Slashdot Mirror
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?"
[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.
If you alter your phrase to "geek teachers should train geeks", I'm behind it 100%.
- 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
Hopefuly they arent highering on teh stellar spelling skills you have and your great grasp on teh use of apostrophe's.
siri
--Chag
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
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.
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
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
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!
...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.
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
You are assuming the training is aimed only at programmers and for the purpose of teaching programming. This is seldom the case - most often training is used to promote a programmer's skills to include design knowledge, or management.
Where the object is to teach programming, the result is often shocking. Experienced C/C++ developers regularly come out of courses saying "Hey, I had no IDEA it worked like that".
Many developers take a "know one, know 'em all" approach to languages, without understanding that every language has its own unique way in which it is best applied. For all their syntactical similarity, Java and C++ are worlds apart in the way they should be used, for example, algorithms which are efficient in one are dogs in the other.
I have never been on a training course where I have not learned some useful piece of information. Even a presentation of the Thinking in Java course (after I had read the book and had 5 years of experience with Java) provided some insights which proved useful during project implementation.
On the other hand, I have never met someone who can be an "expert" on a language in one week. There is a lot more to language than syntax, and if you believe otherwise, you are seriously deluding yourself.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
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.
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
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
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
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
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"
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
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.)
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.
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.
>
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.
> 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):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.
You assumed, I assumed programming.
Like I said the only training that "worked" as a new language course.
I have been around for a while. Until the knowledge is used, no training is worth the money spent.
It would be better spent throwing a party, to build moral. Have not seen those be very suceesful either.
Training is not a goal of a company. Dollars are. If you want to train yourself, then do it. It shows that you have more on the ball than the other around you.
...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.
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.
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...
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')
Tech support training? Try this handy online course. (Warning: direct link to QuickTime movie.)
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"Aren't", dammit, "aren't"!!!!
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
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.
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.
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.
As a veteran of many, many "hands-on, intensive" courses, I disagree that such courses lack real value. While you're certainly right that reading a book or three will yield much more depth of knowledge, it's also true that well-run classes offer a great way to start learning about a subject.
After taking a good class (which usually means at least 20 hours of instruction, with about half that spent in hands-on activities), I find that I get a lot more out of the books I (later) read on the subject.
I also find them useful when I'm not being given the resources to learn. That is, when the necessary equipment, software, and/or time is not being provided. Good hands-on classes provide all of that as a matter of course.
So, while I agree entirely that hands-on courses are not a panacea, and by themselves aren't sufficient for gaining a usable skill, I've found them to be very good as a first step along the road to building a new skill.
-Joe
My experiences are much the same. I worked on a helpdesk where we were required to know Windows networking to an ISDN connection, and the ins & outs of general diagnosis of problems before escalating to the higher-ups who actually had control over the system
Management saw "windows" and sent 20 of us off to MS Excel/MS Word introductory training for a week
a grrl & her server
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.
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
What's a "soft"? Is this the latest buzzword from "Wired" magazine? Do buzzword twits still read "Wired"?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!