Main Content

Training course locations - Melksham, UK; Buxton, UK; Lake Constance, Germany; Venice Italy, the USA and India

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-08-30 11:29:25 - Graham Ellis

Many years ago, when I was at First Alternative, I suggested that we run public courses in a holiday location - giving delegates a chance to get away from the hustle and bustle of daily life and to learn in a relaxed environment. We chose Buxton in Derbyshire as a location, arranged the hotel and venue, and advertised what turned out to be ... a complete flop.

For my own training - where I go to the "next level" of expert to ensure that I know the subjects that I teach really well, I'll travel wherever is necessary. That's included places as diverse as Longmont, Colorado, USA and Venice, in Italy. Longmont is one of those places that people seem to accept as a legitimate business destination, but say "Venice" and they get the feel of what I might call a "jolly" - that somehow I wasn't going to learn very much in Venice, but rather it was going to be an excuse for a holiday at my company's expense.

And I think that's one of the reasons that the Buxton experiment failed - because the potential delegates and their immediate technical managers found it hard to justify within their organizations a trip to a lovely place where the headline is "tourism", overlooking the fact that out of season such places are such a natural venue for courses, training sessions and the like. The facilities and the infrastructure are there, available, and at a sensible price. In hindsight, I'm was the more sure that the leisure nature of the destination had been a problem with regards to bookings when I see "how to convince you manager, and your manager's manager" pages on the web site that supported the Venice event.

So - I'm really rather glad the Well House Consultants is in Melksham rather than Bournemouth, or Weston-super-mare, Harrogate or Portrush. Wherever we were / are located, the real difference that the venue makes for our delegates depends on us having the right course, tutor, facilities, environment, accommodation and travel logistics. And I can look at each of those against our product and say: Yes - that's right. People will book "naturally" rather than having to convince their boss that they're off on a skive!

For much longer duration courses, we've noticed a trend for people to be heading off to India these days. For four to six weeks of training, the overhead of injections, medical / travel insurance costs and time can be offset against a cheaper per-day accommodation and training rate that can be offered in the UK or Europe.

I was reminded about the Buxton experiment overnight; I have received an email from a training company based on Lake Constance, and suggesting that we might work with them in some way. And it struck me how very much they're selling their courses based on their beautiful location. And I found myself wondering if the market has changed and "popular holiday spot" is now a sales-positive, or if the German market is different. Certainly Lake Constance is beautiful - I've trained within 1km of the lake (as well as at numerous other German locations) and I would be happy to present the occasional niche course for them there.

More generally, if you've come to this page looking for courses in Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Lua, Tcl or our other subjects - for a group of delegates in Germany, we can help at YOUR location too. See [here] for a pricing chart; you'll find that it makes economic sense if you've got four or more people who need the same course at the same time. Less than that - send them to us on our public courses, or if you're close to Lake Constance drop me a note and I'll pass on details if you're looking for a subject where we overlap.


Illustration - Venice. Real purpose of trip - to listen to (and learn from) Larry Wall, Rasmus Lerdorf, Monty Widenius, and hosts of others. See [newsletter - Spring 2004]. And what a worthwhile and educational trip it was too - as well as being perhaps the hardest week's work I had done in a very long time.