This item is adapted from an answer that I have just written by email - but the question / conundrum as to what to do with fractured advanced training requirements is a common one, so the answer is worth wider sharing. I believe that our solution provides an innovative way of meeting advanced requirements for tiny groups of 1 or 2, in a way that's cost effective for them, but which also makes commercial sense for us - not in terms of extra courses being profitable (which they are NOT) but in terms of customer care at a sensible expenditure of overheads

Fundamentals and some intermediate courses for most programming languages cover a pretty well defined set of topics that are common to the majority of delegates, but as things get more advanced they also get more specialised. For example, there are 4 different GUIs with Python (you could argue 5) and most people will only use one. Which is a bit of an issue with training - it doesn't make commercial sense for us to lay on a lot of advanced courses with few takers, so we use a different approach - our "Extra days". They work like this ...

Delegates who attend a regular course may also book for a day or two of extra training. Those extra days will be run at our Melksham, Wiltshire training centre on days to be agreed with the delegate(s) - typically on days that are otherwise hard to book such as a spare Monday or Friday in my diary before / after another 4 days course. And as they help fill up "off peak" days, we only charge the standard cost of a public one day course for each extra day - 350.00 for the first delegate, plus 250 for any further delegates in your group. But it IS private for your group.

Subjects taught - "you tell me". That sounds a little fluid, but about a half of our business is private courses for which we have a load of additional training material that doesn't appear in any public course and we've used a whole lot of things that we know but don't have notes on. With Python, Perl, PHP and Tcl it's almost a case of me saying "we can handle any advanced requirements". Where that expands (Python case) out to Zope, Plone, Django, etc I might be on slightly thinner ice - quite happy to cover and intro and how the language works with them, but I wouldn't offer or pretend to be able to give full courses on any of them.

There is no need for you to book extra days at the same time as you book your main course - indeed, it might well be that I cover some of the extras during the main course / can talk through things enough for you when I finish for the day - if it's just one extra module you need, there's little point in doing a whole extra day. So that's something that can - if you wish - be resolved later. But I'm equally happy if you turn round as say (for example) "I would like to cover the XXXX Gui, Web interfacing and Django and get some practical experience with displaying Database information on a web page through Python as an extra day" ahead of time.

There is general information about our extra days here (and an example for Perl here. General Python training information (as Python was used in the example above) is here
(written 2008-02-25 07:30:18)

 G301 - Well House Consultants - Booking a Public Courses
G400 - Well House Consultants - Private course
H201 - PHP and MySQL for Content Management
Y212 - Further advanced features of Python
P711 - An Introduction to Standards in Perl

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Calling on Melksham / Trowbridge / Devizes / Chippenham businesses
Getting somewhere with the train service
Trying out our Java examples on our web site
Java - a demonstration of inheritance on just one page
Advanced Python, Perl, PHP and Tcl training courses / classes
Online hotel reservations - Melksham, Wiltshire (near Bath)
Automatic startup and shutdown of Tomcat
Extra public classes in deploying Apache httpd and Tomcat
Which modules are loaded in my Apache httpd
Java (JSP and Servlet examples) live on our server
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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