Live and learn. Part 4. Study while working?

- I want to pump and take Cisco CCNA courses, then I can rebuild the network, make it cheaper and more reliable, keep it at a new level. Help with the payment? - the system administrator who has worked for 7 years looks at the director.

“I will teach you, and you will leave.” What am I a fool? Go, work, - the expected answer sounds.



The system administrator goes into place, opens a forum, Toster, Habr and reads how to configure routing on a network of shit and sticks of almost museum equipment. Hands fell a little, but oh well - you can save money for training and pay for yourself. Or maybe it’s true to leave? The neighbors brought a new Tsiska ...



Got into this situation? Training in the work process, organized by the company or on the initiative of the employee, in my opinion, is one of the most productive forms: the employee already knows exactly what he wants from the course, how to evaluate information and how to use it. This is the case when a six-month course can bring more benefits than the whole university combined. Today we’ll talk about courses, corporate universities, mentoring and the most useless form of training. Pour hot tea, sit in front of the monitor, let's choose the form and / or format of training together.





Tease reflexes - learn more!



This is the fourth part of the cycle “Live and Learn”:



Part 1. School and career guidance

Part 2. University

Part 3. Further education

Part 4. Education inside work

Part 5. Self-education



Share your experience in the comments - maybe, thanks to the efforts of the RUVDS team and Habr’s readers, someone’s education will be a little more informed, correct and fruitful.



So, the university, graduate school, and maybe graduate school behind, you are at work. A working routine has already been delayed, approaches to tasks have been formed, salaries are twice a month, and the immediate prospects are more or less obvious. What motives can there be in order to start studying again on a serious basis? There are enough motives.

• The desire to change the scope of activity in order to switch to a better job, earn more, learn a new profession, etc.
• The need to pump skills for current work in order to grow vertically or shift horizontally; change job.
• The need to acquire new knowledge, try a different field - for example, in the case when the wrong university is over, the wrong job is chosen, there are feelings of career and intellectual stagnation, etc.
• Emotional reasons (for the company, for the sake of interest, from boredom, etc.). The most controversial motivation, because in this case the eternal student does not have a goal and specific planning. In defense of this group of students, it can be said that often during their studies they penetrate and with equal enthusiasm enter into work in a new specialty.

We have already figured out whether it is worth getting a second higher education , now we will discuss alternative options that save time (but not money) and allow you to learn something new in the shortest possible time.

Training related to work but not inside

▍ Extramural, evening courses

The most similar form of study to a university: in the evenings you attend 3-3.5 hours of lectures and practice, where teachers help to master new material. At the same time, there are no unnecessary non-core subjects in the courses, students are the same working people as you, that is, in addition to training, you can make new and sometimes useful contacts.

pros

• As a rule, teachers at such courses are practitioners, which means they give material to the extent that it is useful to you in real work. Some skills can begin to be applied from the first days.
• Classes are held in the evening 2-3 times a week and do not interfere with work (if you have to get with traffic jams, agree that on school days you will come to work a little earlier and leave, respectively, too).
• You solve practical problems in the company of professionals equal to you and thus, additionally perceive patterns of thinking, apply teamwork skills and receive additional information from classmates.
• The groups in the courses are most often small in number, and each student gets significant attention from the teacher both in terms of answers to questions and in terms of practical work.
• If the courses have any corporate affiliation, at the end you can get an offer to work in your specialty - and if you just step into IT, this is a very cool opportunity (for example, from our group of 9 people, one received an offer right away, three of them agreed to go to the company upon graduation, three more offers were received, but rejected).

Minuses

• Courses are quite expensive.
• University courses can be “crammed” with non-core subjects and taught by theorists who work part time after regular lectures.
• You may sharply miss the educational background (for example, during the training on the Software Development program, I did not have enough knowledge of mathematics, and I had to first analyze the problem mathematically and then solve it programmatically).
• You may encounter an outdated material base (for example, developing Windows Server 2008 and a PC for XP in 2018?), So a laptop, money for licenses, or the ability to find something a little pirate for training purposes can be very useful, but fresh :-)

What to look for

• Carefully study the program of the course and the number of hours, find out what is included in the training and what form of final certification awaits you at the end (scope from nothing to defending a full-fledged diploma project in English).
• Ask the methodologist who your teacher is, what experience he has, and whether he practices.
• Find out about the options for installment payment or dividing the payment by periods - as a rule, this form of payment is less burdensome.
• If you have an entrance exam or an entrance interview, do not try to get around it, be sure to go through it - so you will evaluate your level of preparation and be able to ask questions that are important to you.
• If there is English in the framework of the course, do not try to subtract its cost from the cost of training (because you already know it). It is in the foreign classes that a close acquaintance with the group takes place, and this is very important - often fellow students call each other for work.
• Find out whether a certificate of completion of the course is given and in what format (any paper with a seal and signature is needed).

