Help my boss spend some money on me

cacharo

My boss has to submit his training budget soon so he is trying to fit some extracurricular IT training. It does not neccessarily have to be job specific, just IT related. We have looked at some onsite VMware esx classes, and other onsite small cert related classes. I cannot get him to budge on purchasing any equip for a lab, but we make due with what we have laying around. My employer pays for all materials (within reason) for certs and the tests themselves so books and such are already covered. I already have transcenders and cbt nuggets for my own self training so that is out also. Budget I assume is <10k I presume.

What would you tell your boss to do?

iowatech

What would benefit our particular environment the most??

That would be the question I would ask the boss, then go from there.

dynamik

What better way could the company spend money on you than by giving you a raise? Try that approach

It seems like instructor-led training is the only thing you could possibly put that amount of cash into. It looks like you've got everything else taken care of.

cacharo

iowatech wrote:

What would benefit our particular environment the most??

That would be the question I would ask the boss, then go from there.

It is really more for recreational purposes than job specific. My question to those reading is if you were given an opportunity to spend some money to further your education in IT (or just to play with) what would you choose? We are one of the bigger managed services firms around so we have customers with every type of environment you can think of. This makes it easy to approve whatever we like because it is in the reach of 'our job'.

Megadeth4168

If we still had a training budget.... I would be torn between a couple different things...

For myself and what I want to learn I would do a CEH course

For something that might benefit my work environment I would do something like
VB/C#.NET classes or some kind of database/SQL classes.

networker050184

If it was me personally I'd get some security training. Security is something thats always good to know and if it leads to a certification those are great to have on a resume. Also every company benefits from security knowledge.

cacharo

dynamik wrote:

What better way could the company spend money on you than by giving you a raise? Try that approach

It seems like instructor-led training is the only thing you could possibly put that amount of cash into. It looks like you've got everything else taken care of.

Unfortunately that is a different, much smaller budget.

Megadeth4168 wrote:

For myself and what I want to learn I would do a CEH course

For something that might benefit my work environment I would do something like
VB/C#.NET classes or some kind of database/SQL classes.

Both very good ideas, I like the programming angle. That would certainly be worthwhile.

nel

tell your boss to take you on a massive drinking session as a team building exercise whilst gambling away what you have left and staring at naked women ! jkn.

no but seriously, if you cant buy any equipment you have most things covered. go for more certs or even try for degree funding if you dont have one! anything you could add to your cv is a plus for me! its either that or all the execs in your company will be doing what i first mentioned