Identify benefits of training, and highlight ones which are beneficial for the company. When company understand their benefit with training, they will give you a green light, as all companies belives in fact - updated strong skillset employees are asset for the company.

posted April 22, 2009

I only have 5 years of experience in the IT market, so more mature persons may have sounder intake on this subject, but this are the top 5 answers i get when talking about my (or a newly contracted coworker):

5) You have one week to prepare yourself.
4) Talk to X. He/She's done something similar.
3) You say you enjoy a challenge don't you?
2) Buy a book and will reimburse you.
1) Google is your friend.

The Book way is one of my least favorites because:
- usually its not available
- nowadays the examples and explanations are the same you'll find on any given blog.
- they get outdated fast.
- and most importantly, if your company payed for it, then its your responsibility to put its knowledge to good work (even if its not available or doesn't respond to your needs).

From experience, the "there's no way i can use that tech in that timeframe with those requirements unless i get a formal training" argument can get you fired (or branded inapt to anything other the tech you here contracted for) even if its true. So i wouldn't advise anyone to use it, unless you're desperate or have a level-headed boss.

The most successful argument i used was to supply market quotes for an senior resource in a tech i would need to help me in said project. The result was not what i expected but i did get the senior resource and formal training, just not in the area i asked for.

But the best way is to plan ahead (when possible) usually in the last trimester companies are more open minded to some extra spending (probably because budget leftovers or Tax benefits), and that is the perfect timing to approach the <insert person of you company that will approve your training here> and talk about the benefits it will bring to your performance and (if there are any) give examples on what went wrong in your projects that year and how this training would help you improve in that area.

Also, but on a lesser scale, don't hide anything. Bring your coworkers to the discussion table, your needs are probably their needs also, and that might:
a) Convince your boss you're not incompetent, just need to be up to date on the latest and shiniest techs (if he is a thigh headed kind of boss, otherwise you won't have this problem).
b) Group training is way cheaper (cheaper being the operative word).

I got nothing more to add. But am curious about the more "seasoned" or more (soft) skilled guys out there experiences.

posted April 22, 2009

On your next business trip, tell him the pilot had as little training as his developers. Point out that there are more "buttons and dials" in a piece of software than the aircrafts cockpit.

I would then recite all the places that things needed do-overs or didn't work as expected, all the ad-hoc "training" where someone was stuck and had to read up and then point out that there is no business accounting for any of that. In a formal training process, you do the training up front and then measure it with tests.

Finally, i'd ask him if he prefers to ask my personal opinion of who is and is not competent or just have them all take certification tests.

If that didn't work, I'd look for another job because I probably irritated the poop out of the guy.

posted April 22, 2009

I think it depends on the company you work for, the importance they place on training and what importance training for testers comes in relation to training for developers. I keep a library of books in my cube, that I share with others in the team, sometimes I review my co-workers cubes to see if they have a book that might be useful for what I am working on. I used to try and get books paid for by the company, and usually one a year is capable of being done, but since I tend to do the same work over and over I like to have my own books as refernce materials and I keep them with me as I go to new jobs.

In a start-up that did not offer much, I was able to get a book a year put onto the expense report as part of a training library that I offered to the rest of the department. For conferences it was tougher, and I was never able to travel to one, only local ones and I took the hit for work that did not get done on days I attended. Basically I came home and did a few hours to catch up on what was going on and limit the catch up I had at the end of the week. For that I had to really push, and I brought back all the materials and shared them with the team. Limits were placed on the amount of money we could spend, so I couldn't go to every session I wanted but I got a couple of useful ones. Part of what helped was focusing on the sharing of the materials, and presenting it to the team and anyone else interested, afterwards - so you get not only training but presentation skills.

