Spending Your Training Budget Wisely

Happy New Year, Peers!!

Welcome to the latest episode of the Testing Peers podcast, this time panel explores how testers and quality professionals can make the most of their training budgets, whether that budget is zero, modest, or stretches into several thousand pounds.

Hosts this week: Russell Craxford, David Maynard, Chris Armstrong, and Tara Walton.

The discussion is grounded in real experience and looks at how learning choices change depending on constraints, priorities, and organisational context.

Starting from Zero: Learning Without a Budget

The episode begins by challenging the assumption that learning requires money. The hosts highlight the breadth and quality of free resources available, including:

• Blogs, podcasts, and community-driven content
• Free learning platforms such as Test Automation University, freeCodeCamp, and edX
• Vendor-provided learning resources from tooling and platform providers

A key recommendation is the free “Learning How to Learn” course by Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski, which helps people understand how they learn best before deciding where to invest time or money.

Spending Around £100: Small Budgets, Real Value

With a budget of around £100, the focus shifts to intentional, value-led choices:

• Books as a focused, low-distraction way to learn:
• Subscriptions to learning platforms rather than single courses
• Prioritising practical outcomes over certificates
• Using community recommendations to avoid low-quality content
• TestSphere and RiskStorming cards
• Obviously, the Testing Peers Conference, March 12th 2026

Books such as Explore It, The Phoenix Project, The Culture Code and other systems thinking titles are highlighted as high-value, low-cost investments.

Around £500: Community, Conferences, and Exposure

At the £500 level, learning opportunities expand:

• Attending local conferences, meetups, or community events 
  • Leeds Test Atelier (Free to attend)
  • SIGiST
  • ShipItCon
• Covering travel, accommodation, and tickets for nearby events
• Investing in leadership, communication, and presentation skills
• Subscriptions such as Ministry of Testing Pro (including a ticket to their #MoTaCon event) and similar learning communities
• LeanPub

The hosts discuss the value of human connection, being exposed to new perspectives, and coming away from events with renewed ideas and motivation.

Certifications and Career Signals

The conversation takes a balanced view on certifications, including ISTQB:

• Not a definition of quality or capability
• Potentially useful for people entering the industry
• Helpful as a signal when e

Transcript

 Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Testing Peers. Today we have got money on our minds and we're gonna talk about tech training, budgets and how we plan to spend it. And we are gonna be looking at different values, uh, and how we might actually spend that in a different way depending on how much we have.

We have my wonderful co-hosts with me tonight. I have Russell Cranford. Hello, Chris Armstrong. Hello Mr. Moneymaker and a. A really quite regular co-host recently, uh, Tara Walton. 

Hello. 

And we can't have a special guest without them offering their fantastic ideas of banter. So over to Tara. 

Oh, banter's always the hardest one.

'cause you ask me and then my brain goes blank. But I've got a good one for you today, and I don't know if we've ever talked about this before. Heroes or villains, guys. For 

what purpose? 

Oh, yeah. Depends on the context. 

Watching movies always key, right? 

Or would I want to be hero or a villain? 

Oh, well, Russell, I, I know deep in your heart, you're a villain.

That's just what I'm naturally drawn towards. 

Natural talent, 

absolutely not true. But 

I break things by looking at them. It's gotta be an evil trait. 

Oh no, that's just part of the, the qa, DNA. 

Well, that's what I'm saying. We're all by default necessarily evil, aren't we? 

You see, I, I prefer villain because they seem to have much more fun.

Okay. They get the comeuppance, but you can get away with so much more. Whereas here is you have to be a bit of a, you, you have to escape for the 

sequel, don't you as well? So, you know, multiple go 

played by a different actor. I thought we're 

talking about sequels too. Okay, Chris. Chris looks very thoughtful.

Chris is gonna be a hero. 

No he's not. 

I was thinking about this through the lens of the TV show Traitors, where there's a very clear divide between traitors and faithful, and I think you could have a lot more fun in that show as a traitor because you're the only ones there that know what's going on, who isn't.

So in that sense. The funders in knowing that you're doing those things. Although it leans a lot into like a bit of a pathological existence, which I'm not sure I really want, but I think in reality it's a bit of a, like a neo, neo kind of thing in the sense that you want to be an anti-hero, like be a cool, bad guy, but you're really popular and your, your kind of heart's in the sort of right place, but you're, you're still a bad guy and all those things.

The means justify the end. 

Yeah. You're outside, obviously you, you're playing outside the law because you're too much of a, a, you know, a cool, cool guy who, who can't be, um, held with the, uh, the red tape that society's trying to put around you. 

So you're Batman. 

Mm. Did you just say Batman 

or the Joker? He says film all about him.

Mm. 

So it is Harley Quinn as well, actually. 

Yeah, 

I mean, Tara, what are you hero at war villain? 

Um, so I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the villains because I think very often they are the hero that has just been pushed too far. 

Well, that's, there's a whole Incredibles thing about that, isn't it?

Yes. The Incredibles first villain was exactly that. 

I always loved in the, the d and d realm, you know, there's an entire grid that you can fall into and, um, quite often the people that are so far into the, you know, lawful good alignment of, I, I always follow the rules and for the good of all, end up doing more harm than good.

Um, so I always fall in that kind of, you know, context is key. And what's your ultimate goal? Kind of, 

I was always chaotic. Good. 

Uh, explains a 

lot.

Chaotic. Anyway, that 

part. 

Excellent. Well after chaos, shall we, uh, go on to, uh. Normal, normal service as where, so we're gonna talk about training budgets, and we're gonna look at different, as I said, different levels of training budgets. So should we put the first cap at a hundred, either a hundred dollars or a hundred pounds?

Well, let's do a hundred pounds. Let's a bit more. Well, how much is that worth in dollars then for our American audience? 

120, depending on how, um, Trump and our own Prime ministers, uh, causing, um, chaos in markets. It 

may well change in the time between recording and doing those books, but I think it's fair to say the, the, the sort of premise is I'm a tester.

I've got a training budget to spend. I've got a hundred money and I'd like to spend it. What would you advise? How would you go about it? How would you go about finding out the right things and convincing your 

purse string holder that this is what you should do?

I love that. That sounds easy, Chris. Yeah, 

Chris makes it sound so easy. I think the hardest part of that is finding something that'll give you any bang for your buck under that amount. Right? It's everything these days is. Add a zero to that at least. Um, so how do you go about finding something when, when you're given that tiny little budget of congratulations you, we gave you a whole hundred dollars, 

what's gonna be evil?

And say, what about if you've got zero budget? Should we start there rather than a hundred? 'cause there's actually a lot of good fruit 

resources. Mm-hmm. Or is that where we finish? Or 

do they go into the 101 because they're under a hundred pounds still? Yeah. Now I've lost you. As, 

as somebody who creates free education, I can say that there is a lot of really good stuff out there that you don't have to pay for.

Yeah, there is. 

We built a whole training academy based on, uh, Python, Python Academy based on freely available resources. 

I've got, I've got a first resource that I would recommend before you even know what to choose. Steep Teaching Solutions by Barbara Oakley and Terence Sinofsky. I'm sorry I butchered your name.

They have a free course on Coursera, that's called Learning How to Learn, because let's face it, we don't all learn the same way, so it might be. Webinars, courses, conferences, hands-on tutorials, all those things. Find out what actually works for you. Um, and, and that course is free. That's really useful to be able to sort of do that.

I was recommended by Mike a brink off. Years ago, and I bookmarked it because I thought it was such a useful course to have. So have you actually done it? I did, but so long ago I can't remember any of at all. So I think I need to take it again, but what, what, what I uncovered really was hands-on stuff. I have to be actually making stuff.

I don't like, the theory is all lovely, but if I, if there's no outcome from the theory. I won't do it. It means nothing to me. Something that just ends with a multiple choice to pass. I am not motivated by personally. It has to be something where I can actually create something at the end or have something tangible from the end of 

it.

See, I think you've highlighted a good point. I think you need, do need to understand your learning style first, but with a hundred or just over a hundred dollars or hundred pounds. The, I mean, the first thing I would think of is either a subscription to a Coursera course itself, which may be a bit more than that possibly, but also buying books or, or subscribing to a, you know, a.

