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Are You Getting Enough Say In Your Training?
DrEducator asks: "Has your company ever contracted external instructors to train its programmers? Have you been satisfied with the lecturer's level of expertise? I think we all have a good grasp of how vital the role of training is to both a corporation and its employees, but given its importance should you have more of a say in selecting or evaluating instructors before they deliver training? I firmly believe in the tenet that 'geeks should train geeks'. Moreover, I think that the geeks themselves have to take a more active role in the whole process. So, I'm curious - do you think you have enough say in your training? Do you actively refer instructors that you've seen at conferences or previously taken courses from (university, college, or adult ed)? If not, have you had the opportunity to interview an instructor, or at least review their qualifications? Share your experience - how much input do you want/need/have?"
hi. and no, im not. but then again, i'm not getting much training...
[keys dictionary] Oh yeah, training. Don't get much of that here.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
What is training? I thought geeks taught themselves.
The way I've seen it, is the company is either highering on reputation, or cost... hopefuly its the former and not the latter...
Bill Gates took my pants, and I thank him for it.
Who trains the trainers? I do the training for our end users, but for the other 2 geeks in the company, we just casually share knowledge. We don't have time to do a formal training for each other. However, a key for us is documenting what we do so we can look at eachother's notes in the event we want to learn about one another's projects.
Yes, I do.
No, I don't.
No public transportation here.
Training?
CowboyNeal trains me!
If you alter your phrase to "geek teachers should train geeks", I'm behind it 100%.
I have not seen a single management based training to have any meaning. Outside firms do not understand the systems that are used internally.
The only training that was project related that "worked" (1 out of 2 got it) was the language that we were going to used in a new project. 1 week and you were are an expert.
Training is over all farse. It is the doing that actual trains the programmer. It is their failures that they learn from the best.
- Current Market demands
- Project Goals
- Long term investment to gain ratio
- Value addition Index
So though geeks for geeks is a good idea, managers need to intervene. The right balance should be struck between employee gain and company gain.But then deciding is not a easy job, and in my expirience employee gain is sacrifised for company gain.
One option would be to be slightly more vocal and talk it out.
The complete geek way is also not theway to go coz then company wont gain everything.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
But I don't work there any more.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
--Chag
does it take intensive training to get a /. fp!? should we all be asking for this? is there somewhere i can get /. fp! training - red hat training centers? do you have to run linux to get a valid /. fp!? what about all the decrepit and aids-ridden mac users? what about the hordes of sperm-swilling ass-reaming glow-in-the-dark windows faggots? are these fine specimens to be left out in the cold?
Every year, I get a personal training budget. I can spend that money on whatever technical training I want, from whomever I want. Obviously, if I choose to take courses out of state, the money will go much less far due to travel expenses, so I mostly take them locally. It usually works out to about 4 weeks of training per year.
I guess you could say my company treats me like an adult - or maybe like a member of the family. It gives me the money I need to get good-quality training, then trusts me to decide what training I need, where I should take it, etc.
It's a really good situation, and one of the reasons I've been working at the same company for nearly 10 years now.
-Joe
Source code speaks experience and authority.
In the past 4 years working for Company X, I've had 4 hours of company-paid-for-it training. Those 4 hours were for training as some massive quality control initiative (1984 Motorola Technology, now known as Six Sigma).
The training consisted of the instructor reading aloud overhead transparencies.
Every other request has been denied.
So, getting some training in the first place would be wonderful.
Then I have no issues with them sending me off to training where-ever it might be..
All the company supplied training I've been to would have been useless if I hadn't known most of the material ahead of time.
I disagree with notion that Geeks should teach Geeks. Its been said a few times already in the postings but the vast majority of geeks may have the skills, but not the skills to teach the skills!
:)
With the dot-com shakeout behind us, most training centers that havent folded probably kept the best trainers. At least one can hope!
One day I'll go to a training class again and can give one more unscientific data point to verify that.
siri
Unfortunately, my experience is that employers shuffle you to whatever courses the think you need and whatever is cheap.
It's basically a coporate feel good technique.
Of course when you really need training on something their pockets are dry.
I guess I just need to be a contractor. With the gobs of money they absorb from their workers, I'm guessing they're willing to train their people in just about whatever they want.
-- Scientist: You aren't going to leave me here, are you? Boagh! Thump...
I'm currently working for a company where the training philosophy is summed up as "If you need to be trained, find another job.". Of course, their design philosophy kind of gets summed up along the same lines...
The Large Cable ISP that has been in the news alot lately, that I work for, which I will not say the name, seems to not train it's employees enough, either that or they just don't hire good enough people.
Now our level 3 Techs know their stuff pretty well for Windows stuff, but if you have a Mac or Linux problem, forget it. They know Windows backwards and Forwards though.
I know that alot of the people in the sales department however, don't really know how to keep track of things, use databases, general computer tasks very well, etc... They get their job done, but there are problems.
Our web designers for our local pages, aren't really well trained either. They don't know how to set up an Apache server, use Perl, CGI, C++, or even compile a program. They know ASP and VB, and Flash, but that's it. They really want to know how to use 'better' programs, but they aren't given the training needed.
Me? I was dropped in with NO training except a 3 hour thing on Video on Demand.
The people who do the actual networking and router setup. They know their stuff really really well.
So basically, we need to fill in the cracks. The people in 'important' areas, are well trained, but elsewise not.
They need to be better informed on Wireless networking, networking in general, routing, computer usage, security policies, doumentation (ISO anyone?), etc..
Some people actually mail out passwords to things over PLAIN TEXT!!! They are important services. Our passwords for our workstations have to do with... well they are simple and you can guess anyone's.
They need a 'geek week' of training where they have people come in, show them what they are doing wrong, and what they need to be more efficiant, and point them in the right direction. They could handle themselves from there, but right now there just isn't they don't know what they need to be trained on and improve on. Many people are really sketchy using the AS/400 database system, which is easy, but they aren't trained for it, and it's not point-and-click. The secertaries even weren't trained on the Databases that they use every day. They have had to teach themselves, which has worked out ok, but it could have been better directed.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Our companies are supposed to train us? What a sweet concept!
I always just have someone throw a book at me (if I'm lucky).
- Sighuh?
Anytime I have to learn something new related to computers, I head over to groups.google.com and look up "[fancy-new-product] sucks" and read the results. Saves many hours later on.
- 1.) This is to prep you all for an ad they will be running about how Dr.Educators employer has GOOD training, unlike the examples of bad training that will come up in the posts (or to determine if slashdot IS a good place to advertise).
- 2.) Dr.Educator has been assigned to poll professionals, and is using you to get the results.
You won't get an answer from me. Sorry.Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I just started with a new company, and a larger one. After 2 startup dot-com bombs, I'm with a 5000 person company and one of the things I did in my first month was fill out a quarterly goals (rolled up into departments) and a development plan. They view the development plan as a living document that grows with the employee.
I've talked to others and most of them have gotten good training. We have in house training on our product (software), as well as formal training. After not had anything in 4 years, this is nice.
I'm in the operations group, so most of these guys are leaning more towards certs. However, coming from a mixed (ops/dev) background, I'm doing some geek-geek training, which is better received by the others than the formal training. Tends to move faster.
That being said, going outside the company gives people a different perspective and helps to incorporate theory and fresh knowledge back into the group. A few of the guys are shooting for MS in CS degrees; something that is forcing them to think differently. While not always directly applicable, the knowledge forces them to work, expand their horizons and try new things.
In the past, though, even at smaller companies, I've pushed for one conference a year as my training. I need the break and if you can't spare the time, I'm looking to move. There is more to life than sitting in a 6x8. I go more for the after seminar, after hours geek-geek meetings. This is where I learn, get new ideas, etc.
After getting started on the process, I think it's a good idea to have every employee moving for something. If you're not moving forward you are moving backward in this business.
I work in a big company and last week I was trained on a obscure, buggy and almost unusable proprietary soft.
The trainer knowed all the menues eintries of the soft but was unable to provide all the technical information I requested (typical answers were "this is useless for you", "You don't have the right to know that").
Today I got a call from the trainer, she was very very very worried because she forgot to delete the powerpoint files and the examples she used during the training and she asked me to delete it (of course I did it, I don't like to fill my HD with low quality information).
Does this training worth the thousand $ it costed, don't think so, but 'til now no one asked me a feedback.
At my company, I have seen the geeks school the trainers. Most of the "training" is veiled corporate product placement. I've also seen the geeks rip corporate reps a new one over flawed, buggy software they were trying to sell^H^H^H^H train us on. We rely heavily on open source in our office, and management pretty much lets us do what we want (we're pretty lucky that way), but they still see fit to schedule training programs from corporate vendors.
Who knows about those crazy management folk. *shrug*
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
...and my employer makes many of them.
1. Train management only. We're quite good about sending management to technology conferences. They attend the conference, don't understand what's being presented and conclude that conferences are of little value.
2. Train only to address skill deficits. I've been told I'm one of the experts on my team and have somehow wound up as the only full time employee who hasn't gone to training in four years. I'm a web programmer who's taught himself enough Unix and SQL to survive. When I've had a task on hand, I've been willing to teach myself enough to get the job done; most of my co-workers just throw up their hands and say "I don't know how to do that." So they get sent to training.
