Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-10-14 06:42:05 - Graham Ellis
There are tiers of trainers, and if you're choosing a technical trainer for yourself or your staff, you need someone from the right tier.
In the upper tier, you have Experts with a "Capital E". They really know their subject inside out, and they can present courses to highly technical audiences really well; I'm amongst these people this week, and it's enthralling to hear Randal Schwartz go through modperl in 45 minutes, or Brian Aker talking through MySQL server replication, clustering and cluster tables (different subjects) in a similar time.
The middle tier have a much broader subject subject knowledge, without being quite such experts on individual topics. I, unashamedly, put myself in this group and not "upper tier"; I don't need to be a hyperexpert when I'm called upon to teach Perl to a newcomer to programming, and I mustn't be a "one language only" guru when I'm helping people convert; it's just too narrow, and if you speak to the authors of the languages you'll hear them say "I made this C like" or "we picked up this from Ruby". Yes, and many trainees will be converting and will benefit from a broad teacher.
The lower tier, if you can call it that, includes trainers on other subjects who get some exposure to the target subject, and who will spend an hour or two on Perl / Tcl / PHP / MySQL as part of application training or management overviews. Such people often come on our courses, and I'm delighted to give them tips and techniques. I don't regard them as competition as they have a distinctly different job to do and, with a few bad exceptions, won't claim to offer a full course on the subject in question.
Let me repeat - I'm proud to be in the second tier, and it's a business decision that I'm there. I'm very very happy to take groups of nervous newcomers to [enter language] and take them through from basics to writing good professional code, introducing the philosophy as well as the mechanisms of the language, teaching good technique and comparing, with some authority, to other languages as we go. This is the training that most people want, and it's proven time and again by the number of requests we get train further groups for the same company, or the number of people who recommend us on to their friends and contacts. Our marketing indicates that the vast majority of our customers are referrals in this way and that's a huge vote of confidence by our customers.
Why am I writing this article this morning? Because I was shocked over dinner last night, seated with some of the upper tier people who had better remain nameless, to hear them talking about flying lecturers from the upper tier halfway around the world to present more fundamental courses. Bemoaning the lack of ability to charge what they felt the right rate should be, not realising that they can't charge the right rate because they're selling the wrong product - they're selling a Rolls Royce when the customer wants a Ford. Very nice indeed, but too expensive and too high maintenance. The real tragedy? They hadn't even looked at the Ford to see whether it did a good job - they had simply heard of it, and discounted it straight out with disdain. "Can't be any good" attitude.
I remember the particular contract they were using as an example. I was the Ford.
I don't mind competition, but I did "feel" the disrespect last night. This morning, it's mellowed. I'm thankful that they're not really able to provide the majority training needs. Occasionally one will "slip through the net" and a Guru will fly halfway around the world to present over the heads of his audience (yes, I HAVE seen this; I hope I'm not making the same mistake in reverse) but for the most part the customer will realise that he needs a course with plenty of hands on, a group which is small enough to give people some one-on-one time, and a trainer who'll be available for follow ups, and with associated subject knowledge to help put the whole in context. That's what I'm proud to provide.