• If you would like to have a class from The Trainer's Friend taught at your site, you may need to convince management to do it
• There are two main issues to address to make this happen:

1. What is the need for training? (make the business case)

• Although you hire people already technically competent, the industry is constantly changing and your people need to learn any new technologies you plan to use in your installation
• This is so your IT capabilities and practices can more rapidly use the technologies appropriate to your business, to provide new services at lower cost, with increasing reliability and security
• New techniques or capabilities in existing products and technologies can often make developers more productive and effective with already familiar tools (e.g.: COBOL and PL/I can now handle Unicode and XML natively)
• New products and technologies are not impossible to learn by one's self, but it takes time and managment committment
• Although your people are capable of learning this on their own, they are often over-worked, under-staffed, or not given incentives to learn the new techniques
• Our course developers find learning curves from two months to three years to learn the latest features or technologies; but they put the results into courses lasting just 1-5 days
• If your staff needs to learn product updates or new technologies, they get the benefit of condensing the learning curve dramatically - and each student gets that benefit, instead of each developer having to go through the learning curve on their own
• Note we also have a page on our website to help estimate the return on investment (ROI) from dollars spent on training

 

2. Why choose The Trainer's Friend (raise their awareness of our existence and our quality)?

• We are not a large company, and therefore we are not widely known by managers. But ...
  • We are well-known, and well-regarded, by the technical community
  • Although we do not cover all areas someone might want training in (so we are not "one-stop shopping"), what we do cover, we are the best at:
    • No one keeps their materials more current than The Trainer's Friend - this maintains the value of our materials for a long time after a class has been taught.
    • No one keeps their materials more useable than The Trainer's Friend - page numbers, indices, quick-reference summaries, pointer to websites for future reference also add value to the materials long after the class has been taught: the materials are a solid reference tool on their own!
  • We are flexible and creative when it comes to content tailoring, course development, and class scheduling
  • We give back to the business / technical community:
    • We provide free technical materials on our website
    • We publish practical articles in the trade press
    • We help solve problems in the technical community by responding to posts in technical newsgroups such as ibm-main and MVS Open Edition
  • You can help us by:
    • Being an inside sales person: tell your manager about us, tell your training people about us
      • Point to our website (http://www.trainersfriend.com, of course)
      • Give them our email address: kitty@trainersfriend.com for scheduling, pricing, and support of classes, or steve@trainersfriend.com for technical questions regarding content or setup
      • Give them our phone number: 303-355-2752
    • Help us to reach the right people: give us names and email addresses or phone numbers and we'll take if from there.

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This page last updated: 15 August, 2012
Copy © 2012 by The Trainer's Friend, Inc.