276. How To Get The Most Out Of Your Training Budget

How do I get the most out of my training budget at work? How do I use my training budget as a way to improve my standing at my company? These are the questions we will answer in today's episode of Dev Questions.

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Training budgets are tricky things. Sometimes companies don't even have one. Other times companies have a training budget, but they don't want to spend money in it. Still, other times you'll get to the end of the year and you'll end up buying training in order to use up the budget. Whatever the situation you're in, there's ways to optimize what you get out of the training budget while also increasing the chances you'll get a bigger training budget next year. So let's talk about it in today's episode of DevQuestions.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Software development is more than just writing code. So let's talk about the rest of it. Specifically, let's talk about how to get the most out of your training budget. Companies love to have highly competent, well-trained developers. They may not want to pay for them or pay to get their current employees up to that level, but that's what they want. So here are some ways to show your employer the value of training as well as to show a return on investment. This is important because if you show a return on investment, you're more likely to continue getting help. So, number one, establish a goal before you do anything. This is one of the things that people do wrong a lot. Now, yes, I sell training, so I want to be careful here because I don't want to come across as, well, here's the things you should do to get my stuff. That's not what I'm doing here. But I want you to think through the different ways that you get training and what value you get out of it. What's your goal? What's your intent? I see companies that send people to conferences. I speak at conferences, you know, a few times a year. And when I do, the conference might be free, that's great, or it might be hundreds or even a thousand plus dollars to go to the conference. And then there's the travel expenses. So let's say the conference is $1,000, but then you have to be there for three, four, or five days, and that means hotels and meals and flights and maybe a car or Uber. That's a lot of money. So one conference, which might be, let's just say it's four days, one conference might cost your company $5,000. Do they get $5,000 worth of value back? Or is it something where you're going on a trip and you're having fun in a new city and meeting new people and goofing off and not really getting a whole lot of value out of it? Even if you're super intent on, I'm going to go to every session I can, which is great, but that's still a big fire hose. I mean, I teach these sessions. I know that it's hard to have good takeaways from a session that you can apply for even a few sessions out of the entire day. So even if you get a few nuggets of wisdom from every session you go to, there's not a lot of value returned there if you're not careful. Because it just that's the start of the process. Really, what you're trying to do with a conference is you're trying to figure out what's out there. What are the things, the questions I should ask? So if you have the goal of figuring out what questions should I ask, a conference can be great. And I would never discourage you from going to that because what you're doing, you're taking full advantage of the conference by figuring out what do I need to discover? What can I learn more of? What new things do I not even know to ask for? When you do, you'll find some great stuff. And you'll realize, hey, these are the things I need to learn more of. When I speak at conferences, I attend the conference as well. And I take advantage of going to a number of sessions, even though I learn all day a lot, right? So I spend a lot of time learning in my normal day job. But I go to conferences because I get the opportunity to sit on in on sessions where I hear something new or in a different way or about a new technology that I wasn't paying attention to and I should have. And so now what I do is I write down a list of the things I need to research, the tips that I've learned as well, and any kind of new information that I want to go deeper into. And so I come home from a conference, I have a list of anywhere from five to 50 things that I need to do next. That is getting value out of a conference. So if you go in with a goal of, I want to be exposed to new things and figure out what are we missing? What are the things that we're not doing that we should be thinking about? That's a great way to go to a conference. Or it might be, I'm gonna go to a conference to network. So I want to meet people, I want to, you know, make new connections. That can be great as well. But if you go to a conference and you don't know why you're going, and you go and you know, you go to the sessions, but you get tired after a while, you don't really take good notes, and you learn a few things and you come back and you have a few things you can say, hey, I learned this or that, um, that might not be worth the anywhere from a few hundred dollars to five thousand dollars. So when you establish a goal before you do something, then you have a better idea of am I meeting that goal? Because if your goal is to, let's say your goal is to learn SQL Server well, and that's your goal, your training. Well, then a conference is not the place to go. Even if it's a a SQL conference, it's not going to be something that will teach you SQL well. Now, maybe a pre-workshop will give you some depth, and that's great, but it's not going to give you the depth that you could get in a different way. Maybe it's a five-day training seminar instead. I've done those as well, where you go somewhere and you sit in a classroom for three to five days of intense learning on a topic. That can be super valuable at helping you go deeper. The problem is that it's quick. And so you don't get a chance to really absorb as much as you want. You don't get as much time to practice as you probably should, which means that while you get exposed to it, when you start to learn some of these things, really what happens is a lot of it gets lost. And you have to either go back to your notes and hope they're there, or go back to the booklet they gave you, or if they provide you video, it'd be awesome, but they usually don't. Um, but somehow rereference that stuff. Or maybe it's, you know, you go to a college and you go to, you know, take one class that is in database development. And, you know, that's over the course of a semester, so you have more time to absorb. You do the homework and you can go deeper. Unfortunately, it might not be as practical and hands-on as you'd like because it's a bit outdated. But whatever the case may be, set your goal first. That way you know if you're accomplishing it. Because a lot of people just waste training dollars. And when they do, the bosses look at that and say, I don't see the return on investment. Therefore, why would I can have them continue to do this? This seems like a waste of time. It feels like I'm just paying for vacations. That's not necessarily what's happening, but that's what it can feel like. When the boss doesn't see a big change because of what you learned, then how is that value to the company? What how is that adding anything to the company? You might say, well, but their goal should be to help me. No, their goal is to help the company, and they will help you as well if that aligns with their primary goal. But their goal isn't to just be this altruistic company that benefits their employees without any benefit to the company. That doesn't usually