3. Ignore the class syllabus. One of my co-workers took an online class then promptly took a sit-down class from another vendor on the same material. So, of course, he comes back and says that the class didn't cover any new material. Good luck for getting anyone signed up for that class now.
Just be happy that you get any training at all. I just got dumped onto a new project and all I got was a welcome to the team and a big ass stack of manuals for technology we use. The manuals were for a version three previous and were missing most of the useful pages. So rather then send me for a three day training course (which would have been sub $500) I had to waste a two weeks learning this from scratch...
A really good way to boost morale, added training, and all around good idea...
Is to allow your developers to rotate on topics they feel are important and allow them to give a class every week for about 1 hour on 1 day of the week. You would rotate between developers. This is an inexpensive way to boost moral, and increase training, as most developers can learn well on their own and train others on somethign new.
You people get TRAINING?
I have never had a training request accepted, despite having to use a wide array of tools in doing my job. I had to learn everything I know pretty much on my own, without so much as a mentor -- I couldn't even get the cost of my Oreilly books covered!
So I'm in a pretty good position to state what you really, really need when learning a new concept. Here's what I need:
1) Knowledge of the framework. A little of what's going on under the hood, a little of how to use the API, a firm basis on the simplest terms. Explicit API knowledge comes through use, and training on it would be forgotten anyway. However, no book can ever impart to you the most basic knowledge of an API. Take XML parsers for example. The most important idea in XML parsing is the idea of the node. Explain nodes, and the related terms, well and slowly, and you won't have to explain anything else.
2) Knowledge of the use. Every language and concept has its own niche. There is no broad, end all-be all in the computer world, though several swiss army tools -- Perl and Java among them -- exist to make things easier. Knowing where and why you'd use an API makes it much easier to understand what you're being trained on.
3) Knowledge of limitations. NO BOOK EVER TELLS YOU THIS, but it's essential! It's the reason why we need mentors. I spent three weeks writing a multithreaded VB app to learn that the reason it wouldn't give me any feedback is that the multithreading system expected me to do my own preemption for system events. Abuh...Java didn't expect me to do that, so I didn't expect VB (a "dummies" language, or so I thought until I started doing a lot of Win API work in it, and realised how much quicker is was for simple interaction than VC) to do it either. A visiting manager who knew VB (probably in the biblical sense) chastised me, asking where I learned VB. I told him MSDN.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
subject says it all - after all, you're not in college (or high school?) anymore...
If I want to have a training I need to say why do I need it and what good does it to the company, and then if the price is right I can get to go. So I guess I have SOME inference on who gets to teach me.
Anyway I don't get much of it (training I mean)
-- I have a pact with God. He does not manage systems and I do not make miracles.
I sometimes give training courses in OO design and analysis as a part of my job (described at http://isocra.com/training/). In our case, all the trainers do it part time, spending the rest of their time developing our products or working on consulting jobs. Having professional software developers giving courses in software development techniques seems to make sense, and it means we can discuss our experience and those of the trainess in a serious way (actually that usually comprises a fair bit of the course time).
Unfortunately, this seems far from the usual case. Courses from the big training companies are sold on a franchise basis, and many of those giving them are not experienced in the subject matter themselves. The exercises tend to be very prescriptive, and therefore don't really help the trainees with using the information in their jobs. Often, the trainers are unable to discuss the material in any depth. Courses in specific technologies (as opposed to general techniques, like the ones we give), seem of very limited usefulness anyway. The same information is invariably available in books, or even in the online help for the product.
sorry, but this post smacks of some training company fishing for free market research. Drop in the /. post, wait a few hours, and then glean a few good quotes (change the wording a bit to protect the guilty), nuggets of wisdom, and get into the heads of "the geeks".
/.'ers will be used and abused like this.
They can then turn to *your* managment, and say, "Look at this! This is what you're folks are saying..."
*sigh*... oh well, isn't the first time or the last time
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
Training? What's that? Oh, you must be addressing those who can get a job. I could care less how good the training is if someone would only give me a chance.
IT is a dead industry. Pass it on.
.. immediately or before you start using the product. The worse thing you can do is go to training and then not use your training for a few months later.
I also find that using the product [sometimes struggling] a few months before training so you don't spend most of your time in training on the simple stuff.
Live web cams
IMHO, for the most part technical training is for people who "don't get it" and probably won't much better after th course, or neccesary for products that are so non-intuitive you shouldn't be buying them to begin with.
I take company-paid training all the time, usually in a nice city. I'd much rather spend a week hanging out in a hotel on the company's dime and listening to some bonehead moron read their product's user manual to me very slowly during the day for a few hours than sit at my desk at work.
11*43+456^2
Question said somethin' about Programming, but I feel I should comment on training in a field we're all familiar with ;-)
The company I work for (outsourced Tech Support) is currently working on an plan to consolidate their so-called Level 1 reps to support the company's four "current" solutions... other products are being phased out due to the fact that they are in fact out of date.
The four products in question:
1. A new software-based solution installed on the customer's PC
2. Same as 1, but web-based and thus (mostly) platform independant.
3. An older standalone PC solution which is still quite functional despite its age
4. A newer standalone PC solution
Now, obviously all four would have their own quirks, and such... However, this little plan is being carried out rather quickly, and thus, training is 2 days, approx. 10 hours of actual training. But that's not all - to assist our level 1 we are rolling out a new knowlege base!
Which has made our training... a joke.
2 hours of familiarity.
Followed by 8 of Knowlege Base training.
Which has yet to work.
Now onto the meat and bones of this: We're given the opportunity to anonymously "rate" the training in areas such as Instructor's Knowlege of subject, whether the training was well-prepared, and whether or not we feel ready to support the product being trained in... Not as effective as, say a focus group of 1 in every 20 Level 1 agents, but still enough to get an idea of any ideas.
Now, considering that they're thinkin' of upgrade training, obviously that feedback works... provided that there is INDEED something wrong with the training.
If one person has an issue, it could be that person.
If ten people have the exact same issue in a training class of 20... well, harder to ignore that.
Perhaps I've been exposed to too many of those "intensive, hands on training" short courses that purport to teach everything about a topic in a few days. Generally, though, I've found such courses to be of little value. Personally, I'd rather learn by reading a book, interacting with peers and trying things out on my own. This style of learning is more incremental -- and I think it leads to better knowledge of the subject.
While I'm aware of the problem of using universities as a model, it's interesting that rather than two (or more) eight hour training sessions over a few days, universities will stretch the same amount of class time over several months, with practice time (homework) and discussion interspersed with the formal lectures. Practice, to me, is essential to really learning something. And "hands on, intensive" training just doesn't provide enough time for practice.
I have taught a few, very short courses myself. The approach I used was 2 or 3 two hour sessions spread over multiple days. There was plenty of time for practice during the training sessions. Students could also practice on their own between sessions. Some actually did. I also provided students with thoroughly documented examples that they could refer to back at their jobs. Finally, I made myself available for further consultation. My students indicated they found my approach quite helpful.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
Why is it expected that a training course or documentation must always answer your every question or explain every aspect of a product or subject? Training courses and documentation are like software: they get better with time, usage, and testing. No one expects a Beta software release to meet all requirements, why then is the first training course or help system expected to meet all requirements?
I have long battled with clients over their perception that designing and creating training courses and help systems takes less time, effort, and testing than their software project. That is a fatal project flaw and leads to poorly conceived training and help.
Quality of instruction? Bah! You should feel damned good that the place you work still has money to spend to bring in outside trainers at all. I don't know who you work for, but myself and most of my friends (all professional programmers and Infosec types) haven't gotten any training -- outside or otherwise -- approved since September 11th.
Maybe it's just the general slowdown in the IT world in general, but the picture I get from most of the techies with which I associate is grim. Every single one tells me how the company they work for cut the training budget to the bone, along with any budget for travel. Hell, at my company, to save money, they've even restricted who gets business cards!
Perhaps it's for the best. I've had, in the past, a lot of training -- both off-site and on-site -- with a lot of different companies. From big league Verisign to small-potatoes Motive, I've found that professional trainers usually run about 3 or 4 months behind a good programmer that reads selected forums and Dr. Dobbs. In one particular instance with a Verisign instructor, _I_ ended up teaching the class because the instructor had never used the LDAP integration native to Firewall-1 -- this in an Engineer-level class!
So if you are getting a training budget at all, your money might be better spent if your guys get together and pick someone they know by code rather than reputation. Fly that person in, and spend a week with them at work and after hours -- it'll be a lot more constructive. In other words, have the company pony up its money for someone whose technique you want to know rather than a professional instructor whose methods are unknown and suspect. Who _wouldn't_ want a memory-management tutorial from Linus, or a UI design class from Andy Hertzfeld?
I've finally figured out what the problem is with getting good training approved:
Our work is paid under a one year renewable contract.
Lowest bidder gets the job.
Bid estimates are higher is they include traqining in the bid.