A podcast or something. Um, but on that cheap then yeah, absolutely. Chris is holding up explore it. There are, you can, you can, you can really increase lots of skills, you know, Python as, as exploratory testing itself. And again, you can get books that have, especially if it's language based. You do actually build things.

It is more practical, but practically based. So you do have that ability to actually do that. And you do, you can follow obviously things on the internet as well, and you have the internet is your friend, but it's finding the right things to actually do with that. So I think you can still do a lot. And I think there's the point of why we sort of put a small amount of money in.

First of all, you can actually achieve a lot with a small budget. It doesn't have, you don't have to spend the world. And as Russell said, there are still free resources out there. So actually you can do things on the cheap. They may not all, they not, may not all be the best, so you need to choose wisely for that free.

But absolutely use recommendations from the, from the community, but you don't have to spend a large budget and go to those, you know, really expensive courses and conferences to achieve a lot. 

And I love that you brought up books. I know one of the things that helps me learn the best is actually walking away from the computer and not having the distractions of being able to open a new tab, or I'll just answer that email real quick when I've got a book and I can go to a different room and scribble in the margins and come back and maybe do a hands-on exercise, but I can separate myself from all the distractions.

That is where I get the most value. It's why I keep buying more books to put behind me. 

You are all wise people. That's what I'm gonna say. No. Um, yeah, there's lots of different things. I think the thing we should probably tell our podcast listeners is some of these resources we will try and put links into our podcast notes so that you don't have to try and listen to them all, and hopefully you just read that to find them.

But there is an amazing array of resources that are free from the blogs, LinkedIn posts, um, to kind of like things like Automation University that was. I've forgotten who's, I wanna say who was it that did that? Apple Tools. Apple Tools, yeah. Um, there is kind of like Free Code Academy. There is. You can even do some of the Harvard Computer Science courses, for example, for free on um, x.

I think it's called ed edX edx.org and some of those are free if you don't want to like do formal certification in them, but just wanna do the course and stuff like that. There's loads of learning out there that is cheap as chips, uh, and of high quality. It's sometimes you're paying the certificate rather than actually the learning, which is to Chris's point about getting his practicality outta it.

Not always the most important thing. It can be important if you need to demonstrate on a CV or application that you've got a skill that you've got no experience in. 'cause it shows you've learned something and ticks a box and manages a risk. But if you're already in a role and all the rest of it and want to enhance your skills, advance your skills, the certification side of it, it's often less valuable 'cause it's experienced that normally.

It's valued more, but yeah, there's lots of books. Explore it is a fantastic one. Uh, I was just looking through it. The thought of books I would gonna recommend were things like, um, the Phoenix Project goal, those sorts of wider, how organizations work, system thinking type style, as well as the, you know, explore it and books of that ilk.

Think coding wise, there's a lot of those sort of learning materials that are free or cheap. There's Udemy, there's online platforms that you can pay for. Subscriptions for things like that, that you can go down as well, that give you a, a multitude of courses, which you can select from. I wouldn't particularly call out a, a set course, but there's lots of options of those ilks that will cost you less than a hundred dollars, and I'd happily say, well, if it's 10 pound a month, $10 a month, I'll have it for 10 months, then please, if I've only got a hundred dollars, I'd accept that, and then they know I have to plan.

10 months of the year I can use it. Um, I have no idea how much they do cost, by the way, but I understand they will be under a hundred dollars a month. Um, unless you've got business memberships. But yeah, that's what the, I would go down with the low budget. 

Hopefully. A lot of it's got to do with what you want to do, what you're trying to achieve.

Are you trying to increase your. Profile your portfolio. If there's something you're gonna be working on that's coming up at work or something you need to learn. Technology styles, coaching promotions, all these things. Like you say, systems thinking is a great place to go if you are beginning to endeavor into a more sort of holistic, um, strategic world.

There's things like the Culture Code book there, there's, there's some really. Really good challenging stuff there. Really, really interesting actually out there. And, and a lot of it is what, what's your motivation? Like, if it's just something that's new and on trend, that's always gonna change. But there, there's some really good old stuff.

Like I would say sometimes some of the older approaches, older textiles and languages and stuff have got such solid foundation, um, that they don't. Yet belong in a museum. They deserve to be things that we still study. Um, you know, Jerry Weinberg's got a lot of good quality stuff. There's still a bunch of old blog posts that I say old that might be a decade old, that I still reference and share with people about useful things.

'cause I still think the foundational truth in those things are good and the new and shiny is really important, but sometimes those foundational elements behind things are really important. 

You've got lots of things online for service providers like AWS, um, Prova, all these sorts of companies will actually provide learning materials for their tools.

Often is the case these days. Mm-hmm. Especially free sometimes behind walls. Uh, certification especially. There's lots of that stuff, but what I can't understand is how long have we been talking? Five, 10 minutes. Not one of us has said. Um, the testing peers conference for under a hundred pounds 'cause it's 30 quit.

I'm sorry, but I'm just surprised that none of us have self reflected our own conference. Well, we're trying not to be shells for 

ourself. Russell, maybe we can have out, I meant. 

Tara mentioned it was, I, sorry, sorry. 

It's, it's 30 quid for you, but it also comes with a cost, maybe more, you know, $1,400 airplane ticket for me.

Yes, that's true. 

So the GoFundMe will be live, uh, 

in, I dunno about everyone's company, but my company has a separate travel budget from learning budget. So actually the 30 pounds will come out, the a hundred pound learning budget, travel would come out of travel and subsistence budget, which is a whole separate budget system.

But not every company's the same. But anyway, I see our company, it's not close to, our company 

isn't the same. So our learning budget would include the travel in the hotel as well. 

Yeah. 

So, so, so that's not learning, so that seems weird. It wouldn't, it wouldn't, yeah. It wouldn't, um, it couldn't fly 

with them.

Yeah. 

Yeah. 

That, you know, if, if the short term. I have to put in this much time and energy into learning something, like going to a conference or reading a book or, you know, digesting in a full podcast even can be a little overwhelming. I really like things like the um, test sphere cards too. 'cause I can pull one out, read over it, go, oh, I wanna learn more about that.

Or just remind myself of something that I might have forgotten over the years. Um, and that's a really cheap just little tool that you can.  Get by on your learning budget and say, you know, this would be a really nice reference for us to have. 

Cool. So we, should we up the budget now? Should we up the budget to 500 or do you think a bit more than that?

500 units? No, I think 500 is a good units. What 

you 

saying? 

Almost 500 money. That's what we're calling it. 

We're like a monopoly. It's monopoly money. Yeah. 

Brings up a good point too. A lot of times if it's, you know, you've got a budget of 500, but it's 510. You, you, you could go over a little bit. I've never known anybody that's Absolutely.

Put their foot down and say you can offer to pay a 

little bit more yourself. 

Yeah. But usually they'll go, oh, okay. Like, I understand it's so close. You know, so there's, there's some wiggle room in there. Don't just say, oh, I guess I can't do it. Ask always works. Asking 

where I'm from, which is shy. Ben's getting out, which is basically, if you don't ask, you don't get.

Yeah. So try and ask. Ask if you can. Because you're guaranteed a no. Unless you ask. You ask. You might, I don't know. But if you don't ask, you've already given yourself. 

Don't ask. Don't get, yeah. 

So what can we do with 500? 

Well, 500 you could definitely get to like a, a domestic event, like an in-person event.

And you know, Russell's alluded to conference stuff already. Um, I think it's important like the four of us and a lot of testing peers, folks have the reason why we put the effort into making. P Khan was because we have connected with some amazing humans. We have been challenged, we have learned, we have gotten new ideas, we have come away from events inspired, led to do more things as a result of attending those things.

You don't have to aim for the stars with the biggest and brightest conferences you see, but there are, there are meetups, there are local conferences. There are amazing things where. Look, I hate the term thought leader, but there are people who are putting ideas out there into the world for you to be interacting with and sharing with, and those people.

