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
Do you have a relationship with your professional organization?
What is your professional organization? is it in technology? Something like Ineta, PASS, ISUG, IDUG, IOUG or one of the other various technology groups that exist. Or maybe your preferred group is more in the business side of things like ASPA, LOMA or AICPA. If you dont know your desired professional organization, take a second and plug in your favorite search terms + professional organization into «binoogle» and see if the results lead you to a new beginning.
If you already know your professional organization, what do you expect of your relationship with your organization? Is it a two way street? Do you give as well as receive? Would you like the relationship between you and that organization to be stronger or weaker? Do they do enough to help you succeed, do they provide value? Do you do what you can to enable their success? A little overly rhetorical probably, but you get the point.
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