Training budgets?

[tosca925]

We have an issue at our place at the moment with training budget or should i say the lack of. The powers that be seem to think that because you work in IT you know everything that works on a computer. I have been trying to negotiate a budget for training for three of us but have had no luck. There is plenty of money there, but seems to be wasted in other areas and i do mean wasted (don't really want to post details here)

 

How much are you given, who gets what, do you have a budget?

What sort of training do you ask for/get?

[GrumbleDook]

Not including stuff for me (I generally come under the SLT training budget now) we have around £2000 to cover the 3.5 million techies in the team.

 

Ok ... it covers 5 and a bit people ... we tend to go down the route of books and CDs for self-paced training, followed by the school covering the cost of the exam.

 

Whatever we do for training has to be tied in to CPD and whole school development. We pay and provide for training to fit the job and to expand the job ...

 

We also have a small pot to cover things that can't be completely tied into CPD and whole school development ...

 

This includes trips to trade shows, expenses for travelling to events, even to cover costs of additional hardware when testing things.

[steve]

We get a specific budget for 4 techies of £600 in total, which we can use how we like, including overtime for in house training.

 

Plus access to a large pot of money specifically for SIMS training.

 

Then use of any savings I make in the development budget.

 

If all that fails I can beg and usually get a bit more funding for training :-)

[Dos_Box]

My forst school allocated me the princely sum of £200 pa. Not even enough to attend a 2 day Word course. A pitiful joke and a realistic indicator of how poorly schools manage and look after their IT staff. No wonder many lose them after a short time.

[MkII]

With 'training will be provided' in my original job description I was hopeful.

 

When it came down to it I was told the allocation for all staff was £200 absolute maximum.

 

I couldn't find anything for that so blagged a weeks advanced server training from our support provider as I hadn't used up any support tickets. We changed support provider the following year and that was the end of that.

 

This year I have been told that our 3 yearly LEA tech staff meeting counts as all the training budget allocation. That's the petrol money. This is the only money that i've ever been allowed to spend on training. We have no books etc that I haven't bought myself.

 

I'm not allowed any other 'training' as I can't be spared the time. This includes Edugeek conferences, the BETT show etc, all of which I have to do on my own time, from my own pocket.

 

I joined the union and was told I wasn't allowed to go on training or I'd not be allowed to do any training for my own job. I didn't laugh.

[ThatBoringBloke]

If I want to do my own PD, i.e. an MCP exam then I 'may' be able to get them to pay for the exam. If however I opt to return to Uni the school will pay 50% of the fee's.

[StewartKnight]

I'm lucky (and not a little cheeky), as school is paying for me to do a degree!

[Sylv3r]

The school here pays £400 to each member of staff for CPD over a year. That is for both teaching and support staff.

 

Of course the likes of the LMT will use a lot more then the £400 they have been allocated, but that is the baseline figure that has been put on everybodys head.

[tom_newton]

I wonder... if software companies offered a "bundle" so training was included in the initial software licence price, would this be a good ruse for folks like you to slyly re-allocate budgets?

 

Tom

[john]

I wonder... if software companies offered a "bundle" so training was included in the initial software licence price, would this be a good ruse for folks like you to slyly re-allocate budgets?

 

Tom

Ask for it as part of the deal, thats what I would do