July 14, 2006 at 2:16 pm
Great article. I'm looking forward to the next sets. What caught my notice at the bottom of the page is "Do you wish you had a mentor?" That is where I'm at. I'm a long time bus. intel/data mining developer and want to break into a more DBA role, but companies are often not willing to do that unless you have experience - it's the whole chicken and egg situation! I'd love to break into the DBA side with a mentor that could show me the ropes. This site is a wealth of knowledge, and really does act as my mentor.
Thanks again,
Rob
July 18, 2006 at 4:01 pm
At my current company, I've been fortunate to have some CBT approved - the company purchased a CD set that was available for anyone to use, and a number of people (in different areas of my department) took advantage of it. That may be one of the key points to use when trying to get funding for training; the more employees who can use it, the more likely the company is to fund it.
I can understand companies being reluctant to spend big bucks on training; I've seen several times where the company paid for someone's college education (masters level), only to have that person leave within the year for another more lucrative job. I can't think of any company out there that wants to fund the education of their competitors future employee!
Cost justification (ROI) is a big killer of training initiatives, I think. As data professionals, we need to be able to justify the budget dollars spent on training, and I think we often don't do a good job of that. The flip side is that those who control the purse strings may not understand the value of training (especially for "non-current" software or methodologies). It's up to us to find ways of making the benefits to the company clear: does the training increase productivity (for us, or for the users via new programming initiatives); does it help provide better customer service; does it increase our competitiveness or allow us to respond faster to changing business needs.
If we can show how training benefits the company, and show a short payback window, the odds of getting funding are vastly increased. Especially if you can document the payback! That can be tough, but as an example: If I learn a new technique that allows me to do something in 10 minutes that used to take 1/2 hour, and I do that task 3 times weekly, the training saves 1 hour per week. Multiply that by my hourly rate (which I can get from HR, and it's higher than you think because they calc it including benefits), and a dollar figure can be attached. For the training mentioned in the first paragraph, we figured it payed for itself within 6 months just from the three programmers who originally took the training. Everyone who took it beyond that was "making money" for the company!
Steph Brown
July 22, 2006 at 6:53 am
I agree with Stephanie that cost justification is a big killer of training initiatives.
While it may be possible to demonstrate with hindsight that some specific training made it possible to reduce a regular task by x minutes, it is much harder to demonstrate ROI for the time spent learning and applying more general skills.
For example you cannot measure the ROI of the time you spent reading Code Complete or learning about the best practices of using SQL server. Even if the stored procedure you wrote is saving the company extra time because it is more efficient, and more easily tested, maintained and extended because it is structured better, you cannot measure it. If you learn how to monitor your databases, you cannot measure the time saved because defragmentation is not slowing the queries down, or a good backup strategy is preventing the disk from filling up.
Even in large companies there are small teams with only one person for each task. In a small team it is less likely that any of your colleagues (let alone your manager) can recognise the difference between the quality of work from someone who learns what is needed "right now" and someone who is also improving his generic skills.
It seems to be a peculiar feature of IT that the better you do the work the more invisible it becomes and the less money is spent on it, including training.
July 28, 2006 at 1:53 am
Same here.
My employer only aplied for "employer of choice" status when customers started to ask for it. Nothing has changed since, and needless to say my respect for this status has now evaporated.
July 11, 2007 at 7:02 am
Great topic...I'm especially interested in how to build a development plan.
I work for a large public university and am disappointed, especially since it's an academic institution, at how little support (i.e. none) we get for professional development. All of my development has been done on my own time, with my own money, and not acknowledged or rewarded at work.
Since I didn't really have a development plan in my mind, I decided to work toward my MCSD and use that as my learning framework. It has worked well so far. I have passed 3 of the 5 exams and will start working on my 4th.
One problem I have run into is that since i'm doing this on my own time and I have a family, I can only manage to pass one exam per year...so I'm slowly getting behind the 8-ball so to speak. I'm working on the MCSD for .NET v1.1 and am falling behind. I need to start training myself on .NET v2.0 and SQL Server 2005, but want to finish my mcsd first.
I'm looking forward to your next articles.
Keep up the good work.
George H.
July 18, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Excellent article. I am very lucky in that I have plenty of support from my employer, offsite training, msdn license with all the support and resources that go with it, magazine subscriptions and reimbursement for books added to the shared library. I can't wait to read your article on how to create a development plan. My biggest problem is finding the time to read and practice all the stuff I have at my disposal. A development plan will help me focus on one thing at a time and maybe I'll be better at setting aside time for this. I don't feel I am taken advantage of all this great information at my fingertips.
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