"Ironically, in an industry where technology changes on what seems like a monthly cycle, many iSeries 400 shops do not include sufficient budgetary funds to maintain their staff's educational needs. Hence, they can lose their technical advantage.

Stagnant applications, poor staff morale, and the inability to effectively enhance applications are just a few of the business disadvantages your company will suffer from if you don't fund your staff's continuing education. One noted IT consultant recently was told by a client that he would not train his staff on the new RPG IV constructs or things like SQL because "then they would leave." It sounds to me like there are bigger issues at that particular location, but the point is that such fears can be detrimental to an organization.

Lately, there seems to be a huge reliance on the networking capabilities of the Internet for what I call "just-in-time education." (Should we call this "JIT-e"? J) I often see programmers using newsgroups, list servers, and regular old email to extract information from often-unknown colleagues. For example, staff members with little or no knowledge of backup and recovery may be given the task of creating a backup plan for the company's system. Rather than learn about IBM's Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) or other backup and recovery techniques via a technical conference, a community college, or technical manuals, they send out an email to a list server or post a question on a newsgroup or online forum, hoping that one of their peers will provide the answer quickly. From the questions I've seen posted, it is clear that in many situations the person asking the questions has had little or no experience with the subject at hand.

You can solve this problem by stepping up to the budgetary plate and asking for funding for education. Education is not cheap; however, as they say, "Knowledge is power." IT managers have a responsibility to their employers to ensure that staff members are keeping up their skill levels in the right areas, and it's up to IT managers to determine what those areas are. (Staff members don't need to know every technology du jour that comes along; many hot, new things will simply go away, soon to be replaced by others.)

At minimum, staff does need some level of contemporary technology training. For example, all AS/400 and iSeries developers should have the basic skills and understanding of RPG IV and HTML. Whether your staff has these skills should not be dependent on whether or not you, the IT manager, also possess these skills. In fact, if you want to be a successful IT manager, you need to do three things:

• Hire people who are smarter than you are.
• Keep the people you hire smarter than you are.
• Listen to the people you hire; then make your decisions.

My continuing education has been self-taught (books and periodicals), hands-on (labs, research, and "play time"), and structured (conferences). In addition, for the last six years I earned my living doing RPG IV training at AS/400 shops, which is a learning experience in itself. But by far the best bang for the education buck is one of the three national AS/400 and iSeries education conferences.

The first is the iSeries Technical Conference. Although IBM Learning Services (ILS) originally cancelled these events for 2002, they recently reversed that decision and brought them back. I could not locate the events on the IBM iSeries Web site in time for this article, but they may be there by the time you read this. Visit the IBM iSeries Education Web site for more information.

The second opportunity is offered twice each year and is provided by the educational pillar of the AS/400 and iSeries industry: COMMON, IBM's national user group. For the last 41 years, COMMON has sponsored two national AS/400 and iSeries Education Conferences each year. COMMON is very popular and is by far the most widely attended iSeries education event, with attendance numbering nearly 4,000 at a single conference a couple of years ago when I was president.

COMMON is the best deal going for iSeries education. The benefit of attending the COMMON Conference is that you not only get to learn from some of the best minds in our industry, but you also get to meet and form relationships with the iSeries development team. Wouldn't it be great to actually talk with the person who writes the code for the DDS compiler or the RPG compiler or CODE/400? Well, they all attend COMMON, so go talk to them!

The Spring COMMON Conference is being held April 14 through 18, 2002, in Nashville at the Opryland Hotel. The fall event will be in Denver on October 13 through 17, 2002. To find out more about the Nashville COMMON Conference, visit the COMMON Conference Web page.

By the way, COMMON is a not-for-profit organization that relies on a combination of full-time staff (about two dozen people) and part-time volunteers (over 100 currently active) to produce each event. I'm a speaker at COMMON, and I'm also a volunteer, working to help make the conferences better. You can volunteer by signing up at the Volunteer Desk at the Nashville Conference and Expo.

The third education opportunity is IBM's list of universities and community colleges that offer AS/400 and iSeries education. Click on the Index of Countries link to get a list of the colleges and universities in your country that have joined IBM's Partners in Education (PIE) program.

Remember, educating your staff is critical to your company's success.

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Robert Cozzi, Jr.
Editor