The Trainer's Friend, Inc. - Convincing Management

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If you would like to have a class from The Trainer's Friend taught at your site, you may need to convince management that this is desirable
There are two main issues to address to make this happen:
Why choose The Trainer's Friend (raise their awareness of our existence and our quality)?
- This is sometimes a hard sell. 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 and more useable than The Trainer's Friend - this is an added value feature
  - We are flexible and creative when it comes to content tailoring, course development, and training scheduling
  - We give back to the business / technical community:
    - We provide free technical materials on our website: our z/OS Unix paper has been downloaded over 50,000 times
    - We publish practical articles in the trade press
    - We help solve problems in the techincal 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 or steve@trainersfriend.com
      - Give them our phone number (in Colorado or from outside the US: 303-393-8716; in the US, toll free: 800-993-8716)
    - Help us to reach the right people: give us names and email addresses or phone numbers
What is the need for training at all (make the business case)?
- Although you hire people already technical, the industry is constantly changing and your people need to learn the new technologies properly 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, 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; but they put the results into courses lasting 1-5 days
- If your staff go 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 student doing self-study on their own and each having to go through the learning curve on their own

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