At TechEd someone asked me what the best way was to get trained as a DBA. This person had become an "accidental DBA", being assigned a few servers to manage and was trying to get up to speed on SQL Server.
Now part of the reason that I started SQLServerCentral.com, as well as End to End Training, is that I believe in education. It's something that has always been a part of my career and something that I think always will be. My partners, Andy Warren and Brian Knight, believe the same thing and we know that to become a great DBA, or to continue to be a great DBA, you have to continually invest in yourself.
While you have to take charge of your career and ensure that you are improving your skills, you also have to invest in yourself financially. I think it's important that you set aside time as well as money since many employers don't necessarily do that. However if you are investing in yourself, I think it's only fair your employer to the same as well. So the poll question this Friday
How much training money should you get per year?
The young lady I was talking to actually mentioned that she gets $7000 a year for training, she'd spent some on a conference, but what else should she do? I gave her some advice, but I was somewhat surprise at that number since I think that's a great training allowance and I'm not sure how many people actually get that much money.
My guesstimate is that the average DBA probably makes about US$70,000, though you could easily be above or below that. So $7,000 would be 10%, and that seems like a lot. Especially considering there's a time cost to training as well. If you're in a class or at a conference, you're not being productive at work.
So what's a good number or percentage? I'd think that 5% might be a good number or perhaps $3,000-4,000 a year plus the time off needed for training (1 week or so). Let us know what you think or even what you get and if it's enough for you.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
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Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
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