Let's remember we had a hand in crafting what our training world looks like
today by our actions of yesterday, and let's not paint all trainers and
training centers with the broad brush of incompetence and uselessness.

We need to remember that, as Laura Robinson so succinctly points out, for
those who are technical and wish to learn more, certified training centers
with competent instructors who are also computer professionals are
available.

Then, there are the bootcamps and "butts-in-seats" training centers where
all that matters is that at the end, ready or not, you too can be an MCSE
and make $85,000/year in your very first job (yeah, right)! The fact is many
of these bootcamp classes are taught by the same computer professionals who
later complain about the quality of the monsters they helped to create.

We need to police ourselves and not be willing to settle for useless
training at Billy Bob's MCSEs-R-Us Bootcamp and Day Care Center. What's the
point of spending your company's training dollars there, anyway? A
company-paid week off of work that you have to make up for by working twice
as hard to catch up and that you didn't get anything out of anyway?

We need to convince management that if training dollars are going to be
spent, they should be used at a place where we can actually learn something
from people who are trained instructors, who have actually worked as
computer professionals in the real world, and who you can call with follow
up questions after the class is over. Perhaps a plan of action as to how
that new knowledge will be applied to improve the computing environment and
save the company that same money by preventing downtime, improving security
or whatever might be a convincing argument to spend a little more up front
for quality training.

And as with anything else, when it comes to training, you get what you pay
for. You also get out of it what you put in. If you do wind up at Billy
Bob's, push yourself, your instructor and the others in the class by getting
involved and asking challenging intelligent real world questions. You might
turn the class into something stimulating and constructive for everyone. And
if the others don't rise to the challenge, you'll have an argument for
getting a refund and going to a real training center next time.

It beats sitting in the back and whining about how much the class sucks.

My two cents.

Ivonne Zamora
Manager, LAN and Desktop Support Services
izamoravisa.com

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