The organization that I work for recently hired a consulting firm to create a centralized database for us. It's a SQL Server database with ASP pages as the interface. I've struggled a great deal to get up to speed on this new monstrous system that we have, but having started with no SQL server or ASP experience, my progress has been rather slow.
I would like to know what practical steps I can take to become proficient with our system and able to manage it and make updates and changes as necessary without having to put in tons of calls to the consultants, who are now gone?
Should I shoot for general training classes? Should I find one of those expensive week-long intensive classes? Or should I arrange to have someone do some onsite training?
Right now I'm drowning, but I don't want to give up my job!
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The answer to your question boils down to two orthogonal issues:
- How much budget do you have, or how much can your organization bear to spend on training? The more money you've got to spend, the closer you can come to an ideal tailored solution, which would indeed involve having somebody come to your site to perform a survey and then train you on your own system. The consultants who did the original work would probably be best-equipped to do that quickly and would probably also be delighted to take more of your employer's money.
- How well do you learn through self-study versus instructor-led training? If you're a good self-starter/self-learner, you can indeed find lots of books and online training classes to help you come up to speed, or you can look around at instructor-led training options to see what's available (but, here again, budgetary matters will come into play). If you can afford a boot camp, I recommend it, mostly because it'll get you away from the office and put you in an intense learning situation where you can devote 110+% of your energies to learning what you need to know, instead of taking care of business as usual.
--Ed--
This was first published in October 2004
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