Therefore, there is no training budget. What little training we got was charged to overhead. That was, at least until our customer(government) started complaining about overhead charges.
We are stuck with whatever free seminars come around, what we're willing to pay for out of our own pockets, and mostly lame training given inhouse.
All that said though, I think training would be a good niche for User Groups.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Our Network Admin is getting a free MCSE.
A FORMER employee is still having his tuition paid for.
A part time programmer is having her tuition paid for.
Me? Why, I'm getting squat. The only training I got was a beginners Cold Fusion training session a few years back.
All requests for training have been rejected. Guess I'm not important enough to train.
Gee, you think I'm on the short list for downsizing?
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
While all the available books out there on all of the techy subject areas may have useful info, there is no substitute for 'hands on' time. Boot camps and intense (and short)training courses do not linger in any one area log enough to master the subject. Some areas could benefit from apprenticeship programs. My company does not provide opportunities for hell desk personnel to move onward and upward to network admin. These are the people who spend a lot of time with the nose in the book but can't get ahead -- no hands on time. M$ certs are now designed for those with the book skill and hands on experience. Catch -22.
"Whaaaa! I am am an overindulged 20 something little shit who thinks the world owes him.
WHAAAA!"
We now return you to your normally scheduled whining.
wtf!? OFFTOPIC!? That post was asking several boolean questions - questions that are either yes/no in response. Therefore, a post simply consisting of "no" is adequately ON-TOPIC.
In my experience both Rational and Sun provide excellent training, but at a high price.
Training is a management level initiative brought upon their employees. I think this is probably the right way of doing things. If you run into the paradigm of coder-helps-coder, you can't quantify what level of competence you programmers are actually at. Hiring an external trainer, you can (hopefully) gain insight into the programmers styles and behaviors, and really push them to expand themselves if they like it or not.
I have seen some pig headed programmers that were stuck to one way of doing things, their way, and when it came to moving to a new focus, they fell apart, and it is a waste to the company if you have to fire a programmer for not keeping up to date. It is much cheaper for a company in the long run to keep aboard competent programmers that can change with the company.
If you aren't convinced with having a trainer come in, at least send them off to courses or pay toward continuing education. All it means are higher valued employees who will probably be more content that their employer is actually showing an active interest in their employees.
PS: I was one of those pig headed programmers, and yes I did get kicked. Lesson learned, I hope.
Bye!
For whatever reason my managers keep trying to get me to be normal well adjusted human being. I am not and never shall be and sending me on motivational or management courses is a waste of time and money.
Tech courses are impossible to get and when they are offered they are so esoteric that you will never be able to use the skills in a later job yet they still want you to sign a contract that you pay it back if you leave before the end of time.
So far I have just refused training or avoided it and it worked fine so far. Just throw me some books and I will pick it up soon enough. I guess most geeks do.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I work at very large high school district in California and they have told us that they will not pay for ANY training because if we actually learned anything they might have to pay us more. The say that they can not pay for anything that MIGHT lead to a promotion.
"The ignorant fight to win, the wise win before they fight." -Sun Tzu
Check out the official page here.
If you are in the Rochester NY area check them out. CSH is a very cool place that always has something going on (ping our soda machine!). Maybe you could give a seminar?
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
I work at a moderately sized corporation (2-3K people), and we sometimes bring in outside instructors from various places. Many of them come directly from the organizations that produce the software packages we use. And from my experience, these instructors are the worst. I've taken two classes offered like this, and the instructors were terrible. They didn't know the material well--or if they did, they just could not convey that.
However, what we've started doing is having our own developers teach classes for some kind of compensation for their own unit's training expenses. This works out much better since the classes can sometimes be tailored to specific products within our corporation. Plus, we have some really talented people that you can easily contact weeks after the course if you have questions.
Mark
An Instructor Needs to Be: ... low ummmmmm ratio ... avoids random snoring, actually helps the learning process ... yes even at professional levels
A geek at heart.
Knowledgabel about the subject (obvious)
Great communicator
Part Entertainer
Part Baby Sitter
Part Drill Instructor
and Patient
Not an easy combo to find
At Student Needs ....
To want to learn the subject! i.e. not *forced* to take it (hugely important)
To have some skin in the game.
I like the system my company has used before, The student puts up the money for the class and then gets 100% reimbursement for an A 90 % for B etc from the company. Also the company was pretty liberal with what course could be chosen.
As a boss, :)
training is great bang for the buck, if well chosen. If nothing else its great for morale and it build loyalty to me
We have regular in-house training sessions. One programmer gets up and pontificates on a subject for an hour, then there's a QA, then everyone goes back to their desks. It's not too bad since the head programmers are instructing more junior programmers....basically saves the company money on renting someone expensive and (theoretically) teaches us new and cool stuff.
Since I've been at my current employer they've never even bought me a BOOK, let alone put me through training. Around here's it's "If you don't know it, go home tonight and learn it"
I spent 3 years at ITT Technical Institute to learn how to do this. j/k. I run win2k and fp just fine. And it's still...
Most of the things I can do well, are things that I've sat down and figured out to do myself. Training doesn't cut it because, as they say "the devil's in the detail". If your willing to describe "training" as an "overview" then Ok, but getting training and certification so you can parrot some textbook word for word isn't anywhere as useful as people think.
"There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green.", David Reed
I take class only if the training guys are offering free coffee mugs or T-shirts. For every thing else i use one of those bibles (the computer books, not religious) or complete references or O'reilly and OFCouse R&K.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Actually, my previous employer did something rather innovative in this regard. (Shocking, in fact, considering their relative lack of innovative business practices.)
After having poor results conducting "management training" courses using outside firms, they let one of the women from H.R. start doing in-house training. She had a previous background in conducting training classes, so it worked out really well. She became the de-facto "corporate trainer". After employees reported satisfaction with her classes - was eventually given pretty much free reign to conduct her classes however she wished.
Nowdays, every employee eventually goes through her classes, which are held once a month for about 10 months, at which time the participants "graduate". It's no longer called "management training", but rather, "employee development".
As for technical/PC related training - that's another story. I really had no say-so in what training I received, other than suggesting courses that interested me to my boss, who could approve or deny them. (Basically, if it allowed us to earn a certification, we couldn't go. I think they had a mentality that if we got certified, we'd run off to someone with better pay and benefits.)
I'd really like to be able to say that it wasn't that great, but then a bunch of you would come running at me with machettes.
Oh and btw, make sure you have the credentials if you want to be in the same room as these guys. They're lev21 geeks and won't teach to anyone below lev18, sorry.
As a person on the other side of the desk (i.e. one of the evil 'contractor companies' that get hired to design training) I have an opinion on this issue.
...
First some background -- I am an instructional designer. Like an interface designer or architect, I work with other people (content experts, lecturers, multi-media programmers) to create learning materials. When I am hired by a firm to develop some training there are few very important questions that any reputable learning consultants must ask
1. Is it a 'training' problem? There are all kinds of problems that are not training related. Maybe all the web-programmers know how to use Dreamweaver, but they still prefer Notepad.
Most times 'training' is only one piece of the puzzle -- there are usually environmental factors like rewards/acknowledgement, time/project management, human resource and other issues that will affect training.
2. Who is the target audience and what are their PERCIEVED, STATED, ACTUAL needs. The manager might say they need an in depth course on XYZ (percieved) whereas the programmers might say all they need is the 'X' of the XYZ (stated) and having done a proper needs assessment/instructional design, the learning consultants find out that the programmers need some remedial Calculus to even understand XYZ (actual).
To figure out the all these needs -- a proper Needs Assessment must be completed -- this doesn't have to be a huge ordeal, but it should be a proportional effort to the size of the 'course' that is to be offered. So for a half day workshop, it should only take a couple phone calls and maybe a quick site visit for a good 'instructor' to understand the requirements.
3. What are the barriers to implementation in the users environment? What will enable implementation? This is where alot of the customization will come in -- let's say the company cannot use process ABC and ABC is a generally accepted industry practice. Well first, the trainer needs to find out about this (by doing a needs assessment), the work with the company to come up with an alternate to ABC -- or find that an alternate already exists in house.
The bottom line is -- if your company is paying for customized training and you haven't seen or heard from the 'trainers' until the first day of the course -- then chances are it will be a rip-off and waste of your time.
Grip
Failure is not an option. It comes automatically enabled in every Microsoft product.
My employeer doesn't even hire trainers. They have what's called "on-line" training (though "on-line" is misleading, because you don't even use the internet nor intranet at all for it, once you download it). To say "piss-poor" is an understatement. It gives you worthless examples, and no way to ask any questions.
In fact, how it even presents material is piss-poor. A perfect example is the questions before each unit. Before each unit, you are forced to answer a question in which the answer is within that unit. For example, if you were doing the basic Java lessons, and you got to the inheritance chapter, it would ask you: "How many classes are you allowed to interhit from when creating a new class?" and it would give you options, and you choose the answer, and it will say if you are right or wrong. But, really it's just guess work, because you don't know!!! If you did, you wouldn't be doing that lesson, would you? Instead, if they asked you the same questions after that unit, that would be one thing (but they don't), or if they gave you a "in this lesson you will lean foo and bar" it would be another.
