With so many resources out there and ways to train, we want to know what works best for you and why! Give us your thoughts on the best and worst strategies.
34 Spice ups
taylorc
(TaylorC)
2
4 Spice ups
pbrain
(Juanoflo)
3
Classroom training with hands on labs always works well for me. i need to be engaged and be able to get answers to questions right away.
I am an autodidact, but that is mainly due to necessity and pure survival, but when given the option, I would prefer the traditional setting.
Online courses and self paced learning becomes tedious and fails because there is no pressure to get the classwork done. And in IT everything else is priority.
6 Spice ups
z-rogue
(Z-Rogue)
4
Whatever I find interesting or find I need for what I am doing. Ill watch videos\read resources on whatever I find interesting and want to learn. Same goes for any issues that I run into and need to learn in the moment to resolve whatever issues come up. Its important to build your own knowledge base and collect things as you go, not necessarily dump a ton of knowledge without anything to connect it to.
I dislike classroom style learning, I want to feel engaged in what Im learning, and I tend to stop and resume a subject several times based on interest.
IT is a journey, Enjoy it.
3 Spice ups
kyle4591
(Kyle K)
5
Training? What’s that? Oh yea, that’s that thing that was cut from the budget back in 07 or 08. Even when there were dollars for it, I haven’t worked anywhere that ever made an effort at training. Either upper management considered smart well trained employees to be expensive and a flight risk, or direct management had no knowledge (scary) or was self taught (scarier) and didn’t think anyone should need training. Most/all of my training is done either on my own time using various message boards, user guides, and blog posts. It’s a lot of chaff with very little wheat but what wheat there is is golden. I would welcome the opportunity for time off to complete some hands on lab training, even if I had to foot the bill for it. I’m a learn by doing person, and if allowed to follow someone who knows what they’re doing it works very well.
11 Spice ups
Pretty much what Kyle said. I have yet to come across an organization that invested into formal IT training programs or had budget for it. Most of the time i do self training and then work on convincing mgmt to reimburse the training/exam costs.
1 Spice up
I like the Matrix method.
You know, the direct upload to the brain followed immediately by a practical exam.
14 Spice ups
I agree with Juanoflo, in that I enjoy benefit from classroom training that stresses a hands-on approach to getting the material through to its students. The individual often has the knowledge required to effectively teach the subject in a way that is structured to the material/exam/test. You are often pressured into meeting deadlines and will feel clueless/left-out if something is missed (that’s motivation to stay with the class).
1 Spice up
So do you prefer a five-day crash course or more of a university style training in a classroom?
@pbrain @christiancarder1834
I prefer learn at my own pace with labs. If need be, just give me a book. I’ll make do. Not to be “one of those guys”, its just a I typically learn faster than the back third of the class in college, and I get frustrated. Which isn’t very nice of me, I know.
4 Spice ups
Hands on and in chunks. When I say chunks, I mean task based guidance with explanations that aren’t so high level that you lose sight of what is being done but just enough that you know how the process works on a fundamental level.
MVA, Pluralsight, CBT Nuggets and Cybrary do a wonderful job with this.
5 Spice ups
I’d prefer receiving IT training from a group of half naked attractive women but seeing as that seems out the realm of possibility I resort to such things as books and the interwebs. It’s a damn shame.
10 Spice ups
Our company is currently pushing to put money into a training program, specifically using an LMS system that will allow me to track who has done what and how well they did (based on learning assessments from the training). I’m mainly looking at online media training, and so far Udemy and Skillsoft have been the most promising. Lynda.com and Udemy have excellent material but their management system is rather lacking to be able to manage and track how people are doing. I need to be able to not only get the information to the employees, but make sure they have gone through it AND retained the knowledge from it.
If anyone has any suggestions for me, I’m happy to hear them!
1 Spice up
Nice try, I am not making you a meme of that…
@stephenmoniz
7 Spice ups
Dang, I have failed you, myself, and my peers again 
It was worth a shot lol
5 Spice ups
I will private message you some more information
I am taking classes… and it hurts when the professors are lazy and/or don’t know enough about the labs. My professor for my Hardware class didn’t teach the class, Professor Messer did.
My current class… Intro to Operating Systems, well, you tell me. Our first lab, we were going to build an answer file and do some automated image building. I thought, “Great! I have imaged so many computers, I now get to see how we build what I’ve been deploying” The school computers were upgraded from 4 gb of ram to 12 gb of ram, the OS’s were upgraded from 32 bit windows to 64 bit windows. That meant the 32 bit Windows AIK wasn’t working. When I suggested to the professor it wasn’t working because of the hardware and os changes, she just blew it off. We wasted the rest of the period, it wasn’t until the end of the class (and her researching what I already told her) that she figured out it wasn’t going to work.
then there was my intro to network class… it was more of a history of the internet class. I actually learned more about subnetting from the intro to operating systems textbook than I did my professor.
1 Spice up
jahnthro
(Jahnthro)
19
Might want to take a closer look at that Headline photo, then.
2 Spice ups
That sounds so frustrating! Is this through a college/university setting?
@desktop36750842
