Training yourself

rhernandez of Multimedia Shooter rants on getting your own training and makes some valid points:

Everywhere I look, in dark corners of our building, at the cocktail party for POYi last night, in my emails, in my dreams…training, train us! How come they won't train us to do multimedia? When will they get it? And on and on it goes.

Well, guess what? I have an answer. Or at least some advice. Ready?

Two words, train yourself! There I said it. If that makes you mad, then you can stop reading this and go back to your dark corner and wait for your newspaper to train you, send you to that wonderful all encompassing multimedia workshop in the sky, while the rest of us learn by doing. And when the layoffs come, and they will (have already) let's see who's left.

This is the sad reality of our business, for some of us our 'calling'

-Down sizing
-Limited resources
-Leaders with no sense of direction (not in my case, of course)
-Falling profits
-A general feeling of doom and gloom in the newsroom
-People screaming, "Who moved my cheese?"
-No money for training

Wake up and smell the coffee! There are no reinforcements coming, no help on the way. Squint your eyes, open them wide, whatever it takes too see the writing on the wall. This is what is says…..If you love, truly love your profession, and you love to tell stories and want to be in the biz for the next decade, then, invest in yourself.

-Identify the way you learn best.
-Invest in that method of learning. If it's books, buy them. If it's DVD's, buy them. If it's a workshop, send yourself.
-Invest in yourself, it's about you, not about your company.
-Close your eyes and go back to those days in college where you stayed up all night in the darkroom (for those of you too young to know, a darkroom was a place where you would…oh forget it) Harness this energy.

Still need more reasons:

-It's the greatest return on investment, the returns are enormous.
-You become more valuable in the process. You stop settling for just getting by.
-You realize your potential.
-You own your own future.
-You become a risk taker.
-You will be happy and have the ability to do your own thing.

We all know we're alone on this. Why? Because no one has to do anything for us, we have to do it ourselves because we're the ones with the most to gain or lose. Don't play it safe.

MORE.