The company I work for has a well-staffed IT shop, but the one thing we are lacking is anyone with real developer experience. We have one woman there who is known as the "database developer", but all her experience comes from Access. Access front-ends to SQL databases, that sort of thing. It works for the most part, but it's frustrating from our perspective when we have to deal with all these Access databases/front ends, and we know things could be so much better.
A few times they've tried to send her to VB training of various kinds, and as the resident SQL "expert" and the one that works most closely with her, I've tried to steer her in the right direction. She's willing, but it's clear at this point she just doesn't have the skillset required to make the leap to "real" developer. This is a state job, however, so just letting someone go for such reasons is a convoluted enough process that it's probably not going to happen so long as she continues to be competent in the Access world she's created for us.
I'm damn tempted to see if I can get a copy of VB6 from MSDN or some other source and throw it in front of her, see what happens. I've got 0 VB experience myself, but from reading the descriptions it does seem like she might be able to embrace it. I've seen the behind the scenes coding/scripting she writes in these Access front-ends, and it really seems like she is doing a lot of what Visual Basic would require, but she just can't retrain her brain to deal with VB10 or whatever.
Is this a mistake? Our needs aren't anything special, just "Go get this SQL data and show it to the user, maybe let them edit it" type stuff. If I had any kind of time I know I could probably teach myself enough VB to do this, and I've been tempted a couple times just to pad the old resume, but it always gets put into the "Yeah, someday" file.