Software Testing Training

As a tester I found that my employers were not helpful at all, I did mange to persuade them to let me go to a couple of conferences which cost ￡100 but even then I had to sign a document that said I would reimburse the cost if I were to leave
Which I am doing at which point the company promised me all the training I wanted if I would stay

Training that I would have liked to go on would have been:

Risk based testing to learn how to concentrate the testing effort on the high risk areas
Performance testing so I could learn what the best things to monitor were
Unit test training, I've been trying to encourage the programmers to write more but would like to have known more myself

Rosie,

Whether your company supports sending you to software tester training or not, IMHO there is not very much good training available to teach people how to be better testers. I took about 8 classes from the International Institute of Software Testers, they have 2 or 3 annual training weeks in the US. I thought most of it was very general and not helpful to my job. The best class for software testing I did take was Michael Bolton's Rapid Software Testing class, which is heavily based on James Bach's testing methods.

To answer your question, my current company (with several hundred thousand emplyees) is not very good at sending us to training. I had to jump through 30 hoops and spend a good 6 months trying to get 2 days of training approved. Shame on my company. Instead of sending QA to classes like the Rapid Software Training class I mentioned, my company sends people to the annual Mercury Interactive seminar in Vegas, which I assume is like a huge commercial for Mercury products.