Is training changing?
At Dotted Eyes we have taken thousands of people through our MapInfo and FME training courses. In the last 12 months, and despite of finances (especially in the public sector) being as tight as they have ever been, we have also seen our training numbers go up, not down. Why? Clearly we have excellent trainers, good facilities (if you choose to come to us) and all the follow up services you need. But like any professional organisation that should be a given in today’s competitive market.
There is a lot of change still going on. With so many people having been through restructures, many are now finding themselves in new roles with access to software and tools that they don’t know how to drive but know if they did it could add real value. And why not add another skill to your CV or LinkedIn profile. After all, it’s an asset the business is paying for.
Some people really like to get out of the office and focus. I went on a two day training course myself recently and found it a refreshing change from the constant flow of emails, calls and interruptions. You can switch off and focus. If you take a team out of the office it can also turn into a team building exercise – bonding with peers you don’t spend lots of time with in your day-to-day role. We even took one of our guys for his first ever curry!
However there are also those people who only have 20 minutes per day to focus on this. This could be a gap in between meetings or, if like me you prefer to learn in the evenings, the short window of time after putting the kids to bed and just before dinner. How do you cater for this cross section of the to-be-trained populous? They won’t come on a two day course. They don’t have the time to spare. I think this is where we are going to see an increasing need for short online sessions. These would be designed to get you up to speed so that you don’t spend half the course learning to switch the software on and load in a bit of data, but instead focus on the areas that give you the biggest benefits.
Another angle is that more and more we are also mentoring people or a small group on a specific issue. This again is a different type of help. Some class this as consultancy – I wouldn’t – that’s having the job done for you. However in numerous cases it’s been great for us to step in, skill up and then disappear to leave everybody to it. This works really well if it can be done around a specific project, where we are transferring skills in and adding what I would call real value.
Finally and new to the block, we have vocational training – where the group learns new skills and approaches to business challenges that they can then apply back in their organisations. Our pilot courses have been a real hit, and we will be launching these fully in the autumn. Its conceptual, there is no software in sight and it was all about talking and sharing experiences amongst a group of peers. Very valuable but a different kind of value – very much what we try to engender at all our Dotted Eyes events, such as our FME user group and forthcoming data management workshops in November.
So in summary it’s a mixed market and at Dotted Eyes and our sister company, miso, we are looking to provide the solution that fits, with a combination of these services, to help people get where they need to be. But I also think it’s about an individual preference about how they learn.
Just as well we are all different!
Written by Charlie Gilbert, Business Solutions Director at Dotted Eyes, 4th September 2013