I find it so much more rewarding when I'm training with a target - in other words, when I know a little bit about the use that my students are going to be making of their new skills. I think that every trainer should work as I do - tailoring his presentation to the group he has in front of him, encouraging trainees to think of how the topics covered benefit them, and even bringing along their own data and programs they're going to have to maintain to show the tutor and class.
This style of working - for the maximum benefit of the trainee in his "real world" use of the subject - does impose some restraints on the organisation providing the training. The tutors selected need to know their subject really well, and be quick to analyse requirements. A professional note-reader won't fit the bill. And commercially, the maximum class size has to be lower than the provider might like. All of our
public courses are limited to seven trainees to allow
our tutor plenty of time to work with each trainee on HIS application and HIS data.
(written 2005-02-22, updated 2006-06-05)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
G310 - Well House Consultants - A better class of course [211] Look after your staff and they'll look after you. AOL. - (2005-02-12)
[215] Open Source becomes mainstream - (2005-02-14)
[219] Some unusual features - (2005-02-18)
[230] Course sizes - beware of marketing statistics - (2005-02-27)
[292] Elegant languages - Perl, PHP, Python - (2005-04-26)
[350] Want to be one better - (2005-06-17)
[371] The training team that's looking out for you - (2005-07-07)
[394] A year on - should we offer certified PHP courses - (2005-07-28)
[497] I have a river to cross - (2005-11-16)
[554] What backup is adequate? - (2006-01-04)
[559] ''I don't know'' is sometimes a good answer - (2006-01-09)
[577] Learning to program in Perl or PHP - (2006-01-26)
[579] Short Linux and Perl courses for small groups - (2006-01-27)
[646] PHP - London course, Melksham Course, Evening course - (2006-03-14)
[726] In praise of training course delegates. - (2006-05-20)
[1035] Longer hours and better value courses - (2007-01-15)
[1453] What makes our courses special? - (2007-12-02)
[1488] New trainee laptop fleet for our Open Source courses - (2007-12-30)
[1576] Making PHP and MySQL training relevant to the course delegates - (2008-03-15)
[1645] Seeing how others do it - PHP training - (2008-05-17)
[1933] Learning to Program in C - (2008-12-10)
[2010] How long should a training module be? - (2009-01-27)
[2049] Why Choose Well House Consultants for your course? - (2009-02-20)
[2074] Weekday or Weekend PHP, Python and Perl classes? - (2009-03-10)
[2084] Books and distance learning from Well House Consultants? - (2009-03-15)
[2109] Why most training fails ... - (2009-03-30)
[2187] Are we IITT (Institute of IT Training) members? - (2009-05-17)
[2633] Why do I teach niche skills rather than mainstream? - (2010-02-13)
[2762] Well House - Mission and Policy summaries - (2010-05-13)
[3001] How will we present courses over the coming years? - (2010-10-17)
[3271] The importance of feedback - (2011-04-30)
[3385] Do university courses teach the right things for life at work later on? - (2011-08-10)
[3419] Data that we use during our training courses, and other training resources - (2011-09-04)
[3587] C++ Courses - do I get official certification at the end of my Well House course? - (2012-01-20)
[4280] Making use of huge data, object orientation, unit testing and frameworks - (2014-06-07)
[4558] Well House Consultants - Python courses / what's special. - (2015-10-28)
[4583] Back in the saddle again - excellent open source course from Well House Consultants - (2015-11-26)
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