1: I will not chase the beach ball. Forget it. It just isn't going to happen anymore.
2: God dammitt, I am a giant cow of death! I will poop where I want.
3: Watching the villagers bring food and wood to the town center is boring.
4: Bringing food and wood to the town center is even more boring.
5: WTF! I am a giant cow of death! I don't want to learn how to use a water miracle to water the damn crops, I want to learn FIREBALL!
6: The throwing villagers around the island trick is pretty fun though. C'mon teach me more stuff like that and this relationship will change for the better.
>
As a professionnal developper and trainer, I can only say two things : 'geeks should train geeks' is the way to go, sure, but properly training other geeks is hard. Sometimes harder than to train an unexperienced non-geek customer.
That said, the feedback from properly trained people (especially other geeks) is amazingly positive. Though YMMV, I guess...
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
...now that really sux.
I don't think I should be sitting in the same room as the guy that doesn't understand a thing and that keeps asking the same question even after it was anwsered.
I have been scheduled to go to trainning sessions I walked out of because I was better off reading the trainning material instead of sitting in the class room. Too bad, 'cause the trainer was good.
I think senior developpers should have a say on who attends specific sessions based on the content.
Just my 2 cents...
Cheers,
-Freak
Interview them? Sounds like a waste of time... the only qualification that trainers need (aparently from my experience) is a tech-related vocab that includes big words like "megabyte" and "microprocessor". Even better if they know something about technology that is refered to using acronyms like AGP, PCI, or even WYSIWYG. Maybe we should just give them a Scantron test with vocab questions! Save us time and money!
My SIG is a SG-552 Commando
If we really believed in Darwinism we'd stop putting speed limits and roadside barriers in school zones. Dumb and getting Dumber!
"There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green.", David Reed
Training?? WhatchutalkinboutWillis?! Dude, be f*ckin' grateful you even get training. I asked for training last year and was asked if I would rather work for a company that offers training but is laying off workers. Nice.
I recently started time management courses, which were offered courtesy of my clients (a big european bank) HR dept. I attend these courses for 2 hours, 3 mornings a week, starting at 11:00. The only problem is that the courses are given at another location in the city, so I have to travel to my usual workplace and then leave mid morning, wasting 45 minutes in transit, to go attend the seminars, and returning (another 45 minutes) resulting in a loss of 1.5 hours a day for a total of 5.5 hours a week. This training lasts 6 weeks.
I have to admit that since I started this training I am much more aware of time.
The quality of instructor led geek education is seriously lacking. I'm sure everyone has heard the phrase, "Those who can do, those who can't teach." As a general rule the above statement is true. Another interesting comparison would be the salary of a technical Instructor vs. that of a profession software engineer. Let's take J2EE for example. Here is a job for a J2EE or .NET instructor.
J2EE or .NET Instructor
The salary is between 28,000.00 - 30,000.00! I would like to think that an educated instructor would make at least a third of what he could be making as a consultant in his field of expertise. That is just ridiculous.
Speaking as somebody who does technical training for large companies (as detailed in my resume), your ``tenet that 'geeks should train geeks''' is less than ideal.
There are two things you want in any teacher:
The actual teaching and delivery of a class is essentially a performance. A stand-up comic has to be constantly side-splittingly funny; a teacher has to be occasionally funny and educate the audience. Otherwise, there's not much difference.
A good teacher who doesn't know the subject is obviously (worse than) useless, but somebody who knows the subject but not how to teach is just as bad. You need the two together.
So what makes a good teacher? You've got to be on top of everything: you need to have absorbed the subject so thoroughly that you know it forwards and backwards, inside and out. You need to have that information extremely well organized so that you always know where you are in your own mental map.
When you've got that down, you'll probably also have the confidence that you need to bare your soul in front of a bunch of people. Humans grant authority to those with (percieved) confidence, and you need a great deal of authority to teach: you've got to control all those people.
Every teacher has had a number of different disruptive students. You need to know how to keep people focused on the subject at hand. Usually, this means letting people have their say, no matter how wacko, and using your normal conversational reply to ideally bring the thread back to earth--or, at least, steer it straight. Sometimes, you've got to be blunt: ``I'm sorry, Dave, but this is a class on the Internet, not on the dystopian perspective of the Romanovs. I wish we had the time to explore the Romanovs in more detail, but we've got to get through the dot-bomb in the next forty-five minutes, and we haven't even mentioned how the IPO hype brought in so many investors charged with what Alan Greenspan rightly called `irrational exuberance'....''
Every class has at least a couple students who close up into their shells. People don't learn when they're in their shells. Drawing them out is a challenge. How do you get somebody involved when they don't give you an opening? One very shy girl, I tossed her a real softball and she almost went into the foetal position....
There's a lot more I could go into--passion for the subject, honesty, knowing when to say, ``I don't know,'' and more. I haven't even touched on the preparation: how to make a lesson plan, design exercises and tests, grading, record-keeping, and a lot more. It's just like any other discipline: it takes a lot of time and hard work.
So, don't think that just because somebody is a geek like you and he knows his stuff that he'll make a good teacher. If he's got the archtypal geek personality, you want to avoid his class like the plague--he'll be the proverbial professor who talks in everybody else's sleep.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Not only do we NEVER get training, but in 5 1/2 years we've only had 3 departmental meetings. Of course we're still expected to know everything.
Training is starting a new job and teaching propriatary software you've never seen before... Training is when your boss throws a proposal on your desk to develop software for hardware that exsists only in theory. Training is not reading or talking. Thats called learning.
> Has your company ever contracted external instructors to train its programmers?
No.
> Have you been satisfied with the lecturer's level of expertise?
No.
Jobs rarely last over 18 months in this business. Training is rare because it isn't worth the company paying for it. Training by peers doesn't work because of egos. If you can figure out how to make it work, don't train for it.
I spent many years on the opposite side of this (i.e. working for a firm that delivers training to progammers), so I'll offer advice from that perspective.
Larger companies have their own training departments/divisions. Often, they'll have their own training rooms and/or facilities. If larger companies can overcome their own bureaucracies, they have the greatest power for getting the best-quality training. Trainers fall all over themselves trying to get large accounts. Before offering a large contract to a training firm, the large company should:
Smaller companies have a harder time making the training firms dance because the potential money made is much smaller. They also won't get the big discount that the big companies can get. That said, the smaller companies can send out an request for information (RFI) and collect basic information from potential trainers in a consistent format (rather than surfing training sites, making calls, etc.). Once the information is collected, the end-users, and a couple other folks could conduct phone interviews with potential trainers.
Questions to grill any potential trainer with (for both large and small companies):Comment removed based on user account deletion
The big problem is that different people learn in different ways. Check out this description of the various polarities in preferences and how they affect the way people learn.
Personally, I have found the traditional "skill-based" training to be largely a waste of time - I just don't enjoy working through a bunch of exercises with canned explanations, esp. if the trainer is a professional trainer as opposed to a professional developer/manager/architect or whatever. The IT training business (certainly in the United Kingdom) is pretty much industrialized, and geared towards turning out as many Microsoft-certified whassnames as possible. Attending a course with one of the big training shops is in my experience a case of working through a bunch of thick books with more-or-less real world examples with doctrinaire solutions. There is rarely an opportunity to explore alternative solutions, and the goal seems to be acquiring a bit of paper saying "MS certified whassname" rather than learning anything new.
On the other hand, I have attended a bunch of excellent "training" events such as those run by the Atlantic Systems Guild which includes Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, where there was an agenda of topics to discuss, but little or no "here's a book, read it, and we'll do a bunch of exercises" nonsense. The format was "here's an idea, or a story that happened to us once - let's consider what it means for you", along with a bunch of hands-on sessions exploring some of the topics.
So, all this comes down to - work out what your learning preferences are (there's a questionaire here, and make sure you tailor your training to it if at all possible.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
...was just communication with my coworkers.
What better way to learn to do kernel debugging than to be tutored (and given a helping hand when needed) by the fellow down the hall that does it all day long? What better way to learn good design process than to hang around with the product leads and get involved in their discussion? What better way to learn the QA process than to get involved in writing software with them for a bit? I've done the formal education thing -- spent four years doing it -- but I never learned as much in as little time as when being given a helping hand (or just chatting over lunch) with a coworker more experienced than me.
Alternately, I've had the opportunity to help and tutor some (other) coworkers as well. An environment in which folks are encouraged to share with -- and learn from -- others is perhaps one of the most valuable things a company wishing to have a robust, happy engineering department can have.
I don't know that there's anything that's been done by management or by the founders to encourage this behaviour, by the way, except hiring the very best engineers they could. Politics and one-upmanship don't mix well with an engineering mindset (well, not a hacker mindset, in the Jargon File sense), particularly when everyone involved respects each others' skills -- and teaching and learning are things we all enjoy.
A geek may have vast experience and knowledge to share.. but if that geek is a poor speaker or communicator, training dosen't do the audience any good. I once had to deal with a geek who talked so damn fast and mumbled every word that nothing he said was understood.
