Post course support - part of the service
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-02-02 07:38:58 - Graham EllisAt the risk of generating a lot of questions from previous trainees who read this column, I'm reproducing the following here - rewording an email answer .... I'm totally aware that a training course is just one cog in the wheel of learning and applying a new skill, and I set out some of our philosophy here ...
"""We're primarily a training company; our philosophy is very much to help people learn for themselves - what's that saying about "give a man a bag of wheat and you feed him for a month - give him seeds and you feed him for ever". We do some contract work to keep our "hands in", but we're very selective what we do as we could easily take on more that we can handle to the detriment of everyone.
Linux is a huge subject. Rather than attempt to cover every aspect of the subjects, we provide specialist training in this area on LAMP deployment - linux use, administration (as required for a web server) and installation and configuration of Apache httpd, MySQL, PHP, Perl and Python. We don't cover firewalls, DNS, sendmail and the other multitude of possible topics. Our page at http://www.wellho.net/course/linux.html introduces our Linux courses: Basics (1 day) - Admin (1 day) - Web Server (2 days) or they can be combined into a 4 days course. There's links to the full course descriptions, dates, prices, etc from the link given.
Inevitably, questions arise after a course. Customers can't know exactly what's going to turn up in their use when they get back to work and in a short course such as ours we can't cover everything. So we provide forums like "Opentalk" and an email service to customers at no charge. Since it's free, we can't make this open ended / limitless but people appreciate this and welcome the support given. We also offer "extra days" if you wanted to buy a further day of my time; we don't do an hourly rate as even a one hour contract job would "nix" a potential training day which is where are resources are geared. There's details of our post-course support at http://www.wellho.net/net/after.html
We can help further too (there's a limit to how much information I can put on a web page). If you wanted to stop around after training one day of your course for a few hours and look at your specifics, that's great; we don't throw you out at 5p.m. ;-) ... occasionally we have personal commitments in the evening, but we can usually find at least one point during a course. If you live fairly close by, you would also be welcome (by prior appointment, please!) to pop up here for a couple of hours one evening or weekend to look at specifics, and even to work on your own systems with me from here. No charge is made for these extra sessions, but if they start to get to the point where I'm recommending a complete extra day to be what you need, I'll point you at our "extra day" service http://www.wellho.net/course/ax.html"""