbursement.
I have not worked for another company that provides as much education. However, I believe that this practice is fairly typical of large telecommunication companies that maintain either an operation or an international travelling field engineering group.
rhadc
I work for a consulting company so as such we only spend money that we have coming in from contracts. There is a partial academic reimbursment plan towards degree programs but for training I get to go to maybe 1 training class a year. if I feel that "I should be up on the new technoligy" then it is up to me to go out and read books,check websites,etc to learn about it. Though on a side note, my company will usually pay for the books at least for me to read up on new stuff.
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
I started programming from hobby and love. I spend over $2-15k per year in hardware, software and books and whatever else to stay on top and pay for my own MSDN subscription. I've busted my behind working for remedial tech support jobs and programming in what spare time the company would allocate. I then left the company to be a programmer 5 years ago. Still worked for a living programming, studied for a living other hours. My knowledge increased.
s we can sign up for. Again, no obligations. But we must pass, and all classes apply towards certification. That's a great offer and one which I'm greatfully accepting, as are the other 20 IT people here and managers. Again, this is the exception rather than the rule. It's never been like this in any aspect of education, tuition reimbursement, or work environment anywhere I've ever worked before and we're not a dot-anything. We've been around since 1921 and are very stable and growing. This is my 15th month here.
I began consulting for various Law Enforcement agencies writing custom software for tracking various aspects of their job. I even make some royalties.
I'm now a Research & Development programmer for a large company with no contract or IP agreements and am almost completely automomous, work 40/hr weeks, great benefits, $70k+ salary, easy commute, and they send all the IT people to training. At first, the classes are assigned based on how they feel you need. Start with Beg, then Intermediate, then Advanced classes in all topics you need.
Now, there's a free-for-all-pre-approved-in-your-own-time-classe
My advice on it, tho, is don't expect your employer to be responsible for what should be you're own motivations. If you make your efforts, your own endeavors, sacrifice your own time, then it'll pay off more-so. However, if you really need training indeed for your job, then accept what they will provide. If they won't provide, then take a cold-hard look at how much you really want to do what you do and how important you think you are to the company. Perhaps you are important but that responsibility should be yours. Who knows, but don't *EXPECT* others to foot your bill.
Keep yourself motivated and up-to-date and you'll excell far more in life. You're job, and you're relevance is you're responsibility.
_Shawn
As in Last year was the first year there ever was a training budget. Before that the head of the IT dept. payed for Fiber training himself. We've managed to get like 14G for 4 fulltime, and 1 mostly fulltime.. and we will be adding another full time hardware tech soon. Th reason?? They (administration) are too afraid of us actually knowing what we are doing and going somewhere else.. Yet they continue to whine and complain when things don't get done quick enough.
Conversely, I finished my master's degree and dropped my previous employer like a bad habit.
Moral: The first concern is employer/employee relationship. Education is a subsequent investment built upon that relational foundation.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
In 18 years of programming desktop computers for a living, I've recieved a TOTAL of 3 weeks of employer paid, formal training. During most of that time I was given commercial software packages to evaluate and was expected to train others. They worked on the theory that it was cheaper for me to learn from the manuals, at work, than to send someone off to school. After all those years of talking to machinery, I now work as a telephone support tech for a LARGE ADSL internet provider. They gave us 3 weeks of in-house classroom training prior to letting us out into the call center and they constantly give update sessions that amount to one or two days per month. We also are eligible for up to $1500 per year for continuing education (after we pass the class).
But, by far the best ongoing education benifits I've ever recieved in any job was during 3 years I worked as a camp manager/director for a major protastant denomination. I was classified as a missionary (no theology degree) and they paid my salary, room and board, and expenses for 4 weeks/year of ongoing education (and for 4 more weeks of just plain old vacation).
Why was it I became a programmer again?
If I didn't feel that I had more to offer than the book did, I wouldn't be training. Given that, what is the way to maximize your training budget, and get more out of your training?
End of rant? Take what you can get. If you can get conferences or instructor-led training, read the written stuff ahead of time, list the expected benefits, and ask questions early and often. If you don't ask for specific information, you may not get it!