Besides--I train myself. I say to my manager to just give me the books and tools and I can be ready inside of a month.
I have Zero, I need more...the real problem is the topics I need training, in no one that my company has a partnership for training with really offers these classes. I end up getting sent to the classes my boss thinks I need, which many times a waste of my time and the company's money.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Using 'ask slashdot' to get answers to questions? Oh, the humanity!
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
As far as my classes with Sun Microsystems, it has been almost rock-solid. The more advanced the course, the more advanced the teacher. It really has been a good experience.
My employer also offers a huge library of online training materials. Sometimes these take the form of flash or HTML documents and quizzes. Kind of good. But I like the "get it yourself whenever you want it" kind of thing. I can take any online course at any subject at any time.
One of the more progressive things they have done is signed us up with a membership at Books24x7. Basically, they've got a huge library of technical books (and management books, and basic office books) that you can read online, at your own pace. It'd be better if you could print it out.
But the "chase your own training" so really good for the kinds of people who will take advantage. But I think instructor based courses are the best. But since I don't live in a primary city, I almost always have to travel somewhere for training. And since travel costs more, the company is less eager to do it...
Ok, I have this propensity to work in weird niche markets because that's where I find the most interesting problems to work on. I sum it up like this, "If your problem(s) is(are) complex enough that you can't really describe it(them) in a typical code specification document, then I'm interested. If you can put them in a spec, then go find a code monkey. Not that I won't do the code monkey part, but there better be some interesting stuff to do on the front-end." As such, I end up working on research problems -- I don't find many trainers that either a) know more about the problems I am trying to solve at any given time than I can learn elsewhere, or b) are good enough at their jobs to provide me with insights into tools that *might* be useful someday. Typical trainers are just people who go around and emit pre-packaged drivel and most have never had a creative thought in their lives. Or if they have, those brain cells were sloughed off when they accepted the trainer position.
The most successful training I have seen was the internal training program that TRW set up in its northern Virginia offices. I was there five years and found that it worked quite well.
First, we had a committee, chaired by Human Resources but staffed by employee volunteers. Second, we had a budget with which to furnish classrooms and pay instructors. Our classrooms had PCs, Mac, Linux, and various servers. We managed the classrooms, scheduled instruction, and picked instructors. The instructors were fellow employees.
Using your own employees has several advantages. First, you know this guy or gal. You can look at their work and see that they know their stuff. Next, the person knows you and they can tailor the instruction accordingly--like match it to current or future projects. Finally, the person is available during the work day for questions should they arise. For example, I became Joe-X-Windows and, as a result, had my pick of projects
Classes were mostly held after work hours, starting at 5pm. Instructors were paid (8 years ago) $25/hr for preparation (negotiated ahead of time with the training committee) and $30/hr instruction time. Slots went first come first serve or, occassionally, to projects/employees where a need was seen.
Everyone got a lot out of this: The student got a good class. The instructor got some extra money, the chance to look good to his/her peers, and the learning experience of teaching. And the company got off cheap! Not that we didn't send people outside when necessary, but looking inside worked very well.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
The "training" that I have been sent to was exteremly expensive, worthless from a technical standpoint, and took me away from actively working on the project. I suppose for someone with less of a DIY ethic it might have been worthwhile but I didn't need someone endlessly repeating business process modeling methods or telling me how to use a freaking GUI. I can RTFM and figure it out myself. The manuals exceeded anything offered in any of the courses.
Now those JBoss under the hood training sessions sound like they rock.
~~ What's stopping you?
90% of the training we get it purely charmschool stuff. how to get along with a (PH)manager. how to tell someone that they are wrong with out getting fired...... you have to scratch and claw to get really training
The most intelligent people I've come across in my time are usually just the opposite of geeks.
And some of the least intelligent people I've come across in my time are geeks/slashbots.
You mean some companies actually pay people for their time in learning new things? They don't just say "Hey, we have to do this project in technology Y," so buy a book, expense it, and have it done in a month? What a novel idea. Maybe it's because I work in a small company (~50 people), but corporate-sponsored training is pretty much unheard of to me.
After reviewing the document I ended up marking as many as half of the topics as being redundant, or below the target audience's skill level. The document was presented to the training center staff who put together a lecturer and a time for the class. Several weeks later the class was held and I saw the same syllabus come across my desk that I had reviewed! Outraged that the training center was wasting my time I quietly raised a point with the staff that we (the class) already knew most of the information being presented.
This did not sit well with the training center staff, and perhaps rightfully so. I ended up being the only one leaving a class that I did not need and going back to a normal workday. My classmates stayed in the class and basically slept through 2 workdays.
Several days later, I was reprimanded by my manager for not attending the class. After taking the time to explain to him that it covered topics that we had already been using in day-to-day activities for as long as six months, it was decided that I did not need the company's training facillities anymore and that they would simply fund any technical book that I wanted to purchase.
Moral of the story:
Don't trust or go to corporate training. They (the training organizers) usually don't know what they're talking about, and insist that you need their help. Training is best accomplished on your own at your own pace.
when times were good the management excuse was there's no time to not make money. When times are bad the management excuse is there's no money to make time.
Seriously in my 6 years of working for a very large services company (three letters, but I'm sure they could be any three letters) I have been to one 1 week class. Since then we have pretty much been told no unless it costs nothing, does not involve travel or time away from productive time. But if we want to take time on our own to take any of the online courses for free, we can certainly write long boring term papers to our management to request permission to sign on to them. Otherwise I suppose we're suppose to tremble with gratitude that we have jobs.
My CEO recently sold $30 million of stock that was a gift from the board and the stock price is half of what it was a year and a half ago. Guess where that money comes from? Right, training and HR development.
Having worked as a small time programmer (*cough* VB *cough*), a Finance/Strategy analyst, and now a software Instructor (mainly Photoshop, MS Office, etc), this is what I can see has worked from all three sides of this issue:
If you can create the real analysis to *prove* you will save the company money by going to training, you will go. If you don't take the time to do the research, get one of the accounting lackeys to stamp 'agree' on it, and send it above your boss, then you won't be going.
It is up to you, programmers. Just like money, people don't usually come up to you and give you some training without impetus.
That anyone wants.
I've been employed in this industry for 20 years. I've heard whiners like you the entire time.
Time to do a real self-evaluation.
But your evaluation is "gee, I know IT, WTF won't you hire me".
Lame loser.
can't relate to the general population, let alone people of their own kind.. what you need is a hybrid, someone who's seen both sides of the coin..
The training I have received has been a mixed bag. I break down trainers like this:
Interesting + Knowledgeable = Good class
Interesting + Not Knowledgeable = Mediocre class
Boring + Knowledgeable = Bad class
Boring + Not Knowledgeable = Very bad class
The first one is someone who is great getting ideas across and knows their stuff. These trainers are rare, but I have been blessed to come across many of them. The second is people who can keep your attention, but can't waver much from their training books, and tend not to give you very good real-world answers. I find many college-students-made-trainers fall into this category, and a majority of trainers I have come across are like this. The third class states that there are some trainers who really know their stuff, but are totally unable to get their knowledge across to students. I find many "geeks for geeks" fall into this category (but certainly not all of them). Just because you know something doesn't mean you can teach it to others, and I hate it when some trainer has this smarmy-ass attitude of "Look what I know and you don't." The fourth I have come across only twice, thank God, and I actually blew off one class because the boredom was so excruciating, I though I was going to slit my wrists just to see color. Luckily, the workbooks were much more interesting and actually taught me what I needed.
But there is another, very important variable: students. More classes than I care to admit have been partially ruined by certain people. Some students are just plain dumber than a bag of hair, but boy, are they loud about it. Some are these "attention getters," who seem only to speak to look good, usually by repeating what the teacher said or reading ahead in the book and then giving a "looking ahead" type of answer. Some have cell phones and beepers that go off constantly. If the computers have network access, IM chimes keep going off, and distract you.
A good example is I went to one software class at a great expense. It was a proprietary software that (at the time) was gaining considerable ground. The prerequisite was thorough knowledge of NT Server, SQL, and call center voice switching systems (Rockwell, Aspect, etc.). The class was an intense, five 12hr day course, with a test and certification at the end. Our class consisted of 4 students who met the prerequisites, about 10 who didn't (most by a long shot), and 5 trainers who were just there to learn how to be the next set of trainers to teach the course. Among those 10 students, most had never seen an NT box, didn't know anything about their call center switches, and after the second day, just gave up, chatted among themselves, wandered in and out of class, and gabbed via IM, pagers, and cell phones. This was very distracting, and the teacher had to ask them to be quiet about once an hour. On top of that, halfway through, the teacher got sick, and his replacement was one of the "trainers-in-training." By Friday evening, when I had to leave for my flight back home, we had only gotten through 70% of the course and the certification test was canceled. Later, we got apologies in the mail with certificates to take the course again for free, but my work wouldn't let me fly out a second time.
Some courses (especially management courses, I find) are just excuses some people use to "get out of work," too. The government sector is filled with this kind of abuse.
So it can be a mixed bag, and unless you know the teacher, you could get just about any experience, even with the same training company.
