Train the Trainer

Back when I had a corporate job, I had a boss with an unorthodox philosophy regarding training. Rather than sending the entire staff out for training, he usually only sent me. Upon completion of the course, it was my responsibility to train my staff on the material I'd just learned.

At first I wasn't pleased with this arrangement. However, I soon realized there were benefits beyond the money the company saved by not sending everyone to training classes.

The place where I took the training classes had a policy that allowed you to retake any class for free once you had paid for the initial session. Because I was responsible for training my subordinates, I made an arrangement with my boss that allowed me to take each class twice; often back to back. This helped me in a few different ways.

First, it meant that I got to spend a lot less time in the office dealing with day-to-day support issues. That was definitely a good thing. More importantly, though, taking classes back to back helped me absorb much more of the material than I would have been able to if I'd only taken each class once. That better prepared me for teaching the material to others in my department and for passing the certification exams.

Finally, spending so much time in training helped me to build a good relationship with the trainers at the facility. This was probably the greatest benefit of all, because any time that I ran into a jam on the job, I was able to pick up the phone and ask one of my buddies at the training facility for advice. Needless to say, doing so was much less expensive than opening a Microsoft support incident.

As you can see, I've picked up a lot of different techniques over the years for getting free or cheap IT training. These techniques all work well, but don't forget another great resource: the Internet. The Internet is chock-full of free technical articles and webcasts on just about any subject imaginable.