Health Insurance for Your Career and Your Company

July 13, 2010 Dan Burger

When it comes to job-related or career-related training, the majority of you are on your own. Your employers–IBM i platform adherents–aren’t proactively offering IT educational opportunities. Their employee handbooks probably cover training and education and your company may reimburse employees for passing courses that relate to job performance and provide a benefit to the company. But it’s still up to you to take the reins.

Consider training and education like health insurance. You don’t want to be without health insurance, and you decide when you need it. If you’re not looking after your career health, you only have yourself to blame.

Yes, employers who don’t encourage training and don’t invest in their employees are short-sighted to the point of being wasteful. It’s odd how many are focused on getting the most out of their equipment, but not out of their staff.

One of the familiar laments for IT personnel is that there is no time for anyone to be out of the office. A week in Orlando or Las Vegas is too much time away from work and the risk associated with absence is too great. Or maybe it’s the cost that is too great. Companies don’t encourage this and the employees who return to a week’s worth of work that backed up aren’t too excited about it either.

Let’s say you are an RPG programmer or you manage a team of RPG programmers. What are you going to do about continuing education? Ignore it? Claim that the obstacles to it are too great to overcome?

One way to overcome the “can’t escape the day-to-day job requirements” obstacle is with an eLearning program. The idea isn’t new, but the timing might be right. Considering that IT skills are increasingly needed to reach business objectives, that many IT environments are in need of updating, and that IT workloads are bearing down on existing staffs, an eLearning program might be the best possible fit.

“Too many developers now work in environments where it’s impossible to take even a day out of the office for training,” says Paul Tuohy, one of the partners at System i Developer, which has just introduced an eLearning program that is spun off the group’s successful RPG Summit event. “Every time we run a Summit event, several people tell us they want to come but can’t get away or get the travel approved. We developed this e-Learning program as an option for those whose companies or circumstances do not support off-site education.

“The news from COMMON Europe was a startling wake-up call in terms of just how pervasive this problem has become. Organizations simply can’t continue to underfund and undervalue training and expect their IT staff to keep up. Sooner or later, the investment needs to happen. Otherwise, you’ve got a whole different set of vastly more expensive business problems to work out,” Tuohy says.

The System i Developer eLearning topics are presented by Tuohy and the other partners: Jon Paris, Susan Gantner, Paul Tuohy, and Skip Marchesani. The initial curriculum includes Free RPG; Modular RPG using Subprocedures and ILE; RPG and the Web; RSE/RDi/RDP Jump Start; Modernizing DB2 for i; and Modernizing RPG Applications.

Each multi-session course includes live online instruction with real-time Q&A, handouts, instructor assistance between sessions, and a session playback feature for review.

System i Developer will offer new and repeat courses several times per year. Pricing starts at $109 for a single-day course and $429 for a two-week course.

For more information see the training company’s website at www.systemideveloper.com/eLearning.html, e-mail info@systemideveloper.com, or call 800-650-1804.

The next RPG & DB2 Summit on-site event is scheduled for October 12 through 14 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For more on this training event, follow this link.