Continual Development

It’s amazing the difference a day can make sometimes.

Projects that were giving me headaches are getting the final OK, company paid training opportunities have appeared out of nowhere (and look to get approved), and a carrot has been dangled in front of my nose with respect to my 2008 year-end review. I can’t talk about it till I have more info sometime in March I think.

A couple of weeks ago I had queried my boss about training. Training is expensive and our budget this year is very small. I asked “if I was willing to pay for the training, travel, and stay out of my own pocket, would the time spent at training be considered vacation time or be billable as a working day.” The returning answer was basically, no matter how it’s paid for, it would count as a working day. He then followed up asking me if I had anything in mind. There are a few big QA Confrence that I keep getting mailings for. StarEast (Orlando) and StarWest (Vegas) so I brought these up, there’s also a week long course that I hope will be offered in Boston in the Fall (it’s offered in Tampa in 2 weeks). It was pointed out to me that it wouldn’t be politically good for me to attend either of those confrences paying for them myself.  Thinking about it, I can see the potential conflicts it could cause, some may think I’m going ‘too far’ beyond the call of duty.  I’ll table those two confrences for now, and hope that the week long session comes up north here in the fall.