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Why I Avoid Training Labs

11 years ago
conference, demos, presenting, training
6 Comments

When I read Tom LaRock’s post about training I had a Carly Simon moment – I was pretty sure his blog was about me:

I see the phrase “SQL Server training” tossed around a lot these days and often times it makes me want to stick a fork in my eye because I know what is being offered is not training, but something different….  If you aren’t putting your hands on the product, you aren’t being trained.

I do a lot of – see, here I go using this word – training – or at least, what I think is training.  I teach people how to use SQL Server, virtualization, storage, blogging, Twitter, you name it, but I rarely put peoples’ hands on a product.  While I do have some demos like my Blitz session, I try to avoid tedious walkthroughs that people won’t remember anyway.  My reasons are simple:

Labs don’t scale well.  It’s absurdly hard and expensive to set up classroom environments where dozens – let alone hundreds – of people can try things out.  The cloud should make that easier, but we’re not there yet, especially not in limited bandwidth environments.

Labs don’t hold the audience attention.  The instant you let people start playing around with a product, they do almost everything except what they’re actually supposed to do.  They try to break your demos, surf the web, Tweet, anything but actually do their homework.  I know this because I even experience this in very small scales with groups of just 2-3 people in corporate environments.  The moment I say, “Now let’s try it out on your server,” one person goes for it – but the rest sneak a peek at Outlook.

Labs don’t hold a monopoly on learning experiences.  There’s lots of ways to learn, and lots of people have different preferences.  Personally, I hate structured lab exercises where I have to put tab A in slot B.  I learn best when I watch someone throw away the conventional way to do something and do it completely differently, harder/faster/better/stronger, explaining the mechanics of the underlying principles.

I hated science until I watched Mythbusters.

I hated cooking until I watched Good Eats.

I didn’t have to put my hands on anything in order to figure out that my shopping list needed to include Diet Coke, Mentos, meat, box fans, and air filters.  I didn’t need supervision the first time I crafted my bargain Bellagio or my fanned flank steak.

What I passionately love about Mythbusters and Good Eats is that they’re both educational and entertaining.  I rarely find labs entertaining in any way whatsoever, and therefore I lose interest quickly when the presenter pops open a program and starts stepping through scripts.  Don’t teach me the syntax – teach me the underlying principles so that I can understand whatever small details I’m faced with, and make learning exciting.

I know Tom will say Mythbusters and Good Eats aren’t training programs, but I disagree.  Based on the number of Mentos and Diet Coke videos on YouTube, there’s simply no disputing that these programs do train people.  If everyone had to wait until someone physically put their hands on a Mentos and Diet Coke combination, the trick never would have caught on.  If everyone had to wait until another DBA/developer/sysadmin walked them through a task in order to accomplish it, then they’d never make progress either.  Labs aren’t the only source of training.

conference, demos, presenting, training
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6 Comments. Leave new

  • Brent
    November 18, 2011 10:56 pm

    Commenting on my own post to initialize my FeedBurner comment feed. I feel so ashamed. First post!

    Reply
  • jeremiah peschka
    November 19, 2011 9:34 pm

    I hate demos in presentations. There’s nothing wrong with me, I can run a script at home and figure out how something works.

    Reply
  • Aaron Nelson
    November 28, 2011 11:39 pm

    Interesting thoughts, not sure if I agree with them all. Typically if you’re not demoing I’m checking email. I grant you that the “hands video” thing is absolutely excellent and something I even use when I do sessions. There’s definitely room for that, but I’m the kind of person that prefers 10-12 hours of trainging as opposed to 75 minutes. That’s just me.

    One thing I don’t get though. Who’s Carly Simon?

    Oh, and how was the Mentos video not hands-on? Looked pretty hands on to me. I’m going to watch it one more time to be sure 🙂

    Maybe it’s just too late at night for me to be reading and commenting on blogs. You should probably delete this just to be safe :-/

    Reply
    • Brent
      November 29, 2011 7:20 am

      Aaron – yep, learning is very individual. I happen to be the very opposite – when folks demo, I usually switch over to Twitter and email myself!

      Carly Simon sang You’re So Vain. It’s a little before your time:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHWrudgCc3Q

      Reply
  • Nic Neufeld
    November 11, 2014 12:20 pm

    Not sure how I landed on this ancient post but having read it and Tom’s post (as well as the comment thread) I have to say I agree pretty strongly. I would compare my experiences back in, probably, 2009 with a Microsoft course on SQL Server that my company sent me to…where we walked through labs demonstrating how to do various tasks that none of us actually understood with my more recent experiences at PASS Summit, at your precon last year, and with the SQLskills immersion events. Training as Tom defines it teaches you how to do tasks. At this point in my career I’m not terribly excited to learn how to do tasks, in general…when I need to, there are plenty of resources to figure it out. But learning principles, underlying technology, internals, that sort of stuff…that is why I attend training events. Slogging through lab sessions just feels like a terrific and expensive waste of everyone’s time. Oh look, I created a non-clustered index in AdventureWorks by following this 1-2-3 step process. Goodie!

    I guess the way I see it, if I was going to recommend training to my past self…skip the lab session drudgery that is being dubbed here “training”…the teaching you how to do certain tasks…and get into the principles that are important. I like your session on how the SQL Server engine thinks because it teaches indexing and performance optimization not as a task to do, but at a more conceptual level, and once people get that, learning how to do the task is, well, nothing to speak of. Same thing with the internals course from Paul and Kim. I didn’t need to crack open DBCC PAGE at that moment. When I got back, I certainly found occasion to start using it more (give a man a hammer, everything looks like a nail, they say). Good training courses aren’t cheap and neither is time away from work, so the less filler spent dutifully clicking through walkthroughs in SSMS, the better.

    Of course, I grant people all have different learning styles and I’m just voicing my preferences. Your mileage may vary. Hands-on product can be a good thing…but when you spend nearly every day (and every night, when on call) with your hands on the product constantly, taking a break and learning “hands-off” for a bit can also be a good thing.

    Reply
    • Brent
      November 14, 2014 10:46 am

      Nic – thanks, glad you liked the post! Yeah, I’ve heard similar complaints this week about Amazon’s hands-on “training” at Reinvent here in Vegas. The labs were next-next-next type affairs with no real troubleshooting or problem-solving, and that doesn’t really teach you much.

      Reply

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Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm on an epic life quest to have fun and make a difference.

I co-founded Brent Ozar Unlimited to help make your SQL Server go faster. I also maintain sp_Blitz® and the open source First Responder Kit repo.

My current car collection includes a Jaguar XKR-S, Porsche 944 Turbo, Porsche 356 Speedster replica, and a Ferrari 328 GTS.

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