Heh... actually, that's a great addition, MBN. Lots of folks forget that knowledge is ability and without the knowledge, you may not have the ability... that's the whole purpose of teaching someone... help them achieve the ability. With a good mentor, a person can very quickly gain abilities that might otherwise take years to learn through typical self or instructor led training methods.

To wit... I think that companies should sponsor the idea of summer-long apprenticeships of Jr. DBA and Jr. SQL Developer as they do for other areas in the company.

Perhaps the title of this article should have been "Be a Mentor". 🙂