Things are tight
It seems like budgets are being cut everywhere, and IT training seems to be one of the first places cut. In an earlier post I outlined where you could get a lot of valuable training for relatively little cost. In this post I will explore a few methods that have worked for me over the years to get your boss to say YES to paying for you to refresh your fountain of knowledge.
With the economy being what it is, many companies are cutting back on training budgets yet our need for knowledge as database professionals never stops. Luckily the SQL Server community is one of the liveliest around and there are solutions.
I'd estimate that almost everyday of the week you can find live webcasts about various subjects in the SQL Server arena, the problem here is that many of these top quality training events aren't well publicized. I never knew about them until joining Twitter a few years back. As it turns out, many SQL user groups around the world stream their meetings online via live meeting, there are PASS VC's webcasts, Vendor sponsored webcasts, and the list goes on and on.
Local Events
TPS reports, love them or loathe them, they are a necessary thing for most of us working in corporate America. I firmly reside in the loathe camp, Just ask my boss.
In this case though, I've decided to start putting out regular updates about what Ive been up to for PASS. I hope the benefit is 2 fold, 1 to allow a greater transparency into what happens behind the scenes and more importantly for me to have a place to reference what we did and when!
We sent out quite a few different surveys during/after the 2009 summit, some of them are listed:
The 2010 PASS Program Committee Call for volunteers is open, We're looking for the usual assortment of people to help shape the summit in 2010.
Ever wanted to have an input into which sessions are actually chosen for the summitt? The group of volunteers who do this are chosen from these applications. Its a very challenging endeavor but also very rewarding.
There are literally dozens of separate projects that need to happen every year in order for the Summit to come together appropriately. Things like setting up the mgmt software, reviewing the ppts, reviewing the chosen abstracts for grammatical errors etc. These people will also be chosen primarily from the applications received
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PASS Value Allocation
Listening to the SQL community over the years, I thought Id take a second to put a quick thought out about why I believe PASS makes almost every decision it makes as an organization.
As a non-profit, Its all about money value, and its use to support the community. Almost every decision that is made within the organization has a value cost, whether that value is actual dollars that need to be spent, or if its a volunteers time, nothing is free or limitless. Just because Microsoft decided that the top tier SQL engine will now cost 58k per processor, doesn't mean they are giving that money away freely to user group organizations.
If you're unhappy with where the organization is allocating its resources, Contact them directly, or probably even better contact all of the board of directors (protip: email format ) let them know you want things to have a different priority, if that fails, they have elections every year, VOTE!