I've always been in favor of investing in things that I think will benefit me long term, but all investments cost something - time or money usually, both hard to come by. I remember doing an fill-in presentation at a SQLSaturday where we talked about professional development, one of the attendees was pretty frustrated with me when I said that employers can't/won't provide you all the training you need. Body language screaming 'that's not fair!'. We could argue that, but I think better to just focus on what the world is....it is what it is.
So if you can make the leap to decide to invest time/money, the next part is how/when/where?
Dan Appleman had a article in Visual Studio Magazine titled Show Me the Money that talks about the importance of deciding which technology to learn. If you look at our own history in SQL Server, are you a happy investor if you spent a lot of time on English Query or Notification Services? Will learning Reporting Services help you get/keep a job, or is a distraction compared to learning more XML?
There are no easy answers. Early adopters sometimes get rich, sometimes get the hatchet when the technology fades away. Look at the current job ads, can you see many ads that match your skills? What could you add that might separate you from the pack? Would some MySQL/Oracle/Something Else experience help, or should it be something else within SQL Server?
Decide to invest first, then think hard about how much and where to make the investment. Don't look for immediate returns, and realize that not every investment will have a big payoff.
I'll define a brown bag lunch as a training event held at lunch time where someone on the team does a technical presentation designed to enlighten/educate others on the team that decide to attend. The original idea was that everyone would bring their lunch in a 'brown bag', but I think it's more common that lunch is provided. They have that whole grass roots/open source/good karma feel to them. No better way to learn a topic a little more deeply than by preparing a presentation on it, and for most people it's more approachable because they know all the people in the room.
That's the intro, now to the question - do they work? I've tried it when I was managing, and sadly, it didn't work.
The first hurdle was that I needed to give them paid time to prepare the presentation. Not really fair to ask someone to give up time with family for something that is directly work related, but you have to look hard to see if you can afford to lose them for 4 hours (or more in some cases). In most cases if you want the training, you find a way to give them the time.
The bigger hurdle was that for most of them it was the first time teaching/presenting, and it was painful. I sat through one that attempted to explain every concept of UML and I think all of us were lost 10 minutes into it. That means to make the presentations work you have to devote additional time and resources (you!) to reviewing their outline, checking the slides (UML had 180 for a one hour presentation), and doing a practice run with them. For most managers this is time well spent, but time that is very hard to come by.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle was convincing the rest of the team that some good might come from the effort. Funny how the prospect of 'giving up' a lunch hour to listen to a presentation was taken as an intrusion or worse. Providing the food will offset this to a good degree, as few things motivate IT professionals like free food!
I'm always looking for input from people that have made this work, and so far I haven't found many (please do contact me if you have). If you decide to give it a try, here are some suggestions:
You could easily do worse than playing one of the many MSDN webcasts, or a series of interesting videos from JumpstartTV!
When we first set up shop for End To End Training we knew we wanted both a flip chart and a dry erase board. For the latter we did some research and many people recommended tileboard, available from the local home supply type store for about $10 for a 4'x8' sheet, a lot cheaper than the store bought ones. We put a wood frame around it (using pocket hole joinery if you're interested) and used it for 18 months. It worked reasonably well, but the dry erase part turned out to be more like almost dry erase. We had to use a sponge that was barely wet to get stuff off and we also had a couple incidents where permanent markers got used. Dry erase is supposed to be easy!
We just moved to our new office and debated just replacing the tileboard (and making it easier to replace again in the future), or trying Plan B - plexiglass. We purchased a 4'x8' sheet of 1/8" plexiglass for $100 and mounted it on top of a new $10 piece of tileboard, then secured it using screws and fender washers. Installation was a pain, lots of static electricity between the two sheets and as we drilled the mounting holes we kept getting bits of dust sticking to the inside which we then had to carefully wipe away trying not to leave fingerprints and other smudges. The plexiglass also doesn't like to quite lay flat. Close, but not perfect. A mounting issue I'm sure, but it didn't make it easy! We're testing it live this week in class and it erases easily with a soft cloth. Some colors work better than others, we've had to set aside the brown markers for now (maybe because they are the low odor ones), and it's just a little shinier than we'd like, maybe should have just painted behind it rather than use the tileboard. We'll see if it works out to be worth the extra money/effort, or if we need Plan C.
If you've found this mildly interesting you might also want to read an article I posted years ago, White Board, Flip Chart, or Notepad?
I was having this discussion recently with Shawn Weisfeld, President of ONETUG and it's definitely a frustrating topic. As a former IT manager my team was always pushing to go to a class or a conference to "maintain their skills" but surprisingly few would make time to attend a Code Camp, MSDN Event, or just read a book on their own time. Why is that?
I know that MSDN & TechEd events tend towards 'look at our latest new features' and sometimes add in some sales pitch, but for the cost - free - I've seen some awfully good demos. Code Camps though, or my own SQLSaturday! don't suffer from the same market spin. You can totally ignore the few sponsors present, and there are enough sessions that you can skip the 'New Features in Product vX' if you want. So why does the Orlando Code Camp average 400 attendees when I'd easily bet there are 4000 .Net developers in Orlando? Why does the Orlando .Net User group average 30 attendees, and the SQL Group about 20?
Some of it is marketing I think, trying to get the word out to a bigger segment of the available audience. Some of it just seems to be a negative attitude towards anything free, that somehow if its free it must be of lower quality. User groups in particular seem to suffer from a perception that there is nothing of value for the advanced user, that the groups cater to beginners.
In fairness, I'm really only complaining about those that don't take advantage of free training that do nothing on their own. If you read SSC or SQLTeam or blogs or whatever, or buy the occasional book, good!
If it was up to me everyone would attend paid training all the time, mostly because Im in the training business and would benefit! In practice that's just not affordable or sustainable. So what about you blog reader? Are you looking at alll the training options available to you and making good choices, or just waiting on the boss to approve the next training trip?
