Hiring training facilities.
Jacinta Richardson
Who here has their own training facilities?
For those of us who don't (and Perl Training Australia is definitely in this
boat), how do you handle arranging labs in another city when it isn't convenient
for you to go and check them out?
Do you try to get someone you know to give them a look over? Do you always make
the time to fly out and ensure they're sufficient? Or do you just trust that
things will probably be okay?
What do you look for in a training facility? Do you care about the machine
specifications? How important is it that morning and afternoon tea are served?
Do you test their coffee? Do you make use of lunch vouchers or in-house
catering or do you let attendees buy their own lunches?
I'm curious as to how you arrange labs for your training courses. Please feel
free to add questions. For us:
We often don't make the time to check out labs in other cities before training
at them. We usually want to do so, but time often gets away from us. This has
bitten us badly once when the staff at the facility turned out to want to close
the doors at 4:30pm when we had pitched our class to run from 9-5.
Unfortunately, sometimes even checking out the labs isn't enough to find out
whether or not they are suitable. A room can seem quite pleasant when it's
empty and you walk in half way through the day; but it can be down right nasty
by 4pm on a warm day with all the machines turned on and 15 bodies working away.
Separate air conditioners for each room are important.
In a training facility we look for:
* Clear, large monitors. 17" minimum with a decent resolution.
* Lots of elbow room between attendees
* Quiet, very sharp data projector
* Decent air conditioning.
Machine specifications are typically irrelevant (we don't teach anything which
can stress a low-end machine), so we often laugh when we're offered RAM and
processor upgrades.
Morning and afternoon tea is nice, although we'll cope okay if there are just
biscuits as well. Good coffee seems to be really hard to find. What is it with
training facilities providing "freshly brewed" sludge?
We always use lunch vouchers, although we prefer it if these vouchers are
accepted in more than one location. Our most recent course only had a single
location (we were assured there would be more) and although none of the students
complained I was a bit disappointed.
A new training room criteria I'm thinking of adding is a question regarding fire
drills and floor wardens. I know this sounds hopelessly paranoid, but it isn't
really. In our course today we stopped for morning tea at about 11:10 and came
back at about 11:25am. At 11:30 we were told that there was going to be a fire
drill in about 5 minutes but we wouldn't have to evacuate. At 11:35 we were
asked to leave the building. The fire warden for the training facility then
proceeded to leave; rather than ensuring that the floor was cleared etc. In the
mix-up of people on the stairs we lost some of our students too. :(
The whole thing took about an hour, so I'm glad we decided to solve it by
breaking for lunch really early, and then having 2 afternoon tea breaks.
I'll be asking my next facility when I book:
* Is there a fire drill scheduled that week
and
* Who is your fire warden, and do they know what they're doing?
If it were possible to mark the fire wardens on their jobs I would have had to
give ours a 1/10.
All the best,
J
--
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`6_ 6 ) `-. ( ).`-.__.`) | Perl Training Australia |
(_Y_.)' ._ ) `._ `. ``-..-' | +61 3 9354 6001 |
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Gabor Szabo
On 9/15/06, Jacinta Richardson <jar...@perltraining.com.au> wrote:
> G'day everyone,
>
> Who here has their own training facilities?
We don't own facilities either.
Most of our trainings are on-site but even there we bump into trouble
with classrooms. We try to recommend them a setup but in the end
we go with what the client has. Many times it is far from being optimal.
The biggest trouble usually is actually that we are on-site.
Many managers expect their workers to do their daily job
more-or-less even while they are in class. That means many times
students have to read their e-mail and respond to them.
Many times they are even taken out from the class.
Once they are out for 2-3 hours usually they cannot
come back as they cannot follow the class any more.
Once I had a class where we started with 21 ppl and after
5 days we ended with 4. But at least those 4 were satisfied.
When talking about the facilities the things I ask for
is to have enough space so I can get next to each student
to help in the lab work. This is not always possible as sometimes
classrooms are too packed.
Machine specs are not important but we ask for basic software to be installed.
Perl 5.8 + Text Editor students are familiar with. Putty or similar if working
on a remote Unix/Linux machine. + Internet connection.
Unfortunately even this is not always easy. We tell the training manager to
ask the students which OS and which editor do they prefer - after all most of
what I teach is OS independent - but in the end in the classroom I see
many people breaking their fingers with what they have. e.g. Windows-only
people working on Unix with vi....
If we could ensure that people who are only familiar with Windows would be
able to work on Windows and similarly people who are not familiar with vi and
emacs would have at least nedit installed on Unix/Linux.
That would be a huge step in reducing frustration in the class.
When on-site the lunch, coffee and refreshment situation is the same as
they normally have in the specific client. Sometimes it is very good
but in other cases we just eat too much...
When renting class-rooms we usually give lunch vouchers and serve
coffee and refreshments. This is the 'standard' or 'expected' in the
local training industry.
Gabor
--
Gabor Szabo
http://www.szabgab.com/
Perl Training in Israel http://www.pti.co.il
08-975-2897 054-4624648
Rich Bowen
> The biggest trouble usually is actually that we are on-site.
> Many managers expect their workers to do their daily job
> more-or-less even while they are in class. That means many times
> students have to read their e-mail and respond to them.
> Many times they are even taken out from the class.
> Once they are out for 2-3 hours usually they cannot
> come back as they cannot follow the class any more.
> Once I had a class where we started with 21 ppl and after
> 5 days we ended with 4. But at least those 4 were satisfied.
>
I've had this problem almost every time I do training on-site. If
it's onsite, they seem to not take their investment seriously, and
wander in and out. I had a training where, of 18 people registered,
only one person was actually there for the entire time of the class,
with the rest of them wandering in and out, having 2-3 hour meetings,
leaving early, arriving late, and so on. And that one person wasn't
exactly the most interested student. The folks that really wanted to
learn the material ended up being there less than half the time.