And if its really, really good (this is seldom the case) then I end up with one of those handouts that always seems to stay somewhere near the top of the desk. I use the Desktop Chronological Filing System (TM). The one where items are sorted by their last access times. The deeper it is then the older and more irrelevant it is.
Real learning comes from use. Sit down and start doing it. A good seminar should be able to teach you if the tool is the right tool for the job first. Second, it should be able to get you to the "Hello World" stage. Trying to do much more than this usually causes information overload and I tend to just take notes without mentally registering what is said.
Tres
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
calls fire department
.005bps.
LOL, programmings and training.
Sometimes, i dont know why I dont get paid twice as much as programmers that need to run to a lecture environment to learn how to do anything substantial thats new to them.
If somebody said they needed training before they could do something i'd put them on the top of my to-fire-list.
This is the unfortunate product of comp-sci grads hitting the workforce. They have been brainwashed into thinking they need to attend an 'education show' in order to do something well, or at all. Consider that all the people that created this field probably never attended a programming class ever.
Name me another profession that actually has whole bookstores on their craft. A many number of these books are written by programmers that are 10x better at imparting the knowledge. If i need to do something new and substantial i'll go to Softpro (my local computer bookstore), pick up a few books (researched through amazon), and work through them, sometimes over the weekend. If i have a book by Bruce Eckel, Larry Wall, etc, why do i need to sit in a room and listen to some guy slowly impart knowledge at
Now, if you need to sign up for a lecture just to get the books that are unavailable someplace else then thats another problem and should be throught over carefully by management.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
My wife works for a school district and they're all the same.
Comfortable losers work there.
Maybe my wife fits into that category too, but at least she's close to home. She'll quit after she's vested in the pension plan, anyway.
OK, this is a bit of a rant.
There have been several times of the course
of my nine years of technical instruction where
I have come into a site, prepared to teach
a high-level course to several of the company's
employees, only to find out that these
employees were brand new hires, and did not
know the correct way to hold a mouse.
So who's fault is that? Mine? No... perhaps
the idiot who scheduled the class should have
foreseen the expertise level of the target
audience and scheduled something they could
actually understand. Or perhaps the scheduling
idiot KNEW the expertise of the target
audience, and decided that "they can skip the
preliminary stuff; besides, this training costs
us lots of money!".
Bastard!
Now, when faced with that situation, I go much
slower than usual, not introducing the subtle
nuances that more advanced students eat up; why?
Because 1) I am spending time teaching them
the basics which should have been done in the
first place, and 2) those subtle nuances would
only fall on fallow minds. The students aren't
ready for those juicy tidbits yet; they just
want to survive and get going!
To make it all the more interesting, occasionally
there is ONE (yes, only ONE) student in the class
that should really be there. They are the ones
that really need the advanced stuff. But they
are so bored out of their minds because I have
to go slow for the newbies. They usually end
up playing digital grab-ass on some unsuspecting
student, until I catch wind of it and yank their
ethernet cable. And of course, in the end, I
am the bad guy, not teaching to the guy who
needs it what needed to be learned.
You just can't win sometimes.
By the way, I totally agree that a great
technical instructor is just a geek with good
social and outstanding communications skills.
With a lot of patience stirred in.
Over most of the past decade, I have seen a
LOT of instructors come and go. Some are
great instructors, but not technically proficient.
(We let them teach things like MicroSoft Word).
Then there are those that could write driver
code with just the 'cat' command, all before
breakfast. But they could not pass this info
on to a student if their lives depended on it.
Everyone can teach a little. Everyone can be
a bit technically proficient. To find someone
who can do both well, then you have a gem there,
folks! Seek these people out, and learn from
them. It doesn't hurt to ask who is teaching
a class; perhaps it is someone you learned
from before and liked (or hated, so you can
avoid them). Get involved. Training isn't
a one-week vacation.
I agree with you to some extent, but I have also found that most people who cannot explain a subject well (and answer questions well on that subject) do not *truly* understand that subject and its implications... (aside from cases involving a significant lacking in social skills).
:)
In fact, I often learn much more about a subject by trying to explain it to others... showing to myself that my understanding was lacking before.
In other words, perhaps the mantle of "geek" inherently requires being able to teach well.
You only think your "senior".
Those of who really are laugh at pissants like you who have 3-5 years of experience and think they're senior.
You're intermediate, and to those of us in management, you're the worst because not only do you need constant supervision, you think you don't. Your decision making is poor, and your technical skills are only starting to take shape.
A kid with an attitude is all you are.
Senior? What...a senior in high school?
Hmm. What training? I never get any of that here.
At the retard institute, they only let you think you're working.
In reality, you're a drooling retard with dilusions of grandeur.
I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Yes, most developers certainly have the abililty to learn on their own. The problem I see most often is whenever the developer is left alone to figure out a solution, the resulting solution is usually lacking the "best practices" they could otherwise learn from a good trainer.
In my thirteen years of working full-time as a software developer, I have been sent to exactly one training class. I am usually pretty happy if my employer will reimburse me for books.
I'm sorry, if they're not knowledgable and interesting they must be wearing a red nose and pedaling a unicycle into a wood-chipper.
Which doesn't have any teaching value (beyond "don't do this") and as such they aren't running a class at all.
It reminds me of a seminar on genetics I went to where the person hosting knew about ten times as much as the actual person presenting (whoch mainly just quoted recent headlines, the stupid sounding ones mainly).
Make it interesting with a clown falling into a wood chipper and I'd go again, but not to learn.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Disclaimer: I am a trainer. I teach C++/Java/Oracle and related stuff to geeks.
As noted elsewhere in this discussion, there are two very large problems in the training industry.
1. People who know the material, and therefore think they can explain it...without lots of communication skills.
2. People who are excellent trainers who are not subject matter experts as well...so they can't actually answer the questions.
I have a relatively simple test for High Quality training. Ask them to skip the slides. If someone can give a coherent explanation and answer questions without the slides...they are usually worth listening to.
At the same time...the high-end geeks are usually not the target audience for management-created-training. I find as a trainer that management tends to expect me to make sure that the least technical of my students get up to speed on whatever I am teaching. My guess is that if you read slashdot, and you read O'Reilly books, then you could get a lot of what I teach without me there. However, that is not the normals state for people learning. Training classes exist so the people who don't read O'Reilly and slashdot can learn new technologies (well, that's why the worthwhile training courses exist).
It is very rare to find a trainer who can answer the really hard questions. Why? Because mostly, the really hard questions don't come up in training gigs...so it is not useful to know.
If someone were to want a serious training, try finding a trainer to start a project with a team. Bring someone in for 2-3 weeks, and sign them up as project manager/mentor for a technology that the group doesn't have. That's a serious training...that no one seems to want.
One last thing...from inside the industry
A lot of the training firms have gone under, and a lot of them have slimmed down. What I have most noticed though (being there myself) is that the industry is heavily populated by independents, almost all of whom have left. Only the ones who have the rep. (and skills) are left. If you get a contract trainer now, very good odds that they are good at what they do.
--K
Atleast in the consulting biz, saying What you want training in usually isn't the problem, but finding the time to actually GO to training.
:P) that works with systems across the board. I've done lots of different projects on MS and Non-MS platforms, etc, but I've never had the chance to work directly with Oracle for long periods of time. Thus, I've sortof got the basics down, user administration, basic tables n shit, but I've never got into doing any performance tuning. I basically feel that I lack a deep understanding of how the base oracle RDBMS operates.
I work for a System's Integrator (whom shall remain nameless
So, I've had Oracle training on my "Personal Development Plan", for a while now. The problem is, we have Oracle experts. So, the chances of getting into the situation where a client will pay for me to go to oracle training are nil. And lets not forget that I've been on the same project now for about 18 months, with no finish line in sight.
The long and short of it is, I could have seamstress training on there, with advanced string design, or some shit, and I'd still be fighting for time to actually go through with it.
$0.02USD
Disclaimer: I'm a Washtech member.
As a member-run union of tech workers, we found out what our members wanted. Training was one of those things that are members wanted and that we could accomplish in the near-term.
So we do have geeks training geeks. Classes happen if folks want them and if we can find a qualified teacher. Qualified has come to mean, 'knows his/her stuff and can communicate it'. We have hired some non-members on occasion, too. They're damn cheap, and unemployed members can delay payment for 6 months.
But really - contrast the fate of most geeks to a union construction worker, like an electrician.
Geeks (most) pay for college. Union construction worker - employer paid apprenticeship program of class-room instruction and OJT.
So how many geeks start out their work careers paying off debt? How many construction workers have debt starting out?
Geeks have to continually upgrade skills to avoid being obsolete. You can check out the responses to this story as to what are chances are. Construction workers have to upgrade their skills as well - whether mandated safety programs or for new tech. Union construction workers have zero out of pocket costs for this, paid from dues and from employer contributions.
oh yeah, us geeks are sooooo smart.
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
Siggy Wiggy Figgy Tiggy a bana bo Biggy!
In the ideal world, training is handled this way:
Boss: We need you to work on Project X, which requires ABC technology and is due in Z months.