In my current company we do get offers for training, there is an internal training system, accounts for Books 24x7 which is nice and we do monthly QA Talks to share information, although external conferences are always tricky Long distance ones are still not on the table, local ones are available but there is a limit to what we can do for training sessions - I made a list of sessions to go to and justified each one for its merits for testing. This included improvements to current test processes and future ones, I am a proponent of Agile processes that I discuss and push in our team when I can so it was nice to be able to attend some sessions at a conference last year. I had to go through approval twice where part of the approval was to have summaries of the sessions and share the materials with everyone. I have found that sharing the materials and training others helps to get approval.

posted April 23, 2009

A book that costs less than a team lunch strikes me as being in a very different category than a $1000+ course or conference. Indeed, as someone who has learned from books, courses, and conferences, I generally favor books for education, courses for credentials, and conferences for professional networking.

Specifically, telling your boss: "I'd like to learn about faceted search on my own time; can I expense a $35 book?" should be a no-brainer--and not just because I'm publishing one. :-) But it's reasonable for management to think a bit harder before approving a conference (many of which are junkets) that will cost $1000 and a few days of an employee being out of the office.

Of course, all of this works better when an employee has such a strong relationship with his or her manager and employer that their judgment is aligned, and the decision isn't adversarial. Personal growth is a concern that should be shared between employer and employee, and an employer who shows no such concern will pay a price in employee productivity and loyalty.

posted April 23, 2009

The measure of how apt a company is to pay for training for their technology workers is closely related to how the work of those individuals are tied to the revenue of the company.

If one of the core revenue streams for a company is heavily dependent on technology (ex. eCommerce site, shrink wrap software, etc.) then the chances of an employer paying for classes, books, conferences, etc. will be higher. This is simply continual investment in a company's valuable assets (i.e. the software engineers, DBAs, etc.).

However, if you work on an application that has no direct association with how the company makes money (ex. an internal time tracking application for an insurance company, etc.) then it will certainly be an uphill battle to receive any additional resources paid for by the company to improve their employee's tech skills. Unfortunately, these folks will be viewed and treated more or less as a *cost*, not an asset, which business instinctively try to reduce spending on whenever possible. (In addition, they are also vulnerable to outsourcing and offshoring.)

The "culture" of the company is dedicated by *how* it makes money and *who* is responsible for helping to making that money. In general, software companies whose product is technology-based tend to be better at providing and paying for skill improvement resources for their tech employees than non-techology companies would.

Links:

• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html

posted April 23, 2009

You are absolutely right (in my opinion based on my experience) when you say that the availability of training is a matter of company culture. Ray Vega just made a good point by tracing it to the ways the company earns its revenue.

Explaining the ROI to your boss is not productive, she already knows it. Only a few managers don't get it, most understand it, but they have to make reasonable policies under their budget constraints (see Mr. Vega's point again).

Explaining the ROI to employees might help. If a good book can make you a slightly better professional, your payoff can be worth thousands of dollars and justify a $50 investment.

What doesn't work? A library. I've observed it many times and strongly believe that developers spend more time with a book if it's on their desk and not on a common shelf (or worse, on a different floor). While organizing a programmer's library sounds like a reasonable cost-cutting move, it cuts benefits more than it cuts costs.

What works? A three-pronged approach: borrow from your company's programmers' library (and be a librarian's worst enemy!), expense what you can, and buy that book if you can't expense it.

posted April 23, 2009

Well, I've a nice long list of things that didn't work as well as I'd hoped (I have a library on my desk - over 60 books and only 3 on loan just now...) but there are two particular things that have worked well in my context. One you will be familiar with - the "Brown Bag"; "Lunch and Learn", "Knowledge Break" sessions - they are pretty popular and we have several streams going now, each supporting about 1 session per month. The other that worked well in our environment - I managed to get it written explicitly in my job description that it was part of my job to bring industry good practice knowledge into the organization. That has helped in many ways; it means I'm spending about half my time educating in one way or another, even while doing other work. Whatever I do becomes collaborative and educational if there's any opportunity for it to become so. Typically I spend a lot of time getting things set up and working the right way, then when folk can see how it ought to go I move on. Once people know something is possible because they've been there helping it happen, they don't tend to look back. (feel free to quote me)

posted April 24, 2009