Are your people, potentially people that you can resonate with, challenge yourselves, collaborate with, and a 500 pound dollars budget could get you to a local event. Something that's going on there, like could cover your transport, it could cover some overnight accommodation, potentially some food or a ticket.

Um, those things. I, I would recommend everyone give it a go. It's. Terrifying to be in a room with people you don't know. But do you know what? You might just meet some of the best people you've ever met, 

or you might meet people you hate, but hey, you've tried. 

We're trying to sell it on people we've 

all met.

Sorry. We've all met in the conference, by the way. That's why I was saying that. Sorry. Me and Chris have had a lot of hate relationship and now 

we're stuck with each other. 

But you've made a very point. There's loads of local conferences, not just on testing itself, but technologies, tools, um, on different things.

Meetup community is, there's loads of, like I've mentioned our conference, but in the UK there's all sorts of free events. You know, you've got smaller events like special interest groups, biggest ones, and software testing. You've got things like, um. There's stuff that's happening in Leeds, test, Tilia, things like that.

You've got, um, ShipIt conferences, you've got all sorts of different conferences and events that aren't pure testing sometimes, but are actually free or low cost. Mm-hmm. So that generally they're not on your doorstep always, but they're generally within day commute, day travel. Not necessarily easy day travel, but you know, sometimes you have to put a bit in to get a bit out, I guess is the point.

And I, I really like leadership and soft skill. Seminars too that you can go to that might help you with, you know, presenting big ideas to stakeholders or being able to talk in front of a room full of people. Um, so that if maybe one day you want to speak at a conference and you're like trying to figure out how to do that, you know, don't discount those things too.

That has traditionally nothing to do with testing until it does.

Everything has something to do with testing. 

The other thing that you could do, we've mentioned conferences and which are really important, but you could also buy a subscription service That could be to actually, how much is MOT at the moment? Is that five? Is that under 500? Yeah. So you could go, you get into their, their system and, and actually that now will get you a, the cost of a ticket to the theon.

Um. For next year. But you could also subscribe to, we've mentioned books before, but you could, you could apply, you know, for a course or for a, um, subscription to a book, you know, a specialist book repository type thing. So to allow you to get more access to larger numbers of book through subscription services and things.

So there are options like that in the, you know, for that amount of money that would allow you to. Get much more information than just buying individual books. There's also, 

um, like there's a lot of people trying ideas building in public, um, things like Lean Pub. Mm 

um, where a lot of 

people are self-publishing and breaking those things down and.

If you see people doing good things and you are blessed with having some budget to, to throw people's way where you can glean some, some, some wisdom, some good stuff that you can work with, but also encourage people to build. 'cause getting a publishing deal is one thing, but self-publishing is, is another.

And the, the value that that can be gleaned from that can be super good. Like I've, I've. Definitely lent hard into a few lean pub books, um, down the years, and that's a great space to, to invest in. Certainly, really, really pleased with that. And, and if you, if you do have a bit of freedom on budget, supporting people who are creating content that you appreciate, you find useful, it can, can be a really good way to do it.

Because we talked about feedback a lot. Creating and putting stuff out in the public isn't easy. So if you've got, if you've got, especially when it's 

on your dime. 

Yeah. Blessing people with that sort of stuff is, is, is a wonderful thing. If, if you've got the opportunity.

Right. So that's 500. Well, I was just 

looking at the cost, so MOT for. Will cost 349 pounds at 9 3 4 9 99. Well, budget you got from me as well, but for uk, but the US is just, it's 499 pounds. 99. So you get 1 cent, 

including or excluding tax. What? Uh, 

that it does say plus tax as well. So you, so you'd be slightly over, you'd be, you'd be putting your hand down the back of the sofa.

If I remember correctly though, things like Ministry of Testing and Medium usually have holiday sales. So if you're waiting to the end of Y the year to use your budget, it might be worth seeing if there's a discount coming up. 

And again, shy Benz always reach out and say, you've got a 409 90 $9. Can they do it for that?

You never know. 

It's true. 

You might not get two years in a row, but you can certainly try. 

Well, a lot of places not they have scholar. Sometimes they, it's your budget. Sometimes they've got a scholarship thing. Sometimes they've got opportunities to do stuff. Likes always, like you say, dis Yeah, there's, there's a chance.

Chance to ask and collaborate. To quote, to quote Russell I just to ask because they can only say no. Always. Let's go big. Now 

there's one more I wanted to point out. It's really, really important. That's gonna be controversial. So you may not be able to pay for like a pure course, but for example, you can pay for certification.

Of multiple different things, including things like I-S-T-Q-B-A-W-S courses and so on. Yeah. Now I'm not as the world's greatest fan of is T qb, meaning you're a tester, but if you're trying to get into the field and do not have much practical experience, it is one of the ways. On top of other things of debt, partly demonstrating that you are interested and that you're doing things and generally doing that certification.

If you just do the exam in the uk, it's about 225 quid, I think, or something via Pearsons or something like that. So you can buy a book, you do some online learning, you can speak to peers and things like that, and you could do those sorts of courses like that. I'm not saying it's a golden nugget solution to proving you're a tester.

It's not. But it is something that can go onto C to show entry-level jobs and get people started out in careers that not having can sometimes be an obstacle for. 

It's the same thing with I mentioned earlier. It's that foundational level of stuff. You can't just like skip to being an expert and that is one of those things that's going to give you content, gives you ground context.

Yeah. It gives you a grounding, it's gonna give you break may all agree with Yeah. But anyway. Um, but yeah, it's something that, you know, you can pay for a book sometimes for 30 quid and then do that. Not everyone learns like that. I appreciate, but there's lots of different things out there. The Udemy, as I mentioned before, there's lots of courses on this sort of stuff and stuff like that.

People try to help people get through exams. So you could do cheap course, pay for the exam yourself as an option if you've got a tight budget. That's an example of one. Anyway, sorry. So I will now let you proceed to the next level. You let me 

proceed. I want to go big now. So I was gonna say your training budget is, so, your training budget is three grand.

That's not big. 

That's six times bigger than the last one. 

That's three grand more than I get. 

Yeah. I say many companies are off 

millions to, to do your trading budget. 

I was gonna say, there is a caveat here sometimes where your training budget is more in terms of time. I was gonna say 

with the right justification.

Many places I've worked confined ways of doing it. The budget is flexible enough to allow three to five grand, 

we'll say three to five grand. Yeah. 

I'm just thinking some security courses and other things I know are about five grand. 

Yeah. But anyway, they're also time. 

There's time cost for all of this stuff.

If an employer is letting you do training or going to conferences or events, they are giving you paid time usually to do so 

well. Where do you stand on that? If you're going to a conference, should that be work time? 

If you are going to learn about your work, is it related to your work, then yes. If you're going to a plumbing conference and you're a test engineer, I would say no.

So context still matters, but yeah, if you're going to a testing it related thing or something to enhance your skills in your workplace, then I think it is something that your employers should be contributing time towards. Anyone disagree, and I 

think that is something that is falling out of. Outta Vogue as we, uh, tighten our belts so often, uh, development of our staff is becoming a free solution.

They might be willing to give you your time. You know, you can schedule x number of hours every week that's on development, but, hmm. Funding is a different story and sending you out and away from the office or completely out of reach is also another thing that I think I have struggled with in the past with, if you wanna do that, take your PTO.

Um, so you gotta be really careful about, you know, what you're asking for and how many little buckets you're dipping into. 

It's like everything. Conferences are a classic one where sometimes people go try and go to like 20 of them. Then you've gotta think about the impact of that sort of thing, because it's the time away from the business as well as the cost of the conference.

You may be speaking at them, for example, but again, there's an element of their paid time. Then there's an expectation, there's a a work benefit usually that's coming from it, an enhancement of learning or something that's coming out reputational. But it is interesting because you're right, some companies are good at saying you have time.

Terrible at kind of letting you take it, uh, and other way around. Some people will give you time, but not budget. So it is sometimes a, it's a challenging thing. Uh, I was gonna throw a curve ball because I appreciate, it's not quite the topic, but do we think, 'cause I've seen this, this, this sort of scrum culture, I'll call it, when you often end up with one test or a two test is spread or thin, that test is in particular are more loathed to take time away from testing.

