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This all sounds so strange to me. Your company *begged* your programmers to get certified?!?!? And offered to pay for it and pay bonuses? What kind of company do you work for? (And where?) Any who are these companies that regularly send employees to COMMON? How do you get to Utopia? To be fair, in the six months I've been at Handleman, they are doing a LOT of things right. My request to attend COMMON was turned down this time because it wasn't in the budget, so I've made certain that it gets considered for the upcoming year's budget. Maybe the fall COMMON. But there are a lot of opportunities for cross training here. I'm hoping to develop some serious data comm skills through a so-called mentoring program. Also, possibilities exist for Oracle and Unix training. We've got a mainframer jumping into the AS/400 area. Prior to Handleman, I spent the bulk of my career employed by contractor / consultant houses working for hundreds of clients. While I enjoyed the different environments, change of pace, one very distinct disadvantage to this career path is the lack of opportunity for training. Even so, many of the client-employed programmers I worked with never had these opportunities, either. Just luck of the draw? I figured it was just "business as usual". Maybe the geographic area I'm in? Dan Bale IT - AS/400 Handleman Company 248-362-4400 Ext. 4952 D.Bale@Handleman.com Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur. (Whatever is said in Latin seems profound.) -------------------------- Original Message -------------------------- Booth - you won't find those same MCSE's (Microsoft Certified...) at any user group either. The books & certification is how a pc jockey can spend a few months & a few thousand and boost their annual pay $10k (or more). 3 years ago I worked with 15 other AS400 pgmrs. We begged them to get certified. We bought books, training cds, had evening studies, even paid a bonus when they passed - Only 3 or 4 were interested. How do you light a fire under a 10-15-20 year application pgmr? You'd think it was a union job! (with apologies to any members). And you know what? There are many AS400 certifications worth having for your career, just like MCSE. And I think many that have them are doing very well. Current customer-2 as400 pgmrs, 2 net techs. 400 pgmrs maintaining ancient code. Going nowhere fast. Network guys learned linux & w2k & frontpage on their own after hours, and now building the corp intranet. jim <snip> +--- | This is the Midrange System Mailing List! | To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com. | To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com. | To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com. | Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com +---
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