Re: Experience VS Ability[how to learn tools]

[Elna Tymes <etymes -at- LTS -dot- COM>]

> Buck wrote:
>
> >For those beginners .... please buy, borrow, or steal [snip] the four most
> >important
> >packages in current TW ads.  They are .... [snip]
> >....  Buy the "Dummies" book for each of them, then go home and spend
> >24 hours on each package.  You're now qualified to put the names of that
> >software in your resumes.
> >
> >Cost?  If you don't consider it important enough to spend $2000 for a
> >proper start to your career, then you should try teaching.

And then Dan BRINEGAR wrote:>
>
> As one who's pathologically incapable of *choosing* which hill to die on, I
> tend to die on lotsa different hills every couple of years. Perhaps as a
> result, I haven't actually *seen* $2000 in one place sin ce I got out of
> the Army (at which time I spent everything on clothes toys and housing).

And to Dan and Nora and the others who haven't said much on this
particular subtopic, I can really sympathize with the cashflow problem.
If you lurk on some of the comp.xxx newsgroups, you can occasionally
find legitimate copies of early revisions of the software you want to
learn, and for bargain prices. ("legitimate = the license comes with
it).  One of the reasons our shop has "more toys than most" is because
we watch those newsgroups, as well as some local ones, and buy what we
need at deep discounts.  We've never had a problem with the license
transfer, either.

Further, if you can borrow a friend's copy of a program while he/she
isn't using it, you aren't violating the spirit of the agreement.  And
most people have older versions of current software that they'd be glad
to lend you for a bit.

Finally, realize that there have been very few really new software apps
in the last decade.  Word processors are pretty much alike these days in
terms of the basic - they have to be, in order to be competitive.  The
spreadsheet packages did their feature-for-feature matching steps about
six or seven years ago, and haven't really changed all that much since.
And frankly, a spreadsheet is really a table form of a flat database
file, so that gives you some ideas about records and tables and
manipulation of data.  And relational databases declare tables the way
some people create families -- one piece from here, another from there,
these over here are included only as long as they're declared part of
that one's family (or table), etc.  And frankly, with the emphasis on
creating user-friendly front-ends for most apps, most packages are
getting easier to learn with each new rev.

That said, be aware of the unfortunate trend for people to characterize
others by labels: you pass if you have Framemaker (or BSD UNIX, or
Oracle Financials, or whatever the flavor of the week happens to be) on
your resume, you don't pass if you don't.  It may not be right to do so,
but <shrug> that's the way the current marketplace works.

It follows, then, that if you can find ANY way to get some experience
with the package of the week, you can then put it on your resume.  You
don't have to own the package.  You don't even have to have used it in
the last two years (it's like riding a bicycle - it'll come back to
you).  Since most writers spend the first week or two coming up to speed
on the content of a project anyway, you can be practicing with the tool
as you assimilate the project material.

If you're going to be an independent contractor who works out of your
home, however, rather than in someone else's office using their
machines, realize that you're setting up a business and most businesses
require that you have your own tools. In that case, Buck's suggestion
about buying your own copies is legitimate.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems

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