'cause there's always more testing you can do. There's always more code you can write to be fair. So actually that culture of trying to get things out the door and all the rest of it accidentally puts pressure, possibly, possibly more so on testers to help the team and then put themselves a little bit on the back burner.

That team culture sometimes makes people focus on the, the team over your skills that will then help the team, if that makes sense. I appreciate. That's slightly a side question from the theme, but initial thoughts before I 

does that, does that, does that lend itself? And, and forgive me if I've, I've, I'm, I'm taking down a tangent, tangent here, but, um, to lend itself to a little bit about is it my professional development or is it my development for my company?

So to be, am I developing me as an individual contributor or my developing myself as a teammate? And sometimes the two will combine and other times. 

Diverge. Yeah. Sometimes your learning's not relevant, you know, so I know companies that give you a budget of 500 pounds to spend on whatever you want. If you wanna learn French, you can learn French.

But then there are other companies that stipulate it has to be for the growth of the company. 

Exactly. 

And so therefore it is much more for, for what's important for the company rather than an individual. 

So it depends on the company training culture. 

Well, and I have been sent to training specifically to bring back this information for the rest of us, but we're only paying for one person.

Yeah, yeah. 

I've done that. Yeah. That's cool. That's just cheap, but nevermind. But unless they're training you to be a trainer as well and paying you to do those courses, then they're asking a lot.

Sorry, I took us on a tangent, but it was just kind of like, I think there's a bit of a pressure on people in Scrum teams potentially to focus on the team goals over themselves sometimes, which causes a bit of a conflict, and I've seen it more in testers than the developers and the teams I've worked with.

It's not that they don't, it's just that a developer can take a step back for a day or two without less impact than a solo testing. 

So there's usually a larger team. They're involved. Like you said, I, I think I've usually been one tester to every. Six-ish developers. And so when that, when you only have one tester that walks away for two, three days, it's devastating.

And that's sometimes why lot of pressure, I guess, managers. Push back on time off. Anyway, we're going away from Yeah. Where we just spend your budget. But I was just thought of interesting side tangent to Chris's point. 

So, so big, big budget, big budget can, can be we, we've talked about events and there are some big and exciting events that exist.

Right. Um, and I think everyone should have the opportunity to try and go to a big, big event once in their life is, I think those things are, are, are magical. They're intimidating. But I think it's one of those, it's like Disney World. You, you should try and go once in your life, um, just to see if it, if it's for you and, and, and have a go on those things.

I think that's really exciting. Um, and there's so much to navigate in those sorts of spaces. My first ever testing conference was a Eurostar, which was incredibly Tim, intimidating, 

go big or go home. 

Or go big, have a breakdown, and then go home. Um, yeah, 

that also, that's 

huge. 

Doesn't work, but yes, it does impact.

Yeah. 

But then there, then there's like other things you can buy. Like, so I worked in a place where we were, we didn't just test websites, but we had other stuff. And so people could buy Arduinos kits for testing kits to experiment and, and run, run some like tangible stuff to get their hands on. Like, oh, I really want to get.

This piece of hardware to accelerate some of our learning and and such, like a lot of that is a real thing as well. 

Another thing I would spend that, that sort of money on is potentially if it was business based, uh, a, you know, a bespoke course, you know, bringing someone in and a bespoke course for a particular topic.

So therefore everyone can be trained on that particular topic and is specific for the particular company. I think that's really valuable. So if I had that sort of money, then that's possibly what something I would look at. 

I agree with that, especially if you're looking for, say, an entire department or a, a culture shift that you're trying to implement or anything like that.

If you've got the budget and you can pay for those people, that, that's what they do for a living is to come in and help with those things, then do that. It's life changing in some cases. 

Yeah, I think, yeah, that was a good thing. I would love someone to buy me a. Nvidia, DGX spark AI mini supercomputer type thing for my desktop.

If that's just within budget, I think it's about four and a half grand or something of just that, 

that, that's, that, that's, that's a, it's a real, real 

thing. 'cause sometimes it could be, Kiki could provide you more value. It could, you know, you know, back to, um, the quality being the removal of unnecessary friction.

That could be something that you've been dealing with for a long time in your setup. That's. It could be get a new hub, 

AWS, um, credits for example, so that you can do things within the cloud it or Google or AI friendly, 

get some sort of like enterprise account on one of those tools, you know? 

No, no, I think there's lots of stuff like that and there is, as you said, training courses.

There is lots of more certification type things. Some specialist ones are quite expensive 'cause they do it for like eight people and then they charge you a bomb. So like security courses and things are generally the ones I've seen that have made me shed a tear. 

And I, I know when it comes to certifications, there are some that, uh, you can just assume that you're gonna fail it the first time, like the pass rate is so low.

So being able to take that larger budget and say, I'm going to take it the first time here, and if I, if I don't pass and get my cert. There's usually a discount that comes along with, oh, well if you do it again in six months, then it's less. So being able to kind of plan ahead and snowball that, that helps a little bit.

Again, it depends on the context that we're talking about a little bit, but another one that's quite expensive is kind of like bootcamp systems. Hmm. So if you want a career change or something like that, usually sometimes it's a promise for jobs. Sometimes it's commitment to work for someone like that.

Sometimes it's a pay a fee to kind of go through this six week course type bootcamp. And that fee can be several thousand pounds, I think, within our budget. Depends on the companies and things like that, but they're often all used for changing careers. Um, so let's say you want to become, um. I dunno, a data scientist or if you want something like that, you might go into bootcamp do or test engineering or something of that ilk where you can go into bootcamp.

Work with people, um, to do things. Some of them are apprenticeships. There's different models, but there's lots of employers out there that do it for free as part of, you're joining us, we'll train you for six weeks and then we'll sell you, uh, as a resource to other companies and make money back that way.

And some of them are actually saying, no, no, you can just pay us money. We'll put you to the course. At the end of it, you should to get a job as a tester. Equivalent. So those sorts of things are when you've got budget, but again, your company isn't gonna probably pay for that unless they've agreed to a career change and you're on a redundancy route and all sorts of complexities.

But it's something that's out there. If you had five grand for your learning, if that makes sense, you wanna invest in yourself. There's all sorts of things they can do like that. 

Do we want to leave a message to employers about. Train your staff, their people. 

If you expect staff to continue to be able to be a top of the range and be good at doing things, then you have to invest in them as people.

And that may be money. It's certainly time. 'cause without time, money doesn't make a difference. But you need to invest if you want people. And right now we are going through an AI revolution. If you want people to utilize that in a sensible, safe way, and to be quality the implementations you use, not just chaotic.

Then you need to upskill the people in your team who are gonna be validating these things, be it testers, data scientists, or other things, the tools, the ways of working that does it. So invest in time, invest in people, invest in training, 

every, um, survey that goes out, when people ask what they want, it always comes down to development.

People don't wanna be static in their job. They don't wanna get burnout, they don't wanna just. Be passed over for that promotion. They want to learn and grow, and so keeping your employees happy comes with keeping them well trained. 

And I would echo that the same thing. If you're coming from a company, make sure that you do invest in your people.

You can make it relevant to what the, the company are needed, whatever. But I. It is absolutely giving the, giving the employees time to be able to do it and, you know, feel safe that they can do it rather than putting pressure on, get this, get this out, get this out, get this out. Oh, you're going on a course.

Mm. You know, be open, honest, and you know, and make sure that the training is relevant both to you, the company, but also don't judge them for, for, for going on the training. 

I'm gonna reveal something the opposite side to all this. So like we talked about time, money, budget, and all the rest of it. I've worked in places where the budget's never been the problem.

Oddly, it's the people trying to spend it has been the problem. I've had to give money back when training budgets multiple times to David's point 'cause the employees haven't felt able to ask for the money. Haven't felt, had the time off and they've had to cancel things. Oh, we've got a major release next week.

