{"id":894,"date":"2005-12-13T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-12-13T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/?p=894"},"modified":"2005-12-13T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2005-12-13T12:00:00","slug":"in-praise-of-good-trainers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/13\/in-praise-of-good-trainers\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of Good Trainers"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> that mentions training which got me thinking even more.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

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  1. So are you a DBA or just<\/i> a trainer?<\/li>\n
  2. How<\/i> much time do you need off for teaching!?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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!<\/p>\n

    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!<\/p>\n

    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 😉<\/p>\n

    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<\/p>\n