Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
---
Developers: We can use your help.
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
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
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.
-----
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 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
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)
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).
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).
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.
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.
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."
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
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."
Why shouldn't the company help out a little? If you worked in a machine shop and a new machine came it it would be the company's responsibility to train you. So in a programming environment where new languages/environments etc are coming out constantly why shouldn't the company invest the money to get the most out of its workers. Its easier to pay to train people then to fire the ones who don't learn on ther own and get new people. So even from a costs/benefits viewpoint its good business sense not just a handout.
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.
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 know its easier said than done, but you've got to get out of there. It is one thing for a small company to say they haven't got the money to train people, but large enterprises have no excuse.
Training doesn't just help the employee grow, but the enterprise as well. Some employers will spend millions on recruiters, expensive job searches, taking people off of productive work to stand in at job fairs. They fail to realize had they spent $2-3k on Joe Computer Operator they would soon have Joe Jr. SysAdmin. The same goes for nearly every industry and career.
I'd start looking if I was you.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
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.
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.
And as a plus, instead of training we can just 'borrow' code from Perlmonks anyway.. :)
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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.
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.
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.
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
Frankly, that's pretty harsh. I don't think of a training budget as a way to "pay you to learn to do your job". That implies that the training budget should be used for remedial training, which I agree is a waste of $$$. However, it's to a company's benefit to offer training in tools and techniques that would make their employees more productive. And there has to be some room for experimentation in that regard as well. Not every tool or technique that's introduced will help the bottom line, but some will, and it's worth it to spend the time doing some research to find out.
As I said in another post, more and more companies are resorting to hiring consultants and outsourcing to fulfill software development projects that use new technologies, to save time and cost in training the internal employees. And in my experience:
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 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 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.
Oh. By the way, books don't have "skill retention". You do.
--
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
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.
Which is worse: to lose a trained employee, or keep an untrained worker?
--Any sufficiently reliable magic is indistinguishable from technology.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
Hey, you know, I spent a few years as a teacher. I wasn't very good at it, I'll admit (I have a hard time presenting matirial at the level of the students, I tend to go over their heads without realiseing it. I thought this was a problem, but after reading your post, I've come to understand that it was all my students fault.), but I did learn one interesting thing. Different people learn differently. That's right! Everyone is not like you! Wow, quite a concept I know, it really surprized me.
This kind of comment really pisses me off. Are we professionals, or are we some kind of 133t club, where only people that got their mad skillz from an approved source can be real haxors? "I'm sorry sir, we can't hire you for this position, because you were recently seen with a copy of Perl... For Dummies instead of the Camel Book. As you know, the only Geek appoved source for learning Perl is the Camel Book, so despite your demostrated competance, I'm afraid we shall have to look elsewhere." I mean come on, Some people just learn better from audio input. Some learn better in a social environment. If nothing else, a class gives you at least on additional view point, that of the teacher, and probably those of your classmates as well. Professionals meet, professionals exchange ideas and techniques. Doctors and lawyers go to classes and confrences, so do scientists and professors. Dr. Jones knows that just cause he's a hot shit cardiologist doesn't mean that Dr. Smith doesn't know more than him about infectious diseases, and how they can affect the heart. It's great that you're an ubergeek and you can learn every skill on you own, and you don't need anything from anybody, but you know what? If we fired everyone in the industry that couldn't do that, there wouldn't be enough people left to keep it afloat.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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.
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.
This won't be so clear cut to you when your boss decides to fire you. At some point your going to be working on a huge, time consuming project that makes the company a lot of money.
You'll be salary and overtime will be expected, but just until the project is done. Finally the project is done and the company makes huge revenues. They decide however that they need some new functionality and you haven't had time to learn about it yet. They ask you if you know it and you say no, but you're willing to learn. They laugh at you and say "we don't train our employees, they provide us with a service." You now are out of a job that you could have easily kept if you had been training yourself in your free time, but wait the company didn't give you a whole lot of free time, and the free time you had definitely wasn't going to be filled with training yourself on something you couldn't forsee now would it?
So when you're jobless, homeless and stupid because you can't pay your college loans off and the technology has changed and no one will give the time of day I'll be laughing at you because my company values me and my ability to learn the things they want me to learn.
Bzzt Whir Click
There are also the issues of retention and motivation. An employee who feels like the company values his/her contributions, and rewards his/her contributions accordingly, is an employee who will be dedicated to the employeer, and far less likely to move on to another job. If an employee feels like he/she is just there to make a pay check, with little or no potential for growth or influence is the employee who is going to job hop for even a small raise.
The chancellor of my alma mater was asked just before he retired a couple of years ago how it was that he was able to move the university to the top 20 and keep it there during his tenure. His response was that by giving a total compensation package just above the standard, you could attract and retain the best and most dedicated talent to your faculty and staff.
Wrong. I am one of the senior developers on my team and I loudly objected to code reviews as I consider them extremly harmful for the reasons mentioned in my original post. I think pair programming is a much better idea with a 'live' code review that happens in real time, is less boring to the parties involved and results in a code of much higher quality than any solitary code review can aspire to produce. Most code I write forms the foundation of the application and most of it is a template based framework (stl extensions). It's complex enough that nobody even tries reviewing it. They just take my word for it that it works :).
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
[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
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!