It's like, well, okay, that was probably Forecastable or Scrum. We're releasing every two weeks anyway. So yes, there's always a release, uh, those sorts of logics. But having to give people the faith, the trust, where I've recently worked, having to change the culture to actually it's okay to learn, was quite a big thing.

To actually get more of that budget spent. The, the area of tests spent more than, let's just say some of the other areas because. We tried to influence people that it was okay to learn, and that often comes by leaders setting an example. 

Yes. And it is a double edged sword. If you as a, as an employee have been begging for time and budget to train, and then you don't, you're going to lose it very quickly.

So. 

I stop asking for as much money next year and so on. That's what happens. 

Yeah, 

we could talk to any, I certainly could for a lifetime. So sorry for consuming all the oxygen people. We will wrap it up here though, otherwise we'll go on. But if you do have questions on learning development, wanna ask about the resources, um, feel free to reach out to us at contact us@testingpeers.com.

Always interested in hearing from us, uh, from listeners. Always. Wanting to help basically as much as we can people. We have got a conference, as I did blatantly plug throughout where the conferences are available. It is in Nottingham in March in 2026. So if you want to know more about it, feel free to go to testing peers con.com.

Uh, there's more information on it there. It's the 12th of March in Nottingham, uk. Uh, at the moment, well, yeah, 30 quid basically ticket. Um, so not a bad price for a ticket for a full day conference come along by all means. But they thank you to our, um, guests special, our special guest, Tara, and to our, um, familiar faces and voices more likely on the podcast.

Chris and David and myself, thank you for joining us. For now it's goodbye from the testing peers. Goodbye.

 Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Testing Peers. Today we have got money on our minds and we're gonna talk about tech training, budgets and how we plan to spend it. And we are gonna be looking at different values, uh, and how we might actually spend that in a different way depending on how much we have.

We have my wonderful co-hosts with me tonight. I have Russell Cranford. Hello, Chris Armstrong. Hello Mr. Moneymaker and a. A really quite regular co-host recently, uh, Tara Walton. Hello. And we can't have a special guest without them offering their fantastic ideas of banter. So over to Tara. Oh, banter's always the hardest one.

'cause you ask me and then my brain goes blank. But I've got a good one for you today, and I don't know if we've ever talked about this before. Heroes or villains, guys. For what purpose? Oh, yeah. Depends on the context. Watching movies always key, right? Or would I want to be hero or a villain? Oh, well, Russell, I, I know deep in your heart, you're a villain.

That's just what I'm naturally drawn towards. Natural talent, absolutely not true. But I break things by looking at them. It's gotta be an evil trait. Oh no, that's just part of the, the qa, DNA. Well, that's what I'm saying. We're all by default necessarily evil, aren't we? You see, I, I prefer villain because they seem to have much more fun.

Okay. They get the comeuppance, but you can get away with so much more. Whereas here is you have to be a bit of a, you, you have to escape for the sequel, don't you as well? So, you know, multiple go played by a different actor. I thought we're talking about sequels too. Okay, Chris. Chris looks very thoughtful.

Chris is gonna be a hero. No he's not. I was thinking about this through the lens of the TV show Traitors, where there's a very clear divide between traitors and faithful, and I think you could have a lot more fun in that show as a traitor because you're the only ones there that know what's going on, who isn't.

So in that sense. The funders in knowing that you're doing those things. Although it leans a lot into like a bit of a pathological existence, which I'm not sure I really want, but I think in reality it's a bit of a, like a neo, neo kind of thing in the sense that you want to be an anti-hero, like be a cool, bad guy, but you're really popular and your, your kind of heart's in the sort of right place, but you're, you're still a bad guy and all those things.

The means justify the end. Yeah. You're outside, obviously you, you're playing outside the law because you're too much of a, a, you know, a cool, cool guy who, who can't be, um, held with the, uh, the red tape that society's trying to put around you. So you're Batman. Mm. Did you just say Batman or the Joker? He says film all about him.

Mm. So it is Harley Quinn as well, actually. Yeah, I mean, Tara, what are you hero at war villain? Um, so I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the villains because I think very often they are the hero that has just been pushed too far. Well, that's, there's a whole Incredibles thing about that, isn't it?

Yes. The Incredibles first villain was exactly that. I always loved in the, the d and d realm, you know, there's an entire grid that you can fall into and, um, quite often the people that are so far into the, you know, lawful good alignment of, I, I always follow the rules and for the good of all, end up doing more harm than good.

Um, so I always fall in that kind of, you know, context is key. And what's your ultimate goal? Kind of, I was always chaotic. Good. Uh, explains a lot.

Chaotic. Anyway, that part. Excellent. Well after chaos, shall we, uh, go on to, uh. Normal, normal service as where, so we're gonna talk about training budgets, and we're gonna look at different, as I said, different levels of training budgets. So should we put the first cap at a hundred, either a hundred dollars or a hundred pounds?

Well, let's do a hundred pounds. Let's a bit more. Well, how much is that worth in dollars then for our American audience? 120, depending on how, um, Trump and our own Prime ministers, uh, causing, um, chaos in markets. It may well change in the time between recording and doing those books, but I think it's fair to say the, the, the sort of premise is I'm a tester.

I've got a training budget to spend. I've got a hundred money and I'd like to spend it. What would you advise? How would you go about it? How would you go about finding out the right things and convincing your purse string holder that this is what you should do?

I love that. That sounds easy, Chris. Yeah, Chris makes it sound so easy. I think the hardest part of that is finding something that'll give you any bang for your buck under that amount. Right? It's everything these days is. Add a zero to that at least. Um, so how do you go about finding something when, when you're given that tiny little budget of congratulations you, we gave you a whole hundred dollars, what's gonna be evil?

And say, what about if you've got zero budget? Should we start there rather than a hundred? 'cause there's actually a lot of good fruit resources. Mm-hmm. Or is that where we finish? Or do they go into the 101 because they're under a hundred pounds still? Yeah. Now I've lost you. As, as somebody who creates free education, I can say that there is a lot of really good stuff out there that you don't have to pay for.

Yeah, there is. We built a whole training academy based on, uh, Python, Python Academy based on freely available resources. I've got, I've got a first resource that I would recommend before you even know what to choose. Steep Teaching Solutions by Barbara Oakley and Terence Sinofsky. I'm sorry I butchered your name.

They have a free course on Coursera, that's called Learning How to Learn, because let's face it, we don't all learn the same way, so it might be. Webinars, courses, conferences, hands-on tutorials, all those things. Find out what actually works for you. Um, and, and that course is free. That's really useful to be able to sort of do that.

I was recommended by Mike a brink off. Years ago, and I bookmarked it because I thought it was such a useful course to have. So have you actually done it? I did, but so long ago I can't remember any of at all. So I think I need to take it again, but what, what, what I uncovered really was hands-on stuff. I have to be actually making stuff.

I don't like, the theory is all lovely, but if I, if there's no outcome from the theory. I won't do it. It means nothing to me. Something that just ends with a multiple choice to pass. I am not motivated by personally. It has to be something where I can actually create something at the end or have something tangible from the end of it.

See, I think you've highlighted a good point. I think you need, do need to understand your learning style first, but with a hundred or just over a hundred dollars or hundred pounds. The, I mean, the first thing I would think of is either a subscription to a Coursera course itself, which may be a bit more than that possibly, but also buying books or, or subscribing to a, you know, a.

A podcast or something. Um, but on that cheap then yeah, absolutely. Chris is holding up explore it. There are, you can, you can, you can really increase lots of skills, you know, Python as, as exploratory testing itself. And again, you can get books that have, especially if it's language based. You do actually build things.

It is more practical, but practically based. So you do have that ability to actually do that. And you do, you can follow obviously things on the internet as well, and you have the internet is your friend, but it's finding the right things to actually do with that. So I think you can still do a lot. And I think there's the point of why we sort of put a small amount of money in.

First of all, you can actually achieve a lot with a small budget. It doesn't have, you don't have to spend the world. And as Russell said, there are still free resources out there. So actually you can do things on the cheap. They may not all, they not, may not all be the best, so you need to choose wisely for that free.

