Training vs. Conferences: How to Spend Your Team Budget Wisely
The right training can motivate, align, and level up your team. The wrong one wastes everyone’s time.
IT companies spend heavily on employee training, but is it worth it?
I’ve worked in startups and global enterprises with budgets to send my teams to conferences and training. I’ve also talked with peers and friends at prestigious companies like Google and Facebook about how they handle professional development.
Typically, the budget stretched to one event per person, per year. Most early-career developers chase conferences, even though training would help them grow more.
Senior – not necessarily old – team members know how the business works and have been to plenty of events. Some still love the buzz of big venues and chatting with experts, while others have families and prefer not to leave town for multi-day trips to hear presenters recycling blog content.
I match training to what drives each engineer. When I get that right, attendance stops feeling like homework and starts feeling exciting.
Sometimes the need is obvious. Patterns show up in 1:1 notes if you pay attention. Structured sessions spotlight the gaps and offer tools to close them. I don’t expect a two-day workshop to transform someone overnight, but it plants a seed and nudges them in the right direction.
The Training I Ask For
Here are the courses I most often request from HR:
- Conflict & Communication: Taking a stance and speaking up respectfully isn’t easy for everyone. A short refresher can go a long way.
- Resilience Training: Life gets messy. Stressful jobs and personal challenges can accumulate quickly. Resilience training provides individuals with tools to cope — without requiring them to discuss personal issues in one-on-one sessions.
- Presentation Skills: Bigger companies mean bigger audiences. Some of the most brilliant engineers I know struggled to present their ideas clearly. Training helps them shine.
- Basic Management Training: Leading people is a different skill set from writing software. I send team leads and heads of engineering to training every few years, especially when they’ve just taken on a new role.
Training for Alignment
Training is one of the best ways to get everyone rowing in the same direction. Company size and culture matter: I’ve seen veterans from big corporations struggle in startups and vice versa.
In small teams, people often wear many hats outside their job descriptions. Large corporations have well-defined processes for nearly everything.
At XING, new employees had onboarding days run by HR, with training sessions and intro meetings. They joined their team on day one but often skipped team meetings for the first few days to focus on onboarding.
In my startups, I had to run onboarding myself: architecture presentations, code walkthroughs, the works. It takes time, and some people need structure to realize that the habits and best practices from their last job may not fit the new setup.
The Real Value of Workshops
Workshops aren’t magic spells. People spend only a couple of days on the topic, and no one absorbs it all. What they do take away can still be powerful:
- Motivation from talking with others who also want to grow.
- Fresh ideas and inspiration for their daily work.
- Pointers to follow-up material: a video, article, or book.
- The reassuring knowledge that others face similar problems and that solutions exist.
When Training Isn’t the Answer
If I doubt that a person will benefit, I still ask if they want to go, but I don’t push them to do so. I’m open to alternatives. Sometimes all they need is time and space to learn something new.
I’ve had great results with Coursera courses and books, and I’m sending people home to study in peace when they’re diligent and self-motivated. This arrangement works well as long as they show progress. I test people’s commitment with shorter time intervals first when I have doubts.
Using Training in 1:1s
As a manager, I also utilize training goals in one-on-ones and annual evaluations. I see it as setting the stage:
They can grab the spotlight and show me they’ve leveled up or find another way to prove it. Either way, the responsibility is in their hands.