▍Corporate universities

An interesting training format, accessible both to employees within the company and to external students. You study at the company itself, its authorized training center, or at the partner department of a basic university (for example, HSE or your state university), and also receive part-time or evening education in the framework of your chosen specialization (information security, communication systems, software development, project management, 1C programming, etc.).

pros

• This is a great way to get acquainted with the company, with teachers (who, as a rule, are not lower than middle), try to get a job in it. Moreover, sometimes this is the only easy way to get into the company, showing himself during training.
• 90% of corporate university professors are practitioners. You do not just study, but solve real combat tasks that the teacher had to solve as a manager or techie.
• A comfortable learning environment - in fact, you are on an equal footing with the teacher, because both managers, but different companies.

Minuses

• At your company, executives may not appreciate the prospects of training within a foreign corporate university.
• Teachers can provide information tailored to the patterns and problems of their company; perhaps something will turn out to be irrelevant or inapplicable to you.

If, however, the employee of the company that owns the course is studying at a corporate university, then there are more pluses (benefits for training, next to the desktop, the attention of colleagues and management, easily applicable knowledge, an intelligible model of career advancement / movement), and minus one is sometimes very difficult perceive their colleagues as teachers.

▍Distance courses and online training

You get access to educational resources (videos, lectures, summaries, books, sometimes entire libraries, code repositories, etc.) and study either at a convenient or agreed time, without leaving your workplace (well, or from a personal PC). You have a “cool” job, the ability to communicate with a teacher (chat or skype), homework, but most often you don’t know how much you are on the course, who is with you, and communication with “fellow students” can turn into an open flood.

pros

• Save energy and time on the road and fees.
• Convenient and familiar training format.
• You can study directly at work or immediately after it in the office (if there are no atrocious systems for monitoring working hours, actions, logging, fierce security services and fellow informers.
• You can choose a comfortable pace of work and deal with incomprehensible moments right there, on the Internet, on Toster, on Habré, on StackOverflow, etc.

Minuses

• High motivation and self-organization is required, because it is more self-education than training with a classical mentor.
• There is no live communication within the learning process.
• It is very difficult to check the teacher and clarify whether this is the one that was announced in the course description.
• The risk of making a wrong choice of course - there are so many of them now that it’s very difficult not to miss and get into a really high-quality online school (even a corporation can be a bungle).
• Minimum employment opportunities - if you do not show outstanding abilities (and how do you do it online?), The only thing you can count on is to get a resume in the HR base of partner companies, which, if necessary, can call.

What to look for

• On the certification form and the conditions for obtaining a paper signed certificate with a seal (often it is necessary to pay extra for it).
• Terms of payment and urgency of access to the course materials (ideally, this should be unlimited access).
• To listeners' reviews on social networks and on independent sites (they are usually moderated on the site).
• On the format of interaction with the teacher (ideally, this should be a chat + analysis of homework with students, preferably with pre-sending homework).

Since at the beginning of the series “Live, Learn,” we agreed on some subjectivity of our reviews, I’ll say that I am wary of online forms of education. It is scary to pay sometimes very big money for unknown content. On the Internet there are so many cool and really intelligible courses in all areas of IT knowledge that it seems to me the best choice to give preference and time to just such knowledge. In addition, most employers wanted to spit on the papers of online schools with a high degree of skepticism, but real skills and theoretical skills did not bother anyone. For example, due to my exceptional theoretical knowledge of the OSI network model, I managed to get my first job in IT - to become a testing engineer (at the age of 27, without a technological background). Of course, it is up to you to decide, but I am more a supporter of 0.5-1-1.5-year courses with offline presence.

▍ Trainings and workshops

A good training format, unless, of course, we are talking about personal growth trainings and other business youth. These are short-term, intensive courses in which the teacher helps to deepen knowledge in a field familiar to you and pass a short course of practice.



Lasts from 3 hours to several days. I will not talk about the pros and cons - the main thing is that this is not an advertisement for some next product. See sponsors, check organizers and speaker reviews and go. Sometimes it’s very interesting to go to a training or workshop not in your area - for example, you can understand colleagues a little better.

Forms of learning within the workflow

This is a very important block that cannot be bypassed. I had mixed training experience within the company and, I think, it’s worth talking about it, because the companies themselves position this as their competitive advantage in HR PR, and employees hope for the result.

▍ Mentoring and mentoring

How do newcomers feel in your company during the first business days? Sitting at an empty table and nervously fiddling with a welcome packet while waiting for a working PC? Poking at the phone, just not to raise their eyes to colleagues? Or relaxed and comfortable reading information on their work? Alas, my experience suggests that the latter are a minimum. Meanwhile, there are a lot of companies (and even very small ones) in Russian IT that are worth learning from: a new employee is assigned a mentor who, as part of his working time, conducts training for a beginner in basic tasks, simultaneously showing infrastructure (accesses, servers, equipment, bugtracker, helpdesk, project management system, etc.), introducing colleagues and so on. Thus, the new employee immediately joins the team with the mentor, knows who to contact and quickly learns the working material. Sometimes mentoring is accompanied by a modular or final exam in the field of activity, and this, although a little stress, but some kind of guarantee for the employee and for the company.



