Challenging the IT course business model
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2015-02-05 19:59:10 - Graham EllisI love a challenge to our business model - and indeed to a common business model across the IT training business. It gives me a chance to look, to consider, to review what we and the industry do, and to sanity check our choices. We've got a Learning to Program in Tcl and a Learning to Program in Python course - both at the start of March, and both late additions to our schedule - so I've been promoting them a little wider than usual (note - these courses are for newcomers to programming; for experienced programmers, the equivalent courses Tcl Programming and Python Programming start a day later).
Anyway - here's what was written:
Can you tell me why it is over £1000 to learn python when you can go out buy a raspberry Pi for 75 quid go and get a book look at youtube and learn the fundementals there, go to higher education and learn c++ and java, seems expensive python is very rarely used in industry
And in answer ...
The short answer is that we provide a service that's wanted by our customers. Our clients are mostly companys (large and small) wanting to get their staff up to speed quickly, and the same company will send delegates on multiple occasions or have us train on site from time to time, so clearly they feel there is the right return on their investment in training with us. If we didn't get business (and we're very busy indeed at the moment - the courses I've promoted on Facebook are late additions to our schedule, which is why we're promoting them) we wouldn't be giving courses.
But that short answer is a bit glib, and we should look a bit deeper.
Firstly, comparing the price of hardware and training is comparing two different things - like comparing the price of food and the utensils you cook it in. It's a valid thing to look at when you're looking at your total budget spend, but not when comparing items against each other. So I'm going to rule out the price comparison between a Raspberry Pi and a training course as invalid.
Now, some people learn well from books, videos, and other media. In fact I initially learned Python from books. But that wasn't just one book; it was three different books and looking at the view / approach each took to get a full view of the topics. Although I was already a very experienced programmer indeed, it took quite a while and I learned how to do things and not the best way for me to do things. It took some considerable investment of my time, and there were periods of great frustration where I was thinking "surely there's an easy way to do this" or "I can't see what's wrong with that" and I had no-one to turn to. The time taken to self-teach, even with good,modern aids has to be experienced to be believed, and it's far from suitable for everyone. I have (just) completed delivery of a four day course (teaching Java as it happens) and this week - just as for my learning - delegates are hitting the frustration of "how do I do xxx" or "what's wrong with yyy" during a practical. I can spot the problems in seconds (or even split seconds) So - secondly - you learn far quicker on a course, thirdly you learn better techniques and fourthly you are far less liekly go get frustrated and give up with tutorial help. After I had learned Python (!) I flew to Denver, Colorado and spent a week on Mark Lutz's Python course - Mark being the author of the O'Reilly books on Python and a close associate of Guifo van Rossum who wrote the language. And I found that week invaluael to me, even with my prior Python background, and even at the extra cost of flight to another continent and car rental.
Higher education is excellent and recommended where appropriate - but it's not appropriate for everyone. Elapsed time taken is far longer than one of our courses, and costs (up to £9000 per year) can be significantly more than a course with us. Yes, there are lower cost alternatives too, but not everyone has the luxury of the time / can't take a sabatical and be release from their employment to learn. So, fifthly, I'm going to suggest that higher education and commercial short courses are for different markets, and don't complete with each other - so the comparison is only occasionally a valid one.
Java and C++ are indeed among the most used languages in commerce / industry. But we're a niche training company, and that bulk work isn't our specialty. But I'm scratching my hed to think how my challenger came to the conclusion that Python is "very rarely used in Industry". I naturally come across across a lot or people who are using Python - they're certainly not rare; I have a sufficiently biased picture to not be able to say with authority the relative numbers of commercial practitioners of Java, Python and C++. And whilst there is a significant minority who require Python, my sixth point is that someone should provide that course (and we do) - in fact we're very well placed to do so for a subject which isn't the most common, so delegates need pooling from a relatively wide area.
I have given an answer that's perhaps longer than it should be - looking at each of the individual points raised in more detail, rather than looking at the product itself and stressing how it meets the needs of our delegate - how it benefits our customers.
Bright, intelligent people who are specialists in a wide variety of fields require to be able to process data in their work, and need to learn how to do so cleanly, well and efficiently. Python is often the natural language of choice for such tasks as it's quick to write, encouraged good coding, and does not need deep geekyness. And they need to learn quite quickly - data is to be analysed this year (not next), and with minimum impact on the rest of their current workload. What better way to learn than taking a week away, where everything else is shut off and they can learn and be guided by a professional tutor (who's also available to the delegate after the course) who can take them logically through the elements, assist with things they find more difficult, advise them on experiences and suggest how best they perform certain tasks. Compared to the incidental costs of getting it wrong (and coming up with poor code), or the cost of taking a long period to learn, our courses are a bargain!