"What does Spanish have to do with anything?" you ask. Well, bear with me as we wander through yet another of my circumlocutory columns.

You can sort of separate training into various components. You can get training in the overall knowledge base of your current industry, whether it is the Java API world, or the world of (say) mass transit. If you are a documentation specialist, in the first case you might be needing to learn how an API works in terms of the rest of a Java enterprise application. In the second case, you might be interested in finding out the current best practices on safety on subway travel, and how to communicate these best practices to a transit employee in the middle of a transit emergency.

Do we get born with either of these pieces of knowledge in place? I'm going to say "no", unless you are some sort of Java or transit prodigy.

So where do we get training?

• Internal training. Someone (or a group of someones) passes, through mostly informal processes, knowledge to you to help you do your job. Advantages: Cheap on the surface, if you don't estimate what it costs to have a senior employee sit around talking for eight man hours over a week talking to a new guy. Disadvantages: Not all internal someones are good trainers, not all internal someones want to be trainers.

• Book learning. You go out and buy a book in something and teach yourself. Advantages: self-paced, cheap. Disadvantages: Some things aren't available in books (Java APIs yes, trends in mass transit dynamics at the worker level, no). Some things are better learned when there is a teacher-student dynamic with a live human being to ask questions to.
  
  
• Online courses. You get on the Internet and find a course that will do what you want it to do. Advantages and disadvantages are similar to book learning, except there can be a more interactive component to an online course (chat room, Web cam, and so on).

(And, of course, the formal training route, with immediacy of both practice and feedback. There's a reason why this method has survived the centuries, because it works. But the premise here is that some mean person is telling you this isn't an option.)

And then there's the method where you pay for a course yourself. Disadvantages: Expensive, and time-consuming (from your boss' view, if not your own). Advantages: Well, at least you're getting trained!

Which brings me back to my Spanish class. Seemingly unrelated to anything in my current career field, but it was cheap and it is being done using the formal training method. And I was thinking how unrelated it was to my current career field until I read in the news recently where the Bank of Nova Scotia had purchased one of Chile's major banks. And all of a sudden, Spanish is aligned perfectly with my current career field.

What am I trying to say? One, you never know, two, there is no such thing as tangential training, and three, fight for formal training with anything you can get away with.