There are several points that you need to know / understand when organizing mentoring at work.

• The work of mentors must be paid - in the form of bonuses or KPI. Payment should not depend on the beginner’s work period, but according to the results of the trial period, you can still reward a little more, which means that he trained and carried away with quality.
• Mentors should be experienced and sociable - alas, if the super-genius DevOps throws the manuals on the table and gives a link to the internal Wiki, it will not do any good. A new employee and mentor should have a communication mode and dialogue.
• The mentor should be responsible for the jambs in the work of the ward during the training period - and, for example, if an inexperienced tester gives everyone 127.0.0.0 via DHCP, it is the mentor who needs to fix this trouble, and at the same time to understand for himself that you need to learn on test environments (well, yes, based on real events, we were trained, we trained - in general, we did not get bored).
• The mentor should act as a guide for the company, provide access, communicate with the system administrator, introduce colleagues from other departments, etc.
• In the event of personal hostility or conflict situations, the mentor should be replaced immediately.
• The mentor's workload during the training should be reduced and redistributed to other colleagues within reasonable limits.
• Each newcomer should have a mentor, from an intern to a senior, the difference is only in the approach, timing and amount of information provided. The personnel service must take care of the normal passage of the process of adaptation of each employee, otherwise problems in the work process are inevitable, because each company has its own working characteristics.

In any case, if you have not tried the mentoring institute within the company, set yourself this task right next month - you will be surprised by the result of working with new employees.

▍Meetups, lectures, meetings

Perhaps one of the most productive forms of training within the framework of the work: employees tell each other about achievements, share skills, hold product meetings and presentations, invite colleagues from other companies to exchange experiences (sometimes for passing hunting). Such meetings have a lot of advantages:

• employees learn to understand each other and work in a well-coordinated team;
• developers communicate in one language and exchange solutions that can be easily taken and applied;
• You can get acquainted with the culture of another company and show your advantages;
• mitaps are free.

The key to an excellent meeting is preparation: work with speakers, prepare presentations, a hall, and be attentive to the topic. The result will be pleasant and useful.

How to study at work?

When you work, the most precious resource for you is time. This is a difficult period of life when you need to work, build a career and not miss an opportunity, start a family, help parents, realize their aspirations in hobbies and hobbies. So, the biggest problem is to find time for training, so that it turns out to be dense and effective.

• Stop wasting work breaks on tea, coffee or chatter with colleagues on extraneous topics - take this time theory and analysis of questions arising from the study.
• Initiate working discussions with colleagues at lunch and in the smoking room - often a person is pleased to share their knowledge in a relaxed atmosphere.
• Read and listen to lectures in traffic jams and vehicles, if there are any in your way.
• Be sure to outline the lecture and practice in a notebook, do not rely on memory. If something is not clear to you during the lecture, put notes in the margins. For example, NB for what needs to be repeated and deepened and “?” For what needs to be clarified, asked, studied independently.
• Never teach or study at night - firstly, you will fall asleep for a long time, and secondly, everything will be forgotten in the morning.
• Study in a quiet environment. If the policy of the company allows it (and in the IT sphere it allows almost everywhere), stay for an extra hour and a half in the office to do educational tasks.
• Do not learn to the detriment of work - such a deliberate deception will not benefit anyone.
• If you study programming or system administration, it’s not enough to memorize the theory and read the Habr, you need to do everything in practice: write and test the code, work with the operating system, and try everything with “pens”.

And, probably, the main advice: do not treat studies as in student time. By scoring for studies that you pay for and that focuses on practice, you are fooling yourself.

How to negotiate with management?

If it comes to paid tuition, it’s best to pay for it yourself - this way you will remain independent of the employer. If the company pays, you most likely will have to either work out some mandatory period or return part of the money upon dismissal. If you do not have plans for dismissal, be sure to talk with the manager about partial or full payment, explain how your training will be useful.



Before training (and not in fact!), Discuss a change of schedule or a transition to a floating schedule - as a rule, in the IT sector, they most often meet them.



Well, the main thing is that if you understand that you are not ready to devote proper time to training and will do work, skip classes because of, etc., it’s better not to start. Perhaps you have already taken place as a cool specialist and you simply do not have enough food for the mind. It is up to you to decide.

▍Ancient postscript

And if you have already grown up and you are missing something for development, for example, a good powerful VPS , go to the RUVDS website - we have a lot of interesting things.