Training Philosophy

Career
1

This is an interesting article about training: Philosophy - Securing Hardware

For the things we have to learn before we can do them,
we learn by doing them.
- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

Tell me and I forget,
teach me and I may remember,
involve me and I learn
- Chinese Proverb

Some know the value of education, by having it.
I know its value by not having it.
- Frederick Douglass

How much is training really worth?
Here’s a secret - our training contains no exclusive, magical information. You could learn all the things we cover in class with freely available resources on the internet. However - we’re pretty confident and our clients agree that what might take a day of self-directed study can be covered in class in under an hour, because we’ve taken the time to curate the most important parts, and optimized the way that you learn them in glass. Every day of class clocks in at about a week of self-directed learning. Now, once we consider opportunity cost of all the time spent, it turns out training is still the better deal.

2

In my experience, high quality in-class training is definitely more effective than self learning but only if I’m actually going to apply the lessons in anger in the near term. If I go to in-class training and then don’t use the knowledge for 6 months then it’s completely wasted. But if I apply the learning immediately to my own problems then it’ll stick very well and the training is well worth it.

The reason I use self-directed training much more is because I don’t really know what I need to learn next until I need to learn it. Sure, it’s slower to be self-directed but usually I’m doing it because I have an immediate problem to solve and so in the end I’ll solve the problem and the knowledge will stick with me, which is where the real value is.

If you can time in-class training properly, it’s definitely worth it. Maybe now with many more online training resources this will be easier?