Welcome to the Saturday University at iLink - when working is taboo, projects are passé and deadlines are dead. iLinkers were organized into 8 groups and each group was assigned to a learning track - the aim at the end of the first trimester being either to clear exams or to build a prototype or to provide a demo-cum-seminar.

I really believe that this is a seriously huge initiative by the management to improve the workforce. Let me put down some numbers to try and justify this: Saturdays were always "half-days" at iLink - 4 working hours. Between Aug 5 and Dec 9 (when the first trimester ends) there are 19 Saturdays; 76 training hours; 9.5 training days per employee. Annualize this and you get 28.5 training days in a year! That's a whopping working MONTH every year dedicated to training.

The ignoramus might enquire "OK - so what?". Let me give you a snapshot of a couple of other scenarios from the other side of the fence. Scenario 1: Check http://www.programmersheaven.com/c/userpoll/Poll_archive.htm?PollID=136. For those of you who are touchy - yes, I noticed it does not add up to hundred because of rounding errors. But, the long and short of it remains that half the programmers in the field today get 2 or fewer days of training annually and most get none at all. Scenario 2:  In 2003, Computerworld came out with a list of 100 top players to work with based on the number of training days. Wal-Mart came up trumps with 26 training days whereas the bottom eight reported 2 days or fewer. And hey, we are talking about the *top* 100 companies here!

I won't belabor the obvious by drawing conclusions out of the last two paragraphs - but have hopefully done enough to justify why I like the concept and why it deserves to be the first post (over such seemingly obvious choices like Arsenal, Bridge and Calvin). There you go, I managed to squeeze them in as well.