You: I'll be glad to tackle the project, but you should realize that I am not trained in ABC. Is there a possibility to get some training?
Boss: Sure, find something you think will fit, and let me know and we'll work from there.
That is the ideal world. In reality, you must factor in many other items that play in the corporate world including: budget, project life cycle, other members of team with knowledge that may be able to help you out, timelines and office politics.
I am fortunate enough to work for a company who does listen to training request -- notice I said "listen", not "act on every request".
A company should not act on every request -- because, quite frankly, sometimes it just isn't appropriate to send a person off for training. Companies need to make sure the training is relevant, useful, and increasingly isn't a "paid vacation" for the employee.
Let's face it, many employees think training is an excuse to go somewhere and relax on the company dollar. I've seen all too many employees ruin it for others by going to conferences and never setting foot in the classes.
I've learnt that the best way to present my case to management is to not ask to go to every conference that I get a brochure in the mail about. I prioritize what I would like to get training on based on what I am working on and will be working on in the future. I then narrow it down to roughly 1 or 2 training opportunities a year. I then write up my proposal and discuss it with my manager. During this process I also check with my manager to make sure the money is there (other employees need training too, and I have no qualms about giving up my training dollars for them if I had have training already and they haven't) and that the timeline is appropriate.
Using this approach, I've yet to have a training request turned down. I don't just "ask" for training, but I present a detailed request outlining all aspects of training; and most importantly, I go to training events that I think will make a difference -- not just a free paid vacation.
You mean you actually get to expense the book?!
Keep Austin Weird!
I work for a large international company in their outsourcing arm (which is why I'm posting anonymously) .... We used to get reasonable training from external companies, (IBM, HP). Next they decided to use another 3rd party company for training, we'll call them X for legal reasons. Now I went on a couple of X's courses, supposedly for people who were already knowledgable in Unix ... in both cases they covered things like "ls" and didn't get much more technical than that! ... waste of time (the second time we informed management on mass so they'd believe what they would not believe the first time ...
... which is crap for technical courses (we spent an hour finding all the mistakes in the basic linux course) ... we have an education budget this year of 30UKP each, which really goes a long way for a technical course!
... which doesn't work as we are trying to do the day to day work and (a). don't have the time and (b). are geeks so can't teach anyway...
Now we are expected to use e-learning
This combined with the knowledge level of the staff going down over the last 3 years, the people I'm working with now wouldn't even be classed as trainees against the people I worked with then. We are expected to knowledge transfer our learning to them
I'm a developer who spend a good part of my time training, both pure technical stuff and more soft stuff like project management and team coaching.
....
/Sverre
Whenever I'm to go to a new organisation for technical purposes, I always ask for all the internal documentation on standards, code guide lines, code scheletons and so forth. If I'm to train people from the organisation I also ask for one day with one of the lead architects so I can learn how the ropes are, do and don'ts, homegrown tools and tricks.
If I can get that, I can give so much more to the people I'm supposed to train. If I don't know anything about how things are (supposed to be) done, I have to give the "standard song and dance". Which is not nescessarily bad, but if I'm teaching EJB (I'm primarily a Java Buff) and teaching "You should always use getter and setter methods, or I shall kill you in your beds", it's a bit unfortunate, when it turns out that the internal guide line is always to use Session Beans which returns complete Data Objects --- and never use getter and setter. (That's one from the real world, btw).
So I would suggest, that the person who shall perform the training should spend time getting familiar with the organisation the people works in.
This assumes, of course, that all people attending a course come from the same company, which may not always be the case. It is mostly for me, though.
The surpricing part is, that even though I explain that if I get 1 day with the lead architects or programmers, I can give a much better course, I'm often turned down. "He/She can't spare the time" or "that's to expensive, we won't pay for that extra day. Just go with the standard materiale, we will explain the differences when they get back."
I belive, that if we can get a process, where the people who are to train others are first themselves trained in ways of the organisation they are to train in, the result would be of a much higher quality.
And then the dime ran out
Best Regards,
Educators are"damn liars",
and most evil of all animals.
They do not deny the charge
of being evil word bastards.
Check out www.pairprogramming.com and learn something new, unless you are one of those hard heads who think they know it all -- HA!
I'd disagree with the spirit of that statement, at least as I read it.
While you may not use the knowledge directly, general programming knowledge -- a broad knowledge of your subject, if you like -- can do a lot to enhance an individual's ability even in a specialised area. Many of the best designs I've come up with in mainstream programming projects have borrowed a neat idea or principle I've learned elsewhere.
Personally, I make the effort to go and learn about these things anyway, because I find them interesting; after all, that's why I went into this career. Many people don't, though. Perhaps more importantly, some would, but don't know where to look. Training these people would improve their performance indirectly even if you never used the concrete knowledge from a training course.
And of course, geeks work much better when their interest is maintained. If you've got a L337 Hax0r working a 9-5 patching a 10-year-old C application -- because someone has to do it and you know this guy will get it done and done properly -- it's just smart management to let him have his fun (and keep his knowledge and skills current) for a couple of hours a week. That way, his loyalty and commitment to doing a good job will stay with you, he'll still be able to do more advanced stuff next if you want him to, and he'll still be one of those happy geeks who's interested in his job. Never underestimate the advantage of keeping a geek happy; it's worth more than any management trick I've ever seen.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well I'm glad to hear that it's not just me.
Until our children are no longer molded into castrated sheep democracy remains a fake and a danger. -A. S. Neill
Another industry with short-term projects is construction. These guys work themselves out of a job just like we do.
But there are some big differences on training!
Really - contrast the fate of most geeks to a union construction worker, like an electrician.
Geeks (most) pay for college. Union construction worker - employer paid apprenticeship program of class-room instruction and OJT.
So how many geeks start out their work careers paying off debt? How many construction workers have debt starting out?
Geeks have to continually upgrade skills to avoid being obsolete. You can check out the responses to this story as to what are chances are.
Construction workers have to upgrade their skills as well - whether mandated safety programs or for new tech. Union construction workers have zero out of pocket costs for this, paid from dues and from employer contributions.
That's why I'm a washtech member. Here's our training program - geeks training geeks.
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
videophd.com
I just made a similar reply to another post - but it is still relevant to say this here. Another industry with short-term projects is construction. These guys work themselves out of a job just like we do. The industry also has a cut-throat bidding process. But there are some big differences on training! Really - contrast the fate of most geeks to a union construction worker, like an electrician. Geeks (most) pay for college. Union construction worker - employer paid apprenticeship program of class-room instruction and OJT. So how many geeks start out their work careers paying off debt? How many construction workers have debt starting out? Geeks have to continually upgrade skills to avoid being obsolete. You can check out the responses to this story as to what are chances are. Construction workers have to upgrade their skills as well - whether mandated safety programs or for new tech. Union construction workers have zero out of pocket costs for this, paid from dues and from employer contributions. That's why I'm a washtech member. Here's our training program - geeks training geeks. [washtech.org]. Why do construction workers have company-paid training? The same reason microsoft forces dell to sell microsoft. The same reason the Washington Software alliance lobbies to kill premium overtime pay for tech workers and bring in more h1-b visas at lower than market pay. These folks organize and use their strength. Why don't we?
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
I just made a similar reply to another post - but it is still relevant to say this here.
Another industry with short-term projects is construction. These guys work themselves out of a job just like we do. The industry also has a cut-throat bidding process.
But there are some big differences on training! Really - contrast the fate of most geeks to a union construction worker, like an electrician. Geeks (most) pay for college. Union construction worker - employer paid apprenticeship program of class-room instruction and OJT.
So how many geeks start out their work careers paying off debt? How many construction workers have debt starting out?
Geeks have to continually upgrade skills to avoid being obsolete. You can check out the responses to this story as to what are chances are.
Construction workers have to upgrade their skills as well - whether mandated safety programs or for new tech. Union construction workers have zero out of pocket costs for this, paid from dues and from employer contributions.
That's why I'm a washtech member. Here's our training program - geeks training geeks.
Why do construction workers have company-paid training? The same reason microsoft forces dell to sell microsoft. The same reason the Washington Software alliance lobbies to kill premium overtime pay for tech workers and bring in more h1-b visas at lower than market pay. These folks organize and use their strength. Why don't we?
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
That's so mid/late 90's. Have you read a tech sector contract recently? If I leave my company, I have to pay them back for any training that I received in the previous year. I kid you not.
On the other hand, that's completely theoretical. We have no training budget, and we aren't allowed even an hour a week for peer training ("If you think training's that important, do it on your own time", quoth my boss).
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Here's the the run down for my training.
This is a credit card.
This is a computer book store.
