It’s exciting to see business starting to heat up, particularly with the IOD Conference approaching.  One of my annual goals at the IOD Conference is to try to get more attention paid to the need for technical training in the DB2 world.  I am forever amazed at the excessive funding that goes into marketing faster/cooler/ better technologies and how little goes into teaching the DBAs expected to use them.  The “solution” everyone seems to be waiting for is some sort of e-learning that eliminates the need to travel and the need to “waste” any potentially productive business time learning…as if learning weren’t the best use of time to make one’s organization more productive. 

I finally decided to spend some time getting myself set-up to access the only IBM Information Management courses available through the free Learner Portal.  It wasn’t difficult to get set-up (I had some minor problems like not the portal not recognizing that IE v8.0 is newer than v5.5) and once I got in I was able to view the classes. 

Unfortunately, from what I can see, most of the training is sales-oriented, not technical.  There are some basis classes (“DB2 9.7 Bootcamp”) that may contain some useful technical information, but there does not appear to be anything technical enough to satisfy a training-starved DBA. 

I recommend anyone interested in exploring give it a try.  And please let me know what you think.  How can IBM do better? 

Here’s the link – the courses are open to anyone with a Partnerworld ID:

https://www-304.ibm.com/jct01005c/partnerworld/mem/pat/pat_sw_im_learnerportal_access.html