Training Your Technical Staff When You Don't Have a Budget
When budgets get tight, it can be difficult to provide adequate training for your staff. Over the last couple of years, I’ve found some ways to provide some training even in the face of a shrinking (or non-existent) budget.
Regional conferences
If you still have some budget, but maybe just not as much as you are accustomed to, look to smaller regional conferences as an alternative to the larger national ones that are in major cities. If you’re fortunate enough to live in a city where a conference is being held, you might get out of having to pay for travel at all. This past year, the excellent No Fluff Just Stuff conference made a stop in our town, and I was able to send two developers plus myself to it for a fraction of what it would have cost to send them away somewhere and pay airfare and hotel on top of the conference cost. I personally attended the Windy City Rails conference this year which was a single day for only $150. While the smaller conferences may not have all the speakers you would get at a larger one, I’ve been really surprised at the quality of the speakers that these conferences draw.
Books
My team has done this for the past year or so. I buy a copy of a book for each person, and we meet once a week to discuss a chapter at a time. Have people take turns leading the discussion. My experience has been that these are most productive if you tackle a topic that your team agrees is currently a pain point, as they can take the information they learn and apply it to their current project. We’ve read through The Pragmatic Programmer, Pragmatic Unit Testingin Java, and are going to move on to Don’t Make Me Think next.
Hashrocket has actually taken this a step further and broadcast these live.
Videos
It’s become commonplace for conferences to record their talks and make them available online for free. Additionally, a number of larger user groups do the same. There are a nearly endless number of videos on a wide variety of topics that are available online. Pick a video (maybe two if they’re short), watch it as a group, and then discuss it afterwards.
Here are a few sources I like:
- Peepcode - these aren’t free, but they’re close
- InfoQ
- Confreaks - lots of videos from a variety of conferences
- Windy City Rails
- San Diego Ruby - The San Diego Ruby group has a great video podcast that covers a broad variety of topics
Peer to Peer
We’ve done this even before our training budget shrank. Have people take turns presenting on a relevant topic that they are passionate about. This works well on a few levels: those listening get to expand their knowledge, and those presenting will often develop a deeper understanding of their topic. If a presentation is used, post it somewhere so that people who join the company later can benefit.
So what have I missed? What do you do to keep your skills current when you can’t get money for training?