But absolutely use recommendations from the, from the community, but you don't have to spend a large budget and go to those, you know, really expensive courses and conferences to achieve a lot. And I love that you brought up books. I know one of the things that helps me learn the best is actually walking away from the computer and not having the distractions of being able to open a new tab, or I'll just answer that email real quick when I've got a book and I can go to a different room and scribble in the margins and come back and maybe do a hands-on exercise, but I can separate myself from all the distractions.

That is where I get the most value. It's why I keep buying more books to put behind me. You are all wise people. That's what I'm gonna say. No. Um, yeah, there's lots of different things. I think the thing we should probably tell our podcast listeners is some of these resources we will try and put links into our podcast notes so that you don't have to try and listen to them all, and hopefully you just read that to find them.

But there is an amazing array of resources that are free from the blogs, LinkedIn posts, um, to kind of like things like Automation University that was. I've forgotten who's, I wanna say who was it that did that? Apple Tools. Apple Tools, yeah. Um, there is kind of like Free Code Academy. There is. You can even do some of the Harvard Computer Science courses, for example, for free on um, x.

I think it's called ed edX edx.org and some of those are free if you don't want to like do formal certification in them, but just wanna do the course and stuff like that. There's loads of learning out there that is cheap as chips, uh, and of high quality. It's sometimes you're paying the certificate rather than actually the learning, which is to Chris's point about getting his practicality outta it.

Not always the most important thing. It can be important if you need to demonstrate on a CV or application that you've got a skill that you've got no experience in. 'cause it shows you've learned something and ticks a box and manages a risk. But if you're already in a role and all the rest of it and want to enhance your skills, advance your skills, the certification side of it, it's often less valuable 'cause it's experienced that normally.

It's valued more, but yeah, there's lots of books. Explore it is a fantastic one. Uh, I was just looking through it. The thought of books I would gonna recommend were things like, um, the Phoenix Project goal, those sorts of wider, how organizations work, system thinking type style, as well as the, you know, explore it and books of that ilk.

Think coding wise, there's a lot of those sort of learning materials that are free or cheap. There's Udemy, there's online platforms that you can pay for. Subscriptions for things like that, that you can go down as well, that give you a, a multitude of courses, which you can select from. I wouldn't particularly call out a, a set course, but there's lots of options of those ilks that will cost you less than a hundred dollars, and I'd happily say, well, if it's 10 pound a month, $10 a month, I'll have it for 10 months, then please, if I've only got a hundred dollars, I'd accept that, and then they know I have to plan.

10 months of the year I can use it. Um, I have no idea how much they do cost, by the way, but I understand they will be under a hundred dollars a month. Um, unless you've got business memberships. But yeah, that's what the, I would go down with the low budget. Hopefully. A lot of it's got to do with what you want to do, what you're trying to achieve.

Are you trying to increase your. Profile your portfolio. If there's something you're gonna be working on that's coming up at work or something you need to learn. Technology styles, coaching promotions, all these things. Like you say, systems thinking is a great place to go if you are beginning to endeavor into a more sort of holistic, um, strategic world.

There's things like the Culture Code book there, there's, there's some really. Really good challenging stuff there. Really, really interesting actually out there. And, and a lot of it is what, what's your motivation? Like, if it's just something that's new and on trend, that's always gonna change. But there, there's some really good old stuff.

Like I would say sometimes some of the older approaches, older textiles and languages and stuff have got such solid foundation, um, that they don't. Yet belong in a museum. They deserve to be things that we still study. Um, you know, Jerry Weinberg's got a lot of good quality stuff. There's still a bunch of old blog posts that I say old that might be a decade old, that I still reference and share with people about useful things.

'cause I still think the foundational truth in those things are good and the new and shiny is really important, but sometimes those foundational elements behind things are really important. You've got lots of things online for service providers like AWS, um, Prova, all these sorts of companies will actually provide learning materials for their tools.

Often is the case these days. Mm-hmm. Especially free sometimes behind walls. Uh, certification especially. There's lots of that stuff, but what I can't understand is how long have we been talking? Five, 10 minutes. Not one of us has said. Um, the testing peers conference for under a hundred pounds 'cause it's 30 quit.

I'm sorry, but I'm just surprised that none of us have self reflected our own conference. Well, we're trying not to be shells for ourself. Russell, maybe we can have out, I meant. Tara mentioned it was, I, sorry, sorry. It's, it's 30 quid for you, but it also comes with a cost, maybe more, you know, $1,400 airplane ticket for me.

Yes, that's true. So the GoFundMe will be live, uh, in, I dunno about everyone's company, but my company has a separate travel budget from learning budget. So actually the 30 pounds will come out, the a hundred pound learning budget, travel would come out of travel and subsistence budget, which is a whole separate budget system.

But not every company's the same. But anyway, I see our company, it's not close to, our company isn't the same. So our learning budget would include the travel in the hotel as well. Yeah. So, so, so that's not learning, so that seems weird. It wouldn't, it wouldn't, yeah. It wouldn't, um, it couldn't fly with them.

Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, if, if the short term. I have to put in this much time and energy into learning something, like going to a conference or reading a book or, you know, digesting in a full podcast even can be a little overwhelming. I really like things like the um, test sphere cards too. 'cause I can pull one out, read over it, go, oh, I wanna learn more about that.

Or just remind myself of something that I might have forgotten over the years. Um, and that's a really cheap just little tool that you can.  Get by on your learning budget and say, you know, this would be a really nice reference for us to have. Cool. So we, should we up the budget now? Should we up the budget to 500 or do you think a bit more than that?

500 units? No, I think 500 is a good units. What you saying? Almost 500 money. That's what we're calling it. We're like a monopoly. It's monopoly money. Yeah. Brings up a good point too. A lot of times if it's, you know, you've got a budget of 500, but it's 510. You, you, you could go over a little bit. I've never known anybody that's Absolutely.

Put their foot down and say you can offer to pay a little bit more yourself. Yeah. But usually they'll go, oh, okay. Like, I understand it's so close. You know, so there's, there's some wiggle room in there. Don't just say, oh, I guess I can't do it. Ask always works. Asking where I'm from, which is shy. Ben's getting out, which is basically, if you don't ask, you don't get.

Yeah. So try and ask. Ask if you can. Because you're guaranteed a no. Unless you ask. You ask. You might, I don't know. But if you don't ask, you've already given yourself. Don't ask. Don't get, yeah. So what can we do with 500? Well, 500 you could definitely get to like a, a domestic event, like an in-person event.

And you know, Russell's alluded to conference stuff already. Um, I think it's important like the four of us and a lot of testing peers, folks have the reason why we put the effort into making. P Khan was because we have connected with some amazing humans. We have been challenged, we have learned, we have gotten new ideas, we have come away from events inspired, led to do more things as a result of attending those things.

You don't have to aim for the stars with the biggest and brightest conferences you see, but there are, there are meetups, there are local conferences. There are amazing things where. Look, I hate the term thought leader, but there are people who are putting ideas out there into the world for you to be interacting with and sharing with, and those people.

Are your people, potentially people that you can resonate with, challenge yourselves, collaborate with, and a 500 pound dollars budget could get you to a local event. Something that's going on there, like could cover your transport, it could cover some overnight accommodation, potentially some food or a ticket.

Um, those things. I, I would recommend everyone give it a go. It's. Terrifying to be in a room with people you don't know. But do you know what? You might just meet some of the best people you've ever met, or you might meet people you hate, but hey, you've tried. We're trying to sell it on people we've all met.

Sorry. We've all met in the conference, by the way. That's why I was saying that. Sorry. Me and Chris have had a lot of hate relationship and now we're stuck with each other. But you've made a very point. There's loads of local conferences, not just on testing itself, but technologies, tools, um, on different things.

Meetup community is, there's loads of, like I've mentioned our conference, but in the UK there's all sorts of free events. You know, you've got smaller events like special interest groups, biggest ones, and software testing. You've got things like, um. There's stuff that's happening in Leeds, test, Tilia, things like that.

You've got, um, ShipIt conferences, you've got all sorts of different conferences and events that aren't pure testing sometimes, but are actually free or low cost. Mm-hmm. So that generally they're not on your doorstep always, but they're generally within day commute, day travel. Not necessarily easy day travel, but you know, sometimes you have to put a bit in to get a bit out, I guess is the point.

