Training sessions

Being in IT there always seems to be different sessions and webinars that are available for us to attend. Some of them are free and some of them do have a cost. Most webinars that we have been attending are free and normally you walk away with a little bit of knowledge from them. Now for me sessions are entirely different because quite often I don't get much of out them.

The way I explain a lot of the sessions that I go to are “the plane took off and flew right over my head”. These are the sessions that I am totally lost from the very beginning because the instruction makes a lot of assumptions that everything knows a lot about the topic even before they say anything. There are then the sessions where “the plane took off and just touches my head” and of course this means that I may walk away with a tiny bit of information but again not much.

What I haven't normally been able to say is “the plane took off and made a direct hit” but now I can say that because of a feeling from a session I recently attended. We took a day and went to a vendor training session and of course I walked into it figuring that I was going to be lost from very early on. The session was about network switches and that material and of course when someone even mentioned those things to me I kind of wanted to run away and avoid dealing with any of it. Well, I decided that after talking to my business partner I would give this session a try and see if I got anything out of it.

I am very happy that I went to this session because I walked away feeling like I had a lot better understanding of network switches and even IP addressing which I also thought was very difficult. There is still quite a bit of work ahead of me to really understand all the material that was covered in the session but I got a very good understand of it during the day. After we left the session I was lucky and we spend some time going over all the material that I learned to make sure that I really did understand it. The instructor did make sure that everyone understood what he was talking about before he moved on but I never felt that I was the one holding up the rest of the group.

The instructor that lead the class really understood the material and made it easy to understand. In a lot of cases he didn't talk in a lot of IT terminology which was also nice. If he used a term he also made sure that everyone had the same understanding of the term before moving on. In IT there are a lot of terms that have different meanings based on what you are dealing with.

Now I can finally say that there are some really good training sessions out there and I am very happy to know what it feels like to have “the plane take off and make a direct hit”. I learned a lot and am really glad that I went. A good instructor really does make a difference when covering material and this instructor really did make a difference.