Take card, buy book, read.
end of training
I am a geek training other geeks I guess. I do not teach proprietary software or anything like that, mostly just training on products like Visual Basic and SQL Server. People come to me to do the training, I very rarely get sent to a company to do training (cheaper for companies to send people to us). If this is the route you are going, I would look into these things 1) Talk to the instructor. After the economy went into the pooper, most companies didn't keep the smart trainers, they kept the people who were ok at lots of stuff. You'll see a lot of MCSE, MCDBA, CCIE, MCSDs out there claiming to be able to teach anything. They can't. Make sure your trainer has a passion for what they are teaching. 2) Try to find out if there will be "career changers" in the classes. A class full of career changers (former truck drivers who heard you can make 85,000 a year being an MCSE an other missinformed individuals) goes entirely different than one with people who need to know this to do their job, or are looking to better themselves. Each class with people who really use this stuff is much more enjoyable and enlightening because you see all kinds of view points and questions. Good times 3) Make sure you read the outlines. I taught a class on the Programming the .NET Framework. The outline clearly shows that we will be covering topics like streams, serialization, threading, remoting, memory management. Kinda the nitty grittys. Well, I get someone in my class who right away asks when we'll get to webpages. Um, who signs up for a 5 day class without reading the outline for the class? I teach 10 seperate .NET courses, 5 different VB6 courses and three seperate SQL Server courses. There is a lot of variety out there...
4) Keep an open mind. Ask questions about the how and why. Your instructor might not have even thought of your question yet, but if they are anything like me they'll help you figure it out.
Duh, if your company wanted best practice, they would provide the developer with the tools to research, design, implement, and deploy such "good practice"
These tools include:
-- Correct and up-to-date reference material (books or otherwise)
-- Time.
-- Peace and quiet.
-- Incentive to do it right (recognition from management, pay, long lunches, whatever)
-- connectivity tools (cell phone, weblog, newsgroups, business lunches with like-experienced people in other companies to pick their brain...isn't this what execs do?)
-- Help. This can be other developers, an assistant (to type all the documentation from the scratchy writing on yellow pad paper),
and last but not least:
-- a FUCKING BUDGET for ADEQUATE computer equipment (HW&SW). (you may detect a slight bit of frustration here)
As far as training, I get a lot more done with about 4 hours at Denny's (or starbux) and a Wrox or O'Reilly book than in front of a screen listening to some guy explain how at his last gig he did it this way and that.
"Piter, too, is dead."
...not bad above.
;o) and sorry for my limited English, I think ya'll catch the meaning.
Add on:
A trainer doesn't have to know each and everything.A trainer has to be able to bring his students to the top of the tops.
So a good trainer should have of course a geek level but from my own experience I know: most time the level of the students will be higher than trainers own after the training.
I'm not sure if real geeks can accept this slight difference in the end... that's why I tend to say "Geeks should train geeks?": yes if the geek is at a trainer level too, not just a *plain* geek.
Take the bone geeks out there
Cheers from Germany!
STIBS
Mandrakesoft Linux Campus Trainer
That's such a sad outlook to have. (The company's point of view, I mean) Sure, if you train your people, they might leave. But.. if you don't train your people.. they might stay.
Think about it.
People are still working at corporations? I thought they had laid everyone off.
Another 17,000 are being fired from the IBM consulting division...
SIGN THEM 30 YEAR MORTGAGES FOLKS!! WHO KNOWS IF YOU'LL HAVE A JOB BY FRIDAY???
lol... training... for what? What pattern to crawl the floor when interviewing for your old job at half salary?
(the alarm clock keeps ringing...)
Hello? Hello?
What training , I do all my training in my free time. The majority of really expensive training I have been too was not worth much , Most of the time i knew more details than the instructor.
Well, that was a little misleading.
.Com bubble, it may be different. After the billionth time of factoring some rent-a-programmer's one-method object, though, I can't say I have much sympathy about that.
What I really mean is that when I bargain for compensation, I include the means to get my own training as I see the need. Whether it is a contractual promise for a certain dollar or hour amount of outside training classes, books, etc. or just a set amount added to base salary, I factor it in as overhead. If the company doesn't see it that way, I don't want to work for them.
Despite the doom and gloom reports, the tech market is not bad around here (Phoenix, AZ) for serious developers. For the art majors who suddently felt the need to make some money at the height of the
I've been on the other side of this - asked to create a Linux desktop use class for a bunch of Windows developers new to the platform who'd picked KDevelop as their IDE. Management said (I quote) `we're not interested in any of this command line stuff', whereas staff were very much interested in the traditional CLI Unix aspects of Linux. My company built a course with a lot of specialist content, focusing on the different systems of Linux operation (users and groups, storage, rpm, and other basics) with carefully selected interfaces rather than base-level tools.
Come the day of a training, as a presenter I think I guaged staff reactions earlier on and beefed up the technical content, but post-course we were told that although the company was generally happy with that first day, `where were vi, sed, awk and emacs?' - this time from management. At this point we realized it wasn't so much a management / staff schism (the cmpany were fairly small) but more lack of a clear vision for what htey wanted from the course. I think most staff still gained a lot from that first day (more so if I'd focused on how to use a particular text editor, or started a text processing programming course) but the lack of a single cohesive vision for that first day stopped things being all they could.
I've had a mixed bag with training. I worked at cisco as a consulting sales engineer (yeah sales, get over it) and found the training internally to "create a hard vacumn". My last task there was to formulate a 4 week per year training program on the [then] 10,000 product / 17 end-to-end solutions product line. The world-wide SE director for the Service Provider SE's said, "we can't have the SE's in training that much of the year." I left cisco two weeks later. This was 1998.
lack of human interaction
speech encumberment
etc..
It's not that I don't think all geeks out there cannot teach, it's just that I want someone who can properly engage me in a discussion/ lecture/ whatever.. If the trainer can do that, then fine. If not, then don't waste my time.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Comments:
1) You really learn a lot from working on projects with good people.
2) a $40 book goes a long way on giving a project skills. Companies should incent employees to buy books that they'll read on their own time. It's a pittance compared to salary and benefits and seminar fees.
3) Formal training really has its place. I worked on a java project where we were switching from jsp/servlet's to j2ee/ejb's and two of us tried to come up to speed from nothing very quickly. In hindsight a week each of a quality training would have
a) helped us discern the hype from the reality.
b) helped us make good architectural decisions.
There's a lot to say for periodically getting out of every day busy-ness and retooling your brain a bit.
And if you don't want to travel or take class, you should be able to take a day off every so often to read up on one of the books you read.
4) While 'Mastering VB n+1' might make for good 'training', there's a lot to say for academic learning--i.e. with emphasis on design and theory--especially for people who lack formal backgrounds.
Wow ! 3 similar posts, you can try going up to 10 next time, lamer
The replies to this message apparently are very skewed towards those that receive little or no training, or of training with little quality. I'd like to add a counter balance to that.
My background: I've been a trainer for two years for a small training & consulting company out of New York (though I've since moved on). I've trained (and consulted) globally, with my courses ranging from beginner to advanced Java, C++, Web Services, XML/XSLT, J2EE, EJB, and most recently the Microsoft 2-day VS.NET seminars. I've taught principal engineers and developers of products you may have heard of, as well as various other companies.
Is training worth it? It depends. The main benefits of training vs. books are:
a) you can't ask a book a question
b) books can't help you when their examples don't compile
c) you'd like to get an answer to that gnatty problem you've been experiencing in that DLL you've been screwing with for 3 days (i.e. free consulting advice)
d) some authors really can't write
e) some technologies are so new or specialized there isn't much in the way of quality books out there (i.e. advanced oracle performance tuning, advanced J2EE architecture, writing for an EAI framework like TIBCO, etc.)
Training is a way of imparting knowledge that the books have IN CONTEXT of the real world AND providing the extra knowledge that the books don't have.
Most training sucks, of course, because
a) it's not relevant to your day-to-day job
or
b) the buyer doesn't know what constitutes good training.
This really harkens back to the scourge of the land of IT: a lack of good managers. It's up to managers to know what training is needed & whether the vendor is of sufficient quality. It's also up to the managers to involve the team with this decision -- I fully agree with the premise of this article that those being trained should influence the training -- if you're not seen as being competent enough to know what you need, there's a real reality-deficiency occurring.
Given the above, what makes a good instructor for technical courses? IMHO, in order:
a1) advanced technical knowledge & expertise
a2) good teaching skills
b) patience
c) energy (you have to carry the crowd through the tough parts)
d) humility (you can sometimes be wrong)
They're all needed, though at bare minimum A1 & A2... if you have teaching skills but don't know much, you're not accomplishing anything except entertaining/babysitting a crowd for a few days. In an advanced crowd this will generate a lot of anger. Conversely, if you know a lot but have the communication skills of a potato chip, you'll still get a lot of angry people wanting to give you the boot.
Having said that, a good course with a good instructor can be a very rewarding experience, probably a major highlight of your career growth -- assuming you get the right course for the right reasons with a good instructor.
In perspective, a 5 day course can run between $1-3k a person, depending on the depth, level, and reputation of the instructor. That's not cheap. It's probably only worth it to go with the "world class" instructors, whether well known (like the folks at DevelopMentor, or Hotsos), or relatively unknown but promising (like my old company).
As for what industries regularily offer training -- generally in my experience, financial and insurance companies. There's always ongoing training there for new technologies, and most new IT hires get 4-12 weeks of training in business and technology.
-Stu
nope.. i wanted apachecon.. i got xml.. fuck that.. whats xml anyways? :)