And I, I really like leadership and soft skill. Seminars too that you can go to that might help you with, you know, presenting big ideas to stakeholders or being able to talk in front of a room full of people. Um, so that if maybe one day you want to speak at a conference and you're like trying to figure out how to do that, you know, don't discount those things too.

That has traditionally nothing to do with testing until it does.

Everything has something to do with testing. The other thing that you could do, we've mentioned conferences and which are really important, but you could also buy a subscription service That could be to actually, how much is MOT at the moment? Is that five? Is that under 500? Yeah. So you could go, you get into their, their system and, and actually that now will get you a, the cost of a ticket to the theon.

Um. For next year. But you could also subscribe to, we've mentioned books before, but you could, you could apply, you know, for a course or for a, um, subscription to a book, you know, a specialist book repository type thing. So to allow you to get more access to larger numbers of book through subscription services and things.

So there are options like that in the, you know, for that amount of money that would allow you to. Get much more information than just buying individual books. There's also, um, like there's a lot of people trying ideas building in public, um, things like Lean Pub. Mm um, where a lot of people are self-publishing and breaking those things down and.

If you see people doing good things and you are blessed with having some budget to, to throw people's way where you can glean some, some, some wisdom, some good stuff that you can work with, but also encourage people to build. 'cause getting a publishing deal is one thing, but self-publishing is, is another.

And the, the value that that can be gleaned from that can be super good. Like I've, I've. Definitely lent hard into a few lean pub books, um, down the years, and that's a great space to, to invest in. Certainly, really, really pleased with that. And, and if you, if you do have a bit of freedom on budget, supporting people who are creating content that you appreciate, you find useful, it can, can be a really good way to do it.

Because we talked about feedback a lot. Creating and putting stuff out in the public isn't easy. So if you've got, if you've got, especially when it's on your dime. Yeah. Blessing people with that sort of stuff is, is, is a wonderful thing. If, if you've got the opportunity.

Right. So that's 500. Well, I was just looking at the cost, so MOT for. Will cost 349 pounds at 9 3 4 9 99. Well, budget you got from me as well, but for uk, but the US is just, it's 499 pounds. 99. So you get 1 cent, including or excluding tax. What? Uh, that it does say plus tax as well. So you, so you'd be slightly over, you'd be, you'd be putting your hand down the back of the sofa.

If I remember correctly though, things like Ministry of Testing and Medium usually have holiday sales. So if you're waiting to the end of Y the year to use your budget, it might be worth seeing if there's a discount coming up. And again, shy Benz always reach out and say, you've got a 409 90 $9. Can they do it for that?

You never know. It's true. You might not get two years in a row, but you can certainly try. Well, a lot of places not they have scholar. Sometimes they, it's your budget. Sometimes they've got a scholarship thing. Sometimes they've got opportunities to do stuff. Likes always, like you say, dis Yeah, there's, there's a chance.

Chance to ask and collaborate. To quote, to quote Russell I just to ask because they can only say no. Always. Let's go big. Now there's one more I wanted to point out. It's really, really important. That's gonna be controversial. So you may not be able to pay for like a pure course, but for example, you can pay for certification.

Of multiple different things, including things like I-S-T-Q-B-A-W-S courses and so on. Yeah. Now I'm not as the world's greatest fan of is T qb, meaning you're a tester, but if you're trying to get into the field and do not have much practical experience, it is one of the ways. On top of other things of debt, partly demonstrating that you are interested and that you're doing things and generally doing that certification.

If you just do the exam in the uk, it's about 225 quid, I think, or something via Pearsons or something like that. So you can buy a book, you do some online learning, you can speak to peers and things like that, and you could do those sorts of courses like that. I'm not saying it's a golden nugget solution to proving you're a tester.

It's not. But it is something that can go onto C to show entry-level jobs and get people started out in careers that not having can sometimes be an obstacle for. It's the same thing with I mentioned earlier. It's that foundational level of stuff. You can't just like skip to being an expert and that is one of those things that's going to give you content, gives you ground context.

Yeah. It gives you a grounding, it's gonna give you break may all agree with Yeah. But anyway. Um, but yeah, it's something that, you know, you can pay for a book sometimes for 30 quid and then do that. Not everyone learns like that. I appreciate, but there's lots of different things out there. The Udemy, as I mentioned before, there's lots of courses on this sort of stuff and stuff like that.

People try to help people get through exams. So you could do cheap course, pay for the exam yourself as an option if you've got a tight budget. That's an example of one. Anyway, sorry. So I will now let you proceed to the next level. You let me proceed. I want to go big now. So I was gonna say your training budget is, so, your training budget is three grand.

That's not big. That's six times bigger than the last one. That's three grand more than I get. Yeah. I say many companies are off millions to, to do your trading budget. I was gonna say, there is a caveat here sometimes where your training budget is more in terms of time. I was gonna say with the right justification.

Many places I've worked confined ways of doing it. The budget is flexible enough to allow three to five grand, we'll say three to five grand. Yeah. I'm just thinking some security courses and other things I know are about five grand. Yeah. But anyway, they're also time. There's time cost for all of this stuff.

If an employer is letting you do training or going to conferences or events, they are giving you paid time usually to do so well. Where do you stand on that? If you're going to a conference, should that be work time? If you are going to learn about your work, is it related to your work, then yes. If you're going to a plumbing conference and you're a test engineer, I would say no.

So context still matters, but yeah, if you're going to a testing it related thing or something to enhance your skills in your workplace, then I think it is something that your employers should be contributing time towards. Anyone disagree, and I think that is something that is falling out of. Outta Vogue as we, uh, tighten our belts so often, uh, development of our staff is becoming a free solution.

They might be willing to give you your time. You know, you can schedule x number of hours every week that's on development, but, hmm. Funding is a different story and sending you out and away from the office or completely out of reach is also another thing that I think I have struggled with in the past with, if you wanna do that, take your PTO.

Um, so you gotta be really careful about, you know, what you're asking for and how many little buckets you're dipping into. It's like everything. Conferences are a classic one where sometimes people go try and go to like 20 of them. Then you've gotta think about the impact of that sort of thing, because it's the time away from the business as well as the cost of the conference.

You may be speaking at them, for example, but again, there's an element of their paid time. Then there's an expectation, there's a a work benefit usually that's coming from it, an enhancement of learning or something that's coming out reputational. But it is interesting because you're right, some companies are good at saying you have time.

Terrible at kind of letting you take it, uh, and other way around. Some people will give you time, but not budget. So it is sometimes a, it's a challenging thing. Uh, I was gonna throw a curve ball because I appreciate, it's not quite the topic, but do we think, 'cause I've seen this, this, this sort of scrum culture, I'll call it, when you often end up with one test or a two test is spread or thin, that test is in particular are more loathed to take time away from testing.

'cause there's always more testing you can do. There's always more code you can write to be fair. So actually that culture of trying to get things out the door and all the rest of it accidentally puts pressure, possibly, possibly more so on testers to help the team and then put themselves a little bit on the back burner.

That team culture sometimes makes people focus on the, the team over your skills that will then help the team, if that makes sense. I appreciate. That's slightly a side question from the theme, but initial thoughts before I does that, does that, does that lend itself? And, and forgive me if I've, I've, I'm, I'm taking down a tangent, tangent here, but, um, to lend itself to a little bit about is it my professional development or is it my development for my company?

So to be, am I developing me as an individual contributor or my developing myself as a teammate? And sometimes the two will combine and other times. Diverge. Yeah. Sometimes your learning's not relevant, you know, so I know companies that give you a budget of 500 pounds to spend on whatever you want. If you wanna learn French, you can learn French.

But then there are other companies that stipulate it has to be for the growth of the company. Exactly. And so therefore it is much more for, for what's important for the company rather than an individual. So it depends on the company training culture. Well, and I have been sent to training specifically to bring back this information for the rest of us, but we're only paying for one person.

