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?

Comments

Depends on working practices

[Jon Peterson]

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.

Re:Training is overrated

[sql*kitten]

Training (in my view) is geared to the lazy and incompetent. They wish to be spoon fed the info

Often times, I'll read a book (or a PDF, or a web site or whatever) but there are times you just can't do without training.

A hungry mind should be able to feed itself from the documentation and the system at hand rather then being read PPT slides

If "you don't know what you don't know", you might just end up wasting your time re-inventing the wheel, especially if a product has a huge documentation set and you just need to do a few specific things. Or if the product is very new and the documentation is patchy. Anyway, sitting down with a book is no substitute for hearing lessons learned in practice, or hearing the developers explain their design decisions. If you say that it is, I can only assume you've only worked with simple systems.

So long as you've some familiarity with the subject before the classes, and can ask specific, relevant and intelligent questions, training is very valuable indeed.

advancing yourself proffesionally (don't forget it is YOUR carrer)

Quite.