Computer Measurement Group (CMG), the non-profit company many IT professionals rely on to provide guidance and advice on best practices for managing infrastructure, is gearing up for its annual conference in Las Vegas, NV this coming December. In advance of the event, organizers have announced that registration is open for seven training sessions designed to give attendees pointers on managing IT capacity and quality of service. The platform-agnostic topics range from capacity planning and TCP/IP performance management to a Unix/Linux quick start course and are included in the cost of the conference.

If you're an IT professional looking for a way to enhance your resume, or a computer technician working on developing long-term career skills, the training sessions offered at this conference might be just the ticket. I caught up with one of the organizers recently to take a deeper look at this year's sessions.

CMG Training -- dubbed CMG-T by its creator, Dr. Michael Salsburg, Director at The Computer Measurement Group and Chief Architect for the Real Time Infrastructure initiative at Unisys -- has been an integral part of the conference for the last couple of years.

"When I was the program chairman for CMG 2006, I was asked to provide more training within the conference program," recalls Salsburg. "Since our attendees work with various platforms, I thought that platform agnostic courses, focused on the basic skills, would offer a lot of value."

According to Salsburg, those basic skills are "measurement, analysis of measurements, and modeling / forecasting based on the analysis" and form the basis of computer performance and capacity management.

Once the topics were established, volunteer instructors were chosen. Salsburg says, "We approached the very brightest luminaries within CMG that have been doing this for decades as consultants and key architects for market leading companies. To me, it was important to keep this as a volunteer activity. I personally felt that I had gotten a lot out of CMG and wanted to contribute something back. Luckily, we found other instructors who felt the same way."

At busy conferences, timing is everything so the training presentation schedule is designed to ensure that they don't run at the same as conference sessions that present critical information to "rookie" IT professionals. "Our conference surveys have revealed that a sizable percentage of attendees are first-time attendees who come to the conference because their managers recognize CMG as the quickest way to train technicians who are new to the field of computer performance and capacity management. So these folks naturally gravitate to the CMG-T sessions."

Though there are plenty of online training options available these days in various technical fields, hands-on IT jobs often deserves hands-on training. Have you ever attended focused training sessions at a conference? How did it help you professionally?