RE: About training opportunities

["Le Vie, DonaldX S" <donaldx -dot- s -dot- le -dot- vie -at- intel -dot- com>]

Sorry to hear about your situation...it is indeed sad.

When I was a full-time employee at Motorola:
1. Yes, I was guaranteed a minimum of 40 hours/year of training (I averaged
around 80)
2. I got to go to 2 external conferences per year (and spoke at several
internal ones) and went to as much training as possible until my manager
said "enough."
3. I had no problem getting time off so long as the project load did not
suffer.
For No. 4 at my last employer, yes, I negotiated the policy as part of my
hire.
5. No, I never perceived any significant difference in policies between tech
comm and other groups.

As a consultant and sometime short-term independent contractor:
1. The only paid training I get is that which I pay for myself, though my
current client has offered to send me through some of their training
programs (if I cover other expenses)
2. I look now to self-training with books and CDs; online training and
tutorials.
3. I get unpaid time off to present and speak at conferences (If I'm
speaking somewhere, I'm not billable)
4. Didn't negotiate this with my current client, though it was discussed
5. See No. 5 above
 
Motorola had a program called the "Silver Quill" program, whereby authors of
technical papers, industry journal articles, books, book chapters in
compilation volumes, got cash awards (and very nice plaques) for their
efforts. The cash awards varied from about $250 per paper up to around $1500
for the more engineering focused. They also paid $100 per presentation, so
if you gave 2 presentations at a conference and had the presentation/paper
published in the Proceedings, you could earn about $400 for each paper (the
average for tech comm subjects) and $100 each for the presentations,netting
you $1,000 for your efforts. 

Once you reached a certain level of awards ($5,000 I think), you became a
Gold Quill Author and received another very nice plaque and a bonus of
$2,500. I was the first technical communications professional to reach the
Gold Quill status (that category was dominated by engineers, many of whom
were in competition with each other to see who could earn the most $$$
awards and bonus money).

Motorola claims that a well-placed white paper or industry journal article
was the equivalent of spending $35,000 in advertising, so paying the author
$1,500 was indeed a bargain for them.

Donn Le Vie


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