Economical Training

ROSE Blog: Rikki's Open Source Exchange

In her Ask Jo column on the Anita Borg Institute site, Jo Miller offers suggestions for training employees when there's no training budget. Her suggestions are:

• Learning exchange: employees share notes about what they learned at past conferences or training events
• Lunchtime workshops: employees lead training sessions and share their expertise or invite other people to come speak
• Speakers: find someone who is marketing a book or program to come speak or teleconference
• Volunteer: volunteer to speak at an event, be a panelist, etc.
• Webinars: employees can gather in a conference room and watch an economical webinar together
• Mentors: engage a mentor

Read her entire post for more specifics about her suggestions.

One other suggestion I have for people working in Linux and open source is to check out your local user groups. Our local group, KULUA (Kansas Unix & Linux User Association), meets every couple of months, but the meetings I've been to were incredibly informative and a great way to meet people with similar interests. The most recent meeting was held at the Garmin headquarters and included speakers from Garmin (who's recruiting, by the way, and there was a serious shortage of women in that meeting so check out their job postings) and Tallgrass Technologies, and Frank Wiles discussed the Basics of PostgreSQL.

Last year, we started offering live streaming from some events as well as streaming video archives: http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/streaming

Check out our events page for event listings near you. Many events are quite affordable and give you lots of bang for the buck: http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/resources/event_calendar

What affordable training events are happening in your community? What other suggestions do you have for economical training in this brutal economy?