* Where does your courseware come from?
How do you find your training providers? Through word of mouth? Through the phone book? It’s a tough decision when there are so many options. Roland Van Liew co-founder and president of training firm Hands On Technology Transfer, who boasts 23-years of experience delivering and developing instructor-led technical training, has devised six questions that you should ask of potential training providers to help you find quality trainers.
We’ll go through three questions today and next week finish with the final three, including the most important question of all.
1. Who are the instructors?
According to Van Liew, there are some companies in the industry that advertise courses and wait until they have a critical mass before they recruit contract trainers. Many of these companies also buy courseware from third parties. “How will [these companies] know how good the trainer is? Contract trainers are useful as supplements to staff instructors but if a company doesn’t have staff instructors the likelihood is they are a virtual training company – a marketing company that sells training,” says Van Liew.
“Find out how the company you’re considering qualifies, certifies and hires their instructors,” Van Liew adds.
2. Where does the courseware come from?
“This question is rarely asked because people assume that you have courseware but a training company could lease it from a courseware leasing company,” says Van Liew. He believes that the courseware’s origins establish the baseline of quality from the training provider. If it develops its own courseware, it’s a good sign because the company will be continually making improvements to it based on student feedback.
Quality can also be assured if the company uses official curriculum in the case of courseware for industry certifications, such as the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification. Courseware from a third party that is neither an official curriculum or developed by the training company is unlikely to be revised and improved upon based on student feedback, says Van Liew.
3. Does the company train for certification or competency?
“The end goal of training should never be to just get certification; it should be to gain competency,” says Van Liew.
He believes there are two types of technical training: product oriented training toward vendor certifications, such as Microsoft or Cisco designations, in which students learn about product features, and task-based competency training that teaches students how to carry out a task, such as how to recover a system after failure.
“Certification often involves nothing more than cramming for an exam and then getting a piece of paper saying the student is ‘certified’ in that particular technology. Training for competency is an entirely different matter and involves hands-on lab exercises, live instructor/student interaction and plenty of practice,” Van Liew says. “Certification may not indicate anything more than the fact that a student participated in a class, while competency enables a student to be immediately productive back in the workplace, confident in his or her ability to actually use the software.”
Good training companies will have the capability to supplement the official curriculum for product training with tasked based training pulled from their own material, says Van Liew. Consumers should familiarize themselves with the official curriculum to determine whether the training provider has added competency-based training to the sessions.
Next week, we run through some questions about class sizes and practical lab work.