>
> If we could ensure that people who are only familiar with Windows
> would be
> able to work on Windows and similarly people who are not familiar
> with vi and
> emacs would have at least nedit installed on Unix/Linux.
> That would be a huge step in reducing frustration in the class.
The training that I do tends to be *nix specific (While I've done
Perl training, mostly I'm an Apache trainer) and so I tend to spend a
significant portion of every class with that one or two people who
are completely new to *nix.
--
rbo...@rcbowen.com
Come to ApacheCon US 2006!
http://us.apachecon.com/
Michael R. Wolf
> When renting class-rooms we usually give lunch vouchers and serve
> coffee and refreshments. This is the 'standard' or 'expected' in the
> local training industry.
Interesting. In US, that's not the norm; students expect to buy their own
lunch. Most are able to expense it back to their company. I guess that
both your culture and mine have a way to make sure that the student doesn't
have to pay for their own lunch while on training. It's just two different
solutions.
In rare occasions, when I'm teaching an on-site, the manager will realize
that it's just good plain financial sense to maximize the student time in
class, and they will order lunch to be delivered. The even smarter ones
realize that the money isn't even the biggest issue -- they get great team
building opportunity for the group to bond and debrief over lunch. And the
manager gets feel-good points for it from his team. It's nice to have your
boss buy you lunch every once in a while.
When I'm teaching at a vendor site, they usually have snacks and drinks
available. Most of them are free. They all have free coffee in the
morning. Most have fruit or pastries.
Steven Lembark
-- Rich Bowen <rbo...@rcbowen.com>
> I've had this problem almost every time I do training on-site. If it's
> onsite, they seem to not take their investment seriously, and wander in
> and out. I had a training where, of 18 people registered, only one
> person was actually there for the entire time of the class, with the
> rest of them wandering in and out, having 2-3 hour meetings, leaving
> early, arriving late, and so on. And that one person wasn't exactly the
> most interested student. The folks that really wanted to learn the
> material ended up being there less than half the time.
One fix that's worked well for us at Cheetahmail
is to have an open class on Saturday for some
subsidized rate (say $200) with the local
company picking up the room charge and paying
the head count for their employees who show up.
That allows the teacher to balance out the lower
fee with a few more people and gives the people
showing up a chance to do so without work
impinging on their daily routine.
Net result is a win-win with the company getting
a lower fee and the atendees getting a chance to
learn in peace :-)
--
Steven Lembark 85-09 90th Street
Workhorse Computing Woodhaven, NY 11421
lem...@wrkhors.com 1 888 359 3508
Michael R. Wolf
happened to me once.
I don't count on the facilities being OK, even when I'm teaching for a
trusted client of mine that has 10 of their own facilities. I'm hosting the
class. I'm the host. It would be nice if the facility took that
responsibility as seriously as I did, but I don't leave my responsibility to
their employees, or worse yet, their non-employees since some sites are not
staffed by full time employees and are often inadequately stocked by other
contractors.
In short, I make the hosting my responsibility. I bring my own coffee and
milk (preferring *not* to rely on powdered non-dairy whitener even before I
moved to hyper-javinated Seattle). I also bring my own pastries and fruit.
I also bring my own salty snacks, sweet snacks, hard candy, candy bars,
cookies, and crackers because I've found that to be the mix of snacks that
covers most students. I've been fortunate in that I can usually leave these
behind and invoice the client for "site provisioning". If you figure that
most hotels charge 5 - 10 USD per student per day for a continental
breakfast, you can see that "drinks and snacks" can add up quickly. But it
also pays dividends in customer satisfaction. Armys aren't the only things
that move on their stomachs.
I often get asked to set up in a hotel (like I'm doing this week). I have
to call ahead to make sure that they don't try to set up 18 inch tables.
Students need 3 feet to have reference material, caffeine, sugar, a
keyboard, and a mouse. Don't try to skimp on workspace; if you're tempted,
read the "Furniture Police" chapter in "Peopleware", DeMarco and Listner's
great book on software development.
As far as machine specifications, I can't remember having a machine that's
too barebones to run an intro or intermediate Perl class. The beauty of the
language is a beauty of teaching the language -- it's not a resource hog.
Linux vs Windows -- I don't care. The Perl constructs are so far above the
OS that any old notepad/cmd.exe or vi/ksh combination will work. (I have
found some notepad-like editors on Linux to be helpful if I've got some
non-Unix folks on a Linux platform. We're using Kate this week. I guess
Kate ::== K Advanced Text Editor). That is, while teaching Perl, I get
beyond the editor, command line interpreter, and operating system. Most
students can get beyond them pretty effectively if I focus them on the power
of Perl.
Hope this answered some of your concerns.
(Sorry it's so long since the original posting. This draft fell into the
cracks.)
--
Michael R. Wolf
Michae...@att.net
**NOTE** new, shorter spelling of obsolescent MichaelRunningWolf-at-att.net
Johan Vromans
> that any old notepad/cmd.exe or vi/ksh combination will work.
One problem I once ran into was that the students on Windows got
slightly different results from the students using Linux. Turned out
that the Windows editor they used did not provide a final newline.
Likewise, notepad does not understand files that have only \n as lime
terminators, so students were not able to inspect the data files that
I provided them for the exercises. Nowadays I provide special copies
with CRLF endings.
-- Johan
Peter Scott
> Likewise, notepad does not understand files that have only \n as lime
> terminators,
Wordpad does. Any system that has Notepad should have Wordpad.
> so students were not able to inspect the data files that I
> provided them for the exercises. Nowadays I provide special copies with
> CRLF endings.
--
Peter Scott
http://www.perlmedic.com/
http://www.perldebugged.com/