Putting together budget figures for next year, I've got as far as training - what do you guys spend on training each year, and what do you spend it on?
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Putting together budget figures for next year, I've got as far as training - what do you guys spend on training each year, and what do you spend it on?
Technician Training?
Nada.......Zilch....... Nothing.......Zero........£0.00p
Can't even get reimbursed petrol money for attending LEA Support Service seminars and briefings.
^ What my fellow Earthling said! ^Quote:
Originally Posted by Earthling
In the past when we've had training it's because there was money left over in the school budget and I caught SLT at the right time to get my hands on some!
Well a 5 day training course costs about 3000 euro overhere... I think this is an absolute minimum for every IT guy to maintain his skills/knowledge.
bio..
We used to have CPD which usually meant we could get on one course per annum, this has now finished due to lack of funding but I still see Teaching staff having training through their CPD.
It is and always will be a two tier system wherein those that teach get and those that don't get nothing.
I do feel that there is a required need for technical people to be constantly updating their skillset but the majority of schools don't feel this is made a priority within schools.
HT's don't know basically what it requires to stay ahead of the game for technical staff as they really don't have a clue about these things and so rely on the LA for guidance, the LA in their ultimate wisdom do not want school technicians becoming better than their technicians as this means they lose money from the various SLA's that they provide to the schools and so it is a vicious circle.
Only those schools who have good leadership invest in their technical people and this over the past 5 - 10 years has brought rewards to those schools whereas other schools have failed to do so and have been left to the devices of LA's which means they have paid over the odds for services which they could have had internally for a fraction of the cost year on in.
This is purely a general overview based on information gleaned over the past 10 years from various sources. :D
Training? What's that? Don't we just know everything already?
Unfortunately, we're the same as most, we spend absolutely nothing on training. We ask every year, we put business cases together (having been asked to provide information), but because of the costs of the courses we require we get told each time that the money isn't available (apparently we would use up about 60% of the whole school training budget igf we went on the courses we want).
It kind of makes the yearly appraisal/PDR a bit pointless given there is a whole section entitled "Training Needs".....
I've just been in talks with the school, offering to pay for the courses myself, all I am asking from them is to be able to take the time off work (not out of my holiday entitlement) to attend the courses, but have been told "no" again as the number of days I would require is more than any other member of staff would get in an average year. How am I supposed to improve!?!?
anyway, rant over :-)
We had the same problem with funding for training so in discussion with the HT last year it was agreed that I include the training requirements and costs within the IT Development plan. This keeps it seperate from the staff CPD budget.
I'm still waiting to see what sort of budget I'll be getting but so far noone has asked me to revise it.
Hmm okay, let me revise my question based on those responses so far - if you had a training/CPD budget, what courses would you go on, what books would you buy, which conferences would you attend?
What courses would I attend? Server 2008 Admin, Disaster Recovery, VMWare implementation and Admin, anything else I thought would be a benefit
Books? Not really keen on books, tend to get most stuff from User Guides and manuals. A set of Office Dummies Guides would be useful......but who to give them to? The list would be long and distinguished.
Conferences? Any that are held in Vegas, The Bahamas, Rio, Cardiff or anywhere where there's Dancing Girls and tequila.
One thing you could look at doing is to make sure that if you are doing a particular project (eg upgrade to Win 7 throughout) then you include training for it as part of the cost. This not only sets you a target it also means that SLT / Training Manager can see some benefit from the money spent.
Good comment, Tony. I have included some specific training in our upcoming Server 2008 / Windows 7 migration already, so was thinking about other ongoing training/CPD needs. I am not specifically talking recommendations for a specific book or course (although please do give those too) as much as "I went on a conference about using iPads in class" kind of things too.
I'm tempted to say anything that will give you more of an awareness of how tech is used educationally would be good, but that is a personal drive I have ... Things like TeachMeets, visits to other schools, etc all come under CPD to some extent.
For my migration of CC3 to Server 2008/Windows 7 I bought "Windows 7: Administrator's Pocket Consultant" and made sure I had at least two days set aside to Google any issues that came up. No training , just a lot of winging it and learning from the outside contractor who helped a bit.
We've now added the Microsoft IT Academy to our EES/MSA, which has a lot of good online training courses on there, its just finding the time to go through them. That's about the extent of the training I get here, although if I could I would transfer my subscription to PC Pro and Experts Exchange so that the school paid for them instead...