Out of everything I need to be doing currently….I’ll talk about this for 10 minutes.
In a past life I was an ESRI ATP that quickly morphed into a CTP. Sometime back in 2013 I let all my credentials lapse because as we were told CTP was only on life support until December 2014. Training in my case had dwindled. It was a great money maker and it gave me the chance to travel some if I was able to get my bids slightly right. One year I made an astounding amount of money doing it. With every franchise you are tied to a corporate entity and training ran it’s course. I morphed business direction and (IMO) became more well rounded. I was quite mad for a while about it. For no good reason really – but still. You work hard to achieve something only to be reminded of the corporate nature of business. It’s business.
During 2011 and parts of 2012 the training regimen was starting to feel more like a sales pitch as opposed to training. You learned about the software ecosystem and at one point we were even installing arcserver to complete desktop tasks and doing a lot to push ArcGIS Online. I look back and am glad it stopped…now. I wished I could arrive at these conclusions quicker. Once again – not that I harbor any ESRI angst. GIS for me is more complicated than one pile of software.
So for those of you not on the twitter…yes it does get distracting but you do learn alot.
I’ve completely been ignoring Geonet. I’ve been doing more open source things and really anything past the the old ESRI-L list has left me flat. GIS Stackexchange does about all I need for questions and answers these days. Once I started looking at Geonet I’m reminded I need to pay attention to it more just to know. GIS is a never ending career of learning and trying to remain relevant on Tech and the industry.
One tweet latter and I’m look at ArcGIS Desktop 1 . Desktop 2 and 3 are up there also.
It’s not the same Desktop 1 that I taught but it’s up there for free. Which sorta aligns with my ideas about the next version of ArcGIS Desktop. Turn loose the current materials for free. They will still be relevant – but as of right now with Desktop Professional hitting the computers very very very few people will be taking it. It’s a good thing. It’s something I wrestle with on my QGIS desktop class almost daily now.
So enjoy – you’ve got free ArcGIS Training materials released form the source.
