September 25, 2007 at 9:29 am
I agree with you, Steve. Conferences and training are, in my opinion, essential! Years ago I worked at a company which didn't send anyone, anywhere, for anything, most of the 8 years I was there. I really sucked. When I left that company I made it a point, in every interview I went to after that, to ask about training. A company that doesn't invest in its employees' training, isn't interested in its future.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
September 25, 2007 at 10:41 am
Are you saying that there is more training available other than SQL ServerCentral.com?
Wow...
:laugh:
September 25, 2007 at 10:43 am
Bummer... you should have asked me 🙂
I couldn't go because my boss didn't want to pay for it. I agree with you... it is valuable to a company to get their employees out of the office and to explore other environments. Otherwise it's really hard to bring in anything new. There is always the chance that a person might become more attractive to other companies, but you're always doing that, simply by giving them experience... it's not something you can avoid.
September 25, 2007 at 11:17 am
noeld
A great quote!!!
September 25, 2007 at 11:18 am
I would love to come to PASS. The one thing that my employer does is grant me the time to prowl forums like this one.
ATBCharles Kincaid
September 25, 2007 at 11:43 am
I am an employer who must balance training costs with budgets. Training $ and time away from the office are both costs that must be carefully considered.
Recently, a local company offered a great SQL class for 1/2 price (2 for price of 1) for a week long SQL class. This was such a great deal, I offered it to 2 of my top employees -- even though the burden of 2 employees out of a small IT shop would be painful.
To my surprise, neither employee signed up for the classes. I was shocked! I would have signed up myself, but have a trade show that is not optional.
Next time you have a free pass to SQL Pass conference, please call me! I will be glad to put it to use.
Best regards,
Myra Canterbury
September 25, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Preach on Steve..... Preach on....
September 25, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Its 15 months that I am working with the current company. I was promised last year by my manager that I will get the SQL PASS training. In December 2006, I sent him the price list that its almost half the price if we book the training now. He said he has to talk to CTO and after that I never got the straight answer. I again reminded him in April and he said he can not get CTO to commit but he is sure that I can go. September came and he said CTO saying there is no budget. So they have been playing for me for whole year. I like the company and my Manager but sometimes you wonder what is my worth in the company's eye. I think I know the answer. 🙂
September 25, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I was all willing to pay my way to PASS 2006, but my boss wouldn't let me have the time off - I think Steve quoted him in the editorial... And the worst part is, I live in Seattle, 14 miles from where the conference was! Crazy.:crazy:
But the company does get us computer-based training if we can show justification (and I think my current supervisor was more willing to push for it). If you don't know how to justify training to the bean-counters, you're going to have trouble getting to conferences and such. It really helps if you can describe what benefits you expect to acrue to both yourself (as an employee) and to the company (employer). We're doing team training with the CBT, and keeping track of useful, productive knowlege we're gaining from it. I'll do a write-up (or maybe several over time) to send to the IT Manager so he knows what he's getting for the bucks he spent. And that will make it easier the next time I need to justify training!
Steph Brown
September 26, 2007 at 7:40 am
Boy do I feel lucky after reading the comments here. The IT organization where I work is strongly encouraged to attend one conference and one class of the employee's choice every year (as long as it is job-related). If management deems it necessary to get any other training then it is in addition to the training that we requested.
This year I went to MS TechEd and they let me count the PASS Summit as a class. I learned a lot at both events and it has definitely increased my value to the company.
[font="Tahoma"]Bryant E. Byrd, BSSE MCDBA MCAD[/font]
Business Intelligence Administrator
MSBI Administration Blog
September 26, 2007 at 8:02 am
This sounds like a poll in the making. I'll set one up and see if we can get you some ammunition for training.
I'll try to search out some articles from someone other than training companies that might show it's valuable.
September 26, 2007 at 8:18 am
The only time until now I have ever been sent to SQL training was to become a SQL help desk person at MS, and to get my SQL 7 certification so the consulting firm I worked for could retain their Gold partnership.
The company I work for now is sending me to SQL Server Magazine Connections in November. Will be my first time at a major conference.
My previous company let me go to any of the free one day rah-rah things going on in Dallas. Unfortunatly Des Moines don't have too many of those 😉
September 26, 2007 at 11:40 am
Every year when my manager (almost in every company) prepared the budget, he told us there would be so much money prepared for training and conference. After the new fiscal year began, the management would say they need to cut the budget, the first thing they cut was the training budget.
So I never had any training. But the company expected you to know everything ?????:crazy:
How do we move from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 ? They expect you to know everything about integration service overnight!!:sick:
My current manager was a SQL Server developer before and he still worked on technical stuffs now, however he never updated his skills. So in the ETL process, he wanted us to use trigger to update the table when we received the text files (from multiple sources), somehow it created a deadlock. So I posted the question here. He found out and he told me not to post any more question and never trusted anyone posting their answer. He just did not want anyone learn anything or be better than him, especially from a female developer, his male ego was bigger than his head. He always had conflicts with female developers but not men.
September 26, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Sadly that is far too common. Back in the SQL 4.21a days, it came packaged with (along with ERWin and Crystal Reports) an allegedly object-oriented development tool called ObjectView, now blessedly no more. We were struggling with it (their program was multi-platform, therefore it didn't fit any one platform particularly well), our main issue was they couldn't handle date/time data types easily and we had to do lots of string manipulation to accommodate them, not that a payroll system has much of a need for date/time data types [/snark]. As with so many packages at that time, the documentation wasn't good, there were no third-party books, and no internet to link up with other users, so it wasn't easy to learn. I happened to be washing my hands in the bathroom when the IT director came in and asked me how the payroll system was coming along.
I told him.
Conveniently the guy in charge of my group was on vacation. They found money out of the mainframe maintenance fund and sent me to Atlanta for a week.
Fortunately they added a policy that key personnel would get to TechEd or another similar conference annually and that training was always budgeted and normally not cut.
There are many things that I miss about working there.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
September 26, 2007 at 8:39 pm
I only had this problem if they had to pay for the training. I past IT Manager would jump at the chance of free training.
I guess that all places are a little bit different and i think if you give your employees some paid training they are more likely to stay with the company and work hard becasue they know that their manager sees them as a hard worker.
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