I’ve been thinking about training versus DBA work recently since it’s been a while since I did any training work. I noticed an entry on Chris Foot’s blog that mentions training which got me thinking even more.
There was a time in the late 90s when recruitment agencies would look at my cv, notice that I taught DBA courses for Learning Tree, had done a bit for Oracle years ago, and say ‘wow, you must be quite good then’. It would help me get work. Clients would also be agreeable to me taking 1 or 2 weeks off per quarter to teach courses and I found that perfect balance. Then as the recession struck in the UK IT Contracting market, I started to hear two responses that I wasn’t used to
- So are you a DBA or just a trainer?
- How much time do you need off for teaching!?
Before I knew it I was struggling to get quality work (along with everyone else) so I concentrated on the teaching which is financially rewarding but, much more important, personally fulfilling. I also didn’t have to explain to the occasional idiotic recruitment agency that maybe (just maybe) teaching other IT professionals to be a DBA might be a touch more difficult than being one! (*Just* a trainer indeed!) It also gave me a lot more time to investigate things than when I had a full-time job. I probably did this for a couple of years but eventually I gave up teaching about 18 months ago. I felt that while I knew more about Oracle than I would normally use in a day-to-day DBA job (something that’s turned out to be true) I was missing what it was really like to be a DBA. I remember being shocked on my very first teaching job when I realised that there were full time DBA instructors who had never been DBAs! I’ve always respected Learning Tree’s business model that used instructors who were independent contractors and combined training with their consulting work because it meant your attendees could be assured that you had some practical experience to balance your technical knowledge. Once I found I couldn’t organise that balance, I realised it was a problem for me.
Now that I’m back as a plain old DBA there are a number of things I miss about training – the human contact is fairly intense, it’s rewarding to see people understand something that they didn’t when they walked into the room, it had a profound effect on my personal confidence and communication skills and training is *extremely* hard work, but you feel you’ve earned your money afterwards. The list could go on because I do love teaching and would like to think I still coach colleagues on the job at every opportunity. It’s still a lovely feeling when an attendee sidles up to me at a conference and reminds me of the course I taught and I find out they’re doing well. I’d be surprised if I never taught another course at some stage.
There are things that I’d missed about being a full-time DBA though although it’s taking me a while to understand them fully. The variety of problems that crop up and I can fix; (believe it or not) I also like the discipline of change control, planning, reviewing documentation – the procedural stuff. I suspect I’m just plain weird in this respect. I like order, cleaning up messes, making sure things don’t go wrong. Being responsible I suppose. Teaching uses those skills too, but it’s not the same. Even working with big, mission-critical databases and the pressure when something goes wrong isn’t the same as talking about it. Most DBA instructors know that it’s important to teach the correct approach to the job and not just a bunch of facts. For example it’s important that someone leaves a classroom understanding the importance of recovery plans and testing those plans, not just how to perform various types of recovery. However, nothing can quite match the experience of doing it when the pressure’s on.
But this blog entry is really in praise of good trainers so let me make a few points as someone who has performed both roles.
1) You need to know Oracle far more completely to teach courses well than you do to be a DBA. The day-to-day situations that you come across as a DBA are implicitly limited by a given site’s architecture and applications (although as a contractor moving between companies you come across more situations, which I enjoy). In fact, I’m sure my technical skills have dropped a little since I stopped teaching because I have so many non-technical things to take care of.
2) When you have a class of 20 students, each individual has their own focus, concerns, questions, experience level and applications that they’re using. It’s hard enough dealing with your own concerns so imagine being responsible for all 20 points of view!
3) The good instructors I know spend far more time investigating, questioning and testing features to make sure that they actually work than I could possibly manage to, given my current daily responsibilities. Their very trade is understanding and communicating how Oracle works. No pointless planning meetings for them!
4) And, believe me, I have *never* been so tired at the end of a day’s work, never mind a whole week! The thing that always used to make me laugh a little is that even my legs were sore at the end of the week. Eventually I realised that it was because I was pacing around so much, excited about talking about Oracle 😉
Finally, everything I’ve said here applies to instructors who I respect. I also know instructors whose work I don’t respect. Some of their traits include
- Sticking ruthlessly to what is in the course notes (because that’s what they’ve prepared for and the limit of their knowledge)
- Struggling to answer questions so they make something up rather than admit that they don’t know the answer and they’ll find out
- Seeing themselves as being superior to their students and therefore demean their questions, whether openly or in their own minds.
but they’re a different breed. Fortunately, I’ve found that many attendess can see through people like this. As Chris says in his blog.