Yeah, yeah. I've done that. Yeah. That's cool. That's just cheap, but nevermind. But unless they're training you to be a trainer as well and paying you to do those courses, then they're asking a lot.

Sorry, I took us on a tangent, but it was just kind of like, I think there's a bit of a pressure on people in Scrum teams potentially to focus on the team goals over themselves sometimes, which causes a bit of a conflict, and I've seen it more in testers than the developers and the teams I've worked with.

It's not that they don't, it's just that a developer can take a step back for a day or two without less impact than a solo testing. So there's usually a larger team. They're involved. Like you said, I, I think I've usually been one tester to every. Six-ish developers. And so when that, when you only have one tester that walks away for two, three days, it's devastating.

And that's sometimes why lot of pressure, I guess, managers. Push back on time off. Anyway, we're going away from Yeah. Where we just spend your budget. But I was just thought of interesting side tangent to Chris's point. So, so big, big budget, big budget can, can be we, we've talked about events and there are some big and exciting events that exist.

Right. Um, and I think everyone should have the opportunity to try and go to a big, big event once in their life is, I think those things are, are, are magical. They're intimidating. But I think it's one of those, it's like Disney World. You, you should try and go once in your life, um, just to see if it, if it's for you and, and, and have a go on those things.

I think that's really exciting. Um, and there's so much to navigate in those sorts of spaces. My first ever testing conference was a Eurostar, which was incredibly Tim, intimidating, go big or go home. Or go big, have a breakdown, and then go home. Um, yeah, that also, that's huge. Doesn't work, but yes, it does impact.

Yeah. But then there, then there's like other things you can buy. Like, so I worked in a place where we were, we didn't just test websites, but we had other stuff. And so people could buy Arduinos kits for testing kits to experiment and, and run, run some like tangible stuff to get their hands on. Like, oh, I really want to get.

This piece of hardware to accelerate some of our learning and and such, like a lot of that is a real thing as well. Another thing I would spend that, that sort of money on is potentially if it was business based, uh, a, you know, a bespoke course, you know, bringing someone in and a bespoke course for a particular topic.

So therefore everyone can be trained on that particular topic and is specific for the particular company. I think that's really valuable. So if I had that sort of money, then that's possibly what something I would look at. I agree with that, especially if you're looking for, say, an entire department or a, a culture shift that you're trying to implement or anything like that.

If you've got the budget and you can pay for those people, that, that's what they do for a living is to come in and help with those things, then do that. It's life changing in some cases. Yeah, I think, yeah, that was a good thing. I would love someone to buy me a. Nvidia, DGX spark AI mini supercomputer type thing for my desktop.

If that's just within budget, I think it's about four and a half grand or something of just that, that, that's, that, that's, that's a, it's a real, real thing. 'cause sometimes it could be, Kiki could provide you more value. It could, you know, you know, back to, um, the quality being the removal of unnecessary friction.

That could be something that you've been dealing with for a long time in your setup. That's. It could be get a new hub, AWS, um, credits for example, so that you can do things within the cloud it or Google or AI friendly, get some sort of like enterprise account on one of those tools, you know? No, no, I think there's lots of stuff like that and there is, as you said, training courses.

There is lots of more certification type things. Some specialist ones are quite expensive 'cause they do it for like eight people and then they charge you a bomb. So like security courses and things are generally the ones I've seen that have made me shed a tear. And I, I know when it comes to certifications, there are some that, uh, you can just assume that you're gonna fail it the first time, like the pass rate is so low.

So being able to take that larger budget and say, I'm going to take it the first time here, and if I, if I don't pass and get my cert. There's usually a discount that comes along with, oh, well if you do it again in six months, then it's less. So being able to kind of plan ahead and snowball that, that helps a little bit.

Again, it depends on the context that we're talking about a little bit, but another one that's quite expensive is kind of like bootcamp systems. Hmm. So if you want a career change or something like that, usually sometimes it's a promise for jobs. Sometimes it's commitment to work for someone like that.

Sometimes it's a pay a fee to kind of go through this six week course type bootcamp. And that fee can be several thousand pounds, I think, within our budget. Depends on the companies and things like that, but they're often all used for changing careers. Um, so let's say you want to become, um. I dunno, a data scientist or if you want something like that, you might go into bootcamp do or test engineering or something of that ilk where you can go into bootcamp.

Work with people, um, to do things. Some of them are apprenticeships. There's different models, but there's lots of employers out there that do it for free as part of, you're joining us, we'll train you for six weeks and then we'll sell you, uh, as a resource to other companies and make money back that way.

And some of them are actually saying, no, no, you can just pay us money. We'll put you to the course. At the end of it, you should to get a job as a tester. Equivalent. So those sorts of things are when you've got budget, but again, your company isn't gonna probably pay for that unless they've agreed to a career change and you're on a redundancy route and all sorts of complexities.

But it's something that's out there. If you had five grand for your learning, if that makes sense, you wanna invest in yourself. There's all sorts of things they can do like that. Do we want to leave a message to employers about. Train your staff, their people. If you expect staff to continue to be able to be a top of the range and be good at doing things, then you have to invest in them as people.

And that may be money. It's certainly time. 'cause without time, money doesn't make a difference. But you need to invest if you want people. And right now we are going through an AI revolution. If you want people to utilize that in a sensible, safe way, and to be quality the implementations you use, not just chaotic.

Then you need to upskill the people in your team who are gonna be validating these things, be it testers, data scientists, or other things, the tools, the ways of working that does it. So invest in time, invest in people, invest in training, every, um, survey that goes out, when people ask what they want, it always comes down to development.

People don't wanna be static in their job. They don't wanna get burnout, they don't wanna just. Be passed over for that promotion. They want to learn and grow, and so keeping your employees happy comes with keeping them well trained. And I would echo that the same thing. If you're coming from a company, make sure that you do invest in your people.

You can make it relevant to what the, the company are needed, whatever. But I. It is absolutely giving the, giving the employees time to be able to do it and, you know, feel safe that they can do it rather than putting pressure on, get this, get this out, get this out, get this out. Oh, you're going on a course.

Mm. You know, be open, honest, and you know, and make sure that the training is relevant both to you, the company, but also don't judge them for, for, for going on the training. I'm gonna reveal something the opposite side to all this. So like we talked about time, money, budget, and all the rest of it. I've worked in places where the budget's never been the problem.

Oddly, it's the people trying to spend it has been the problem. I've had to give money back when training budgets multiple times to David's point 'cause the employees haven't felt able to ask for the money. Haven't felt, had the time off and they've had to cancel things. Oh, we've got a major release next week.

It's like, well, okay, that was probably Forecastable or Scrum. We're releasing every two weeks anyway. So yes, there's always a release, uh, those sorts of logics. But having to give people the faith, the trust, where I've recently worked, having to change the culture to actually it's okay to learn, was quite a big thing.

To actually get more of that budget spent. The, the area of tests spent more than, let's just say some of the other areas because. We tried to influence people that it was okay to learn, and that often comes by leaders setting an example. Yes. And it is a double edged sword. If you as a, as an employee have been begging for time and budget to train, and then you don't, you're going to lose it very quickly.

So. I stop asking for as much money next year and so on. That's what happens. Yeah, we could talk to any, I certainly could for a lifetime. So sorry for consuming all the oxygen people. We will wrap it up here though, otherwise we'll go on. But if you do have questions on learning development, wanna ask about the resources, um, feel free to reach out to us at contact us@testingpeers.com.

Always interested in hearing from us, uh, from listeners. Always. Wanting to help basically as much as we can people. We have got a conference, as I did blatantly plug throughout where the conferences are available. It is in Nottingham in March in 2026. So if you want to know more about it, feel free to go to testing peers con.com.

Uh, there's more information on it there. It's the 12th of March in Nottingham, uk. Uh, at the moment, well, yeah, 30 quid basically ticket. Um, so not a bad price for a ticket for a full day conference come along by all means. But they thank you to our, um, guests special, our special guest, Tara, and to our, um, familiar faces and voices more likely on the podcast.

Chris and David and myself, thank you for joining us. For now it's goodbye from the testing peers. Goodbye.