happen. So that's number one. Establish your goal before you do anything. Now, number two is identify the training and format that will best accomplish that goal. Like I said, there's lots of different ways you can do training. You know, I offer self-paced online training. That can be valuable, but some people don't do well there. And some people want a different experience, or they need a classroom experience, or they just need something different than what I provide. That's understandable. That's why you know I don't, I'm not the solution for every need. But that's one type of training. And that could be just my YouTube videos. But another type of training is that you go and do something. So it's you go to a classroom at your local community college, it's that you go to a training place that's that's focused on training you. You might go to a um nights and weekends boot camp, or you might go to a conference. But once you've identified your goal, then you can identify the training and format that best accomplishes that goal. Figure it out, try it, and one of the things is don't shoot for the moon in the first go. Figure out a small way to do it and make sure it works. Number three, this is really important, practice what you learn. This is where you build practice projects. You know I'm gonna say that, but this is where you actually do your true learning. Because if you just say, hey, I sat in five days of training and it was a fire hose and I got lots of information, yes, but how much did you retain? And you're like, well, all of it, I'm sure. Okay, then let's quiz you on the on the booklet you have. And you're like, well, I don't know all those answers. You didn't really retain it because you were exposed to it. It feels like you know it, and you might have a cursory knowledge or a high-level overview of it, but you want to turn that into muscle memory. You want to turn that into something that you can utilize at your job. So practice what you learn. Number four, figure out how to apply what you learn at work. This is where you start to show impact. Because again, your boss may provide you with training and you may look at the whole training catalog of all the things you could do and say, I want to learn WPF. And you learn WPF, and that may be valuable. But if your day job is to work on a web application, how are you being benefiting your company? Now, you could if you start to create utility apps for your company built in WPF that do something, and that might be super valuable. But if you're just learning something that has no relation to your company, then your company is just paying for you to get better, but they're not getting anything from themselves out of it, which means no return on investment, which means that your company says this is expendable. If we have any budgetary pressure, this is one of those things that are going to go first. Because which do you want to go first? Something that's expendable or an employee? Something that's expendable or something that's valuable. So therefore, make sure you figure out how to apply what you learn at work. Number five, give your boss a written summary of your training and what it produced. This is where you're being super obvious about it. You are making sure that there's no doubt that you learned something from it. This is not a long thing, it's a simple one-page summary, half a page. But you want to say, hey, I learned these things and this is where I applied them. This is how the company benefited from my training. Now you may say, well, I told my boss, put it in writing. Here's why. Because your boss probably isn't the CEO. And your boss has a boss. And if you do the telephone game where you tell your boss something, your boss tries to remember it and then tries to relay that to the next level up, and so on, it gets lost in the shuffle and it kind of fizzles out. But if you can give your boss something in writing that they can turn around and put in their wins and say, hey, here's another win that I have, which is that I got my employees trained and here are the results of their training. That shows your boss's boss that the training dollars are valuable. So now you've given your boss a win, not just you. And you've shown that your training is worth something, that it's not just expendable. It's not just something that's optional. It's something that has a direct impact on the company. So now you've done this, now you've shown that you have a return on investment, that those dollars turn into value. Now, number six, you can start talking to your boss before the new budgetary year, well before because they're going to send the budget early. But before the new budgetary year, talk to your boss about more training dollars if you need to, or more training time if that's what you need. So this is gonna tap, you know, top out somewhere. But if your boss doesn't give you any training dollars, and if your boss doesn't give you any training time, still do some training. But don't do a lot that you're showing impact for. Okay. Show impact in some, but don't make it so that your boss goes, well, you're doing it for free, so therefore, why do you pay for it? But do something and utilize a little bit of time at lunch, or you don't ask for just a little bit of time for a lunch and learn. Or whatever the case may be, figure out a way to do a little bit of training and then show your boss the results of that. Then negotiate in the new year for a little bit of money, a little bit of time. So maybe you have no budget. Just say, you know what? Can I have $200? I just want $200 for the new year. That's it. But that will allow me to grow what I learn and have even more of an impact. So now what you're doing is you're starting to show that if I invest a little, I get a little back. If I invest a little bit more, I get even more back. And just like with investing in the stock market or anything else, when you put money in, you realize I get more money out, you start to go, well, can I put more money in and get even more money back? So that's what you want to do with your boss. You want to say, hey, if you put more money in, you get more value out. So negotiate before the new budgetary year for more trained dollars or more trained time, whichever you think you need. So that's the way to best utilize your training uh time and money at work. Negotiate for something because some companies just don't give you anything. If the good start is just time. Hey, can you give us a little bit of time? This is why I have a YouTube channel with almost 900 videos on it. Because you can say, hey, can you give us just an hour a month that we can learn together? Where we're going to watch a free video on YouTube. So you're not going to pay anything, but we're going to learn about new technologies. We're going to kind of figure out ways to be better at what we do, and then show how that had an impact and turn that into a, hey, can we have two hours a week? Or can we have a little bit of training money to be able to do some of this stuff individually and maybe an extra half an hour a week or an hour a week, and maybe a little bit of, you know, like bias courses or bias time at the local community college where it's after hours. So, whatever the case may be, start small and grow from there because you want to make sure that your career is protected, and that means continue to grow. But you want to do that as much as possible on the company dime. But the way I do that is to show the company that it's not just about you getting value, it's about them getting value as well, that return on investment. So that's how I do it. Best wishes. Thanks for listening. And as always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to IamtimCorey.com and enroll in a course.