Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-08-19 08:30:43 - Graham Ellis
Lunch question. "What's your most popular course?".
I think I have a finger on our business, but that's a very difficult one to answer. We don't keep all of our eggs in one basket; no one subject accounts for more than a quarter of our business and no one client accounts for more than a tenth of our income in any year.
So far this year, Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl and MySQL has each accounted for over 10% of our training course bookings and there's just a few percentage points between the top two subjects, so "what's top" could easily be reversed by the next order we receive.
Technology develops ... and looking back to 2001, I note that the significant courses were Perl, Java and Internet. Both those latter topics have become more mainstream in the last few years and move away from the niche training arena that we're set up to service well. You can download copies of our old Java notes from our Open Training Notes site; the Internet notes covering HTML and the like have long since been superseded and you wouldn't WANT copies of them ;-).
We write all our own training notes and update them constantly to reflect the changing market we operate in. The last changes that I made to a course module were last weekend, and I have a couple of notes that I've made while I'm travelling this week.
We've learnt that nearly everyone in the training business claims that their notes are constantly being updated, but that it's often not the case. Scanning the web last weekend, Lisa visited the web site of the folks that I trained for in the last Millennium and a description of one of their courses. Dates were current, but the list of content was remarkably similar to the course I wrote for them in 199x. Oh - and the description had the line about "we revise our material regularly"; I think the wording of that phrase too was as I left it, years ago.