“I learned during my teaching career that if the folks you are trying to transfer information to don’t trust your technical background or technical expertise, you lose both their attention and their enthusiasm to learn.”
G’day Doug
I couldn’t agree with you more. I straddle the worlds of Oracle developer and teacher and find both rewarding. Students pay so much more attention when I tell them a “war-story” from my days in the developer trenches. Conversely Iâve recently learnt the true way to becoming really good with a product or technology is to sit down and write a 5 day course on the subject. What hard work and such a challenge!… but very rewarding at the end.
Regards,
CM.
I second Chris’ agreement.
It is only when a trainer is technically competent that he or she is going to be able to free themselves from the tyrrany of the Powerpoints/course material, and teach the *subject matter*, not the course material. But technical competence alone makes a boffin, not a good trainer. And real-world experience can flesh out and inform otherwise arid, theoretical material. It’s a balancing act, for sure… as well as a theatrical performance that appeals to my dramatic side!!
I particularly liked your comment about aching legs: mine tend to go by Wednesday!
Hi Doug,
It must be a great experience to meet an Oracle trainer with Production experience and with the gift as trainer. A wellknown company had trainers which *ONLY* trained and consultants which *ONLY* consultet. this is a bad concept.
I was in courses in which the trainer was only 5 powerpoint slides more ‘intelligent’ then the students.
Having a good trainer one week is like having christmas a complete week!!
Karl
Chris,
“Students pay so much more attention when I tell them a “war-story” from my days in the developer trenches. Conversely Iâve recently learnt the true way to becoming really good with a product or technology is to sit down and write a 5 day course on the subject.”
It’s the balance, isn’t it? I’ve come across one or two instructors where it was all ‘war stories’ but when you wanted to talk about the detail, they weren’t so keen 😉 Sometimes a war story can hide a lack of technical knowledge, but the two together work well. Personally, I found I had to develop my technical skills beyond what I’d needed in my previous work, because my war-stories don’t describe the complete picture.
Howard,
“as well as a theatrical performance that appeals to my dramatic side!!”
Yes, I think you need to be a *bit* of a show-off, but in the end it helps the students so I don’t think it’s harmful. I hope this won’t sound too weird, but I would sometimes come out in goose-pimples when I’d explained backup and recovery particularly well – it was such a buzz. Not in the guitar-god league, but the closest I’ll ever be getting …
Oh and once I *realised* why I was getting sore legs, I started to notice them earlier in the week! The mental tiredness is tremendous too. God only knows how a School-teacher copes with a class of children for nearly 40 weeks a year.
Karl,
“A wellknown company had trainers which *ONLY* trained and consultants which *ONLY* consultet. this is a bad concept.”
This is a true story but you couldn’t possibly identify an individual or company from it. I was teaching a course once and an instructor was at the back of the class, checking it out. At the end of the day he sidled up to me an murmered – ‘They *really* like you! They can tell that you’ve really done this stuff before!’
sigh
Once upon a time when mainframe companies were the norm, there were various grades of progression in one’s IT techo career.
The ones near the top of the heap were called “generalists”. Not because they clicked their heels but because they had been around for a while and knew a lot about quite a few different areas of the IT universe.
Then there was the top of the heap. They were called “instructors”. And if one was fortunate enough to land a job with a mainframe maker, the fastest way to learn a LOT about whatever in IT was to hang around with the education folks and the instructors: they REALLY knew what they were talking about.
The kind of knowledge that doesn’t come in a powerpoint slide. Heck, powerpoint hadn’t even been invented back then: the creme-de-la-creme sometimes had access to an overhead projector and hand-written transparencies and that was it!
Amazing how true knowledge still goes through the same channels, 30 years later…
Nuno,
Gosh, that brings back memories 😉
My first courses were with one overhead projector and a single set of slides that I carried from course to course. The idea was that I would reattach the backings at the end of the course and look after them. Well, once you get a bit excited talking about Oracle, the slides end up all over the desk! I remember spending one Sunday wiping OHP slides of several weeks worth of dust. Mmmm, very technical.
Next there were a couple of innovations
1) Two OHPs!! (Actually quite useful to help the flow of the course)
2) A new set of slides for each event! (Possibly not so good for the environment, but nice clean pictures 😉 )
Then it was Powerpoint, adhoc presentation tools based on Powerpoint and it culminated in a Wacom tablet and pen!
It would be funnier if I could say that’s why I jacked it all in, but I have to say I liked the new technology.
Of course none of this made a blind bit of difference to the technical content of the course. Which kind of comes back to your final point.
Cheers,
Doug