Re: [Hampshire] Training courses

> Impressive training record. I worked at IBM Havant and its chainging
> faces for 10 years and managed the sum total of 2 courses (...)


> The second was an NT4 administration
> course that could have been covered in a day, let alone the week we had.
> I did this having installed NT4 workstation the week before and
> installed but never used significantly NT 3.x and not having done any
> prerequisite courses. The questions I asked stumped the tutor as too
> technical, (...)
>

During my later years at IBM, a large part of my job consisted in working
alongside development personnel in the lab. and devising courses to pass on
knowledge of new (mostly Un*x-based) software products to other countries
in Europe/Middle East/ Africa.

The worst part of the job was when countries would send along a delegate who
did not have the pre-requisite knowledge or skills. They wouldn't understand
what was going on, be disruptive, slow everyone else down and ultimately
give the course a poor rating. For some reason, the worst culprits were the
UK; we seem to have a very odd attitude to training in this country.

I, too, got very little (relevant) training at IBM, but this was in the days
when Un*x was still considered alien. On more than one occasion I tried to
sign up for a forthcoming Un*x course, only to find that I had been
"pencilled-in" to teach it.

Incidentally, we used to use a "rule of thumb": an hour's tuition takes a
skilled, knowledgeable professional about a week to prepare properly. This
may go some way to explaining why courses can cost so much.

Chris.