Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2007-12-02 07:34:45 - Graham Ellis
It's one thing to provide a training course ... and another to provide an effective training course that the delegate will fondly remember, and the course administrator will book as his first choice for the next student for the same subject. Yesterday evening, I wrote something of our philosophy for a proposal that we're submitting and I'm going to share it here to give you a flavour.
Looking for yesterday's Santa trip - see here in the archive ... this blog moves FAST ;-)
3. The Well House Consultants Philosophy
We aim to provide you with a superior product - we want you to be so happy with what we deliver that you'll automatically think of us first next time!
How do we achieve that? Here are some of the factors.
3.1 We write all our own material. And we update it regularly too - you'll find that courses have small changes made quite often to mention new techniques and software releases, for example. This also means that we are not constrained to any agenda required by an authorisation centre, but rather we can be flexible to your needs.
3.2 All courses are presented by our own staff who are the experts who wrote them. This means that we can answer all on-topic questions as the course proceeds (and many off-topic ones too!) meaning that your delegates leave with everything covered. Where a question is to be "come back to later" we make a note of it so that we really DO cover it later.
3.3 We offer a "no cancellation guarantee". Once you have booked a course and it's confirmed, we will not cancel it - very occasionally, that means that a public course ends up being a private one, but we know that our customers schedule their training in amongst a whole complex mesh of other tasks and really cannot afford to re-arrange at short notice.
3.4 Public courses are limited to a maximum of just 8 delegates to ensure that each delegate gets plenty of the tutor's time and attention during class and practicals - we won't leave your staff behind, nor run so slowly that we waste their time.
3.5 After the course, delegates will find all the examples in the notes on our web site, which they can download if they wish. Our tutor also offers follow us support via a forum or email, at no extra charge within reason.
3.6 We only teach subjects that we enjoy. Quite apart from us being a little selfish in this regard, it means that your delegates will be motivated during the course; where the subject being taught is appropriate, the tutor writes new examples in front of the delegates to illustrate not only a solution, but more importantly how that solution is reached. And with the tutor enjoying the subject, you'll often find him in the classroom from early to late if the delegates wish to ask extended questions.
3.7 Our training centre is also a high quality business hotel. That was, the delegates on our public courses spend time with others learning the same subjects from different organisations - widening the scope for all concerned. And if you take over our hotel for a private course, you'll see excellent team building benefits too.
3.8 Our training room was fitted to our own specification with our own courses in mind. Everything from a quiet environment to large desks, whiteboards that cover the whole wall and lighting for optimum use of projectors has been taken in to account. Good visibility from all seats, tea coffee, soft drinks and water available at all times, etc, help make an easy environment in which to learn.
According to my records, we have trained almost 30 delegates from [organisation name] in the past 2 years, and I would confidently suggest that you ask any of them for confirmation of the above.
Found this page in my blog through a search? Who are we? .... Here's some of the introduction text from the same proposal!
1. Introduction
Well House Consultants write and present technical and programming training courses in a range of niche subjects - mostly "Open Source". Most of the subjects we teach run as regular public courses at of Melksham, Wiltshire training centre. That's about 100 miles to the West of London, 160 miles south of Leeds, and 15 miles east of Bath. We also run private courses for groups of delegates from individual client organisations, and those courses can be run at or near your office, or at our training centre.
Since our subjects are highly specialised ones, many delegates travel a considerable distance to attend and we so our training centre features hotel standard rooms - indeed, it is open as a hotel for visitors to local businesses when we've got rooms that are not required by delegates.
Our current offerings include public courses in Perl, PHP, Python, MySQL, httpd / Tomcat web servers, Tcl, Ruby, Java, C, C++, and Linux. For many of these subjects we offer a range of courses, to suit different levels of delegate and different levels of competence to be achieved.
We can offer ALL of those subjects on private courses too - run in house at your offices, or at our training centre / hotel as appropriate. The following subjects are also available (the list is not exhaustive - please ask): HTML, web page and web site basics. CSS. Shell programming. Introduction to Object Oriented principles and database design. Private courses can be (and usually ARE) tailored to suit the group of delegates to be trained, and we routinely write a small amount of extra material if our customers require an extra course element which is not on our regular catalogue. There is no extra charge for this tailoring.