The Training Course
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Delhi,
India
Saturday, December 1, 2007
The day before travelling to Dehradun to start my training course I got an email from Koenig (the training company) to tell me that the trainer was ill and that my course would be in Delhi instead. It's amazing how bullshit carries so well even through the medium of email (I later found out from another trainee that the course had been moved to Delhi because they havn't finished building the Dehradun training centre yet).
So I was going back to Delhi...
After the usual (and much clumsier than most) attempt to rip me off, followed by some more assertiveness on my part* we agreed a fee for the course in Delhi.
I was on the course with just one other, a Portugese chap called Paulo.
Our first trainer, Mala could most politely be described (and I've tried really hard not to be rude, honest) as a chocolate teapot. This expression amused Paulo greatly once I'd explained its meaning and he managed to apply it to a great many situations during our time in Delhi.
The course wass a Microsoft Certified Information Technology Professional (MCITP) SQL Server Business Intelligence Developer, a mouthful of John Holmsian proportions, which basically means teaching you to design and implement data warehousing, reporting and mining solutions using SQL Server.
The problem with this course is that it starts off answering the big question of how to do all this clever stuff. Which is great for code-monkeys (who worry about little else) but not so good for annoying, contrary and inquisitive buggers like, ooh, architects and consultants. These people tend to start everything by asking 'why?'. They then ask (in no particular order) 'what?', 'who?', 'when?' and then finally (and if at all) 'how?'.
Out of interest, customers ask the 'how?' question too but this tends to be specifically 'how much!!?'
So you've got Paulo and I asking 'but why?' at every opportunity and the chocolate teapot just melting into a heap on the floor. Which was less than helpful (and a right pain to clean up).
Another failing of poor trainers is this seemlingly universal belief that the trainees have selective literacy - i.e. The trainer is desperately needed to read the text off the PowerPoint presentation (word for fucking word) as we're obviously incapable of doing so ourselves but when it's time for an exercise (and for her to check her personal email and browse the web) we suddenly turn into literary geneii on the level of a (n admittedly somewhat improbable) love-child of Oscar Wilde and Steven Fry. Or something like that.
Still, amongst all this negativity I can say that SQL Server 2005 looks really impressive. The BI side of it continues in the Microsoft tradition of asking why so many standard business requirments should be so bloody hard to implement and deciding to make them easy instead. None of this Oracle snootiness here, this is data warehousing for the common people ('I wanna live like common people, I wanna leverage-my-company's-data-into-useful -management-information as common people do')!
So I got the first trainer booted and we were given Jasjeet instead. Very knowledgeable on .NET and other programming languages (as he was keen to demonstrate at every opportunity) but knew next to nothing about our subject. That was still a great improvement though.
Both the trainers had funny idioms of speech. Chocolate Teapot had a habit of leaving a dramatic pause before the last phrase of a sentence. I reckon she's been watching too much Clarkson.
Jasjeet couldn't pronounce the letter t if it's at the end of a word, replacing it with a soft d sound, e.g. repor-duh.
Both of them used the obvious 'I haven't got a clue about this so I don't want you to ask a question' technique of finishing questions with the word basically to indicate that this subject is so simple you couldn't possibly need to ask a question (every syllable pronounced in full to ensure maximum time wasted - bay-sick-a-lee). And they both loved to round a topic with the enlightening phrase of 'and all that stuff' as if those four words magically convey to us everything they don't know but we need to.
Still, help was onhand with some 'past' papers from a company called Pass-4-Sure. I'd been told by other veterans of Microsoft training courses that memorising these questions would pretty much guarantee exam success (hence the name Pass-4-Sure I suppose). I didn't quite believe them but set about them anyway, endeavouring to understand the answers and not just memorise them. It seems that there are a fair few questions in the exam that aren't covered by the course material which I thought was a little unfair. However, come the first exam, of 53 questions, 51 were in the 'past' paper. The second was worse (or better depending on your point of view): I'd already seen every single question. The result? 96% in the first and 98.6% in the second. And Paulo got similar results. To put this in context, you're given 3.5 hours for the second exam and it took both of us less than 20 minutes to get those results. So you'll struggle to pass without the past papers (because of all those questions the course doesn't cover) but to use them means you could get a great score without ever reading any of the course material or seeing SQL Server. Surely there's something a bit wrong there.
I was actually disappointed with these results and was tempted to retake but quickly realised that I was just being an arse.
Anyway I passed which means I'm not eleven hundred quid out of pocket. However, the boss will be expecting me to know the subject so I'd better do some extra curricular homework before I have to do anything proper with it...
* I was starting to enjoy the bullying of these people and that in turn started to concern me
